Page two, Predatory Priests: Sexually Abusing Fathers

Underlying all these issues are two major ones that differentiate sexually abused boys from sexually abused girls. Both issues complicate boys’ capacities to come to terms with sexual abuse.

First, socialized masculine gender roles dictate that boys and men are not victims and that they may express rage but not the “softer” emotions. The terrifying fury of Brother Lavin in The Boys of St. Vincent typifies the emotional reactions to abuse that are allowed men by these gender norms. This rage may be turned inward, as when in The Boys of St. Vincent a despairing Steven eventually kills himself with a drug overdose, perhaps with conscious intent.

Masculine-gender norms also dictate that men are competitive, resilient, self-reliant, independent, and certainly not emotionally needy (Pleck, 1981, 1995; Brod and Kaufman, 1994; Levant, 1995; Levant and Pollack, 1995; Lisak, 1995; Pollack, 1995, 1998). Again, Brother Lavin’s denial of his own neediness as a child, and indeed of the abuse he has inflicted on Kevin, epitomizes how sexually abused men deny their reality in the service of maintaining these norms. Likewise, Steven asserted as a child that he was not abused; he thus superficially protected himself from his trauma. As an adult, Steven similarly denies that he was hurt by his brother’s failure to rescue him from the orphanage.

In addition, “real” men are thought to want sex whenever it is offered, especially by women, and to be the initiators of sexual activity. For many men, these qualities define masculinity. Their masculine identity is at stake if they are identified as victims because victimhood is identified with being female.

These masculine-gender norms, pernicious for many reasons, are especially likely to interfere with a man’s ability to process being sexually victimized. Because of them, many men believe, consciously or unconsciously, that only sissies and weaklings allow abuse: victims can only be women or feminized men (often seen as gay). Being victimized means being “not male,” as does any acquiescence to victimization. Therefore, men often cannot acknowledge to themselves that they were sexually victimized, nor can they easily allow themselves to say that they were traumatized and emotionally devastated by a sexual encounter (especially with a woman) without giving up some sense of manhood.

In addition, masculine-gender norms make it difficult for men to develop or use the psychological resources necessary for them to recover from their trauma. Unable to be emotionally needy or to process emotional trauma, they are likely to have counterphobic reactions to feeling feminized by abuse. They become aggressive or “hypermasculine.” If they thus become action oriented rather than self-reflective, they are most likely to become abusive themselves, as happens with Brother Lavin and, to a lesser extent, Steven in The Boys of St. Vincent.

A second major factor also differentiates boys from girls as they process sexual victimization. When the abuser is male (and even sometimes when she is female), many boys and men -- whether straight or gay -- have fears and concerns regarding their sexual orientation. Conventional wisdom dictates that a sexually abused boy is likely to become gay, although in fact there is no persuasive evidence that premature sexual activity with either men or women fundamentally changes a boy’s sexual orientation.

Nevertheless, a boy who was headed toward being straight before his abuse is likely to doubt himself, wondering why he was chosen by a man as a sexual object. A boy headed toward being gay may feel prematurely rushed into defining himself as gay, or may hate his homosexuality because of a belief that it was caused by his abuse experience. Even boys who say that their early experiences were not traumatic were introduced to sex in a way that involved an exploitation of a less powerful person by a more powerful one. Whether the boys are gay or straight, this exploitative introduction to sexuality has implications for how they proceed as men in intimate relationships.

Sexual Abuse by Priests
Consider the effect on children of abuse by priests. Priests certainly have no monopoly on being sexual predators. I have known sexual victims who were abused by family members of all kinds, teachers, coaches, scoutmasters, babysitters, neighbors, or doctors, not to mention non-Catholic clergy.

Yet there seem to be specific meanings for victims in having been abused by priests. There is a concerted effort, usually a benign one, to make Catholic clergy part of a parishioner’s “family.” Catholic children are told to call clergy Father, Mother, Sister, Brother. Children, of course, are often quite literal in their understanding of such adult ideas.

And, a priest is not simply “a” father. He is a direct representative of “the” Father, a living re-presentation of Christ. I have heard of one child, a girl, who was told by her priest/abuser that to resist her molestation would be a direct defiance of God’s wishes.

If they have been encouraged to consider clergy as part of their family, indeed, as special family members who have an immediate link to God, how are children to understand when their Father, Mother, Sister, or Brother makes sexual overtures to them? Their most sacrosanct family member has betrayed them in a fundamental way. The more they believe in a link to God through a priest, the more horrific the betrayal. And the more they believe in the familial implications of calling someone Father, Mother, Sister, or Brother, the more incestuous are the acts committed during sexual abuse. Psychologically, then, many victims of priests are dealing with incest.

If a child is abused by a priest, he may not simply have a crisis of faith. He may literally feel that he is betraying God. He knows that his abuser has taken a vow of chastity. Even if he is sure that he never desired the priest sexually, he may still feel that he somehow instigated things and tempted the priest to break those vows. He is particularly likely to think so if his abuser tells him that they are engaging in sexual behavior because the boy is special or beautiful. Whatever the adult’s intent in saying such a thing, the boy may well conclude that the abuse was his own fault.

As a man discerns that he was exploited by someone he had considered a direct link to God, his whole spiritual world may begin to crumble. Boys who are most easily preyed upon by priests are likely to come from families with deep religious convictions. They may be altar boys or choir boys, and in any case they are likely to feel engaged in their religious lives and to have idealized views of their spiritual mentors. In addition, they may come from troubled families and be looking for parental figures in the Church to act as role models and provide the structure that they lack.

With all this in mind, consider the cases of men who were sexually abused as boys by priests I have elsewhere (Gartner, 1999a) discussed two such men, both of whom are still in treatment as of this writing. The circumstances of their abuse were different: Julian was abused by a priest/mentor from ages twelve until fifteen. Lorenzo had been abused by a number of men before a sexual encounter with a priest at age fifteen.

Lorenzo and Julian
Lorenzo and Julian grew up more similar to than different from other men I have known with histories of boyhood sexual abuse. They both came from large families in which tenderness was almost unknown and violence was the norm. Thus they were both starved for affection and guidance and looked to priests to provide for those needs. But those needs also made them easy prey for the priests they idealized.

Following their abuse, they both became sexually compulsive, and each had vast reserves of rage and problems with older authorities. They both had problematic intimate relationships. Lorenzo, a gay man, had never had a relationship of any depth. Julian, a married straight man, found ongoing intimacy with his wife nearly impossible to achieve. But, poignantly, both Lorenzo and Julian had crises of faith superimposed on the more usual damaging sequelae of childhood sexual abuse:

By the time he was fifteen, Lorenzo had had numerous exploitative and callous sexual encounters in which he sexually serviced older boys and men, all of whom were publicly identified as heterosexual and many of whom were married. Confused about the meaning of his own behavior and only vaguely knowledgeable about sexual orientation, he began to wonder if he were gay. He had no one to whom he could talk about this in the working-class mill town in which he grew up. One of ten children in a lower middle-class Catholic home where physical abuse was rampant, he knew better than to discuss gay sex at home. But he began to feel desperate about his sexual feelings. Then he remembered a priest who had once served in his town for two years before being transferred to a large city 300 miles away. He had always thought this priest was “cool,” and so he called him and said he needed to talk to him. The priest came to Lorenzo’s town for a visit, and Lorenzo first told him about his abuse experiences and then said he thought he was gay.

“He looked at me and said, ‘I knew you were gay the minute I laid eyes on you!’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ and he said, ‘Some things are better to discover on your own.’ So, at first he was good about it -- he invited me to visit him, and when I did he took me around the city and showed me gay neighborhoods, gay bars, gay shops. That part was good, but then we went back to the house he lived in with other priests, and I wanted to get high -- I was a crazy kid in those days, and I asked him where to get grass. He said, ‘No problem, just go upstairs and ask Father Donald.’ So I went upstairs, and there was nice Father Donald, and we got high together, and then he made a pass at me.” Lorenzo laughed. “It was the first time anyone serviced me, and I really liked it. When I went downstairs and told the first priest about it, he said, ‘Oh, sure, Father Donald does that with everyone.’ Can you believe this? He knew what was going to happen when he sent me up there! Later, I found out he was gay too and had sex with other boys, though never with me.”

Lorenzo was talking faster and faster, and I asked him to slow down and tell me what he felt about all this. “I thought it was funny. And exciting.” Then he paused. “But, you know, I’m thirty-five now, about the age Father Donald was then. I have no interest in fifteen-year-olds! My nephews are that age! I’d never go near them for sex.” I asked again how he felt about what happened with the two priests. For the first time, he seemed reflective. “It was a terrible thing to do. They knew how fucked up I was about sex with all those men and how unsure I was about being gay. I went to them for sanctuary! And they just helpe__d me party with them.” Lorenzo began to look sad. “In those days I really believed in the Catholic Church. No more.”

Julian was deeply ambivalent about the man who simultaneously mentored, loved, and abused him. From the time he was twelve, Julian was abused for three years by Father Scott, a parish priest who required that he come for special counseling sessions in order to get confirmed. Father Scott made Julian his special altar boy, invited him to visit him in his rooms, and undertook to educate him in classical texts, languages, and music. Julian came from a psychologically and physically invasive large family in which emotions and boundaries were ignored. Although he flunked out of school after Father Scott began to abuse him, once the abuse stopped he became an A student, largely, he believes, because of the earlier influence of the priest. He entered seminary himself but fell apart after two years and dropped out. He eventually went on to get an advanced degree in another field.

Father Scott taught Julian to idealize the male relationships described in ancient Greek texts. These idyllic relationships included intellectual mentoring, deep commitment, and interpersonal intimacy, as well as physical sexuality, which began a few months after Father Scott started counseling Julian. Father Scott led up to the initial “seduction” by encouraging Julian to talk about the pain he felt about his physically abusive but otherwise unresponsive family. After these sessions, the priest would hug Julian. These hugs were precious to the boy, who was starved for physical affection and, indeed, any kind of positive regard from an adult.

With time, the hugs got longer, and then one day Father Scott kissed Julian. He put his tongue in the boy’s mouth and made the kiss last for minutes. Julian was startled and confused, unsure of what was happening and what it meant. After the kiss, Father Scott said, “I know you want more, but that’s all for now.” Julian was bewildered at the time, but when he reached adulthood he said, “So, right from the beginning he made it that the abuse was my idea, so I felt guilty that it was happening even though I had no concept of men kissing at the time, and certainly no interest in it.” Shortly thereafter, the priest introduced Julian to anal sex, and for two years they had regular sexual encounters that included anal sex and mutual masturbation. On a few occasions the sex included an older boy whom Father Scott was also abusing.

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