Predatory Priests: Sexually Abusing Fathers,
by Richard B. Gartner, Ph.D.

This paper was published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2004) Volume 5:31-56.

Abstract
The media, the public, and the Church have spotlighted the effects of the scandals on the Church rather than the effects of priest abuse on its victims. Child sexual abuse has ominous relational implications for its victims. It often results in distrust of authority; seeing relationships in hierarchical, exploitative terms; distance and isolation; and fear of relating. Dissociation, an adaptive response to trauma, can become a characteristic, dysfunctional response to stress. Boys often have particular problems because of socialized masculine-gender norms that men are not victims and concerns about the implications of same-sex abuse for their sexual orientation. To these aftereffects, sexual abuse by a priest adds betrayal of spirituality, unconscious feelings that incest has occurred, and a crisis of faith arising from a sense that one has betrayed God. Examples from film, clinical practice, and an interview with a mental health professional sexually abused as a boy illustrate these points.

Predatory Priests: Sexually Abusing Fathers

The controversy surrounding the 2002 scandals over the abuse of children by priests has churned throughout our culture and at times boiled over into bitterness, rancor, and vindictiveness. Throughout this period, the media and the public, like the Church itself, has paid far more attention to the effects of the scandals on the Church than to the effects of the abuse on its victims.

While there have been some reports of abuse of girls by priests, the largest number of cases have involved boys. In this paper, I track the effects of sexual abuse on boys, with particular attention to the specific aftereffects of abuse by priests.

The Boys of St. Vincent
The Boys of St. Vincent (1994) is a two-part film depicting long-term, brutal sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of boys in a Catholic orphanage. I urge any reader who wants to understand what happens to boys who have been abused by priests to see this movie. Based on true events in a Newfoundland Catholic home for boys, it addresses diverse themes related to the sexual abuse of boys and conveys the complexity of the boys’ reactions to it. The filmmakers captured the most salient.

In Part I, we see the boys’ abuse in horrifyingly graphic detail. Brother Lavin, the Superintendent of the Home, is spellbinding and charismatic, but terrifying. He frequently summons Kevin, his “special boy,” to his office. There, he holds, caresses, kisses, and otherwise molests Kevin while murmuring how much he loves him. But if Kevin displeases him, Brother Lavin explodes in physically abusive rage. Following a particularly merciless beating after he tries to run away, Kevin is broken. He becomes far more careful about his protests; he is more depressed, less lively, and more guarded and suspicious.

Other boys at the orphanage are also abused by the brothers. In particular, we see Steven as he is visited and molested at night. Steven’s older brother, Brian, learns that these molestations are happening “again,” and he protests loudly but is punished with ten belt lashes on each hand.

The brand of Catholicism taught at St. Vincent demands unswerving loyalty to the orphanage and obedience to orders from authority figures. There is an explicit message that those who do not obey will go to hell -- this threat includes boys who try not to acquiesce to their abuse. The situation is particularly calamitous because the boys are orphans with nowhere else to go.

Political overtones are suggested. High Church officials will not stand for any besmirching of the orphanage’s name. Their power to influence lay authorities is chillingly conveyed in scenes with politicians, police, and the Church’s own social worker, who is not allowed to see the boys.

When the boys’ abuse is reported to the police, an investigation commences. The boys’ stories are alternately conveyed by flat recitations by the boys in the police station and brief, viscerally evocative flashbacks to the abuse they are describing. Unlike the other boys, Steven denies he has been abused, showing a bravado and empty showmanship that superficially protects him from experiencing the effects of his trauma. Kevin describes his abuse and is assured by the authorities that the abuse will stop.

But instead the investigation is stopped. The boys’ statements are called “pornographic” and are rewritten so that criminal investigations will not proceed. The brothers involved are placed elsewhere, where they will be “counseled.” The chief detective makes a pointed observation that the boys are not being offered counseling, but he is silenced. Before being removed, Brother Lavin allows Brian to leave the orphanage, He warns him, though, that if he tells anyone what he knows, his younger brother will pay the consequences. The offending brothers are replaced by men equally vicious and oppressive, and in a brief scene at the end of Part I we see one of them molesting a boy.

Part II takes place fifteen years later. We follow the stories of Kevin, Steven, Brian, and Peter Lavin, no longer a member of his order but now a husband and father living in Montreal. The now-retired chief detective brings criminal charges against Lavin based on the boys’ fifteen-year-old affidavits.

Kevin, inarticulate, isolated, and enraged that he is being subpoenaed to testify, says he will not appear in court. Steven is brought in to testify from Toronto, where he is a cocaine addict living on welfare. He is reunited for the first time with his brother Brian, now married and a father. Steven dismisses the idea that he is hurt that Brian never found him again after leaving the orphanage, but underneath his old bravado he is deeply wounded by his brother’s failure to rescue him.

We witness several legal investigations simultaneously in crosscut: Lavin’s trial, the trial of the brother who molested Steven, and the administrative investigation into the coverup of the boys’ testimony. Steven is ambushed on the witness stand by a defense lawyer, and is revealed to be an occasional male prostitute who himself abused younger boys in the years before he left St. Vincent. Shattered, he dies of an overdose of drugs just as his abuser is convicted.

Kevin is initially stonily silent about his abuse and prone to erupt in fury if pressed to talk about it. He will not meet with Steven, but when Steven dies Kevin is devastated. Attending the funeral, he decides to appear in court to testify against Lavin.

Meanwhile, Lavin’s seemingly happy family life is shattered when he is arrested at home. His wife, at first supportive of him, gradually begins to doubt him, decides to stand by him anyway, then turns away from him forever when she realizes the full extent of his crimes.

Imperious, self-righteous, and arrogant, Lavin maintains that the boys are lying ingrates, but in extraordinary scenes with a psychiatrist, his inner life is conveyed. He talks of his own early abuse and abandonment before going to St. Vincent himself at age nine. He then reveals the fear of sex and love that led him to join a religious brotherhood. When he talks about how much he loved Kevin, he breaks down, sobbing.

In the final scenes of the movie, Kevin appears on the stand and in a whisper confirms the abuse he described fifteen years earlier. Intercut are scenes of Kevin’s first molestation. In an initially joyful swimming pool sequence, we see how Lavin turned a lonely boy’s Easter without visitors into a glorious event by taking him swimming. We then see how this marvelous moment veered into violation. Kevin remembers this trauma along with flashes of later molestations and brutal beatings.

In the final scene, Lavin, convicted and alone, repeatedly pounds a table, much as he raged in the first part of the film. Then he looks away again, cupping his face as the film ends.

The Boys of St. Vincent is a harrowing film that tellingly reveals both the facts of the boys’ sexual victimizations and its later impact on them. We repeatedly see the callousness and denial of institutions in relation to sexual abuse, and the inability even of those adults who believe abuse has taken place to stop it.

Although filmed in 1994, and based on events that took place well before that time, The Boys of St. Vincent is a remarkably prescient and compelling description of events very similar to those that made headlines in 2002. We see in the movie how the Church protected itself by silencing the investigation and by transferring priests to other posts rather than removing them from the priesthood. We see how the anguish of the boys is not really considered as the Church preserves itself. And we see how victims are disbelieved and blamed in this horrendous situation.

Effects of Boyhood Sexual Abuse
When we see the boys in The Boys of St. Vincent as adults, one or another of them reveals common aftereffects of boyhood sexual trauma: dissociation, isolation, addiction, prostitution, ragefulness, suicidality, denial, and the possibility of becoming abusive himself. Looking at these and other aftermaths to boyhood sexual victimization conveys its consequences. I have elsewhere (Gartner, 1996, 1997a, b, 1999a, c, d; see also Lew, 1988; Hunter, 1990; and Holmes and Slap, 1998) described these aftereffects at length, but I will review them now.

Sexual abuse is an interpersonal experience that has ominous implications for a boy’s future frame of reference in all interpersonal relationships. When a child is betrayed in this way, seemingly unbreakable bonds are broken (Cheselka, 1996). The abuser uses a power relationship to satisfy his or her own needs without regard to the needs of the victim. When the abuser is in some way the boy’s caretaker, someone whom the boy has believed he could count on implicitly, “treachery is introduced into the most private, personal, and trusting relationships” (Gartner, 1999a, p. 13).

During childhood molestation, dissociation is an effective means victims employ to defend against psychic disintegration (Putnam, 1989, 1992; Davies and Frawley, 1992, 1994; Bromberg, 1998). Men with sexual-abuse histories frequently recount that during their abuse they “felt like a boy on the ceiling watching another little boy being abused.” We see this in The Boys of St. Vincent when Kevin’s hands and body go limp after he has been beaten by Brother Lavin. A self-induced hypnotic state partially protects him from his disorientation and pain. Afterward, his blank eyes and withdrawn state reflect how his dissociation takes over even when he is not being abused.

As with women, dissociation may become the prime means a sexually abused man develops for dealing with anxiety. After chronic abuse, dissociation often become a victim’s chief way of dealing with all kinds of uncomfortable situations. However, it is no longer functional. What started out as a useful, perhaps even lifesaving, way of dealing with trauma ends up as a principal mode of being in the world.

But dissociation may or may not be an appropriate reaction to every anxiety-arousing stimulus. The dissociative “cure” for anxiety can itself become the problem (Bromberg, 1994). For example, a sexually abused man may develop compulsive behaviors, like substance abuse, incessant masturbation, or anonymous, unpleasurable sexual activity, that are his means of hypnotizing himself and returning to a dissociated state. There is an example of this in The Boys of St. Vincent when Steven becomes a drug addict and prostitute. These behaviors offer him him a speedy reentry to the protected dissociated state he created while being abused as a boy.

Interpersonally, these boys often grow up distrusting power and authority. Their ability to form attachments to authorities is severely compromised because they have internalized people in power as untrustworthy, malevolent, and undependable.

But the interpersonal effects go beyond relationships with authority figures. Feeling that all relationships include a power differential, a sexually abused man may have a constant need to control them all. He cannot understand the concept of equal partnership, which bodes ill for his intimate love relationships in adulthood. Power becomes eroticized, which, of course, also has implications for a man’s sexual and love relationships. Phobic about emotional attachment, a man with a boyhood sexual abuse history often maintains an interpersonal distance in relationships. This may alternate with a sense of merging with a loved one so that he hardly knows where he ends and the other begins.

There is a depiction in The Boys of St. Vincent of why a sexually abused man needs interpersonal distance and how he achieves it. Kevin grows up leading an isolated, frozen life, but this swiftly breaks down if he gets close to others. Stonily silent about his abuse, he is prone to erupt in fury if pressed to talk about it. He builds himself a house in a lonely country area and spends his time installing insulation there, perhaps a symbolic representation of the isolation and insulation he needs to survive. But this attempt to distance himself from others and from his own feelings falls apart easily. At one point, we see him physically attack another former St. Vincent orphan who reminds him that he was Lavin’s “special boy.” Then he stops seeing his girlfriend when she becomes too curious about his history.

Confused about what is affection and what is abuse, what is desire and what is tenderness (Ferenczi, 1933), a man with a sexual-abuse history may have great difficulty differentiating among sex, love, nurturance, affection, and abuse. Interpersonal approaches from others that are simply friendly maybe be experienced as seductive and exploitative. Conversely, he may not notice when exploitative demands are being made on him, for he has learned to accept such demands as usual in his interpersonal world.

He may at times be phobic about sex and feel smothered by its forced intimacy. As one man said to me, only half-joking, "The trouble with sex is there's always someone in your face.” He is likely to feel isolated from and during interpersonal sex. In addition, he may feel ambivalent about sexual pleasure, since a certain amount of physical pleasure may have accompanied the traumatic abuse. As another man put it, “All pleasure is bad. It’s bad that my father touches my penis. His touching my penis gives me pleasure. Therefore, pleasure is bad.”

On the other hand, interpersonal relatedness may become eroticized because sex is the only way for the man to feel intimate (or seemingly intimate.

Hungry for interpersonal contact but phobic about it, believing that sexual closeness is his chief opportunity to feel loved but experiencing love as abuse, a sexually abused man who allows himself to be sexual at all often solves his dilemma by engaging in frequent, indiscriminate, and dissociated sexual encounters [Gartner, 1999a, pp. 202-203)].

Compulsive sexuality strengthens the dissociation that sexually abused men need to deal with anxiety. It soothes momentarily, just as there is relief through alcohol or such other compulsive behavior as gambling, eating, drug taking, shopping, and, in less obviously destructive ways, compulsive working and exercising. In addition, though, compulsive sex recreates the sexual-abuse situation where dissociation first developed and therefore is a particularly effective way to summon up the trance states achieved during dissociation.

These sexually compulsive acts are not free or joyous expressions of erotic, passionate sensuality. Rather, they demonstrate a man’s imprisonment in an empty behavioral circuit from which he feels there is no exit. Although he pursues sex incessantly, he achieves little intimacy. He desires love but “he does not feel loved once the sex act is concluded. These incidents leave him feeling empty and lonely, while the idea of fully pursuing interpersonal relatedness fills him with a dread of repeating his abuse history” (Gartner, 1999a, p. 203).

An abused child learns that sexuality and seduction constitute his interpersonal currency, his chief means of getting what he needs in life. Having learned that his sexuality is valuable to others, he may allow sexuality to permeate all his interpersonal encounters. Such a person is seductive in diverse relationships, often inappropriately so.

Another aftermath of boyhood sexual victimization is that relatedness, including sexual relationships, may become exploitative, even sadistic or masochistic. In some cases, the boy himself becomes sexually abusive, as happens with Brother Lavin in The Boys of St. Vincent, who was abused as a child and later becomes the chief victimizer at the orphanage. We also hear that Steven abused some younger boys while at the orphanage. It is a commonly believed myth that this is the usual pattern, that sexually abused boys almost inevitably become sexually abusive men. In fact, though, while it is true that about four out of five male abusers were themselves abused as boys, there is evidence that only about one in five sexually abused boys goes on to become an abuser (Lisak, Hopper, and Song, 1996). Because of this myth, however, many men fear that they will become abusive or worry that others will think they are abusers should they disclose their history.

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