The Monk and the Skeptic. Frank Browning
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once a real, live penis belonging to another male made its way toward me. The teachings about sex emitted by Holy Mother Church or Her evangelical cousins seemed simply silly by the 1970s.
Once the AIDS plague arrived full throttle by the ‘80s, church doctrine moved from the anachronistically ludicrous to the morally reprehensible. Masturbation, as Bill Clinton’s first surgeon general urged, was the ultimate safe sex—a technique she recommended to all the young or unattached (or even to the attached who sought out more); for that counsel she was fired. Worse yet was to come from a series of scandals that nearly bankrupted the church in Massachusetts and all but destroyed what had been a near ecclesiastical regime for sixty-five years in Ireland. The Irish Catholic priesthood was revealed as possibly the single largest organized brigade of pedophiles in the Western world. No modern republic had been so thoroughly dominated by the Vatican and its emissaries as Ireland. Not only were all the putatively public schools run by the church, but also the 1937 constitution recognized the “special position” of the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church in preserving and protecting the faith of Irish citizens. The acid glare from the priests and nuns at any who challenged church dogma burned like volcanic coals—as I learned while traveling in the ‘70s with an Irish friend who was a single mother.
Then as the scandals of brutal and buggering priests at last leaked into the national newspapers and eventually state radio, the whole structure imploded. Daily phone-in programs on RTÉ Radio were inundated with calls from men in their forties who broke down sobbing as they recounted having been held after classes and repeatedly raped by pale, pudgy men in their shoe-length black soutanes. Tough working-class grandmas whom I met while reporting on Irish schools lost control of themselves as they recounted the fear they still felt even entering a school building. Mothers in their sixties called the radio to talk about their disappeared sons. And too often some of those sons’ skeletons were exhumed from unmarked graves, the beating marks yet visible on their once-young skulls. My old image of my father and Father Hubert discussing Saint Augustine over sherry was all but obliterated by these ghastly accounts, replaced by a vicious tableau of bitter, mean, violent men beating and raping little boys in the church cloakroom. I could only ask myself, what sort of persons could these men be?
One insight came when I spoke to Marie Keenan, a social worker and psychotherapist at University College Dublin, who had spent more than a decade interviewing priests about their sexual and emotional experience. “These men who are in the seminary can’t express themselves, are not encouraged to express themselves, are not helped to know and understand the mechanisms of their body,” she told me. “They’re out there without support, without supervision, and it is only a matter of time. When you put these men . . . [when] you give them access to children and put them in positions of power, over time their sexual needs will emerge. It’s just like the system blows.” Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk, who has spent his post clerical life exploring the effects of enforced celibacy, was even more outspoken: “As the [U.S. Conference of Catholic] bishops’ own study published in 1972 said, two-thirds of priests are either mal-developed or undeveloped psychosexually. Only 20 percent are developing and 10 percent are developed . . . What we are producing [are] emotional thirteen-year-olds.”
Little, apparently, has changed since then, either in the United States or Ireland. In France, priests are simply a disappearing species, while in Italy, where the Vatican continues to weigh heavily on domestic politics, the priests are said to have long maintained a “special position” for their housekeepers. Yet officially the teachings of the church regarding sexuality remain locked in a nether zone that drifts further and further from science, psychology, common sense, or real practice. That couldn’t be clearer than in the theological treatment of masturbation or, more correctly, antimasturbation. One of the most extreme arguments comes from a former Saint Mary’s College theologian, E. Michael Jones, who characterizes masturbation as “the root sexual evil first of all from a developmental point of view—it is the child’s introduction to sexual sinning—but also because all other sexual sinning is at its root masturbatory.” Jones left Saint Mary’s (in Indiana) because he didn’t present a sufficiently stern Catholic education; afterward he drifted in and out of Holocaust denial journals. Yet Pope Paul VI, among the most sober of recent popes, was only slightly softer in his denunciation of the solitary sin, issued in 1975 via the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: “Masturbation is an intrinsically and seriously disordered act . . . the deliberate use of the sexual faculty outside normal conjugal relations essentially contradicts the finality of the faculty.” The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was then directed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI. It is on the same theological basis that the church continues to denounce homosexuality and indeed any sexual activity not directed toward “the finality”: the only and necessary goal of our reproductive capacities. Certain liberal prelates have argued for limited exceptions for masturbatory and other non-procreative sexual activity so long as it leads to the procreative act. Foreplay is OK if it leads to coitus, but only if it leads to penile penetration of an appropriate female.
The last millennium has produced thousands of theological tracts concerning the preconditions and requirements for moral copulation, most of which can be reduced to the argument that moral sex can take place only within the confines of a devotional commitment to creating life. Anything outside such a sacred commitment constitutes a fundamental character disorder that leaves the fornicator further alienated from divine fulfillment. There may be an internal, quasi-Aristotelian logic to the syllogisms, but they are largely bereft of any current psychological insight, and at the end of the night, they leave the church’s agents, its priests, with a theological and moral code no more advanced than the hillbilly fundamentalist preachers spew out every Sunday, proclaiming that the world is six thousand years old.
Fortunately, tens of thousands, and possibly as many as half of the world’s 405,000 Catholic priests, have given up on strict celibacy (which forbids masturbation) and have regular sex with willing adults. In 1994, Cardinal Jose Sanchez, of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy, generally agreed to the accuracy of several studies suggesting that at most 50 percent of priests practice celibacy. Anecdotal evidence suggests as much. A decade or so ago, Carl, a journalistic colleague who was openly gay and who had earlier studied for the priesthood, weighed a return to the cloth and undertook on-site interviews with a number of monastic communities. A Dominican brotherhood in the South was particularly keen on Carl. At a critical moment in their discussions, Carl told them of his homosexual life and made it clear he had no intention of abandoning sex with men. The brothers smiled at him, he told me, and asked simply, “So what’s the problem?”
Brother Peter has never been so candid with the members of his order. He supposes they do not know of the friendships and adventures he has shared with me and others. He does not know whether other Dominicans with whom he shares prayers and silent meals also have their own adventures with men, or with women. It would not bother him if they do, but if so, he doesn’t want to know—not because he doesn’t care about their affective lives, but because he believes sharing such intimate knowledge would threaten the security of the monastic family. That “family” is the rock of his emotional and spiritual stability. Ordinary parish priests cast into the crosscurrents of faith and displacement find other solutions. Some have discovered in the hierarchical order of the church a salvation from the disorder of desire. Others, like the Irish child abusers, clearly failed to find adequate solace in the Doctrine of the Faith, and the hierarchy provided them neither charity nor counsel. As Marie Keenan put it, they blew up and took their victims with them. A doubtless larger proportion of those dwindling numbers of Euro-Americans who continue to prostrate themselves for the rites of ordination have successfully negotiated a working balance between their biological compulsions and the real communities of faith to which they have given themselves. In France and Italy, there seems to be a ready wink of the eye when the matter of priestly celibacy comes up in conversation. An old friend from Rome once told me, with only limited irony, that priests, like prostitutes, perform a vital role for adolescent males who want to test out their erotic yearnings so they can decide which gender they prefer. But that was Italy.
Those who have taken up monastic orders are surely of a special nature. No longer do incipient gay men need to seek out the cloisters for refuge from a hostile secular world. Indeed the monastic life today seems to most ordinary people