Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal
by David France
Broadway Books. 656 pages $26.95
WHEN I STUDIED to be an altar boy outside Philadelphia in the early 1960’s my teacher was a seminarian who worked part-time in our parish church. Dan (not his real name) was studying to be a diocesan priest, which means that he was not subject to vows of poverty as are members of religious orders. As the owner of a large white convertible, Dan seemed to take particular pleasure in driving across the schoolyard to chat with my classmates, all thirteen-year-old boys, who’d then stop what they were doing in order to talk to him. I would not know what these conversations were about until many years later, when I met Dan in a local cruising haunt. In the schoolyard I assumed that Dan’s “special link” with my classmates had something to do with basketball and what would later come to be known as “macho banter,” an attitude and style that I longed to adopt then but could not.
The boys Dan befriended were mostly “A” students, beloved by the nuns and regarded as role models. Some were gangly with changed voices; others were pale and shy with a choirboy’s countenance. To my thirteen-year-old mind, Dan didn’t seem like priest material. To begin with, I could not understand why a priest-to-be was always coming around in a plush white convertible and cavorting with my classmates like a rock star. I knew that something was amiss but couldn’t put my finger on it.Years later, at the local cruising hot spot—I was then in my twenties—a car pulled up alongside me and a red-haired man in his thirties offered me a lift. I slid in beside him and saw that it was Dan, no longer a seminarian but a corrugated box salesman for a suburban company. I asked him about his bygone white convertible days and about his “star” seminarian appearances in the old schoolyard—and got more than I’d bargained for. He told me about the private excursions in which he’d take the boys to the local girls’ high school, park, and then talk sexy until the boys, overcome by raging hormones, went into sensual lounge mode when Dan would then suggest that they “take it out.” Mutual fiddling ended in automotive emissions that Dan cleaned up with a white sacristy handkerchief. “You had sex with all of them?” I asked. All except for the fatties and the homely boys. Naturally, I wanted to know why I wasn’t included in these hankie forays. Dan told me it was because he sensed that I was gay and that I somehow “knew too much” or “couldn’t be trusted.” He said he felt no guilt about his escapades and even laughed when telling parts of the story. When our rendezvous was over he dropped me off at my apartment and I never saw him again. Finally, after so many years, I had been added to the tally, albeit as a consenting adult.
Around the time that Dan was telling me about my classmates, Father Paul Shanley had a youth ministry off Washington Street near Boston’s Combat Zone, a zany district of peep shows, topless bars, and huge old porno theaters that had once been vaudeville palaces. Shanley’s office was a Mecca for runaway boys who were confused about their sexuality. Many had been kicked out of their Irish or Italian Catholic homes because they were gay or questioning. Shanley’s work, which was officially blessed by Boston’s (then) Cardinal Cushing and later by his successor Cardinal Medeiros, gave him plenty of access to these boys. This was the 1970’s, the first years after Vatican II, when the winds of change in Catholicism had not yet been turned back by reactionary forces within the Vatican. Shanley counseled boys and told them that it was okay to be gay. His theology was life-affirming and gave young gay men a new lease on life. The dynamics changed, however, when he began to offer his own body to the boys as a kind of tool they could use to work out their spiritual and sexual conflicts. Having a priest to cuddle with and “love,” Shanley reasoned, the boys could learn to transcend the narrow confines of the catechism and become the loving creatures that God intended them to be.
For his part, Shanley was assured an endless supply of good-looking and mostly willing tricks—not a bad arrangement for a pro-sex priest with a liberationist agenda. And yet, what worked in theory failed as an experiment. Shanley’s sexual appetite far outweighed what might be justified as his good intentions. Certainly the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexuality needed to be questioned; young gay men needed to receive counseling that freed them from guilt and self-loathing. And while it’s true that Shanley’s street mission became a clearing house for his hearty libido, this does not negate the fact that he did help some of them to accept their sexuality and go on to live happy, integrated lives.
About Shanley, David France writes in Our Fathers: “Given his national standing as defender of the youth, Shanley was invited to deliver his message all across America. His advocacy had taken on a libertine bent, and sometimes tended toward rhetorical excesses. But he was fluent in Kinsey and in Masters and Johnson.” Shanley would cruise the area by the Greyhound bus terminal, then go to the city’s meat racks. “The girls and boys were starting young, marketing their bodies when they were not yet old enough legally to drink. Shanley did not scold them or preach to them. That was not how he defined his ministry. He tried to get kids to be safer about doing whatever it was they were going to do anyway,” writes France.
Our Fathers is many things: an encyclopedia of meticulous research; a who’s who of victims and perpetuators; a history of the Catholic civil rights organization, Dignity; and a compelling soap opera with first-person diary entries that sometimes border on erotica. As a senior Newsweek editor who has reported extensively on the priest scandal, France has all the facts at his fingertips when it comes to tracing the early careers of priests like the Rev. Shanley, Father Tom Doyle, Father Gilbert Gauthe, and Father John Geoghan. These compelling first-person narratives also include the intrigue surrounding the Archdiocese of Boston and the rise and fall of Cardinal Bernard Law.
With a battery of research assistants and access to Newsweek’s files, France thoroughly substantiates his accounts of abused boys, stalking priests, complacent bishops, and hoodwinked parents. Like any good investigative journalist, he describes how Catholic parish life in the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s lent itself to sex abuse scandals. In those days, Catholics rarely if ever questioned the clergy, since priests and bishops were considered virtual avatars of Jesus. Priests were special people with special rights and privileges, such as going into a Catholic home and asking to go upstairs into the bedrooms of young boys and girls in order to give the kids a special blessing.
Here is where a lot of the abuse cases occurred: under covers and blankets, as the good father inserted his hands beneath boys’ underwear or fiddled with their bulky pajama bottoms. Usually the boys would be too frightened to resist. What could they say to a priest? Who would believe them if they resisted? In many cases, the boys who did tell their parents were chastised as “blasphemers” or trouble-makers. Some were beaten and punished. As France tells it, occasionally a parent would walk in on the “fumbling,” chase the priest out—in one instance a priest was literally thrown down a staircase—but that would be the end of it. Bishops would look the other way or, in the most severe case, transfer the priest to another parish, where the charade would begin all over again. In a few cases, the families of the victims were regarded as trouble-makers or “crazy,” so their charges would be quickly discarded.
France provides historical data regarding the evolution of the Church’s teachings on sexuality, and its hypocrisy. For example, the Church has been aware since the 2nd century that some of its clergy have been involved with minors. As for sodomy itself, Church penalties for it first appeared in 177 AD. By 1179, “convicted” clerics were usually ordered to spend the rest of their days in monasteries. The revised Code of Canon Law in 1983 specifically condemns clergy who abuse their position in order to have sex with minors. Writes France: “Over the centuries, many priests and bishops had been married, and quite a few more consorted openly with women, and sometimes even with men. Even the Vatican sometimes seemed to rival Plato’s symposia. Thirty-nine popes had wives. Pope Julius III, advised for appearance’s sake to end a fling with a young teenager named Innocent, instead made him cardinal and installed him prominently in the Vatican as secretary of state.” Celibacy in the Roman Church wasn’t instituted until 1078, sometime after the East-West schism of 1054. After that, as Martin Luther observed, celibacy was something that caused “either a constant burning or unclean pollutions.”
Even after Vatican II, the Church remained stuck in the Middle Ages when it came to sex. As France writes, “The Church used to teach that collecting interest on a loan was a grave moral transgression, that slavery was a necessary evil, and that Jews were bad. When the wrong-headedness of those positions became laughably clear, the church was confident enough to reverse itself.” That wasn’t the case with homosexuality despite clear evidence of same-sex union ceremonies in the early rites of both the eastern and western Church, as well as the canonization of gay martyrs like St. Sergius and St. Bacchus.
France’s scenes of abuse, however compelling, jump from city to city and year to year and sometimes read like a long series of cameo vignettes. But with such a wide pool of facts and data, perhaps there was no other way to tell the story. The author’s intelligent inclusion of parallel cultural developments, such as the birth of the modern gay rights movement after Stonewall and the founding of Dignity (including the heroic efforts of Sister Jeanne Grimmick, who’s the subject of a new documentary film, In Good Conscience), adds to the drama of a Church exploiting homophobia to restore its tarnished image.
France does not commit the common error of confusing pedophilia (a sexual interest in children) with ephebophilia (an interest in teenagers). Most of the Catholic priests caught up in the scandal were not pedophiles but ephebophiles. Still, against a backdrop of our culture’s obsession with youth, an interest in teenagers seems a logical next step in a world where they are viewed as sexual gods. “Simply put,” France writes, “teenagers were alluring. Turn to any magazine and you would find that teens were prized for their beauty and sexual bearing.” Curiously, France’s tales of priestly seduction sometimes sound like he’s trying to give us a little sexual buzz, as when he writes: “When Birmingham [a priest]wrapped his whole hand around his genitals, Bernie figured this was a taunt. A dangerous, thoughtless escalation. His flesh caught fire with shame. The young man froze. The priest, he realized now, had him pinned against the wall.”
France’s book may be too long for some and packed with too many case studies, but in the end it may be the best summation yet written of an era that led the Church to where it is today: steeped in authoritarian absolutism against the cold backdrop of a youth-oriented, sex-obsessed new world.
Thom Nickels is the author of Gay and Lesbian Philadelphia, Tropic of Libra, and a recent collection of essays, Out in History.
