Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children.

Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children

Jason Berry

Doubleday, $22.50, 407 pp.

In June 1983, a Cajun family in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, discovered exactly what their nine-year-old son meant when he said that the pastor of the local Roman Catholic church had "a secret just between Father and the altar boys."

Two years later, the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe was sentenced to prison for sexually molesting more than thirty-five young boys. The Diocese of Lafayette and its insurers paid more than $20 million to victims for therapy and damages. The investigation ultimately implicated a score of other church workers in similar sexual offenses.

For the Catholic church nationally, Gauthe's case seemed to open a new era of widely publicized scandals, culminating, at least for now, in the case of James Porter, who has been named in criminal charges or civil suits with sexually molesting at least ninety-five children in five states 'between 1963 and 1974, when he left the priesthood--and already found guilty in one case occurring after his laicization.

Although the perpetrators may constitute only a tiny fraction of the Catholic clergy, the victims are far more numerous, and the impact on them as well as on the morale of other priests and on the image of the church has been highly damaging. Not even the sexual abuse of children by their parents, a much more frequent occurrence, shocks us as much as such sexual abuse by clergymen. Virtually any sort of person can become a parent; the clergyman, by contrast, has been chosen and consecrated as a representative of the sacred, a fact that makes his betrayal of trust and exploitation of authority all the more abhorrent.

The first 170 pages of this book are a nearly mesmerizing account of the case of Father Gauthe. They convey powerfully the climate of massive denial on the part of church authorities, the self-protective reflexes of a clerical subculture, the sticky web of conflicting demands raised by competing therapists, prosecuting and defense lawyers, attorneys for insurance companies, and parents outraged at what has happened to their children.

A Lousianan whose personal and family ties gave him an entree with bayou families, New Orleans lawyers, and Catholic priests, Jason Berry gives this story the force, the depth, the density-in short, the truth--of a novel. Moreover, the straightforward narrative structure of the opening section allows him to string side by side the contradictions and ironies, the iniquities and the ambiguities without having to force them into any explanatory grid.

The infamous Gauthe, for example, turns out to be a pathetic Milquetoast. A flamboyant Cajun lawyer for one of the victims has his private grudges to settle with the church. A secret church-connected source, code-named "Chalice," supplies Berry with the names of child-molesting priests--and later dies in prison after being convicted for sexually molesting teen-agers himself.

No story is more dizzying than that of the Rev. Michael Peterson. A lapsed Mormon who converted to Catholicism, he became a psychiatrist and researcher in sexual disorders, then sought ordination to the priesthood. A fireless source of aid and comfort to priests enslaved to alcohol or sexual pathologies, Peterson was a voice for candor and compassion, challenging the ignorance and repression about sexuality that prevailed in many church circles.

He was also living a double life of his own, telling the world that he was suffering from Hodgkin's disease rather than AIDS. It was Archbishop (now Cardinal) James Hickey of Washington, a strict defender of orthodoxy, who visited Father Peterson's sickbed daily, persuaded the priest to acknowledge his illness, and presided over his funeral with 150 whiterobed priests in attendance.

When Berry moves on, in the second half of the book, to explore the overall problem of sexual abuse of minors by priests as it has surfaced across the United States and Canada, his reporting remains eyeopening but his efforts to detect causes and suggest solutions are far less compelling.

At various points Berry blames these abuses and the failures of church officials to respond compassionately to victims on the fact that priests and bishops constitute an all-male caste, lack parental experience, wield hierarchical power, operate without public scrutiny, or blind themselves to issues of sexuality. Here is an "ecclesiastical culture in decay," he argues, and the ultimate cause is the church's rule of celibacy for its priests.

This diagnosis may suit today's ideals of egalitarianism and full sexual expression. But Berry is also willing to make the politically incorrect charge that the celibate priesthood has become the reserve of a growing number of homosexuals, some of whom have created a gay clerical subculture, sexually active, frequently predatory, and too compromised by the violation of priestly vows to be anything but tolerant of sexual misdeeds with minors.

These explanations are provocative, but are they true? Berry's accumulation of court testimony, anecdote, rumor, and opinion is too imposing to dismiss them, and yet too unsystematic to test them.

Nowhere, for example, does the book provide something as elementary as an orderly examination of what is known and still not known about sexual attraction to minors, the categories researchers and therapists use, the range of misconduct and of impact on victims, the current modes of treatment and evidence about their effectiveness. Nowhere does the book carefully compare the church's record with the experiences of other institutions, like school systems and the Boy Scouts, other professions, like psychology and medicine, and other religious groups with married, female, or nonhierarchical clergies. These matters are discussed in passing if at all, inserted into the flow of sordid revelations, always subordinated to Berry's own interpretations.

Nowhere, in a book citing offenses committed over three decades, is there a clear presentation of how society and the church have shifted in understanding these matters. Nowhere does Berry report on a case in which a priest was wrongly accused, nor does he even appear to imagine such a possibility.

In two instances, this writer has interviewed some of the same people and read the same testimony as Berry. I would not contradict Berry's conclusions but only say that he is far more certain about them than I could be.

Two subthemes wind throughout the book. One is the media' s role in exposing sexual abuse. The media have been accused, and tightly in some cases, of sensationalizing this story. For reasons both good and bad, the Catholic church has become a symbol of traditional restraints on the libido. Certainly the church is a leading advocate of a strict code of sexual conduct. That makes the sexual deviations of its celibate clergy hard to set aside as not newsworthy and easy to report in muckracking tones.

At the same time, Berry's experience shows how often the media have been reluctant to report what it knows will incense Catholic readers and nervous advertisers. More, not less, reporting might have served the church well at an early stage in this scandal.

The second subtheme is the author's own struggle, as a committed Catholic, to maintain some religious equanimity in the face of the ugly deeds he repeatedly confronted. There is a depth of moral outrage that both informs and at points deforms this book, but that was probably essential to its writing.

This book should be read by all Catholics in leadership positions--and by anyone still tempted to dismiss this problem as a media creation or simply "a few rotten apples" whose presence in the ranks of the priesthood needs no further explanation.