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| Catholic Church
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The assault on the Catholic Church
There has to be more to the assault on the Catholic Church than a few so-called ‘paedophile priests’, so what is going on?
Brian Rothery
I will not bore readers by going over ground well covered elsewhere, such as how few priests actually molested children, and the low numbers molested by priests compared with those molested in all communities including within families, especially families where the natural father has been replaced. One small and often ignored point might have relevance: the fact that most of the sexual incidents involving legally underage young people (or borderline such as 16) involve boys rather than girls. I have used the expression ‘molested’ here for the sake of sharing some common ground with so many who may not agree with me; in a different world I would prefer not to have to use any label to describe what is either acceptable or unacceptable sexual activity between humans of any age.
First, however, I feel that a striking and even dramatic fact needs more attention and reflection. There is a witch hunt in progress against the Catholic Church, which has gone far beyond the moral panic of ‘paedophile priests’ and is now directed at the Pope himself and at the heart of the Church. What strikes me as most dramatic about this witch hunt is that it is part of a continuing Inquisition, which the Catholic Church itself created and codified and developed during some periods into reigns of terror. This has now turned against the Church itself. Central to the work of the codification of the Inquisition was the construction of the Malleus Maleficarum, which has evolved today into a number of sets of rules and even legislation, best represented perhaps by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), published by the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM, as with the Malleus before it, often guides judges and juries in their judgment and sentencing of those found to be acting or thinking inappropriately (as with former heretics).
The original Malleus Maleficarum was terrifyingly general. You were either a witch or heretic, or you were not, and the decision often depended upon a single malicious accusation or even hearsay. As modern versions have developed, such as the DSM and legislation based on it, its sections have multiplied enormously and become very specific. When the Inquisition finally turned on its own creator, the Catholic Church, it was able to do so by using a relatively new specific crime (or disorder) from the modern Malleus of the DSM. This was paedophilia, which was unheard of in the previous centuries of the Inquisition. As heresy or being a witch were the only two crimes specified by the Malleus, all clerical members of the Church, except for possible renegades, were safe, as they could not be accused of being in either category. In 1980, the new category of paedophilia was entered into the modern Malleus of the DSM and this had fatal consequences for the Catholic Church.
The concept of paedophilia as a mental disorder or crime had not existed in historical times. The opposite indeed was the case in some societies. Boy love was seen as noble in ancient Greece and incest in royal families was accepted in ancient Egypt.
Richard von Krafft-Ebbing first coined the term ‘paedophilia erotica’ in his 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis. Perhaps because he regarded it as being extremely rare, and listed it as such, it remained thus, an obscure note, for almost 100 years, until the child and women protection movement and their allies in the psychiatric profession incorporated it into the DSM in 1980.
But while the label of ‘paedophile’ had remained obscure before 1980, there was one earlier attempt to mount a moral panic and a witch hunt centred on sex abuse in the 20th century. A remarkable aspect of this was that it also targeted Catholic priests and the Catholic Church.
On March 10, 1937, Pope Pius XI condemned the Nazis in the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. One month later, Goebbels responded with an attack on the Catholic Church, claiming that there was ‘a collective moral crisis that perhaps the cultural history of humanity has never before known with such a frightening and disconcerting dimension’. This was sexual abuse by priests. In his speech, he could have been referring to the moral panic of today: “Numerous priests and religious have confessed. There’s no doubt that the thousands of cases which have come to the attention of the justice system represent only a small fraction of the true total, given that many molesters have been covered and hidden by the hierarchy.”
Over three hundred priests were arrested and the scandal was promoted to international proportions via the front pages of the German newspapers. It was a campaign aimed at the heart of the Church and at the Pope. While the expression ‘moral panic’ did not exist until our own current phase of the Inquisition, Goebbels ignited a moral panic in a fire that could have continued to blaze were it not for the annihilation of the Nazis and the discrediting of all they stood for.
George Santayana said that ‘those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it’, but unfortunately some that remembered the Goebbels campaign, and Hitler’s awareness of the potential for exploiting the concept of ‘the pure child in danger of being sullied by undesirable outsiders’, were to use the same emotive ideology to create our current moral panic. This time however there is no fall from grace of Nazis to save the priests and the Church.
The timing of the concept of the paedophile entering the Malleus Maleficarum of the DVM in 1980 was to prove deadly, because of two emerging and possibly related developments. First, in 1983, three years after its inclusion, the series of childcare panics that swept the English-speaking world began with the McMartin Preschool trial. As these ran their course until finally subsiding without a trace, they were joined by recovered memory syndrome and satanic ritual abuse, and the whole new discovery of ‘victimhood’ and historical abuse. Past generations were now to be judged using a label and its Malleus guidelines that did not exist when the people of those ages were actively engaged in what had now become crimes.
While some forms of the panic, such as childcare scares, satanic abuse and recovered memory passed, the general sense of victimhood continued. Within ten years after the entry of paedophilia into the DSM, however, the Internet swept the world, bringing with it both the potential for the emancipation of the human imagination and an instrument for the exercise of new terrors by the Inquisition, or at least new controls by police states that chose to exercise them. Within a very short time after the Internet was established, the world’s masses were demonstrating that a favourite human pastime was talking about human sexuality and looking at images of it. A whole new genre was discovered almost overnight, which was to light the bonfires of the emerging moral panic. This was not the much exaggerated child pornography we read about, but a cache of existing images, formerly found only in special magazines, many of which were published in countries such as Holland. These were child nudity and child erotica and for ‘child’ read under 18. Many of these fell into the category praised by the writer Nabokov and famous photographers like David Hamilton, beautiful early teen and pre-teen girls. The popularity of these images was such that some servers had to shut down web sites, not because of moral outrage but because bandwidth was being exceeded.
If the child protection movement needed proof of the existence of its version of ‘paedophilia’, here it was, although a rational analyses might have decided that much of it was simple youthful human beauty, but in a moral panic where touching and admiring had became rape and ogling, looking at certain images became an odious crime to be punished with a vengeance and hatred that said much more about the judge and jury than it did about the accused. It was clear to some writers, many of whom, alas, were reluctant to write about it, that the sudden new loathing and fear of ‘paedophilia’ were projections from within as a reaction to a new genre of erotic beauty – that of children and teenagers under 18. That such beauty existed at all was to become unspeakable, so it was lumped into the rare group of images depicting real child abuse.
While the ogre of child pornography helped to maintain the illusion of the ever-threatening predatory paedophile, the Internet’s other dark mechanisms of ‘child grooming’ and peer to peer ‘rings’ of deviants fuelled legislation and justified the setting up of powerful policing agencies, such as CEOP in the UK.
One reason why the Catholic Church and its priests do not feature in the child pornography panic is that most of the charges being levelled against priests have to do with physical contact, rather than imagery, in a historical context, the vast majority of it having taken place before the emergence of the Internet. Even grooming-type activities could take place within an existing Church-supervised community and did not depend upon future electronic developments. What the charges against priests and child pornography charges do have in common, however, is that both are based largely on a historical perspective, one in a revisionism regarding what constitutes being abused or victimised, the other in what constitutes an inappropriate image, for example a nude child, or where a line in defining erotic beauty must be drawn.
There may be a strong connection between these two. Much of what our society has criminalized from the past could have been described as naive touching or foolish fondling of children or reckless homosexual responses by young priests to affectionate advances from teenaged gay boys. Modern revisionism has re-labelled both of these as sexual abuse and rape, and, in all cases, regardless of the actual circumstances, encouraged the younger partners in the encounters to see themselves as victims and demand vengeance and compensation.
The Catholic Church has been hoisted with its own petard, because its own Inquisition and its Malleus Maleficarum were turned against it through the simple device of others adding paedophilia to the list of the Devil’s works. It was most unfortunate for the Church that this came right at the beginning of a moral panic that was about to be fuelled by technology, no less than the increased eroticization of humankind through the Internet and television. Goebbels would have loved a similar opportunity. And Hitler would have surely felt vindicated in his belief in the need to protect the purity of the child. Some of today’s child protectionists claim that ‘the essence of childhood’ itself is under attack from the monster of paedophilia.
But can the virulence of the sex abuse witch hunt alone explain the extent of the extraordinary assault on the Catholic Church, with even the Pope now in the sights of individuals whom devout Catholics must fear are manifestations of the Antichrist? There is another possibility. The attackers, riding on a wave of revisionism and victimology, may see a golden opportunity. To attack and irreparably damage the institution of marriage between man and woman and the traditional idea of family. The only obvious individual in the world standing up against this attack is the Pope and the largest organization defending against it is the Catholic Church.
Abortion, divorce and contraception are of course also demanded by the Pope’s critics, but these have been largely achieved in civil society, so what is left and could it be the force that animates the campaign so vigorously?
There is still same-sex marriage to be achieved and Church and Pope are solidly against this. Women in same-sex unions can use the sperm of a third party man or men to conceive babies that can become part of their family, but men in a same-sex marriage cannot do this. Once they achieve legalization of their same-sex unions, they will have to push on for the legal right for men to adopt and we can assume that the vast preference will be for the adoption of boys.
One of the most significant critics of the Catholic Church and Pope is Irishman, Colm O’Gorman, whose story is told elsewhere on this web site. O’Gorman became a ‘celebrity victim’ and went on to build a career in politics and in Amnesty. In March 2002, despite considerable compensation from the Catholic Church, he participated in a BBC documentary, damaging to the Catholic Church, titled ‘Suing the Pope’.
Because of his celebrity victim status and his acknowledged homosexuality, he appears to be virtually untouchable in Irish society. A reviewer of his autobiography writes this about when he ran away as a teenager to Dublin: “He had no money and for seven months allowed men to have sex with him in return for a night's sleep in a bed and a hot shower.”
After emerging from his troubled years, he and a gay partner settled into a marriage-type union and then privately adopted two boys. One woman journalist only tried to challange him on this but he refused to reply to her.
The Irish authorities remain silent on the matter. Is this a portent of things to come?
Created on 06/13/2010 03:11 PM by Editor
Updated on 06/13/2010 03:29 PM by Editor
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