Catholics and the Sexual Revolution
Recently I had a letter from an American friend about clerical misdemeanors. He is not a Catholic, but he lives in a retirement home where there are a number of elderly Catholic priests. Even the "fairly conservative ones" are "saddened and critical," it seems, about the way the cases have been handled. Why, my friend asks, haven't the Catholic authorities acted the way one would expect the headmaster of a school to act with an errant teacher and fired the offenders? This, more or less, was my reply.
"Dear X, What has been happening is indeed in the strictest sense scandalous, and I will do my best to throw light on it. But I want to begin by asking a question of a different kind. What right do most of the people outside the Church who have been throwing stones at the Catholic clergy have even to pick up a stone?
"For decades a large section of the media and a majority of our cultural panjandrums, with for the most part the approval of the general public, have been berating the Church for not accepting the 'values' of the sexual revolution. Now when a proportion of the Catholic clergy have succumbed to those 'values,' who are they to cry 'stinking fish'?
"This does not make the situation any less serious and tragic or excuse what has been happening. The questions which I imagine you want me to answer are: Why have a significant number of the clergy succumbed, and why in so many cases have the authorities protected instead of disciplining them?
"Anyone, at any time, of course, can give way to temptation, or exercise authority negligently or unwisely. But here we are dealing with a collective phenomenon on a wide scale, and I incline to attribute it to the infatuation with 'modern psychology' at the expense of the Church's traditional way of understanding human nature and handling misdemeanors which became commonplace in the wake of Vatican II.
"Not that the council documents are to blame. They make only a few brief references to the use of modern psychology in the Church's ministry to souls which in no sense justify the exalted place it has come to occupy in the life of too many Western dioceses. Psychology has its uses. But it is a discipline in which above all others, I think, 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,' and is the unfortunate results of that little knowledge, widely applied, which we are presently experiencing.
"For 30 years or more Western dioceses have been loaded with priests and nuns who have taken quick-fire psychology courses, from which they have come to believe that sexual drives are the foundation of human personality, permeating all its parts; that 'frustrating' those drives is mostly if not invariably harmful, and consequently that sexual activity of no matter what kind can never be a serious matter or a serious sin; that in a universe where everything has come about accidentally or through trial and error there is no such thing as normal and abnormal, or natural and unnatural — whatever happens is part of nature and to that extent 'natural'; that sex is a purely private matter without social consequences.
"Indeed, this now seems to be the outlook of large numbers of the faithful without their having taken any psychology courses. They have simply absorbed these ideas from the surrounding culture. It is impossible not to conclude that considerable proportions of the Western episcopate, clergy, and laity believe that the Church will one day tolerate or permit some degree of homosexual practice, just as they believe it will one day reverse its stand on contraception and allow abortion in certain cases.
"The irony of the situation is that bishops who have allowed or tolerated active homosexuals in their seminaries and parishes have up to now enjoyed the approval of the politically correct. What they did not foresee was that a society which has accepted so much of the sexual revolutionaries' agenda would still draw the line at molesting boys and adolescents; that the sexual revolutionaries, in spite of their efforts, have not yet managed to destroy the natural revulsion against this particular deviation.
"Priests and religious with the outlook just described are everywhere influential in Western Church bureaucracies and institutions. They question candidates for entry into seminaries about their sex lives to ensure that they are suitably 'mature,' maturity meaning, in many cases, having had sexual experiences of some kind, while others have been running more and more explicit sex education classes for younger and younger children.
"I had experience of this when I was going to and fro between England and Rome for The Wanderer in the 1980s. On one occasion I was asked to give the head of one of the congregation a large package of sex-ed material that would have made the courtiers of the English King Charles II blush. The cardinal turned the pages wearily and said with a sigh: 'The Holy Father already has a whole library of this stuff.'
"About the same time I met a seminarian from one of the English-speaking Roman colleges who told me, with deep earnestness, as though we were 'treading on hallowed ground,' that he and his fellow students were learning 'to explore their sexuality.' Even then it struck me as a recipe for disaster, though I have to confess I did not foresee the exact form the disaster would take.
"It is as though the authorities who have promoted or tolerated these things had been struck blind or gone mad. If you steep the minds of men and women dedicated to celibacy in the subject of sex, they are obviously not going to remain faithful to their vows for long, whether they break them with members of the opposite or the same sex. The first wave carried thousands of priests and religious out of the Church into marriage or concubinage, the second has turned hundreds if not thousands into active homosexuals within it. With priests hearing Confessions it has always been different. They are concerned solely with the objective morality of particular acts, not with details.
"Unfortunately, there is now another side to the coin. Today 'the whole world' knows that there is money to be made out of Catholic dioceses by bringing charges of abuse, and there is good evidence that innocent priests have been accused of abuse — I know personally of two cases — either to get money, pay off a grudge, or punish them for being too orthodox.
"However," my letter continued, "remind the good priests in your retirement home that the faith remains what it has always been, a divine elixir marketed for the most part in earthenware pots and that whenever the pots have gotten too dirty, the Lord of the Enterprise has always come along and provided clean ones with a proportion in silver and gold."
This was my letter. And now what happens next? The way forward, I suggest, has to begin with the four steps backward.
There has to be a real wholehearted acceptance of Humanae Vitae by Western hierarchies, and a genuine sustained effort to put its teachings across. Accepting contraception was the first step on the path to the sexual revolution for Western society as a whole, and the same, as Paul VI saw, has now proved true for Catholics.
It won't be easy. Recalling the faithful after a mass defection from some aspect of God's law never has been, whether under the Old Covenant or the New. And it will take time. Hope lies in the adherence of more and more bishops to the work of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. Without something like this, so it seems to me, the situation can only get worse, the worst situation of all being, not more scandals and more handing over of diocesan cash, but no one being scandalized about anything anymore because the "values" of the sexual revolutionaries have been accepted by Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
The second step will land us outside the door of the confessional. For three of four decades the highest authorities have been lamenting the "loss of the sense of sin." Is it possible not to see a connection between the present disasters and decline of frequent Confession? But it will have to be preached. It won't just happen by lamenting its disappearance. The best approach, I suggest, is to help people realize they are missing out on something good. There are graces that, in the normal course of things, are more readily attainable through this sacrament than by any other means.
Step number three is a catechetics without loopholes or ambiguities; a catechetics based on revealed facts rather than personal experiences, especially in regard to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, and "hard sayings" like eternal punishment. Possibly the latter was overemphasized in the past. But is there anyone who has struggled to live and keep the faith who has not been helped many times by the knowledge that one could be cast from the presence of God forever? Forgive me if I am boring you. How obvious this must seem to most of you who are reading this. But I believe one cannot underestimate the religious and moral ignorance of the post-60s generations.
Up to the time of the council and no doubt for some years afterward, it could be taken for granted that the majority of men offering themselves for the priesthood came from practicing Catholic families and therefore had already had a good catechetical training.
But by the 1990s fully believing Catholic families in the Western world had become a minority. At the synod on priestly formation in 1990, many bishops explained that the bulk of their candidates for the priesthood were now so ignorant that they were having to give them a preliminary year before they began philosophy and theology, in which to teach them the basics of the faith, which they would previously have learned from their families or at school.
Shortly afterward, I had another eye-opener, this time provided by a Benedictine abbot. He had recently had a conversation with a young man who wanted to try his vocation as a monk. They talked about the monastic life and the best time for him to start. When all was settled, the young man got up to leave, but on reaching the door, stopped, turned, and said: "Oh, by the way, Father, should I stop living with my girlfriend now or wait till I come?"
One can see what cannon fodder young men like this will have been for seminary teachers who had embraced the principles of the sexual revolution in a more radical way.
The fourth step backward before we can go forward again, I believe, is a thorough reassessment of the value of psychology as an aid to the Church's ministry, and a renewed awareness that the Church knows and always has known far more about human nature and human beings than any school of psychology, no matter how sophisticated.
How can priests or religious be helped by therapists who, as is too often the case, have little or no understanding of or belief in virtue and vice, grace and temptation, or the difference between matter and spirit? Unless they are believing Christians, the majority know neither what human beings are nor what they are for. To a great extent, questionable psychological theories have helped to generate the very problems that psychologists and psychiatrists are being called in to handle.
When an accusation is brought against a priest, the immediate response should not be "send for a psychiatrist to see how far his sexual orientation is off-beam and get it redirected." The first questions to ask are whether in the opinion of trustworthy colleagues he is or is not virtuous and a man of prayer, says Mass reverently, goes regularly to Confession, has a lifestyle appropriate to his calling. When he fails in any of these respects, what he needs is not "psychological treatment," but conversion.
The idea that a practicing homosexual man is going to change his lifestyle after some sessions with a psychiatrist, unless at the same time he recognizes that he is not just the subject of a psychological disorder, but the perpetrator of a grave moral fault is, I believe, preposterous. Even if his orientation were successfully corrected, without a moral conversion he will simply start going after women. It is like sending for a psychiatrist to make a confirmed adulterer chaste.
I am not suggesting that psychologists and psychiatrists should be expelled from the precincts of the Temple altogether. But I believe they should be restricted to a modest room on the perimeter, and the prestige they have enjoyed for the last 30 years be returned to experienced and orthodox spiritual directors. Men and women with a homosexual orientation who want to live by the Church's moral teaching can be helped up to a point by limited and prudent psychological counseling, but the will to live chastely has to be there first, and only a more intense spiritual life can, with the help of grace, keep it in existence.
Until these four ramparts of the earthly Jerusalem are put back in place and reinforced — the teaching of Humanae Vitae, frequent Confession, a catechetics on the Commandments purged of equivocations, and the return of psychiatry to its proper place on the sidelines — I believe the "values" of the sexual revolution will continue to devastate the Mystical Body, until in Western countries there is very little of the Mystical Body left.
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