The gay purge

By scapegoating homosexual priests, the Catholic Church seeks to avoid a tougher look at its secret history of abuse.

By Cheryl L. Reed

Mar 27, 2002 | The Vatican has come up with a simple solution to the Catholic Church's recent sex scandal: Eliminate gay priests. "People with these inclinations just cannot be ordained," says Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, responding to the sex scandals sweeping the American Catholic Church in recent weeks.

U.S. conservatives have also taken up the cause. Former drug czar and self-appointed "values" cop Bill Bennett told CNN last week that "the church has to consider the whole question as to whether it wants priests who are homosexual in orientation."

That answer may make sense to many, since the sex cases that have received the most attention have involved priests who have molested young boys. And turning the scandals into a "gay" issue allows the church to suggest that it, too, is a victim in the scandal. Rather than being responsible for pedophile priests, the church can portray itself as victimized by gays who have sneaked into the priesthood. But it blurs a central fact at the heart of the controversy: No one, including the church itself, seems to know exactly how big the sex scandal really is, who it involves or what role homosexuality plays in child abuse by priests.

At least one well-known clinical psychologist says he believes the victims are much more likely to be girls and women.

"There are far more heterosexual cases than homosexual," says Gary Schoener, a clinical psychologist who has been diagnosing and treating clergy abuse for 28 years. "The Vatican damn well knows that, and the leadership in the American church knows that."

Since 1974, Schoener and his staff at the Minneapolis Walk-In Counseling Center have consulted in more than 2,000 clergy sexual abuse cases. In a number of denominations around the country, including Catholic dioceses, he assesses priests and their victims and helps develop training programs to teach clergy proper boundaries. He has been involved in over 100 legal cases involving clergy abuse in Colorado, Florida, Texas and New Jersey.

"I would challenge the church to show me that there are more boys than girls being abused by priests," he says. "There are plenty of cases of girls and they are just not getting the visibility."

Though recently they have. On Thursday, when Pope John Paul for the first time denounced the "grave scandal" of priest sex abuse, saying that such men had betrayed their vows and succumbed to evil, a Washington priest was suspended after admitting he might have "crossed over the line" with at least one teenage girl. His admission came after two women contended that he had engaged in sexual misconduct with them when they were teenagers in the 1980s. Almost simultaneously, a former pastor in Santa Rosa, Calif., Don Kimball, stood trial on criminal charges that he raped and molested two underage girls 20 years ago. A former bishop testified that Kimball had admitted to him that he had molested teenagers -- and that he waited three years before doing anything about Kimball.

Many experts on clergy sexual abuse would disagree with Schoener's assertion that most victims of priest abuse are female, though no one has the comprehensive data to prove him wrong. And therein lies the biggest problem with the current sex scandal: In order for any concrete conclusions to be drawn, the church would need to assemble its own comprehensive list of abuses. So far, the church has not done so.

Next Page: Former priest: Priests abuse boys four times more than girls

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