HE SAID, SHE SAID – GOD SAID? Tony Adragna on Quasipundit posted a discussion of the current Catholic imbroglio on his site, to which I replied in the QP forum, The Refuge. Tony kindly dragged me screaming out of the dark and plunked me into the full light of day with a response to my post on QP. So now we move to full cross-blogging mode because my answer is too long for The Refuge.

Tony first divides the priestly offenses into categories: homosexual pedophilia; heterosexual pedophilia; homosexual sex with a post-pubescent; heterosexual sex with a post-pubescent. As he rightly notes, some of the activity was with pre-pubescent males, which would be pedophilia, but some was with post-pubescent males, which would be activity between sexually mature bodies, even if the mind in one of those bodies is as much child as adult (i.e. not fully adult in the ability to assess consequences and properly evaluate physical and/or emotional risk). He asserts that there is a “big difference in morality between under-age sex and pedophilia”, without stating why, then says that neither behavior is okay. He gets back to the under-age issue under the discussion of legalities, but never explains why one is more immoral than the other. Without additional comment he appears to drop that part of the discussion and moves on to homosexuality and adultery, which we will get to later.

I think it’s safe to say that Tony’s sense of pedophilia as worse than sex between an adult and a teenager has to do with the level of innocence and vulnerability of pre-pubescent children, and I think that has some merit; certainly, as he notes, the age of legal consent for sex ranges from 14 upward in the United States, and from 12 upward in other parts of the world, with the highest minimum set at 21. I think, however, to make a difference between them for the purposes of judging priests engaged in sexual activity with youths is a bad precedent, even if our sensibilities are more offended by one than the other. The line is not drawn at whether the sex partner had legal right to consent; the line is that the priests vowed to eschew certain behaviors and they had an added trust because of their influence as avowed men of God on youth at varying degrees of maturity. Just because some went horribly beyond the line doesn’t mean that the violations of the others are suddenly less blameworthy.

The next issue is homosexuality, and that gets very tangled quickly, so I won’t untangle it except to the extent necessary for this discussion. Tony says that many believe homosexuality is worse than adultery; the reason for that, although he doesn’t say so, is the scriptural reference to homosexuality as “against the natural use” of the body. He then goes into a long discussion of why he uses the term adultery – in which at least one partner in the sex act is married to someone else – instead of fornication, which is a more general phrase referring to sex between any people other than those married to each other. He concludes that priests who engage in sexual activity are in fact adulterous because they have made the equivalent of a marriage vow to the Catholic Church on their ordination, and thus are breaking that vow when having sex. Continuing in a rather torturous manner, he finally decides that too much weight is put on homosexual activity when heterosexual activity is just as bad because both are adultery for a priest. I think he could have made the case much more quickly by just saying this: a priest promises to be celibate, and it doesn’t matter if the priest has sex with the gardener, his wife, his young son or his dog, the priest has broken that vow and should be removed from priestly duties. The type of act committed has more to do with what should happen after the removal – whether he is turned over to authorities, dismissed from church employ, or allowed to remain working for the church in some non-priestly capacity.

(I also disagree with the designation of the priest and nun as uniquely “married” to God – the church is the “bride” of Christ and thus anyone who is a member of the church is a part of God’s “bride”. In addition, I believe adultery is the breaking of a vow between two humans made before the heavenly Father, and so a priest having sex is not adultery. But those are theological differences and not the point of this response.)

The big difficulty for me is the whole issue of canon law. Sociologically, churches are defined on a continuum from very high church to very low church, with the level of formality, ritual and collective structure being the criteria used to determine where a particular group belongs. The Roman Catholic Church, with its great elaborate and formal rituals, its massive collective structure and highly developed canon, is about as high church as it gets. The group with which I am affiliated is about as low church as it gets, with few rituals and the Bible as our only guide for behavior and religious law. That said, I’m going to dive in anyway.

It is my understanding that any situation implying imminent danger to a third party can trigger an exception to the confidentiality rule in civil law; if, for example, I tell my therapist in the course of a session that I am going to kill Tony, that I have the knife, and I describe in detail precisely how I intend to do it and when, then my therapist has a legal requirement to break the confidentiality and inform the authorities. By the same token, if I am actively engaging in sex with a pre-pubescent youth and I tell my attorney or therapist about it, they have a responsibility again to tell the authorities because of the obvious likelihood of continued harm to that child. If I’m wrong – I’m not an attorney and I’ve not researched this extensively – then I’m sure Tony or someone else will set me straight. I do know that the rules on confidentiality are governed by state law, and Massachusetts is already changing theirs because of this scandal. So if the protections of civil law really do not inhere, canon is the issue. And the way Tony describes it, there are no exceptions for breaking confidentiality there; the only grace is if the Vatican decides to go easy on the priest who makes it known that a colleague or subordinate is being abusive. So in fact it is more righteous, canonically speaking, to protect a pedophilic priest than to reveal his crime. I do not think that this effect was what the Catholic church was reaching for when that canon was set; I think it likely that if this crime was considered at all, the lawmakers assumed such horrific behavior would be summarily dealt with inside the confines of the church and not need to see the light of a brighter, more secular day for children and other parishioners to be protected from predatory priests. Tony calls use of this loophole “misusing the seal”. My terms would be much harsher. The entire Catholic church is tainted by the hierarchy’s willingness to play hide ‘n seek in the canon, and a canon that implicitly allows this behavior is desperately flawed.

Which leads to the last point, where Tony

must vigorously disagree with the notion that this gives ‘non-Catholic believers a stake in this process’…the process isn't about changing society -- it's about changing the Church… [it’s] ultimately Catholics deciding how to be Catholic.

No, Tony, it’s not. As I said before, maybe that’s true in the finer points. But as noted above, the state of Massachusetts is already changing its clergy-confidentiality law as a direct result of hypocrisy in the Catholic hierarchy; other states will likely follow suit. All churches and clergy will be scrutinized more closely as a result. This will forever be used as “another brick in the wall” by the militant non-religious as an example of how the religious allowed to run amok will not govern themselves but will instead protect their own at the cost of even little children’s sexual innocence. Tony, my religious freedom is damaged by the behavior of predatory priests and the criminal malfeasance of Cardinal Law and others. I look to you and other Catholics like you to protect America’s religious freedoms from this abuse, and you say to me, go away, I’m a Catholic and this is our business, not yours. It was the refusal to see the broader implications of their behavior that led the Catholic hierarchy to close in on themselves and try to defuse this mess internally; please don’t refuse to see the broader implications of how the Catholic church as an entity resolves this. It does have an impact on all the religious.