The purge in the Catholic Church

Sara Miles has written a perceptive analysis of Pope Ratzinger I's (Benedict XVI) recently-announced purge targeted at gay seminarians in the United States studying to become priests: Rome's latest witch hunt won't stop with gays Salon 10/03/05.

The best part of the article is her explanation that, as real and important and cruel as the gay purge itself is, purging gays is not the main goal of the process. "The real battle," she writes, "is about power, and the attempt by Pope Benedict XVI to reassert central authority in the face of multiple and growing challenges to Vatican control - particularly from the United States, long the source of headaches for Rome."

She doesn't ignore the more immediate consequences. For one thing, gays who are kicked out of Church positions will have strong incentive to out gay priests and bishops who hypocritically support the purge. Just establishing the operative definition of "homosexual" for this purpose poses its own set of problems.


She also makes the extremely important point, which our lazy "press corps" has mostly missed, about the real relationship of thepurge to the sex-abuse scandals:

Still, the current seminary investigations are being presented to the faithful not as anti-intellectual reaction, nor as a power play, but as a good-faith effort to address the sexual-abuse scandal. Gay men abuse little boys, the argument goes, so getting rid of gay priests means that kids will be safe. Such linking of homosexuality with predatory pedophilia is an old and inaccurate myth, but it certainly holds political utility for a hierarchy that did its best, for decades, to cover up abuse, blame victims and attack those who sought justice. Like other political campaigns that invoke the horrors of homosexuality to rally followers behind a conservative agenda, this one has less to do with facts than with public relations.

The real connection between the sex-abuse cases and the seminary investigations is that the scandals intensified the Vatican's existing unease about the American church -- and convinced the hierarchy it was time to clamp down. The spectacle of an angry laity withholding money from the church, spilling parish secrets, publicly rebuking prominent bishops, and refusing to accept direction was profoundly upsetting to an organization that runs on order.

"It's more than order," says Rev. John Golenski, a gay Episcopal priest and medical ethicist in San Francisco, who spent 23 years as a Jesuit. "It's about money. If you took away the revenue from Cologne, Munich, Amsterdam and the United States, the Vatican would close down in seven days. The whole show is funded by these places - so if they lose control of the mechanism of authority there, they lose it all. They need the levers of control to be top-down again."

Rev. Golenski thinks the Vatican has concluded that "the clergy in the United States cannot be reformed, but must be replaced." Rome, he adds, "is ready to purge not just homosexuals, but all wrong thinkers. It's a risky strategy for them. But otherwise the hierarchy fears it will irrevocably lose control."

Rightwingers in the Church have tried to say that the sex abuse was mainly the fault of gay priests, and to hold out tighter enforcement of Church hierarchical authority as a solution.

But the closed and excessively self-protective behavior of the hierarchy was a major part of the problem. They tried to keep the problem hidden, rather than dealing with it forthrightly and effectively. Better enforcement of rules against sexual misconduct with minors is part of the solution. But unless the bishops and the Vatican become more open and accountable to the members of the Church and to the public affected by their decisions, they are very likely to fall back on the same hide-the-problem dodge.

With the Church already facing a severe priest shortage and a long-term crisis of confidence in the United States, Ratzinger's push to try to entrench rightwing (or ultra-rightwing) control even more deeply may well backfire on him in unexpected ways. The Church in the US and much of Europe has managed to adapt informally to rules about priestly celibacy, for instance, by quietly accepting in practice that many priests have normal adult love relationships with longterm partners, both gay and straight.

But if Ratzinger tries to completely stifle discussion in the Church over issues like abortion laws, birth control, celibacy, women priests, and so on, that may be more than many Catholics can stand. We can always become Episcopalians or Methodists or something. The days when the Church could convince most people (at least in Europe and America) that you can't be a Christian outside the Catholic Church are long gone. And they aren't coming back.

This posture by the Church on the gay purge is also likely in the short run to boost the perennial campaign by the Christian Right in America to demonize gays.