What Turns Our Catholic Priests Into Monsters?

A culture of denial, silence and sexual repression all helped create abusers, who were often sent abroad.
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."
At the end of the week when Frank McCourt finally succumbed to illness, the above quote, taken from his best known work, Angela's Ashes, has rarely been more relevant.
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Dr Niall Muldoon, national clinical director with the Children at Risk in Ireland (Cari) foundation, which counsels victims of abuse, notes that there was a clear emphasis by the Catholic hierarchy on "getting a child early on".
As a result, you had 12- or 13-year-olds who were brought up to distrust close relationships – for example, always being told to walk in groups of three rather than two.
If you were a recruit for the priesthood, and you were found to be too close to someone, you were often punished.
The effect of this on young personalities still in formation cannot be underestimated.
"Straight away you're teaching someone to be isolated, closed off, not sharing feelings," Muldoon believes.
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"The concept of celibacy has to be considered in the context of someone who understands their sexuality in the first place," he says.
"But a kid at 12 or 13… It's like asking someone to give up chocolate having never tasted it. Celibacy has to be a mature, informed choice."
So the trainee Irish priest was frequently faced with a type of 'double whammy' – the forced repression of their emotions, both in society and within the church structures to which they devoted their lives.
They were then expected to be outgoing and sociable as part of their work – something which served only to heighten their sense of isolation when they returned to an empty house.
Many priests found a way around the problems which celibacy can throw up – for example, through maintaining strong relationships with family members.
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For Rigert, the rigid sexual repression in both Irish society and the priesthood clearly had the opposite of its intended effect, helping to foster bizarre and criminal sexual behaviour such as the sexual abuse of children.

But according to victims of abuse by 'exported' Irish priests, there are other possible explanations for priests' transfer abroad, and their getting away with it for so long.
"It's pretty clear that minority Catholics – and for decades, Irish Catholics here were a minority – tend to trust priests more, believe abuse reports less, and contact church officials, not criminal officials, when they are able to take action," says David Clohessy, national director of the US-based Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests (Snap). "So priests from minority Catholic communities – years ago, the Irish, now Hispanics and others – tend to get by with abuse longer."
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Unless independent evidence proves otherwise, the only rational conclusion is that a certain percentage of the men who enter the priesthood are, or become, sexually deviant and do so in nearly every diocese across the globe."
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Writing in the Irish Catholic last year, UCD academic and therapist Dr Marie Keenan claimed the idea that psychological screening will reduce offending by clergy is built on an "assumption that clergy who sexually abuse children are psychologically disturbed".
She argued that, while they are of course culpable for their actions, such an analysis risks ignoring the role of the institution that is the Catholic church itself.
Research conducted by her, involving interviews with priest abusers, indicates that the church is "pretty expert at ignoring problems... in its clergy, and has a fairly well-perfected culture of denial and silence", she said.
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Snap's David Clohessy goes even further.
"Only the most naïve would believe that centuries-old patterns of selfishness and recklessness by an ancient, rigid, secretive, all-male monarchy could or would be suddenly reversed, especially because the root cause of the crisis – unchecked power by bishops – remain unaddressed," he says.