Pope Benedict's outrage at the scale of clerical sex abuse uncovered by the Murphy report is welcome, but it doesn't go far enough. The elephant in the room, which he has failed to address, is compulsory clerical celibacy and the suppression of human sexuality. That has driven the wave of scandal engulfing the Irish Catholic church.
It is obvious that when you impose a rule of celibacy on up to 500,000 men, the number of priests in the Roman Catholic church worldwide, many will be unable to abide by it and will find themselves twisted all ways as they struggle to do so.
Pat Buckley, an openly gay priest who is estranged from the church authorities, points out that in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, as soon as God had created Adam he said, "it is not good for man to be alone", and promptly produced Eve. Genesis isn't an historical account, but it does contain a social and psychological truth that is widely accepted. Most people need the companionship, sexual and otherwise, of a long-term partner and regard it as a matter for celebration, not denial and cover-up.
Only last month Fr Sean McKenna received a standing ovation in the Derry city parish of Ballymagroarty after announcing that he was in a long-term loving relationship and wanted to get married. Many of his congregation knew about his relationship with a separated woman. McKenna spoke of the warm support he had received from the community for his decision to get married once his fiancée had divorced her first husband.
For years, everyone has known that priests struggle with celibacy and that many are sexually active. It is a common theme in humour and in fiction, from the bodice-ripping Australian saga The Thorn Birds to the TV drama Ballykissangel. One study, by psychologist Richard Sipe, estimates that 80% of priests breach celibacy at some point. The chances are, it was always so. Some medieval popes didn't bother to deny their children and, here in Ireland, the name McEntaggart derives from the Irish for "son of the priest".
I should mention that I am a son of a priest, a Presbyterian minister. I was brought up in the overwhelmingly Catholic town of Dundalk where a number of my father's friends were priests. Even as a child, it struck me that they lived a lonely life compared with Protestant clergy, who generally had wives and families.
Unmarried ministers and vicars tended to be the butt of off-colour jokes and regarded as a bit odd. The assumption was that a family man would relate more easily to the problems of parishioners.
One of the arguments for celibacy given in the Catholic encyclopaedia is that it allows a priest to devote himself wholeheartedly to his parish duties, without a wife and family competing for his attention. I am no longer a church member but, in my experience, this does not happen with Protestant clergy. Instead, many congregations get two for the price of one; the wives, and now husbands, of the clergy play a prominent role in parish activities.
Married Protestant clergy who switch to Rome are generally allowed to bring their wives with them. Celibacy is a rule of church discipline which can be relaxed or abandoned by the hierarchy at will, not a principle of faith. It didn't apply for the first two or three centuries of church history and it has frequently been set aside to attract converts. Why then are men like McKenna forced out of the priesthood if they admit to falling in love? As Buckley sees it: "Celibacy is a wonderful thing for those who feel the calling. Whether they are priests or not, many people don't marry, and give their lives to their profession or their career. That can work well, but the vast majority are not suited to celibacy; men and women need mates. For most people, attempting to repress sexuality leads to pathology of some kind. I don't believe celibacy is the cause of paedophilia, but it is one of the contributing factors."
Sexual repression can also lead to the abuse of power and a predatory attitude to minors, though it must be stressed that only about 4% of priests have been subject to complaints of abusing minors, and many of those have been cleared.
There is, however, no iron wall between paedophilia and other forms of sexuality. Sipe, who has written several books about celibacy, has found that people who are denied normal sexual companionship can turn to children, and that one reason boys are more often abused is that they are more accessible to priests than girls. Other studies suggest that only about half of child sex offenders are exclusively attracted to children. In other words, when human sexuality is denied, it can become warped and find predatory outlets.
The offenders certainly deserve moral condemnation, and the full rigour of the law, but the hierarchy, up to and including the Pope, must likewise face up to the fact that they preside over a system where this sort of behaviour is likely to occur.
It is not as if they haven't been warned. Father Gerald Michael Cushing Fitzgerald is a man not much mentioned in the present debate on child abuse by Catholic clergy, but he sounded the alarm as far back as the 1950s. Many church leaders believed him at the time and even funded him to deal with offenders.
Fitzgerald, who died in 1969, was a Holy Cross Father from Massachusetts who founded the Order of the Servants of the Paraclete (OSP), dedicated to helping other Catholic religious men who had problems in their lives and ministries. OSP was established in 1947 and Fitzgerald quickly discovered that many of the problems he had to handle were sexual in origin and ended in the abuse of minors.
"We are amazed to find how often a man would be behind bars if he were not a priest entrusted with the cura animarum [the care of souls]," Fitzgerald wrote to his bishop in 1952. He advised that paedophiles be removed from the priesthood because they could not be cured, describing them as devious and manipulative "vipers". He may have been thinking of repeat offenders such as Fr Eugene Greene, described by gardai as "the most prolific rapist in Ireland".
Dozens of letters he wrote to bishops have been printed in the National Catholic Reporter.
His campaign reached the Vatican in the 1960s, when he gave the same message to Pope Paul VI. The option of simply calling in the police and letting the law take its course did not seem to occur to anyone. Indeed, part of Fitzgerald's motive was to avoid scandal.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, bishops and superiors of religious orders funded Fitzgerald to deal with problem priests. Those in North America were sent to Jemez Springs in New Mexico, while those in Ireland and Britain were treated at a care centre in Stroud, Gloucestershire, now closed. Before he died, Fitzgerald had made a down payment on a Caribbean island where he planned to keep the worst cases in seclusion, away from potential victims. This "leper colony" solution was rejected by the hierarchy who tended to respond to complaints by moving offenders, paying hush money, or turning a blind eye.
On Friday, the Pope made a strong statement on the issue, but it is not enough to condemn the individuals involved. The resignation of a few bishops will not purge the system. Celibacy lies at the heart of the problem. It may be an attainable ideal for a minority of ascetics, or for a period of abstinence, but if it is imposed as a lifelong commitment on hundreds of thousands of people, it will inevitably break and warp a proportion of them.'SEXUAL REPRESSION CAN LEAD TO ABUSE OF POWER AND A PREDATORY ATTITUDE'
