Masculinity, relationships and Context: Child sexual abuse and the Catholic Church

Abstract

This paper provides background to the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church in Ireland and outlines the particular Irish dimensions to the problem. It argues that a systemic perspective offers best promise to conceptualise the problem of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and outlines. In turning to how the problem has been investigated by statutory and church commissioned inquiries and commissions of investigation (Murphy, 2009; Ryan, 2009) it becomes apparent that how the past is investigated and framed is not merely a neutral matter, but one that is complexly interwoven with present politic and changing social conditions. In offering a critique of the Murphy Report into the Handling of Abuse Complaints in the Archdioceses of Dublin (Murphy, 2009), as one example of a statutory commission of investigation in Ireland, some significant legal and methodological issues are raised that give cause for concern regarding some of the findings and judgements made. What cannot be disputed however is the fact that thousands of children were abused by Catholic clergy in Ireland and worldwide. We owe it to them to get to the full truth of what occurred and to prevent its re-occurrence. In considering a way forward for the church, victims of clergy must be placed at the centre of the church’s response, other key actors must be brought together in dialogue and the church must deal with the systemic genesis of the problem in a spirit of institutional reform and transformation. Introduction My interest in Roman Catholic clergy who had perpetrated child sexual abuse developed when I, along with two colleagues, set up a community-based treatment programme for child sexual offenders in Ireland in 1996, which attracted a large number of Catholic clergy for treatment (see Keenan, 2012). Apart from offering treatment, I was interested in understanding how priests and religious brothers who had sexually abused minors understood those aspects of their lives that had contributed to their sexual offending. Usually people join the ranks of Catholic clergy for a number of reasons, and while there is no evidence to suggest that the main reason for joining is the betterment of the human race, my experience of working with clergy in Ireland for over two decades had led me to believe that the motivation for many was to be of service and to help others. Therefore I wanted to know what had gone so terribly wrong. Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies 65 The most comprehensive research ever carried out on sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, conducted by researchers in the United States (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 2004, 2006, 2011), reports that whatever else formed the priests’ motivation for joining, gaining access to children to abuse them was not part of it. My own experience confirmed this. The more I met with the clerical men who had abused, the more intrigued I became. Put simply, I was not in the presence of “monsters”, nor was I in the presence of individuals who had an “illness”. I began to think there must be more to the abuse problem than “simply” individual psychopathology, and I began to inquire into the situational and institutional dimensions of the abuse problem, which became more apparent to me the more I engaged with the Catholic Church. While many organizational factors have emerged that indicate the significance of gender, power and organizational culture in the genesis of this problem and in the response to it, no research has ever suggested that the church attracts a particular “type” of individual that will be subsequently abusive. My research suggests on the contrary that the problem develops systemically and that seminary experience and the ways in which clerical masculinity is fostered and adopted is significant in how this problem comes to be. As has now become evident from the wave of disclosures of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy throughout the Western world, as well as the actual offending there was another dimension to the abuse problem: the handling of abuse complaints by the church hierarchy. The lack of adequate response to abuse complaints by the church leaders has become apparent in almost every country in the world in which sexual abuse by clergy has come to light. In considering the international situation I am of the view that the actual abuse problem and the response to it by the church leadership are not two unrelated problems, but in fact that they are interlinked. Put simply, both sets of men were part of the same institutional culture. While within this culture not all priests were abusive (indeed as the data suggests, they are a small minority of clergy with 4 – 9 % of Catholic clergy having abuse allegations made against them (see Keenan, 2012, pp 59)), the pattern of response by the church hierarchy showed remarkably similar patterns. The extent to which the institutional and organizational culture of the Catholic Church played a role in the sexual abuse situation had to be empirically addressed and that has been the focus of much of my work while not neglecting the role of individual action and choice. However, in this paper I begin by suggesting that an individualist perspective is a limited one in helping to understand the clerical perpetrator and instead I propose a masculinity relational perspective as a more elaborate conceptualization of the problem. I suggest that those clerical men who adopted a way of “doing” clerical masculinity that was built on an idea of celibate perfection were more likely to become the child abuse perpetrators. Drawing on Goffman’s (1996) typology of adaptation strategies for managing life in total institutions (such as the Catholic seminary) I suggest a way to theorise why some priests became sexually abusive, while others did not that is not based on individual psychopathology. I then turn to inquiries and commissions of investigation into the church’s handling of abuse complaints in Ireland and argue that how a problem is framed will (and in the case of the Commission of Investigation into the Handling of Abuse Complaints in the Archdioceses of Dublin (The Murphy Report) (Murphy, 2009)), did influence the commission’s findings. I offer a critique of The Murphy Report (Murphy, 2009), to raise some important scholarly considerations. 66 Masculinity, relationships and context: Child sexual abuse and the Catholic Church Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church: Moving away from individual perspectives Although there are exceptions (such as Adriaenssens, 2010; Deetman, 2011; John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 2004, 2006, 2011) much work on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church focuses on the assumed psychopathology of the perpetrator and much popular writing and Government commissioned work focuses on the failures of named individuals who were in positions of authority in their mis-handling of abuse complaints (Murphy, 2009). There is a need to move from individualistic perspectives to a relational perspective, which incorporates cultural, theological and organizational factors in our attempts to explain and understand the sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in all its dimensions. I believe that it is possible to identify a number of features of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church that have a determining influence, not only on how the priests came to abuse, but on how the church leaders responded as they did. Factors such as the continuum of the sexual underworld of “normal” clergy; an inadequate theology of sexuality and the absence of a relational sexual ethics for clergy; the churches theology of scandal; clericalism, and deficits in a moral education that is overly intellectualised must all be considered (see Keenan, 2012 for a full discussion). In this paper I focus on two other significant dimensions to understanding the clerical offender: the interplay of power and powerlessness and the construction of clerical