Last week AW Richard Sipe died. He was a former priest who became a psychoanalyst working with priests. That led him to do a study in which he found that half of all priests are at any time sexually active, and that 6% of all priests were abusers. In 1986 he presented his findings to the US bishops. He naively thought they'd be grateful to receive important information that might enable them to act. Those spineless, vindictive, secretive ideologues were anything but grateful. In some diocese he was blackballed.
So when after the scandal broke big in 2002, none of them had any right to be shocked, shocked that there was abuse going on.
Sipe didn't link clerical celibacy to the incidence of sexual abuse -- for one thing, most priests were not celibate anyway, and for another, statistically Catholic priests are not an outlier in sexual abuse of minors. But in a Church where half of all priests were sexually active, he argued, celibacy contributed to the systemic cover up of all sexual activity, including those that were criminal.
It was Sipe's study which tipped off the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe about the extent of the cover-ups. In the story of fighting the sexual abuse of minors in the US Catholic Church, and their cover-up, he is a giant.
So when after the scandal broke big in 2002, none of them had any right to be shocked, shocked that there was abuse going on.
Sipe didn't link clerical celibacy to the incidence of sexual abuse -- for one thing, most priests were not celibate anyway, and for another, statistically Catholic priests are not an outlier in sexual abuse of minors. But in a Church where half of all priests were sexually active, he argued, celibacy contributed to the systemic cover up of all sexual activity, including those that were criminal.
It was Sipe's study which tipped off the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe about the extent of the cover-ups. In the story of fighting the sexual abuse of minors in the US Catholic Church, and their cover-up, he is a giant.
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