{"id":7583,"date":"2004-04-01T10:05:03","date_gmt":"2004-04-01T10:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/still_partly_cloudy.html"},"modified":"2004-04-01T10:05:03","modified_gmt":"2004-04-01T10:05:03","slug":"still_partly_cloudy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/still_partly_cloudy.html","title":{"rendered":"Still Partly Cloudy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Steinfels takes a look at the John Jay Report<\/a><\/p>\n

Many conservatives have blamed the scandal on a postconciliar \u201csilly season\u201d along with a \u201cculture of dissent.\u201d 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\u2019s church. The John Jay data show that substantiated allegations of abuse did indeed \u201csurge\u201d 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\u201375 contained the highest percentages of abusers.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The perspective from the NCRegister<\/a><\/p>\n

Philip Mango, a psychotherapist for 30 years who directs the St. Michael\u2019s Institute for the Psychological Sciences in New York, said he would recommend homosexuals be screened from seminaries because it\u2019s not enough for priests to be celibate \u2014 they also need to be masculine.<\/p>\n

The problem is deeper than whether someone will “act or not act out,” he said. “It\u2019s about being men who know what leadership is. A man who is homosexual can\u2019t do it. It\u2019s not his fault. He can be very nice, he can be very good, but he can\u2019t do those things that Christ did because he wants to be liked. He hasn\u2019t been affirmed. If you want to be loved, you cannot lead.”<\/p>\n

Fitzgibbons said this dynamic only feeds the vicious circle of abuse.<\/p>\n

“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 \u2014 under stress they\u2019re likely to act out in that manner.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Steinfels takes a look at the John Jay Report Many conservatives have blamed the scandal on a postconciliar \u201csilly season\u201d along with a \u201cculture of dissent.\u201d 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nStill Partly Cloudy - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/still_partly_cloudy.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Still Partly Cloudy - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Peter Steinfels takes a look at the John Jay Report Many conservatives have blamed the scandal on a postconciliar \u201csilly season\u201d along with a \u201cculture of dissent.\u201d 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…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/still_partly_cloudy.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2004-04-01T10:05:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Still Partly Cloudy - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/still_partly_cloudy.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Still Partly Cloudy - Via Media","og_description":"Peter Steinfels takes a look at the John Jay Report Many conservatives have blamed the scandal on a postconciliar \u201csilly season\u201d along with a \u201cculture of dissent.\u201d 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. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7583\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}