Pedophiles and priests: anatomy of a contemporary crisis.

"Ecrasez l'infame," urged Voltaire. He meant crush the Catholic Church, and his progressive-minded followers from Robespierre to Gregory Baum have been busy trying to follow his advice ever since. In fact, Voltairian animus against the Church is so deep-seated among the faculty at contemporary mainline universities that last year one embattled papalist, trapped in a U.S. Department of Political Science, resorted to founding the Association of Catholic Social Scientists. At least he could depend on such an organization to provide him with what the birdman of Alcatraz got from his birds: a support group.

But perhaps he is less isolated than he thinks. Even Vanity Fair yielded Bunyan's Christian some like-minded souls; so would have today's equivalent, the Liberal Academy. Consider Philip Jenkins. A Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, a convert from Rome to the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, and the author most recently of Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press), Jenkins has all the markings of a post-Enlightenment anti-Catholic. He isn't one. Political and sociological correctness don't have to coincide. This is the message of hope contained in Pedophiles and Priests. Its author manages to anatomize the present clergy abuse crisis without once using it as a stick to beat the Church with.

Or, for that matter, to beat her opponents with. Jenkins writes as a sociologist, not as a polemicist. Pedophiles and Priests discusses the vital role played by calamity-howlers in creating calamities. Social problems exist, but, as Jenkins makes clear, it takes "claims-makers" to "construct" them into crises--and crises to satisfy the demands of claims-makers. Thus the business of turning problems into crises--and crises to satisfy the demands of claims-makers. Thus the business of turning problems into crises is by its nature self-serving. Greenpeace yells at us to save the whales; we duly open our pocket books and lobby our legislators to that end, and what gets saved is--Greenpeace. What does it matter? Nothing silences misgivings more effectively than a raised consciousness. With biodiversity trembling in the balance, who has time to quibble over the research methods of its defenders, or the six-digit salaries they so often reward themselves with?

Celibacy is not the culprit

Jenkins sees in the current clerical abuse scandal a classic example of social construction. He never downplays the seriousness of priests committing sodomy with the boys and young men in their charge. He simply asserts that what shapes our collective response to such behaviour is not the behaviour itself, but the way in which publicists "frame" it to suit their own interests. The National Catholic Reporter, for example, believes that Rome should allow priests to marry; when, therefore, stories of sexually erring clergymen began to surface in 1985, that newspaper seized on the incidents they described as symptoms of a deepening crisis in the Catholic church over celibacy. Celibacy couldn't have been the culprit. Jenkins finds no significant difference in abuse rates among married ministers and single priests. Nor can he point to any dramatic increase in those rates over the last twenty years. His calculations indicate that some one thousand out of over fifty thousand serving American priests "are or have been involved with minors;" of these one thousand, a few hundred are true pedophiles, and "a few dozen in the whole of North America," the sort of predators in clerical collars our media delight in presenting us with. Claims-makers, concludes Jenkins, have magnified the number of "paedophile priests," by a factor of twenty or more.

The question is why did the North American public swallow such statistical fantasizing. It wanted to. To be successful, crisismongers, like advertisers, must feed existing prejudices. As Jenkins shows, by the time the N.C.R. had caught our attention with its babbling about "clerical pedophilia," most non-Catholic North Americans had already become accustomed to regarding the Church as a world-wide instrument of sexual oppression. Burgeoning anti-Catholicism lent credibility to the wildest claims advanced by disgruntled Catholics. Protestants necessarily prefer Catholics who speak the language of revolution, and for over thirty years now, a massed chorus of Currans, Baums and McBriens has obliged them with their favourite rhetoric. How delighted they must have been, for example, when the Catholic keynote speaker at a 1992 meeting of Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup called the occasion "a Wittenberg," in order to associate it with the site of Luther's protest against the "celibate/sexual system" of the Catholic church, then as now in need of "profound reformation."

Dissidents get their crisis

The N.C.R. got its crisis, but were its claims met? In one sense, no. Rome still hasn't abrogated the rule of celibacy. Yet, in a wider sense, or so Jenkins claims, the dissidents have made their point. To him, the very fact that they felt able to lead a public outcry against the sexual behaviour of their own priests shows how thoroughly "traditional attitudes towards religious authority" have already given way to secular ones, "more in keeping with liberal and feminist beliefs." Imagine our Catholic grandfathers having anything good to say about Martin Luther, a man who called the Mass "an abomination the like of which has never been in Christendom since the time of the Apostles."

It was, of course, Catholicism's sacramental system, requiring as it does, belief in a divinely-commissioned all-male priesthood, that dissidents were most eager to undermine, hence their solidarity with Luther. They sought to downgrade the sacrament of penance, for example, by insisting that clerical sex-abusers were not sinners in need of forgiveness and absolution, but psychological misfits in need of therapy and rehabilitation; in fact, since Rome's patriarchal dictatorship had turned them into misfits in the first place, according to dissident theology, Rome was the one who should be asking forgiveness of them. And already congregations in two Canadian cathedrals have witnessed episcopal breast-beatings.

Meanwhile, in the United States, as Jenkins points out, Saint Luke's Institute, the main Catholic treatment centre for sexually abusive priests, is run strictly on the principles of secular therapy. An essay by its director includes the "twelve steps of sexaholics anonymous."

Does this mean that the Church is about to give up hearing confessions in favour of deprogramming psychopaths? Will she abandon her ancient claim to the fullness of Truth, and be content to become simply an international United Way? We know that that can never happen. Jenkins, however, is not so sure. He is a brilliant and insightful sociologist, but only a sociologist. His discipline is a post-Christian one. In his world, any professor of religion who allowed his thinking to be influenced by religious belief would forfeit all claim to objectivity. The viewpoint reflected in Pedophiles and Priests is necessarily a secular one. Perhaps the time really is ripe for an Association of Catholic Social Scientists. To those of us for whom God is Truth, that title can never be a contradictory one.