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Books about "the greatest scandal
in the history of religion in America"
Annotated Bibliography by James H. Krefft, Ph.D.
The Top Three
1. Jason Berry’s Lead Us Not Into Temptation
2. Stephen J. Rossetti’s A Tragic Grace
3. David France's Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal
Berry, Jason. Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
If you read only one book on this reading list, read this one, and read it first. The first part chronicles the heart-wrenching saga of a priest/sexual predator busted in 1984 in Henry, Louisiana: Gilbert Gauthe. He was locked up for 20 years in 1986 but got out after serving 10 and within months was re-arrested for sexually abusing a child. Gauthe’s rampant unchecked pedophilia over a 10-year period will turn your stomach, so be prepared.
Not to mention the practice of “recycling child molesters” (267) and a blame-the-victim defense strategy fielded by the diocese of Lafayette, LA: “The root crisis in the diocese was a climate of secrecy and denial about sexual dynamics that pervaded ecclesiastical governing” (167). Part Two, “The Political Dynamics of Celibacy,” addresses how a “celibate psychosis” (175) is acting as a cancer within the Church. In Part Three, “Tragedy and Hope,” Berry asserts, “Celibate governing is a tradition of sexual segregation” (299).
Rossetti, Stephen J. A Tragic Grace: The Catholic Church and Child Sexual Abuse (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996).
If you read only two books on this list, read this one second. This thin but substantial volume was sponsored by the Interfaith Sexual Trauma Institute, created in 1994 by St. John’s Abbey and University to address ministerial issues of sexual abuse, exploitation, and harassment. The “Six Psychological Red Flags [for Child Sexual Abuse]” (68-77) proffered in Chapter Four represent the foundation of an abuse-prevention toolkit. What should parents look out for? Read this: “One of the largest red flags for pedophilia is an adult who vacations and spends free time with other people’s children” (70).
If you read Jason Berry’s Lead Us Not Into Temptation and map Rossetti’s six red flags for sexual abuse against Gilbert Gauthe’s personality as described by Berry, it’s apparent that at least four of the six red flags (#’s 1, 2, 3, and 6 in my judgment) applied to Gauthe, and perhaps five. If you want to put yourself into a really nasty funk, read Chapter Five, “Suicides of Priests and the Crisis of Faith.” The chapter does end on an upbeat of hope. Chapter Six, “A Conversion of Perspective,” includes the common-sense assertion, “It is my firm belief that we will never truly be a Church on the issue of child sexual abuse until we become the voice of the victims” (109). Amen!
France, David. Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal (New York: Broadway Books, 2004).
“It’s the secrecy, stupid” would serve as an alternative title to this hefty account of the priest-predator crisis in the Archdiocese of Boston. Narrated in tick tock fashion beginning in 1953, France lays out the stomach-turning events like a steely-eyed prosecutor in a hushed courtroom. Part I details the heart-numbing sexual crimes of the chief villains in the Bean Town spectacle, centering on the predatory leviathans of the infamous ordination Class of 1960: Bernard Lane, Paul Shanley, and Joseph Birmingham. And John Geoghan, Class of 1962, killed by a fellow con in the stir in August 2003. Oh, and let’s not forget their cover-up-in-chief classmate, John McCormack, Bishop of the Diocese of Manchester, NH. France suggests that from the 1960s through the 1990s two-thirds of Boston-area parishes were plagued by priest abusers (437).
Part II chronicles the exposition of the “culture of abuse” (294), beginning with the Boston Globe article on January 6, 2002, and follows Cardinal Bernard Law’s unremitting damage-control schemes and sanctimonious dodges, right up until he handed Pope John Paul II his letter of resignation on December 13, 2002 (561). A sampler of Law’s twisted reasoning was his preemptive admonition to Tom Blanchette, “I bind you by the power of the confessional never to speak about this again” (191). If you tell, you go to hell. Yeah, right. The quote from Fr. Tom Doyle, a principal figure in Jason Berry’s story of convicted priest predator Gilbert Gauthe in Lead Us Not Into Temptation, sums it all up, “’This crisis all along is about cover-up’” (421). Grand silence. “Silentium est assensio” (471), right, Bishop Edyvean? Isn’t it a shame when your own words come back to bite you in the backside?
France weaves into the exposé the subdominant leitmotif of the Vatican’s renewed targeting of gay priests and seminarians as the root (sorry) cause of the sex-abuse crisis. Ah, those cagey codgers in the Curia, plus ça la change, plus ça la même chose: lets grab those torches and pitchforks and have us’n a good ole fashioned witch-hunt.
You won’t be able to put this book down, and you’ll likely break down while reading it. I did twice: the first when reading Gary Bergeron’s recollection of telling his father of his and one of his brothers having been abused by Joseph Birmingham, and hearing in response from his 78-year-old father that he too had been abused in the 1930s at age eight (423-425). The second time I cried was while reading the account of how 500 Voice of the Faithful conference attendees accompanied a group of survivors in a candlelight march to Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston (483-484).
What I haven’t told you yet is how lyrical France’s style occasionally becomes. Call his style “poetic prosecutorial,” an admixture of Crane and Hemingway. This guy should be writing novels. The book is jammed packed with horror tales. If you haven’t raced for the potty and upchucked by Chapter 15, you will when France smacks you with the gut-wrenching grand slam of Thomas Forry (housekeeper beater), Peter Frost (sex addict), Richard Buntel (“’blow king of Malden’”), and Robert Meffan, who insisted that three teenaged “brides of Christ” kiss and fondle his genitals, later rationalizing his wacky conduct to a Globe reporter with, “’I always felt that to destroy celibacy you really had to have intercourse . . . you’d have to be a father.’” Really, he should be writing Canon law.
Alphabetic List of Other Recommended Titles
Abbott, Elizabeth. A History of Celibacy (New York: Scribner, 2000).
Chapters 2 and 3 review celibacy and Christianity. Discussion of the “virginization of Mary” (56-61) is crucial to understanding the seeds of celibacy in the Church. See pages 76-81 for mind-bending stories of “Female Transvestite Monks” and pages 83-88 for the role of the Desert Fathers in creating a cult of celibacy. But the Oscar® goes to St. Scuthin, an Irish monk, who slept every night with two “full-breasted temptresses to challenge himself, so that . . . the lust he conquered would be all the greater” (106-107). That’s the creepiest form of self-flagellation we’ve ever heard of. Imagine the pick-up lines St. Scuthin used: “No really, I’m a saint and I just want to sleep with the two of you full-breasted babes so that I can resist temptation. I won’t have sex with you, honestly!
Anderson, Jane. Priests in Love: Roman Catholic Clergy and Their Intimate Friendships (New York: Continuum, 2005).
Over nine years Anderson interviewed 50 Australian straight and gay “priests with friends.” These priests and ex-priests, both diocesan and religious, have chucked obligatory celibacy and entered into long-term sexual relationships: “They know that the future of the priesthood depends upon priests being allowed to have sexually intimate friendships” (2). Whereas Richard Schoenherr’s Goodbye Father (see below) makes the “logical” case for abandoning compulsory celibacy, Anderson makes the “human” case.
How do I flaunt celibacy? Let me count the ways: you’ll find it all in these accounts: conflicted clerics, whoring, streaking, lonely housekeepers, inventive trysts, adultery, self-righteous parishioners, and scandal-phobic bishops. Not to mention twisted self-deceptions such as lying naked with a beautiful woman and not having intercourse with her, cuz that (the penile penetration part) would be a “sin.” And the personal costs of celibacy: reprisals, exile, numbing guilt, poor health, pajama-stringing testicles, self-castration, and suicide. Are we there yet?
“Sex and the Confessional” (27-34) illustrates the labyrinthine lengths to which celibate-bound priests will go to enjoy intimacy with a good woman (or man), and simultaneously preserve their “Get-Out-of-Hell Free” cards: priests who specialized in hearing the confessions of “priests with friends.” How’s the Curia gonna close that loophole? Come on, you knew they were out there, right? Check out the section on humor (168-170), especially the “celebrate, not celibate” joke. Bottom line: “Celibacy is fulfilling for a priest only when it expresses his authentic self” (176).
Berry, Jason, and Gerald Renner. Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II (New York: Free Press, 2004).
Part One, “The Odyssey of Thomas Doyle,” traces the struggles of Fr. Thomas P. Doyle, O.P. against episcopal, Curial, and papal intransigence on dealing with priest abusers of children. If you grow nauseous ploughing through Berry’s detailed account of Gilbert Gauthe’s pederasty and reports on other child molesters in the diocese of Lafayette, LA, the authors recap those events (37-54).
Part Two, “The Rise of the Legion of Christ,” explores papal cover-up of allegations of sexual abuse by Marcial Maciel Degollado, who founded the Legion in Mexico in 1941.
Part Three, “Witnesses for the People of God,” wraps up with an extract of an address of Tom Doyle to participants at the first conference of the Voice of the Faithful: “What we have experienced in our lifetime is a disaster the horror of which is perhaps equaled by the bloodshed of the Inquisition” (293).
The book also recounts throughout “the persecution of theologians and church thinkers under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [Pope Benedict XVI],” a witch hunt that “Is of a piece with John Paul’s refusal to confront the great crisis of the priesthood by allowing free discussion of alternatives to a male celibate clergy” (9).
Cozzens, Donald B. The Changing Face of the Priesthood: A Reflection on the Priest’s Crisis of Soul (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000).
Take a gander at Chapter 8, “Betraying Our Young”: “No other issue was recasting the face of the priesthood with more slashing and broad strokes than the sexual misconduct of priests and bishops with minors” (114). Cozzens excoriates “The temptation to respond as a corporation” (116) and concludes, “How much of the current crisis remains under the surface can only be guessed. What is certain, however, is the depth and darkness of the waters” (125).
Crooks, Robert, and Karla Baur. Our Sexuality 8th Ed. (Pacific Grove, CA: Wadsworth, 2002).
A hefty sex education manual used as a textbook in moral theology classes in some Catholic theological seminaries. Critics of these so-called “free thinking” moral theology professors point to Our Sexuality as prima facie evidence of heterodoxical corruption of the Church’s fundamental teaching on sexual ethics.
The section on masturbation (239-244), especially the graphic “how to’s” presented in “Self-Pleasuring Techniques,” is a particular bone of contention (sorry, we couldn’t resist). The “lockable metal genital pouch” shown on page 240 looks like something from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. St. Augustine would have no doubt forcibly strapped one each on every male over the age of 13. Ouch! Of course, his son Adeodatus was illegitimate, and Augustine refused to marry his son’s mother, but we don’t talk about that much.
Hamilton, Marci A. God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: University Press, 2005).
If “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” as Dr. Johnson opined, then religion is the first refuge of a scoundrel’s defense attorney (I made that up). To paraphrase the late Flip Wilson’s irrepressible vamp Geraldine, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, God made him do it.” If you’re tired of reading about excesses committed in the name of God . . . if waving pithy protest signs doesn’t do it for you any more . . . if your inner activist is bursting to clamp cuffs on religious renegades, this shrewd enchiridion is for you.
To quote the jacket, this legal manual-of-arms “challenges the pervasive assumption that all religious conduct deserves constitutional protection . . . anyone who harms another person should be governed by the laws that govern everyone else – and truth be told, religion is capable of great harm.” Yeah, it’s sure easy to see when it’s a bile-spewing Ku Klux Klan potentate or a maniacal swarthy-skinned mullah, but don’t our eyes cloud over when it’s an Armani-suited televangelist or an ermine-swaddled prince of the Church?
Part One describes six arenas where religious individuals and institutions have insisted on the right to avoid the law as they have harmed others: children, marriage, schools, land use in neighborhoods, the prisons and the military, and civil rights. Part Two charts the fall of special privileges for religious conduct in Anglo-American history and the rise of the rule that religious entities have no legal right to harm others. Hamilton’s central thesis is “that there is no constitutional right to harm others simply because the conduct is religiously motivated. Therefore the rule of law . . . must be applied evenhandedly to all religious entities” (11). Make no mistake, this book is a game plan for change.
Hendrickson, Paul. Seminary: A Search (New York: Summit, 1983).
Personal account of one man’s 7-year journey through the seminary. Lots of details of daily life in a seminary. If you’ve never been a seminarian, you’ll be tempted to say, “Jeez, this guy is making this stuff up.” As former seminarians, we can tell you, “He ain’t.” The saga of “The Great Rat Epidemic” (92-93) is wonderful. But nothing tops the chapter titled, “Heresy Is Just Truth Out of Proportion” (160-175), in particular the description of his relationship with his “spiritual director.”
How about this segment: “I would go in, sit in a chair beside his desk, talk for a short while, await his nod, unzipper my trousers, take out my penis, rub it while I allowed impure thoughts to flow through my brain, and, at the point where I felt myself fully large and close to emission, say, ‘Father, I’m ready now.’ He would then reach over had hand me a black wooden crucifix” (167). Really, you should read this chapter start to finish.
This never happened to us, however.
McDonough, Peter, and Eugene C. Bianchi. Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).
Check out Chapter Four, “Sex, Celibacy, and Identity.”
Ranke-Heinemann, Uta. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church. Trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Doubleday, 1990); originally Eunuchen für das Himmelreich: Katholische Kircke und Sexualität (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, 1988).
“Catholic celibacy has pagan roots” (99) begins Chapter VII, “The Evolution of Celibacy.” Details of how celibacy came to be de rigueur include such gems as, “The Synod of Münster in 1280 . . . forbade priests to take part in the wedding or funeral of their children” (111). In a dictum reminiscent of KGB intel tactics, “The Synod of St. Pölten in 1284 arranged for priests to inform against each other” (112).
For a recap of a sexual morality as tortured as could be invented by the Marquis de Sade, read Chapter XIV, “Coitus Reservatus: The Recipe for Sinless Sex” (171-177). Antidotes to masturbation reviewed in Chapter XXVII, “Onanism,” range from sickening (clitoridectomy) to puzzling (body searches to assess penis size) to hilarious (trousers without pockets) (317). An account of a German cardinal suggesting to Hitler in 1936 that interning people with hereditary diseases was morally permissible under Church law will make your skin crawl (332).
Rose, Michael S. Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood (Cincinnati: Aquinas Publishing, 2002); also published a few months later with the more Fox-network-like title of Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2002).
Rose’s phrase “Good men,” as in “The Marines are looking for a few…” is a clue to what to expect in this screed against the REAL ENEMY of the ONE TRUE ORTHODOX CHURCH—those religious slimeballs called LIBERALS. A short headline summary of the book would be “Gays and liberal nuns seek to destroy Church.” Rose would have made a good Dominican Inquisitor in the Middle Ages. He wants to root out the evildoers and expose them to the cold clear light of his “orthodoxy’—a brand of Wojtylanism (our coinage, after Karol Wojtyla, the recently deceased hyper-orthodox pope).
Acknowledges that, “Sexual abuse of teenage seminarians by faculty priests has been widespread over the past three decades” (12) but goes on to lay almost all blame for the shortage of priests in the U.S. on heterodoxical liberals. He inexplicably misses noticing the connection between seminarians jumping ship because they saw classmates or siblings groped or raped. The logical pretzel in which he ascribes increases in priestly vocations in certain dioceses to proscriptions in those dioceses against “altar girls” is laughable (20). By the way, the technical name for this kind of logical fallacy is “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” (after that, therefore because of that).
In stunning leaps of non-sequitur illogic he avers, “Orthodoxy begets vocations,” and, “Dissent kills vocations” (22). Maybe he’s forgotten that St. Thomas Aquinas was on the way to the Council of Lyons to answer charges of heresy when he died in March 1274. Imagine if Pope Gregory X had condemned and excommunicated the Divine Doctor. What would they have done at the Council of Trent almost three centuries later? Yesterday’s heterodoxy is today’s orthodoxy, and today’s heterodoxy will become tomorrow’s orthodoxy. Try reading Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin sometime.
Schoenherr, Richard A. Goodbye Father: The Celibate Male Priesthood and the Future of the Catholic Church. Ed. David Yamane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
This book presents as comprehensive and as logical a case that could be made for making religious celibacy a personal choice rather than a Curial mandate. (For the “human” case, see above Jane Anderson’s Priests in Love.) Schoenherr asserts that root cause of shortage of priests is the church’s insistence on compulsory celibacy. The Catholic hierarchy opposes a married clergy because it would be the first step toward a gender inclusivity that would result in ordained women. Such a move would not only restructure the church but also destabilize patriarchy in wider society. “Clerical celibacy provides sacralized support for patriarchy” (205).
He makes a creative economic argument – “Priests are the major human resource for the economic production system that makes up the technical core of the Catholic Church” (11) – as well as a case that the Catholic Church was the prototype of modern bureaucracy capitalist economic organization, “the paradigmatic type of rational-legal bureaucracy” (33). Don’t miss the “Seven Historical Trends Related to Catholic Ministry” (67-87) and his comments on “Papal Battles Against Liberalism” (135).
The priest shortage is the “linchpin” in a matrix of forces driving the church to abandon the mandatory celibacy that now threatens authentic ministry. The collapse of celibate exclusivity and the resultant strengthening of the church are all but inevitable. His “breakthrough scenario” (193-195) has been put on hold by the elevation of Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy. Oh, well. There’s always the next pope. Or the one after that.
Schoenherr, Richard A., and Lawrence A. Young. Full Pews and Empty Altars: Demographics of the Priest Shortage in United States Catholic Dioceses (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).
When Schoenherr, who left the priesthood to marry, died in 1996, the New York Times called him the “sociologist who counted priests.” David Yamane (see above) calls Full Pews and Empty Altars, “The definitive demographic study of the priest shortage in the United States.” If you’re a data freak, this book’s for you. If you want to cut to the chase, go to pages 30-31 and mull over Figure 2.1, Size of U.S. Diocesan Priest Population, 1966-2005, and Figure 2.2, Age Distribution of U.S. Diocesan Priest Population, 1966-2005. Bottom line: fewer priests, getting older.
Sipe, A. W. Richard. Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1995).
See Chapter 6, “Priests and Women” for seven incisive “Myths About Priests and Women.” If you’re a general systems junkie, take out your yellow highlighter and go to Chapter 8, “The Structure Beneath the Crisis,” in which he explores “seven interlocking and mutually reinforcing elements” that influence the character of the power of “the celibacy/sexual system” (163-179).
Unsworth, Tim. The Last Priests in America: Conversations With Remarkable Men (New York: Crossroad, 1991).
Stories of 42 priests. Among the more interesting are: “Joseph E. Kerns: To Live Is to Be Loved” (161-165) – he’s an ex-Jebbie who is married to an ex-nun; “Daedalus Stephens: Disillusioned Idealist” (255-260) – hey, this is us; “Theodore C. Stone: The Faith of the People” (261-268) – he left the priesthood to get married, lost his wife, and was able to return to the priesthood with his children; and “Mel Swift: Sex Offender” (269-275) – this one sounds like a Beckett play. We love the “Society for Serious Loafing (SSL)” mentioned on page 165.
White, Joseph M. The Diocesan Seminary in the United States: A History from the 1780s to the Present (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
Straightforward detailed account of the establishment of the seminary system in America. The epilogue, “Seminaries in Renewal, 1962 to the 1980’s” (405-430), itemizes relevant documents that came directly out of the Second Vatican Council, especially the Decree on Priestly Formation, Optatam Totius (1965). The epilogue also treats important derivative documents such as Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Sacerdotalis Coelibatus (1967), which affirmed priestly celibacy, and the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education’s follow-up “Guide to Formation in Priestly Celibacy” (1974). Nothing on sexual abuse of children by priests.
Wills, Garry. Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (New York: Doubleday, 2000).
Chapter 14, “Marian Politics,” tackles a foundational issue rarely addressed.
Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis
by Philip Jenkins
Oxford University Press 1996
