In order to understand the reason behind the failure of Church officials to correct the problem of sexual abuse and their subsequent cover-ups of that abuse, one has to realize that the genesis of the problem lies within the infiltrated structures of the Catholic Church. That is to say, most of the predator priests who abused, raped, and sodomized countless children, the majority of whom were teenage boys, were themselves victims of prior predation. In my decades of work with clerical sexual abuse cases, I have yet to meet and interview one predator priest who had not been sexually abused himself in his former days in priestly formation. This explains both why they in turn abuse young people, and why Church officials have consistently covered up that abuse.
Let’s take the example of one priest whom we will call “Bill,” and one bishop whom we will call “Leo.”
Bill went to a high school seminary when he was 13 years old, where he was groomed and introduced to gay sex by a faculty member who purported to be a caring mentor. Like most such victims, Bill did not want to tell his parents how he had developed a homosexual orientation, which often happens to boys who are abused during their period of psychosexual development and prior to their ever having had an emotional or physical relationship with a woman. Instead of returning home, by staying in the seminary and getting ordained, Bill’s family and friends would never discover that he, like many abuse victims, suffers from same-sex attraction. Because Bill looked upon his 12 years of seminary sexual experiences with priests and seminarians as forms of love and friendship, he later, as a priest, engaged in the same behavior with boys in his parish. When one of those boys reported his predations to Father Bill’s bishop, Bishop Leo, the bishop sent Bill away for “treatment” and arranged for an out-of-court settlement with the victim. Later, Bishop Leo assigned Father Bill to another parish, just like countless homosexual priests are reassigned after getting caught using the gay Grindr hook-up app.
Continue reading at John Eighteen Thirty Seven