Bless Me Father for I Have Sinned: Perspectives on Sexual Abuse Committed by Roman Catholic Priests

Books and articles on sexual abuse

---

He argues that the sexual abuse scandals are not a failure of celibacy, but a failure of priests to be celibate, with at least the passive connivance of their bishops. The bulk of Weigel's scorn is heaped on prelates who are afraid to lead or command, who can speak only in a kind of fogbound religious legalese, who have allowed homosexual subcultures to flourish within their seminaries and priestly communities, and who have given over their dioceses to a lay bureaucracy that often exhibits little allegiance to Catholic values and papal teachings.

Weigel wants bishops to take back control of their dioceses, and he wants priests and seminarians to evidence fidelity to Catholic teaching, including celibacy and traditional Catholic sexual ethics. Weigel has no doubts that the Church could find good priests in sufficient number.

Dioceses like Denver, Colorado, Lincoln, Nebraska, and Arlington, Virginia, where bishops have consciously adopted a strict, countercultural model for the Church, he claims, are ordaining lots of "healthy" young men. Based on my one extended visit to the Lincoln diocese several years ago, he may be right.

What happens when you confess your sins to a Catholic priest, Protestant pastor or Mormon bishop?

Altogether, his book is informed and wide-ranging, clear, crisp, and direct. It is likely to be a tocsin for the conservative cause, and liberals who ignore it will do so at their peril. Overall, this volume expresses roughly the positions put forward by Weigel, but less cogently and forcefully. Donald Cozzens is a diocesan priest, a psychologist, and a college teacher most recently at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio , and his Sacred Silence is the implicit liberal riposte to Weigel. Sacred Silence is notable for its quietness and very lack of certainty.

As to his target, Cozzens leaves no doubt: It is the habit of denial inculcated by the exclusively male, privileged, essentially medieval structure of the Church. Cozzens first encountered the clerical brand of Orwellian double-think as a young seminarian when he was required to take the oath against Modernism at the same time that the bishops of the Second Vatican Council were embracing many of the positions he was required to forswear. The inability of bishops to deal with the abuse crisis, Cozzens argues, is part of an ingrained habit of defensiveness, starting with the once standard seminary regime in which "Catholic philosophy alone has the truth" and virtually all non-Catholic thinkers are "adversaries.

The great threat to the Church, in Cozzens's view, is a clerical mandarinate, ambitious, lost in details of ritual and regalia, remote from workaday concerns of raising families and making a living, and ready to conceal even terrible crimes rather than risk a loss of status. Cozzens does not believe that celibacy causes pedophilia, but fears that it creates too narrow a base of candidates for the priestly life.

An honest inquiry into the state of the Church, he believes, would expose a need for major overhauls, including scrapping the insistence on celibacy and an all-male priesthood. The path to renewal for Cozzens, however, is less a question of specific administrative reforms than of embracing a commitment to truth, of listening to "contemplative voices" who will speak with "no denial, no half-truths, no minimization, no duplicitous spins. According to Wills, the book is a response to the question put by many readers of his previous book, Papal Sins: Given Wills's seemingly jaundiced view of the papacy, why doesn't he just leave the Church?

Wills's answer is that it is possible to be both a critic of the papacy and a loyal Catholic in the tradition of his intellectual heroes, Lord Acton, G. Chesterton, and John Henry Newman. What really keeps Wills in the Church, however, may be his fondness for Greek. He prefers to recite the Our Father in Greek, and ends his book with a splendid exegesis of the Greek text of the prayer. I assumed at first that he was praising a translation, but according to the Catholic Encyclopedia , the evangelist Matthew was fluent in Greek, and there is a strong case that our Greek text of his gospel, where the prayer appears, is actually the original version.

Wills is a fine literary critic, and his exposition of the prayer is not only extraordinarily beautiful but reveals a text of astonishingly sophisticated theological sensibility. By itself, it's worth the price of admission. Eugene Kennedy is a psychologist and former priest who has been making the case against the priestly celibacy rule for more than 30 years, and he makes it again in his new book, The Unhealed Wound.

This time, unfortunately, he has chosen to couch it in the language of the Grail legend. Anfortas, the Fisher-King, caught in illicit love in Wagner's version of the myth, was lanced in the groin by a sorcerer, and condemned to pain-ridden immortality until released by Parsifal, the holy fool.

The "seeping wound" is celibacy, you see, and, well. In any case, the wings of metaphor carry Kennedy quite over the top. All problems in the history of the Church stem from its drive toward sexual power, the "male reverie of costless sexual domination.

There are strong arguments for a non-celibate male and female Catholic priesthood, and most of them are in this book but buried under layers of nonsense. Taking the opposing, restorationist side in the celibacy question is Michael S. Rose, the former editor of St. In Goodbye, Good Men , Rose focuses on some of the nuttier experiments in post-Vatican II seminary training that, in the effort to be "modern," fostered permissive attitudes toward heterosexual and homosexual experimentation.

Most all-male societies, from prison populations to the 19th-century Oxford and Cambridge dons, tend to evolve significant homosexual subcultures, at least in the absence of aggressive repression. Rose contends that homosexual networks took over many important seminaries in the late s and s, chasing away the sexually straight and theologically orthodox.

As one priest recalls his seminary days in the s: The problem with Rose's argument, however, and with Kennedy's, and Cozzen's, is that the danger of a predominantly homosexual clergy could probably be dealt with either by dropping the all-male, all-celibate rule or by a firm return to pre-Vatican II disciplines. The sex abuse scandals, that is, become just one more platform for liberal and conservative polemics, each side insisting on a return to its own brand of first principles, which each duly defends with reams of historical and scriptural evidence.

The gap between the restorationist and liberal sides seems much too wide and deeply felt to be bridged by polite conversation. Civil wars, unfortunately, are always the bloodiest and usually end only with the total exhaustion of one side or the other. He is an intelligent man and a good writer, but his book is marred by a movie-script style of quick cuts and reconstructed conversations that make it hard to follow.

Bruni and Burkett were part of the New York Times team on the story, and their account is the more workmanlike.

Editorial Reviews

Amid the cacophony of lay and clerical voices weighing in on the priestly sex abuse crisis, the one constant is how little anyone knows about its true extent. One therefore turns to a clinical book, B less Me Father for I Have Sinned , in eager anticipation, finally, of some hard facts. Bless Me Father is a collection of academic papers that grew out of a conference on clerical sexual abuse.

But when priests do get involved with minors, they are much more likely than other sex offenders to be involved with boys. But as the authors are quick to concede, all data are suspect.

Everything we have comes from unrepresentative samples, and almost nothing is known about the sex lives of priests who don't get into trouble. National Library of Australia. Bless me father for I have sinned: Plante ; foreword by Sylvia M. Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card.

To learn more about how to request items watch this short online video.

Books by Thomas Plante

You can view this on the NLA website. New search User lists Site feedback Ask a librarian Help.

Advanced search Search history. Browse titles authors subjects uniform titles series callnumbers dewey numbers starting from optional. See what's been added to the collection in the current 1 2 3 4 5 6 weeks months years. Cite this Email this Add to favourites Print this page. Catalogue Persistent Identifier https: You must be logged in to Tag Records.

In the Library Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card.

• Im Tal der Schmetterlinge: Roman (German Edition)
• The Cultures of Italian Migration: Diverse Trajectories and Discrete Perspectives (The Fairleigh Dic
• How To Grow Your Business Without Advertising: A Michael Senoff Marketing Consultation
• Eternal Flame (The Angelic Saga Book 1)
• Hobsons Choice
• Mr. Lippmann goes to La Habana (Spanish Edition)