Peter Steinfels takes a look at the John Jay Report

Many conservatives have blamed the scandal on a postconciliar “silly season” along with a “culture of dissent.” Liberals have emphasized, on the contrary, a repressive culture of denial, silence, and secrecy, again focusing on sex, which marked preconciliar Catholicism and the seminaries in particular. Both decry the continuing force of these tendencies in today’s church. The John Jay data show that substantiated allegations of abuse did indeed “surge” from some point in the 1960s, peak in the 1970s, and later decline, eventually sharply, in the 1990s. But the data also show that the majority of abusing priests were ordained before the council ended and over two-thirds by 1970. On the other hand, the cohorts of priests ordained in 1970 and in 1973–75 contained the highest percentages of abusers.

These findings suggest that neither the culture of dissent nor the culture of repression may have been as combustible as the convergence of both. The decade 1965 to 1975 saw sexual taboo-breaking publicly celebrated (whatever the reality in private) and a church where matters long taken as bedrock certainties seemed to be shaken overnight, maybe in seminaries and among priests even more so than elsewhere. It is not unthinkable that a segment of clergy reared and trained in a repressive, sex-denying atmosphere found in those developments a permission to set aside their celibacy and act out a distorted sexuality, while a segment of younger clergy, ordained in the midst of change, may have never taken to heart the challenge of that celibacy in the first place.

The perspective from the NCRegister

Philip Mango, a psychotherapist for 30 years who directs the St. Michael’s Institute for the Psychological Sciences in New York, said he would recommend homosexuals be screened from seminaries because it’s not enough for priests to be celibate — they also need to be masculine.

The problem is deeper than whether someone will “act or not act out,” he said. “It’s about being men who know what leadership is. A man who is homosexual can’t do it. It’s not his fault. He can be very nice, he can be very good, but he can’t do those things that Christ did because he wants to be liked. He hasn’t been affirmed. If you want to be loved, you cannot lead.”

Fitzgibbons said this dynamic only feeds the vicious circle of abuse.

“The reality is those with same-sex attraction have a vulnerability toward adolescent males because during their own adolescence they felt woefully inadequate,” he said. “The major psychological dynamic for those who have sex with minors is weak masculine identity and a profound sense of isolation and loneliness. When this is present, these individuals become a potential risk to adolescents — under stress they’re likely to act out in that manner.”