Another take on priestly abuse

The recent floodlight of priestly shame having moved to Europe and creeping ever closer to the Vatican itself, I can't help beating up on myself anew.

Years before the Church's sexual abuse scandal broke in America, I was privy to it, but either too stupid or too preoccupied to follow up. I was a working journalist at the time, and it could have been my ticket to a Pulitzer.

My sister was a county detective in New Jersey, working juvenile, and locking up priests left and right for molesting young boys, and the Church was sending these pedophile priests to Canada for six weeks of "rehab," and then reassigning them"“ within the same bloody county! Mother Church as Father Enabler.

My sister told me of wiring one youngster and then playing the tape of his sexual encounter with a priest for his parents in an effort to get them to press charges. But they were so terrified of the Church's power that they declined, even when confronted with he sordid, undeniable reality of their own son's molestation.

The diocese was exerting tremendous pressure to keep the lid on what would become the now-familiar scandal, and my sister's best efforts to see at least a smattering of justice were stymied at every turn, both by the Church and by the politics of the day. The two were fearsomely intertwined, then as now.

Fellatio with Father Ray

Years before that, there was Father Ray. I was living with two roommates in Society Hill. These guys— ex-dope shooters and general street hustlers— had been around the block, and whenever they were broke, they made a call to Father Ray at his parish in the Northeast.

As quickly as his new Oldsmobile could get him downtown, Father Ray would be ringing the bell. I'd leave and sometimes pass him on the stairs, a small, wizened, bespectacled man with the mottled face of a heavy drinker. He wore a tan windbreaker and black trousers and never looked at me.

When I returned, my roomies were usually off spending the $50 that Father Ray had given each of them for letting him perform fellatio on them. They calculated that Father Ray must have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of the Church's money on male sex over the years.

The role of alcohol

Nothing new here, really. But what I've never read in all the stories of priestly perversion is the part played by alcohol. If anyone has written studies or stories about the connection between alcohol and the ongoing epidemic of priestly sexual crimes, they've escaped me.

My own take"“ based on nothing more than too many years as a practicing drunk"“ is that, for many priests, alcohol is a major factor in their fall from grace, as well as the subsequent scarring of untold young lives. To me, the causal chain goes like this:

Many priests are heavy drinkers. Alcohol lowers celibate inhibitions. Boys and young men"“ altar boys and students"“ are readily available and sometimes swayed by the perceived power of a reversed collar and a friendly manner.

Boys, but not women?

I know that girls and women have been priestly victims as well. But the offending priests, I would submit, tend to think of celibacy as a heterosexual issue. To many priests, sex with males doesn't constitute a breaking of celibate vows (or at least not as much of a breaking).

I would be curious to know if civil and/or canonical authorities have investigated the correlation between alcohol abuse and sex crimes as applied to Roman Catholic clergy. If history is any indicator, though, I suspect my curiosity will go unanswered for some time to come.♦


To read a related commentary by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read a related commentary by Thom Nickels, click here.
To read responses, click here.