The Globe reviews a new book on the sexual abuse scandal

On the other side of the ledger, France’s righteous zeal for the survivors/victims also leads him, now and then, to rely on hyperbole and interpretive liberties that serve, unfortunately, to weaken his credibility. Alcoholism, we are told, “ran endemic” among the nuns and priests who administered Catholic schools. (No one doubts that alcoholism was a problem; no one has demonstrated, however, that it was rampant.) As the Catholic Church entered the 1990s, France judges, the priesthood was thoroughly discredited and “seemed in danger of vanishing.” Hardly.

Apart from such quibbles, the overall tone and content of the book are driven by the determination to demonstrate that a major “cause” of the scandal was the church’s erroneous teachings on sexuality, reinforced by “repressive” attitudes and unwise practices, including mandatory celibacy for priests.

France may well be correct in this assumption, but it remains nothing more than an assumption in the absence of careful scrutiny and examination of the larger picture of Catholic priesthood in the latter half of the 20th century. Such scrutiny will require something more solid than “instant history” whose tragic and poignant character is allowed to eclipse every other dimension of Catholic ministry. One searches long and hard in “Our Fathers” for evidence that most priests, even in the disgraced Boston archdiocese, were neither pedophiles nor abusers but instead humble and often heroic servants of the people of God. That they accomplished this underreported feat while laboring under the presumed burden of celibacy and other restrictions on freedom of sexual self-expression is also part of the dramatic story of these years. That story cannot be told without careful consultation of this difficult but rewarding account by David France. But neither can it be told by this alone.