John Jay Report

John Jay Report or Rock and Roll Made Me Do It

May 19, 2011 in clergy sex abuse scandal, homosexuality 34 Comments Tags: clergy sexual abuse, John Jay Report

I will comment on the John Jay Report more after I get back from a therapeutic river trip down the San Juan.

The report in correct that the cases of reported abuse following a bell curve. The unknown questions is whether there are unreported cases, especially form the 1950s. Victims may have died and files should have been purged. See the graphs at Catholic Sensibility.

However, it seems there was a real increase in the 1960s. It is perhaps understandable that priests may have experimented sexually, but why were so many priests sexually involved with children? 60% of the reported victims were 13 and under. And why were 83% of the victims boys? The report said that priests had more access to boys. But priests have a lot of access to young women – the congregations are mostly women, 2/3 or more of penitents are women, and solicitation in the confessional has been a centuries-old problem in the Church. If priests wanted to experiment sexually, there were plenty of women available.

So why did they prefer children? I think that not so much sexual pleasure as the pleasure of violation and sacrilege was the goal of the abusive priests. The Marquis de Sade has explained the attraction.

And why boys? Perhaps because were available and don’t get pregnant. Perhaps because they were the same sex as Jesus. But I think that the report had decided it would not blame homosexuality in any way, homosexuals, especially in the Church, being a protected class.

From reading hundreds of cases I think that many abusive priests were immature homosexuals who were themselves frozen in adolescence, and that is why they were attracted to pubescent and pre-pubescent boys. Also, there are few young men available in church, and those might well react violently to sexual overtures.

The priesthood is becoming a gay profession, and abuse of minors is declining. I think that the few men, including homosexual men, who are entering the priesthood are doing it at a later age and are more mature. They have decided ( I hope) to accept being celibate and chaste, whatever their sexual orientation.. However, a largely and obviously gay clergy (even if chaste) will be a further obstacle in reconnecting men to the Church.

Sexual Abuse and Homosexual Priests

November 18, 2009 in clergy sex abuse scandal 8 Comments Tags: bishops, homosexuality, homsexuality, John Jay Report, sexual abuse

Very few cases of clerical abuse of minors involved true pedophilia: the sexual abuse of pre-pubertal children. Pedophiles often claim not to be homosexuals, and they may well be correct is this claim, but pedophilia is not the main problem in clerical abuse.

Most cases involved children at or above the age of puberty, and the vast majority of the reported victims were male. Decades of studies by criminologists and psychologists have shown that boys are far less likely to report abuse than girls are, because boys fear the stigma of homosexuality and because males are supposed to suffer and not complain.

The John Jay report claims that is the abusive priests had equal access to females, they would have had equal number of male and female victims. This I doubt. I won’t go into the nature of the sexual acts that priest did with boys, but let us say that they were focused on the male genitals. Many abusers seem to have been initiated into the culture of abuse by other priests, often in the seminary.

The priesthood is not the equivalent of prison; most parishioners are female, and a heterosexual cleric who wants to can find many partners among young adult women, Homosexual priests have few young men at their disposal, since young men rapidly distance themselves from church. The only available males are, in general, married men and adolescent boys.

A homosexual priest may not be more likely to offend than a heterosexual priest. But when he does offend he is almost certain to have many more victims. Priest whose victims were males sometimes had scores, even hundreds, even thousands (Cardinal Groër) of victims. Again studies by psychologists have shown that homosexuals have far more partners than heterosexuals do, as one would expect, given the nature of male sexuality.

Political correctness should not prevent us from seeing the role that clerical homosexuality played in the abuse; but even more important was the failure of the bishops, including the bishop of Rome, to discipline criminal clergy and to protect children.