19/04/02
April 19, 2002 Reportage The Times
The sins of the Fathers
by Peter Stanford
Engulfed by child abuse scandals, the Catholic Church is under pressure to change its law on celibacy. 50 per cent of priests break it anyway, and five clerics describe their experiences
The Catholic Church in both America and Ireland is again under siege. Bishops and cardinals accused of covering up the activities of paedophile priests are facing demands that they should fall on their mitres.
The issue is one that the Vatican prayed had gone away in the mid-1990s. But it hasn't. And now the finger of accusation is beginning to point beyond individuals to something at the very core of the Catholic Church's mission - its demand that priests must be celibate.
The drumbeat of opposition to celibacy is now louder than at any stage since it was made mandatory at the Second Lateran Council in 1139.
For the first half of Christian history a married priesthood was the norm. The New Testament makes it clear that St Peter, the first pope, was married. A passage in Matthew's Gospel (xix, 12), in which Jesus calls on His followers to be "eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of Heaven", seems in context to be part of His teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. And anyway, He concludes: "Let anyone accept this who can." The cult of virginity did, however, establish a foothold in the early church. In the 5th century, Saint Augustine wrote that "nothing is more calculated to cast a man's spirits down from the citadel than the blandishments of a woman". Most priests ignored such a misogynist warning, but the authorities were increasingly concerned that the local clergy was not distinct enough from the laity. What reforming popes such as Gregory VII in the 11th century wanted to see was a dedicated, disciplined army marching in step with their bishops and wearing their cassocks as a uniform with pride. The reality was a ragbag if ill-educated men (there were no seminaries, and only a three-day oral exam to be accepted into the priesthood) who, by their marriages, were assimilated into their community and who then tried to parcel off church land for the benefit of their children. Thus, the decision in 1139 was the culmination of a drive to bring order and discipline. It promised an end to married priests who besmirched the good name of the church by their sexual infidelities, and to property disputes over who owned church land.
A sizeable number of married priests remained at least until the middle of the 16th century, when the Council of Trent in 1545 tried to close loopholes, and the uncelibate priesthood was still around at the time of the French Revolution. Indeed there are still married Catholic priests today in the Uniat churches of the East, which owe allegiance to the Pope; in Britain, convert Anglican clergymen disillusioned by the Church of England's stance on female ordination have been given a special Vatican dispensation to be ordained as priests even when they have wives.
Evidence from within the Catholic priesthood of the failure of this man-made rule of celibacy is compelling. Richard Sipe, an American psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, spent 25 years working with 1,500 priests who were suffering from what the Catholic Church often coyly describes as "broken celibacy". He estimated that 2 per cent abused small children and 4 per cent were sexually attracted to adolescents. That, it should be noted, is considerably higher than among the population as a whole. Sipe reckoned that just 10 per cent of priests were successfully celibate - that is, they had embraced the idea and found it empowering - and 40 per cent stuck by the rule but did so reluctantly. The remaining 50 per cent, Sipe recorded, had at some stage during their ministry been sexually active, with up to about a third of that group being homosexual. Or, to put it another way, half of all priests are hypocrites. They fail to practise what they preach.
Peter Stanford's Heaven: A Traveller's Guide is published by HarperCollins. He is former editor of The Catholic Herald