The Truth Works Well for a Little While
I am amazed, sometimes, when I meet women who tell me they were molested as children. It never ceases to amaze me, how such women can function well at work and at home. How can they be abused and come out OK? And, in some cases, still be in love with the perpetrator. How could they? How could they even try to get beyond it, heal from it, or find any sort of resolution?
Well, these women who make that stunning confession often have one thing in common: their abuser was a Catholic priest. Sometimes, when it was discovered that they were gay, their priest would then turn his venomous hatred on them and try to make them hate themselves for being gay. In a sense, he was not so different from some abusive men, trying to make women “perfect.” (Did you notice how he didn’t make any attempt to heal the child? But, rather, to heal the parent, telling them that they were “dirty?”)
No question, most sexual abuse is committed by men and boys who are sexually interested in children and who tend to be sociopaths. If they are not, it is because they are so terrified of being exposed as sexual perverts that they have become hypocritical prudes.
But, you can’t help but wonder what it is about Catholicism that attracts pedophiles. The best book I have read about this is “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Working-Class Whites in 20th-Century Milwaukee,” by David J. Garrow.
The author was researching how working-class children and adults reacted to being sexually molested by a Catholic priest. In particular, he was interested in how families reacted, even though it meant separating from their loved ones. (And, sometimes, disowning them and turning them out of the house.) The more I read about it, the more I was astonished at the people who were able to move beyond what happened to them and grow in grace and wisdom as a result of the experience.
The more I read, the more I understood why the Catholic Church has so many problems with sexual abuse. To the priesthood, sex is dirty and ugly. The priesthood is a sexual caste in their own right, apart from the people. The priesthood is there to defend Catholic purity, which is represented by the Virgin Mary.
This means that there is no way the priesthood can feel sympathy for sexual abuse victims or for the victim’s families. When abuse occurs, the church turns its collective attention on the priest who is found to be guilty of molestation. He will most likely be arrested and put on trial in front of a secular judge, and he will almost surely go to prison.
The church cannot do anything to heal the victims because their pain interferes with the perpetrator’s “sainthood” — they can’t be forgiven if they are “damaged goods.” The victim becomes a stain on the church, rather than a holy soul that needed protecting. It’s all about the priest’s sin. The child’s sexual orientation is not taken into consideration, because he doesn’t count as a child, it’s all about the priest.
So much of our culture is built on the ideal that sexuality is a positive force in our lives and that sexual desire is sacred. But, as a priest once told me, “Sexuality is dirty, just as money is dirty. And, when money becomes sacred, well, that just changes the world. For the worse.”
And, of course, sex is dirty when it’s being used for masturbation or it is being made dirty by the molestation of children. You cannot be pure as long as you keep giving in to your own lust, to the flesh, or to the demonic.
Sexuality and sexual desire are sacred, but sexuality itself must be controlled and channeled into loving relationships and it must be directed toward procreation and building a family, for procreation is sacred too, and so is the joining together of two people. Procreation can be holy, and sex can be holy, if the people doing it take the sacrament of marriage seriously.
But sex can never be holy when it’s unbridled or random or when it’s practiced outside a marriage, because then it becomes like money, a means to an end and not a gift to celebrate life. (It should be noted that the people with the strongest sexual appetites are often the people who tend to control the church. Those who are sexually shy and retiring are not the ones in power.)
Most women can see through a man’s sexual energy when it is uncontrolled and unchanneled. The first time I met my husband, he took his pants off and dropped his penis into his hand while a bunch of us were having drinks and dinner. The very next thing I knew, he was on top of me, trying to get it in me. I tried to ignore him. He tried to ignore me. I got more and more angry. He got more and more excited. The more he tried to ignore me, the more he was excited by me. It was a perfect example of how sexual energy can be used in ways that we don’t really want to be used. If the person in charge is weak, you don’t have a choice.
And this is why so many priests, who claim that they love God, can turn around and molest children. As Garrow said, in most cases, they don’t consider themselves to be doing wrong when they do what they do. Most of them get drunk or high or use some drug that makes them feel great and they have sex with a child, or they want sex, they want to get laid. They are going to get off on it anyway, they just say, “Hey, I’m not hurting anybody. I am just doing my thing.”
Here is an interesting case: In the 1920s, a man whose name was Leo Kolbe moved to the United States from his home country of Lithuania. He was known for being an expert bookkeeper. He was very successful in the States and became the chief accountant for a large company. He also became a Catholic, and eventually he was allowed to become an “honorary” priest.
It is said that one night, Kolbe received a visit from a young man who had been drinking heavily. The man wanted to have sex with Kolbe, but Kolbe refused. When the young man could not get what he wanted from Kolbe, he went to the manager and complained about Kolbe. The manager said that he could not do anything about it because Kolbe was a Catholic priest.
The manager suggested that he get a prostitute. The young man did so, and had sex with the prostitute. Kolbe was livid.
But this was a man who lived to serve God and to serve God’s people, and so he went to the priest who had just given him permission to use his office as a confessional. He told the priest about what happened. The priest suggested that the priest and Kolbe had their discussion in the sacristy instead of the confessional. And so they did.
Later, Kolbe said that he knew he was a sinner, but God had prepared him to do great things for God, for the church, and for people. He realized that what happened between him and the young man was a mistake. He had gotten out of balance, and had not properly focused on God. The problem, of course, was his own lust, his own weakness.
This is why, really, one of the great secrets to human happiness is that when we make a mistake, we need to blame ourselves, and not others. When we make a mistake, that means we have had a lapse, and then we need to put it behind us. The moment we try to hold it against someone else is the moment that the poison of the past begins to affect our daily life, and we get less happy and less peaceful and less joyful.
Sometimes, when people make a mistake or someone else makes a mistake, it is not the right time to forgive the person who did or said something wrong. There may be other times, other moments that call for forgiveness, and that’s all. So, forgiveness is really for us, not for the people we hurt. We forgive ourselves and try to release the hurt. We do not use it as a weapon to hurt another person.
Kolbe could have responded to the priest, “You don’t know me, Father, and you don’t know my sin. I am a good person and you have no right to judge me.” But what he did instead was a far better use of his energy. He recognized that he had made a mistake, and he said, “I will change, and you will be more free and good because of what I have told you.”
And that, of course, is the point. We forgive ourselves, not because we have to forgive others, but because forgiveness is always a gift to the one who has been hurt. By forgiving, we allow ourselves to move on and find ways to go on without carrying the hurts of the past with us.
If we were not able to forgive, then the past would haunt us. But, what I have learned is that forgiveness allows the past to be forgotten. What is forgotten is in a sense released from our consciousness, allowing us to be with joy. (To
