1,685 words
I attended Catholic high school at Cardinal O’Hara in Broomall, Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1979. I’d estimate that at the very most, 20 priests taught there while I was a student. At least six of them — Father Jones, Father Giliberti, Father McCarthy, Father Cannon, Father Gallagher, and Father Close — subsequently faced multiple allegations of sexually abusing schoolboys there. Father Jones gave a nasty sermon at my father’s funeral. As my sophomore biology teacher, Father McCarthy taught 14-year-olds about sexual reproduction. Father Gallagher was my junior-year French teacher. Of those six priests who were accused, the only one whom the Catholic authorities did not deem the allegations to be credible against was the latter, Father Close. His male accusers had also gone to the police but were informed that the statute of limitations had already expired.
I attended grade school at Holy Cross Elementary in Springfield, Pennsylvania from 1967 until 1975. We were taught entirely by nuns and hardly ever saw the priests from the adjacent church. The nuns, though, were so viciously sadistic that they were primary contributors to my lifelong misogyny.
When the high-profile Catholic priest abuse scandal broke out in Boston in 2002, I wondered why no one had ever written about sexual abuse by nuns. In the course of writing a full-length article for HUSTLER on the topic, I realized there had already been a couple books written about it. I also realized that, as I suspected, the nuns were far more brutal in their sexual abuse than any story I’d ever heard about priests.
I only recently heard from a kid who grew up across the street from me that one of the nuns at Holy Cross had been accused of molesting a pair of twin boys at the school. It was the first time I’d heard of nuns actually diddling students there, but they were extremely keen on public sexual shaming and humiliation — but only of boys. On the first day of first grade, when a pair of boys brawled out in the schoolyard, one of the nuns made them kiss each other on the lips in front of the entire class. The nuns were also unremittingly violent — but again, only against the boys.
My Catholic education was instructive, but not in the way my educators likely intended. It taught me that it’s dangerous to give any human being that much moral authority over anyone else, because it often shields them from repercussions. I’ve seen this template repeated in endless permutations throughout my life: Beware of the “good” people, especially the ones who consistently make a point of being good, because they are often the worst. The very fact that they have to keep announcing that they’re good suggests they aren’t very secure about it. And they tend to use the idea that they represent the ultimate good as a shield they hide behind to inflict all manner of harm upon others. Even Jesus talked about those types.
For me, it led to a lifelong, and highly justified, suspicion of moralists. Once you snatch the good-guy shield away from their hands, they are invariably bastards. And it doesn’t matter what cause they’re hiding behind. What matters is that they’re hiding behind a cause. Their life is one long cycle of protesting too much.
A major report was released this week in France estimating that over the past 70 years, Catholic priests and clerical workers in that country sexually abused up to 330,000 children. That number far exceeds the totals found in similar studies from other countries — which are confined strictly to actual allegations — whereas French researchers arrived at their totals by “extrapolating the number of victims based on study of specific incidents and nationwide surveys.” The study, which did not examine adult victims, concluded that four out of five victims were boys. It also estimated that the average perpetrator claimed 70 victims. Lead researcher Jean-Marc Sauvé said:
Until the early 2000s the Catholic Church showed a profound and even cruel indifference towards the victims. [Their] failures and silence [were] systemic . . . the Catholic Church is, after the circle of family and friends, the environment that has the highest prevalence of sexual violence.
You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here.
Olivier Savignac, profiled in the study, claims he was molested at age 13 at a Catholic vacation camp in southern France by a camp director he says was accused of sexually assaulting numerous other boys:
I perceived this priest as someone who was good, a caring person who would not harm me. But it was when I found myself on that bed half-naked and he was touching me that I realized something was wrong. . . . It’s like gangrene inside the victim’s body and the victim’s psyche.
Mirielle, now 71, claims that she and a female friend were abused by a French priest while in their teens:
I think that each victim experienced it as if they were the only one [victim], and that’s part of this phenomenon involving control and secrecy. . . . We are in a condition of submission . . . in a mental captivity. So we follow this person who suddenly takes power over us. . . . We are caught in a spider web.
Another girl named in the report only as “Marie” says that she was sexually abused by nuns, who’d often penetrate girls at her boarding school with crucifixes:
She would take me to her office, lock the door, and then draw the curtains. After which she would put me on her knees . . . while she squeezed me with one hand to her chest and pulled down my panties with the other hand. We were of course in pleated skirts and not in pants. It terrified me and paralyzed [me].
But Marie said that when she told her parents, they called her a “pervert” and a “vicious liar.”
There’s far more than this recent report from France — enough to kill your appetite for a week. Reports of priests using Grindr at the Vatican. Reports of German nuns pimping out “orphaned boys to predatory priests and perverts for decades.” A book that claims “four out of five Vatican priests are gay.”
But there seems to be a delusion floating around the weird and severely online world of neo-traditional Catholicism that pervert priests are the result of post-Vatican II modernity.
The Liber Gomorrhianus (Book of Gomorrah) was published by the Benedictine monk St. Peter Damian around 1051 AD. It alleged that all manner of vices were abundant in the Catholic Church, including priestly molestation of boys. In the late 1400s, a German abbess named Katharina von Zimmern and her sister were removed from their abbey after claiming that priests had molested them. In 1531, Martin Luther alleged that Pope Leo X shot down a measure restricting the number of boys that cardinals could consort with, “otherwise it would have been spread throughout the world how openly and shamelessly the Pope and the cardinals in Rome practice sodomy.”
The 1836 book Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, which was described by Richard Hofstadter as “[p]robably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” spun lurid tales of infanticide and rape of nuns by priests in Montreal. Many view the book as nothing more than fictional anti-Catholic propaganda.
A report by the Australian government found that
the most notorious cases of sexual abuse in the Australian church occurred in institutional settings in the 1940s–60s by men (and sometimes women) who were thoroughly trained in the strict morality and rigorous piety of the pre-Vatican II church . . . the ranks of abusers cuts right across the lines of conservatives and liberals, with both sides having their fair share of abusive clergy.
Based on all this, it’s evident that Demon Modernity isn’t what caused priests and nuns to grope, rape, beat, and humiliate children; it’s what caused people to start talking about it on a large scale.
I believe that the type of person who’s going to vow lifetime abstinence at the height of their sex drive may have some unresolved sexual issues. It’s also the type of person who’s going to agree to living in either a rectory or a convent with members of the same sex for the rest of their lives.
But it’s not just Catholicism.
It’s more than difficult to arrive at specific numbers regarding sexual abuse — it’s impossible. Regarding adult rape of women by men, if you defined a true allegation only as one that results in a criminal conviction, then nearly all women would be lying. I’m not saying that women don’t lie about rape — they lie about it all the time — but factors such as DNA evidence, lack of eyewitnesses, passage of time, disinterested prosecutors, and biased juries all muddy the process.
What makes things muddier to the point of opacity is an institution that claims a monopoly on truth and righteousness and has an estimated $150 billion in assets to defend. And if the veneer of truth and righteousness slowly starts to fade, it will be increasingly difficult to accrue any new assets, much less hold onto the ones already acquired.
Keeping in mind that sexual-abuse statistics are notoriously slippery, one Catholic cardinal estimated that about one in 25 priests — “and mostly in the 1960s and 1970s” — have had sex with a minor. But according to Newsweek, that aligns closely to the quotient of all adults who’ve dabbled in pedophilia.
Some studies have found that you’re much more likely to be sexually assaulted by a public schoolteacher than by a priest. Others say that if you’re really itching to be molested, join any Protestant denomination, but especially the Jehovah’s Witnesses; the Catholics simply don’t compare.
What I learned at Catholic school was to distrust anyone who claims a monopoly on truth and righteousness and uses it as a whip against you. But even the lead investigator of the recent French report clarified that the Church took second place behind “the circle of family and friends” when it came to “sexual violence.” Although I was fortunate enough to evade sexual abuse both at home and in school, I wasn’t so lucky at either place when it came to violence. So I didn’t learn anything at Catholic school that I hadn’t already been taught at home.
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13 comments
The thing is, if I didn’t believe that God will ultimately punish all these horrible people there would be no point in this life at all. No point in anything ever. I can look at nature and see that isn’t possible. Because I can discern beauty from ugliness means there is a difference that is inherent. It is built into you to hate abuse and ugliness unless you are evil. Those priests and nuns ARE evil. And God will hold them to a much higher level of accountability because they did what they did in his name. If that’s not true I hope I drop dead today.
Still I’ll say that the afterlife is too long to wait for justice. Perps who harm children deserve to be put in a camp.
Wow, Goad under the pay wall, too, now? Going to drive down website views. Oh well…
It is called an incentive.
Dude, just take the plunge, you won’t regret it. While I still refuse to pay to listen to anything on TRS, the relatively small amount I shell out per month to read CC articles is well worth it.
Another great piece from Jim Goad, combining scholarship, statistics, and personal experience! As my background seems roughly similar, perhaps I might add a few observations.
Like Jim, I attended a Catholic grade school (nuns) and high school (priests), and even a college which, though secular, had been created a decade before by uniting a Catholic and an Anglican college (the first time in history) and still had priests (and monks!) on the staff.
The nuns were indeed pretty brutal, but in fairness, it might have been the only way to control us malcontents, and a lot of readers here likely wish for a return to the “good old days” of corporal punishment. What particularly strikes me is how often this brutality was used to reinforce a nun’s error in fact, or pronunciation, at the expense of a child who was, in fact correct. At college I learned from priests and laity that nuns were legendary fonts of ignorance and the despair of those teachers during the period when nuns were “breaking out” and seeking higher education; I was advised by a great Catholic scholar to ignore the famous Summa Theologica, as Thomas “had written it for nuns.”
I attended two high schools (my parents fled Detroit for the suburbs) and there was no hint of any kind of shenanigans in either. A Duck Duck Go search reveals no subsequent “revelations.” One school was reputed to be the finest high school (not just Catholic) in the state, so I suppose the Church might have kept things on a tight leash for PR purposes (offenders sent elsewhere, as per usual). The most revered teacher, who only died recently, did seem a little tightly wound — during a theology class he started shrieking “The Pharisees were not nice guys! They were vicious bastards! Vicious bastards!“); and ingratiated himself as “one of the boys” by mentioning alcohol at any opportunity; but otherwise he was perfectly normal. His brother had left the staff a few years before, to marry a nun, so perhaps he was still living down the shame. Nuns.
At the next school, same deal. But there was one priest who seemed a little off. He looked like John Lovitz (unknown at the time), all grins and pop-eyes, but was the color of an eggplant. I suspect some kind of Mediterranean or even Semitic background. There was always a suggestion of excessive lip-licking. He taught theater, of course, and produced an annual school musical. I had an acquaintance, not a friend, who had a bit of a stutter, not enough to be “special” but noticeable. Speaking of ‘noticing’ I recall see the Father whispering to him in the back row of a class, seeming to “take an interest in the boy” (good) or else perhaps “targeting the weak” (bad), who knows. As I say, no accusations seem to have arise there either.
So there, my past is a bust, scandal-wise. So may I add, scholarship wise, that more details on the Vatican Grindr circuit can be found in Martel’s In The Closet of the Vatican, which I reviewed here: https://counter-currents.com/2020/06/papa-francesco-vs-steve-bannon/
I guess I was lucky. I attended Catholic grade school in the fifties, and it was no worse than what I later experienced in boot camp, which is another totalitarian environment.
Since it never happened to me, and I never even heard it whispered about at the time, I have always been skeptical of the claims of widespread occurrence of abuse by clergy, especially after hearing about 200 people claiming to have been injured on a 40 passenger bus. Maybe that makes me something like a holocaust denier. I hasten to add that the real perpetrators of both the abuse and the coverup should be severely punished.
Sorry, I couldn’t read the entire article because I am not behind the paywall. But I went to Catholic Grade school in a Chicago Suburb and it was beautiful. All my teachers for 8 years were either nuns or Catholic lay women. One of the nuns (my 4th grade teacher) was one of the sweetest ladies I have ever known. She read to the class “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis during lunch time and all of were on the edge of our chairs. The boys were all required to wear light blue shirts with a dark blue tie every day and the girls were required to wear plaid jumpers. There was no pedophilia among the priests and I would know if there was because I was an altar boy for 4 years. There was one nun who rivaled the wicked witch of the west from “The Wizard of Oz” but she was an exception. After grade school, I went to a public high school and I think I was better prepared for high school than my contemporaries who went to public grade school. Anyway, I am an agnostic now but I would reconsider Catholicism as soon as they 1) get rid of this evil Pope and 2) clean up the pedophilia once and for all.
I miss hearing church bells intermittently throughout the day as I grew up with in Pennsylvania.
You can’t blanket-dismiss religion. The music’s too good.
I live in the least-churched part of the country now, the Northwest, though there are plenty of churches.
Unless they have white supremacist bake sales, you don’t hear about them.
Is it a coincidence that it’s also the phoniest part of the country? Of soulless rhetoric-reciting politicians and dour, pissy Seattleites and bitchy “grunge” enthusiasts?
The highest suicide rate?
The most virulent anti-religious people are former Catholics, apparently with plenty of good reasons besides rampant child abuse.
About half the kids we knew attended Parochial schools, in our case, Bonner, as in Monsignor Bonner High School. If Jim was a decade or so older, it’s where he would have gone. Upper Darby PA.
So we grew up with nun horror stories and were grateful for having been raised in our vague Protestant religions.
The people I’ve known in life lugging around the biggest, most unwieldy theological constructs and decrepit, dust-covered dogma and wanting to tell you about it at every turn, are the people with the worst personal histories of betrayal and disloyalty.
See if you can work through the intricacies of The Golden Rule before pontificating on your dime-store “spirituality.”
Yeah, “before you abuse, criticize and accuse.”*
*Walk A Mile In My Shoes, Joe South.
“But there seems to be a delusion floating around the weird and severely online world of neo-traditional Catholicism that pervert priests are the result of post-Vatican II modernity.”
Directly over the target, Mr. Goad.
Two-thousand years of Pozz didn’t just manifest itself overnight.
And it certainly didn’t happen because one sect stopped giving its magic rites in a language that most people don’t understand, or stopped emphasizing that the Jews killed Christ ─ nor because birth control is readily available and unhappy marriages in all 50 states can now be ended with irreconcilable differences instead of by invoking the leverage of wretched accusations.
The important thing is that no creed should have the power to unilaterally ordain the law of the land, or to escape rebuke for the mischief wrought by its mostly well-meaning bluestockings and hair-shirted proctors.
Any (((tribe))) sufficiently beyond the bounds of legitimate censure is problem enough.
🙂
The stock “progressive” position on religion is good fun:
Christianity is bad. Unless it’s blacks doing the Christianizing. Then it’s kinda neat.
What the hell does that say?
Whites are to be scorned and reviled for their antiquated, backwards beliefs.
Blacks are to be patronized and indulged in their quaint customs and colorful superstitions.
Read you loud and clear, progressives.
Very true, sir. See also: (1) distrust of government; (2) distrust of the medical establishment (the brown people pass on that one is generally muh Tuskegee Experiment, despite the fact that most blacks have no idea what the hell that is); and (3) loud, boisterous behavior in public.
A friend of mine was at a work camp when police arrived to arrest one of his co-workers for murdering a child. I asked my friend what the guy was like.
My friend said the child killer was ostentatiously pious. He would get up in the morning and proclaim, “Oh, What a blessed day!” I filed that little piece of data in my warning box.
Never learned from it though, I rarely identify sadists and sociopaths during interactions. Perhaps because it’s the very safe and gentle up-bringing and a touch of autism.
I did avoid being raped by instinct, but this was almost entirely unconscious. I never even suspected the would-be rapist had anything but benevolent intentions, not until my situation was explained to me by a seasoned criminal.
Thank Yahweh for my Jewish lawyer. Cleared my name and got me out of that shithole.
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