July 23, 2004
Volume 7, Number 31
In a speech delivered this Spring that was largely ignored by the news media, the United Nation’s chief demographer declared that the very existence of some nations has now been endangered by fertility decline, and the international community’s insistent call for "gender equality" is making the problem even worse.
According to Dr. Joseph Chamie, Director of the Population Division of the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, "A growing number of countries view their low birth rates with the resulting population decline and ageing to be a serious crisis, jeopardizing the basic foundations of the nation and threatening its survival. Economic growth and vitality, defense, and pensions and health care for the elderly, for example, are all areas of major concern."
Chamie, who was speaking in his personal capacity at the Population Association of America’s annual meeting, asserted that one-third of the countries in the world now have "below replacement" level fertility, which means that women have fewer than 2.1 children on average. In 15 countries, the fertility rate has shrunk to l.5 children or less.
In an unprecedented statement for a high-ranking UN official, Chamie claimed that the drive for gender equality is partly to blame for low fertility, stating that, "While many governments, intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations and individuals may strongly support gender equality at work and in the home as a fundamental principle and desirable goal, it is not at all evident how having men and women participate equally in employment, parenting and household responsibilities will raise low levels of fertility. On the contrary, the equal participation of men and women in the labor force, child rearing and housework points precisely in the opposite direction, i.e., below replacement fertility. And this is in fact precisely what is being observed today in an increasing number of countries."
Chamie also noted the some governments, especially in the developed world, may be concerned about appearing hypocritical if they seek to increase their own fertility rates, while at the same time working to decrease fertility in the developing world. According to Chamie, "Understandably, governments are reluctant to be seen as encouraging citizens to breed for the sake of the country. This is especially true for governments providing international assistance to family planning programs in countries aiming to reduce their comparatively higher rates of fertility and population."
In his address, Chamie investigated the effectiveness of a number of governmental responses to fertility decline, including promoting marriage and childbearing, reducing the costs of child rearing, and adapting work schedules to family life. He was not optimistic concerning these policies, concluding that, "the current and foreseeable efforts of most governments to raise their current low fertility rates to replacement levels seem highly unlikely."
Copyright 2004 – C-FAM (Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute). Permission granted for unlimited use. Credit required.
Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute
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Phone: (212) 754-5948 Fax: (212) 754-9291
E-mail: c-fam@c-fam.org Website: www.c-fam.org
7.17.2004
Infertility Treatments, in Accord With Church Teaching
Interview With Dr. Thomas Hilgers of the Pope Paul VI Institute OMAHA, Nebraska
JULY 16, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Many Catholic couples who experience infertility can achieve pregnancy without resorting to immoral medical treatments, says an expert in natural procreative technology. Dr. Thomas Hilgers, director of Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction, explained to ZENIT some of the fertility methods he has developed that are in accord with Church teachings.
Q: What are the main causes of infertility?
Hilgers: Infertility is due to many causes. It is often called multifactorial, but unfortunately the medical profession only usually focuses on one issue at a time.The main causes of infertility include endometriosis, polycystic ovarian disease and pelvic adhesive disease, along with a variety of underlying hormonal dysfunctions and ovulation-related abnormalities. Tubal disease and obstruction is also a cause of infertility, but not as common as the others.
Q: Among the causes, how important is the role of sexual diseases contracted through premarital relations; past use of certain kinds of contraception; and the decision to delay having children?
Hilgers: It is difficult to say exactly how often these are linked. Certainly, sexually transmitted diseases can cause pelvic adhesive disease and tubal obstruction.My own concern is with the incompleteness and unsatisfactory nature of premarital relationships when sexual intercourse is involved. I think that, in many cases, women who have premarital sex use contraception so that they do not become pregnant; later, when it is difficult for them to become pregnant, they can experience resentment and anger.This makes it very complex, and the chronic stress that develops from this may be another underlying factor to infertility.
Q: What is the institute's success rate in overcoming infertility?
Hilgers: Our approach to the evaluation and treatment of infertility is one that looks at the underlying problems -- the diseases -- that cause infertility and then treats those diseases successfully.This is the primary approach that we use in "NaProTechnology," or natural procreative technology.NaProTechnology is a new women's health science that has been described in the new medical textbook, "The Medical and Surgical Practice of NaProTechnology" [Pope Paul VI Institute Press].In this situation, our success rates are statistically much better than the artificial reproductive technologies. In fact, they average about two to three times more effective. Generally speaking, we will see effectiveness rates in the 50% to 80% range, depending upon the problem and the extent of the abnormality.
Q: Briefly, what fertility methods are in accord with the teachings of the Catholic Church? Which are not?
Hilgers: Those approaches that do not separate love from life are the methods that are in accord with the teachings of the Catholic Church. These do not include such approaches as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization.Those that are acceptable are the approaches that are used in NaProTechnology. This scientific method looks for the basic underlying medical problems that are associated with infertility and then corrects them.
Q: Why is it so important for Catholics to use fertility methods that do not contradict what the Church teaches?
Hilgers: The Church has been extremely wise in its teaching relative to reproductive-related issues.It teaches, first of all, that marriage is a sacred relationship and that children are the supreme gift of marriage. It does not treat children as commodities. The Church's approach makes good psychological and spiritual sense, as well as good medical sense.Unfortunately, over the years, only artificial reproductive technologies have been available. Because of the breakthrough research that has been ongoing at the Pope Paul VI Institute, methods are now available that are very effective, medically authentic and completely consistent with the teachings of the Church. In many ways, it proves the validity of what the Church has been teaching all of these years.
Q: How can Catholics find doctors in their area who can help treat their infertility but not compromise their beliefs?
Hilgers: I would personally refer them to a Web site where one can find a teacher of the Creighton Model FertilityCareTM System -- the system that has been developed at the Pope Paul VI Institute. The teachers trained in that system are allied health professionals who can guide them toward physicians who have training in these areas.
Q: The desire to have children is very strong. What do you say to couples who cannot conceive using those methods approved by the Church?Hilgers: No program of infertility treatment is universally or 100% successful. In fact, there is no program for the treatment of infertility that even comes close.If one watches the news or morning television programs, one gets the mistaken impression that the artificial reproductive technologies are almost the only alternative available to women with infertility problems.What they do not tell you is that they are extremely expensive, the dropout rate in their use is extraordinarily high, and that, overall, they help less than 1% of women with fertility problems in any given year.Physicians who are involved in the provision of Catholic reproductive health care do not have to apologize for the services they have to offer. In fact, they can be extremely proud of the good record they have and the ability to help women and married couples in a way which is morally consistent.At the same time, adoption is a very fulfilling way of family building for many couples.In our program at the Pope Paul VI Institute, 90% of the couples who come to us either have a biological child of their own or have an adopted family. This is an incredible success rate and we are very proud of it.
ZE04071621
JULY 16, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Many Catholic couples who experience infertility can achieve pregnancy without resorting to immoral medical treatments, says an expert in natural procreative technology. Dr. Thomas Hilgers, director of Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction, explained to ZENIT some of the fertility methods he has developed that are in accord with Church teachings.
Q: What are the main causes of infertility?
Hilgers: Infertility is due to many causes. It is often called multifactorial, but unfortunately the medical profession only usually focuses on one issue at a time.The main causes of infertility include endometriosis, polycystic ovarian disease and pelvic adhesive disease, along with a variety of underlying hormonal dysfunctions and ovulation-related abnormalities. Tubal disease and obstruction is also a cause of infertility, but not as common as the others.
Q: Among the causes, how important is the role of sexual diseases contracted through premarital relations; past use of certain kinds of contraception; and the decision to delay having children?
Hilgers: It is difficult to say exactly how often these are linked. Certainly, sexually transmitted diseases can cause pelvic adhesive disease and tubal obstruction.My own concern is with the incompleteness and unsatisfactory nature of premarital relationships when sexual intercourse is involved. I think that, in many cases, women who have premarital sex use contraception so that they do not become pregnant; later, when it is difficult for them to become pregnant, they can experience resentment and anger.This makes it very complex, and the chronic stress that develops from this may be another underlying factor to infertility.
Q: What is the institute's success rate in overcoming infertility?
Hilgers: Our approach to the evaluation and treatment of infertility is one that looks at the underlying problems -- the diseases -- that cause infertility and then treats those diseases successfully.This is the primary approach that we use in "NaProTechnology," or natural procreative technology.NaProTechnology is a new women's health science that has been described in the new medical textbook, "The Medical and Surgical Practice of NaProTechnology" [Pope Paul VI Institute Press].In this situation, our success rates are statistically much better than the artificial reproductive technologies. In fact, they average about two to three times more effective. Generally speaking, we will see effectiveness rates in the 50% to 80% range, depending upon the problem and the extent of the abnormality.
Q: Briefly, what fertility methods are in accord with the teachings of the Catholic Church? Which are not?
Hilgers: Those approaches that do not separate love from life are the methods that are in accord with the teachings of the Catholic Church. These do not include such approaches as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization.Those that are acceptable are the approaches that are used in NaProTechnology. This scientific method looks for the basic underlying medical problems that are associated with infertility and then corrects them.
Q: Why is it so important for Catholics to use fertility methods that do not contradict what the Church teaches?
Hilgers: The Church has been extremely wise in its teaching relative to reproductive-related issues.It teaches, first of all, that marriage is a sacred relationship and that children are the supreme gift of marriage. It does not treat children as commodities. The Church's approach makes good psychological and spiritual sense, as well as good medical sense.Unfortunately, over the years, only artificial reproductive technologies have been available. Because of the breakthrough research that has been ongoing at the Pope Paul VI Institute, methods are now available that are very effective, medically authentic and completely consistent with the teachings of the Church. In many ways, it proves the validity of what the Church has been teaching all of these years.
Q: How can Catholics find doctors in their area who can help treat their infertility but not compromise their beliefs?
Hilgers: I would personally refer them to a Web site where one can find a teacher of the Creighton Model FertilityCareTM System -- the system that has been developed at the Pope Paul VI Institute. The teachers trained in that system are allied health professionals who can guide them toward physicians who have training in these areas.
Q: The desire to have children is very strong. What do you say to couples who cannot conceive using those methods approved by the Church?Hilgers: No program of infertility treatment is universally or 100% successful. In fact, there is no program for the treatment of infertility that even comes close.If one watches the news or morning television programs, one gets the mistaken impression that the artificial reproductive technologies are almost the only alternative available to women with infertility problems.What they do not tell you is that they are extremely expensive, the dropout rate in their use is extraordinarily high, and that, overall, they help less than 1% of women with fertility problems in any given year.Physicians who are involved in the provision of Catholic reproductive health care do not have to apologize for the services they have to offer. In fact, they can be extremely proud of the good record they have and the ability to help women and married couples in a way which is morally consistent.At the same time, adoption is a very fulfilling way of family building for many couples.In our program at the Pope Paul VI Institute, 90% of the couples who come to us either have a biological child of their own or have an adopted family. This is an incredible success rate and we are very proud of it.
ZE04071621
7.11.2004
This Year at Least, the U.S. Will Not Fund Organizations that Support Forced Abortions
PRI Weekly Briefing
9 July 2004
Vol. 6 / No. 24
Today, the House Appropriations Committee struck a blow against coercive population control programs. By refusing, on a vote of 32 to 26, to refund the UN Population Fund, the Committee in effect criticized China’s forced abortion regime and the organization that supports it. [1]
Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, after reviewing information provided by Population Research Institute, concluded on 21 July, 2002, that “the PRC has in place a regime of severe penalties on women who have unapproved births. This regime plainly operates to coerce pregnant women to have abortions in order to avoid the penalties and therefore amounts to a 'program of coercive abortion.'" "...UNFPA's support of, and involvement in, China's population-planning activities allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion.
Therefore, it is not permissible to continue funding UNFPA at this time."
Nita Lowey was proposing an amendment that would eviscerate a 19-year-old human rights law—the Kemp-Kasten Amendment—that allows the President to prevent US funding from going to any organization that supports or participates in the management of a coercive abortion program.
The committee was right to reject it. Why should the U.S. abandon its human rights principles to support an organization that refuses to withdraw from a program of forced abortion? We should be pressing the UNFPA to conform to human rights standards instead of lowering those standards to accommodate a brutal and oppressive one-child policy and the U.N. population group that supports it.
UNFPA continues to make wild and unsubstantiated claims about the harm that will be done to “women” if it doesn’t get its money. The truth is that it is intrusive population control programs themselves that cause harm to women and children, while siphoning funds away from real health care needs, such as AIDS, malaria, and other infectious diseases.
I close by quoting Dongfan Ma, who was forced to have an abortion in China and now lives in the United States in freedom, "Through this denial of UNFPA funds by President Bush and supported by a bipartisan group of US Congressional Representatives, conscience and human nature will triumph over barbaric policies imposed on families in China."
Endnotes
[1] The “yes” votes (26), in favor of funding the UNFPA were Sanford, Boyd, Clyburn, Cramer, DeLauro, Dicks, Edwards, Farr, Frelinghuysen, Hoyer, Jackson, Kaptur, Patrick Kennedy, Kilpatrick, Kirk, Lowey, Moran, Obey, Olver, Pastor, Price, Rothman, Roybal-Alard, Sabo, Serrano, Visclosky.
The no votes (32), against funding the UNFPA, were Aderholt, Berry, Bonilla, Crenshaw, Cunningham, Doolittle, Emerson, Goode, Granger, Hobson, Istook, Kingston, Knollenberg, Kolbe, Latham, Jerry Lewis, Mollohan, Nethercutt, Northrup, John Peterson, Regula, Rogers, Sherwood, Simpson, Tiahrt, Vitter, Walsh, Wamp, Dave Weldon, Wicker, Wolf, Bill Young.
Absent were (7) Culberson, Fattah, Hinchey, LaHood, Murtha, Sweeney, Taylor
© 2004 Population Research Institute. Permission to reprint granted. Redistribute widely. Credit required. _________
If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to PRI, please go to https://pop.org/donate.cfm. All donations (of any size) are welcomed and appreciated. _________
To subscribe to the Weekly Briefing, send an email to: JOIN-PRI@Pluto.Sparklist.com or email pri@pop.org and say "Add me to your Weekly Briefing." __________ The Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of "overpopulation."
9 July 2004
Vol. 6 / No. 24
Today, the House Appropriations Committee struck a blow against coercive population control programs. By refusing, on a vote of 32 to 26, to refund the UN Population Fund, the Committee in effect criticized China’s forced abortion regime and the organization that supports it. [1]
Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, after reviewing information provided by Population Research Institute, concluded on 21 July, 2002, that “the PRC has in place a regime of severe penalties on women who have unapproved births. This regime plainly operates to coerce pregnant women to have abortions in order to avoid the penalties and therefore amounts to a 'program of coercive abortion.'" "...UNFPA's support of, and involvement in, China's population-planning activities allows the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion.
Therefore, it is not permissible to continue funding UNFPA at this time."
Nita Lowey was proposing an amendment that would eviscerate a 19-year-old human rights law—the Kemp-Kasten Amendment—that allows the President to prevent US funding from going to any organization that supports or participates in the management of a coercive abortion program.
The committee was right to reject it. Why should the U.S. abandon its human rights principles to support an organization that refuses to withdraw from a program of forced abortion? We should be pressing the UNFPA to conform to human rights standards instead of lowering those standards to accommodate a brutal and oppressive one-child policy and the U.N. population group that supports it.
UNFPA continues to make wild and unsubstantiated claims about the harm that will be done to “women” if it doesn’t get its money. The truth is that it is intrusive population control programs themselves that cause harm to women and children, while siphoning funds away from real health care needs, such as AIDS, malaria, and other infectious diseases.
I close by quoting Dongfan Ma, who was forced to have an abortion in China and now lives in the United States in freedom, "Through this denial of UNFPA funds by President Bush and supported by a bipartisan group of US Congressional Representatives, conscience and human nature will triumph over barbaric policies imposed on families in China."
Endnotes
[1] The “yes” votes (26), in favor of funding the UNFPA were Sanford, Boyd, Clyburn, Cramer, DeLauro, Dicks, Edwards, Farr, Frelinghuysen, Hoyer, Jackson, Kaptur, Patrick Kennedy, Kilpatrick, Kirk, Lowey, Moran, Obey, Olver, Pastor, Price, Rothman, Roybal-Alard, Sabo, Serrano, Visclosky.
The no votes (32), against funding the UNFPA, were Aderholt, Berry, Bonilla, Crenshaw, Cunningham, Doolittle, Emerson, Goode, Granger, Hobson, Istook, Kingston, Knollenberg, Kolbe, Latham, Jerry Lewis, Mollohan, Nethercutt, Northrup, John Peterson, Regula, Rogers, Sherwood, Simpson, Tiahrt, Vitter, Walsh, Wamp, Dave Weldon, Wicker, Wolf, Bill Young.
Absent were (7) Culberson, Fattah, Hinchey, LaHood, Murtha, Sweeney, Taylor
© 2004 Population Research Institute. Permission to reprint granted. Redistribute widely. Credit required. _________
If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to PRI, please go to https://pop.org/donate.cfm. All donations (of any size) are welcomed and appreciated. _________
To subscribe to the Weekly Briefing, send an email to: JOIN-PRI@Pluto.Sparklist.com or email pri@pop.org and say "Add me to your Weekly Briefing." __________ The Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of "overpopulation."
7.07.2004
Abortifacients...The Other Forbidden Grief
By Janet Morana and Theresa Burke, Ph.D.
We’ve learned a good deal about the emotional and spiritual pain of abortion. Aside from surgical procedures, the Pill, the IUD, and other hormonal "contraceptives" such as the morning after pill, Depro- Provera and Norplant can also cause an abortion of human life.
Ovulation is not always suppressed by oral contraceptives. In these cases, the egg is fertilized, conception takes place, and a new human being begins to develop. These abortifacients interfere with the pregnancy by changing the lining of the uterus so that a newly conceived child cannot implant in the womb. This hostile environment causes the child to die.
Janet Morana, Associate Director of Priests for Life and co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, shares her personal story:
"Three months before my wedding date I started taking birth control pills. I continued taking the pill for two years until it seemed like it was time to start a family... Eventually, I had a tubal ligation.
"As I began to study the teachings of the Church I learned about God's beautiful plan for marriage, including what NFP was all about.
"My grief finally hit me as I watched a video about the wonder of life and I realized completely what taking the birth control pills really meant: aborting new life. I came to grips with the fact that I had not only shut myself off to life, but had also destroyed an unknown number of children. At the end of that video I began to sob uncontrollably. I was overwhelmed with sudden feelings of grief and remorse. I was able to come to grips with these feelings of grief and loss recently at a Rachel's Vineyard Retreat. It was a first step in having my feelings validated, and I began to deal with my loss in a new light."
The Church has always asserted that the method by which a child is killed, or the age at which the killing occurs, do not make an abortion any less real or wrong. The Church can therefore serve at the forefront in ministry to the countless hearts wounded by abortifacients. Our church continues to be a prophetic guide in a new movement to re-claim inner voices that have been silenced, paralysed and obscured by the demands of a contraceptive and abortive culture.
Priests for Life invites all who have experienced the grief of abortion to share your testimony. Contact janet@priestsforlife.org
To find out more information about attending a Rachel's Vineyard Retreats for healing after abortion, visit www.rachelsvineyard.org
We’ve learned a good deal about the emotional and spiritual pain of abortion. Aside from surgical procedures, the Pill, the IUD, and other hormonal "contraceptives" such as the morning after pill, Depro- Provera and Norplant can also cause an abortion of human life.
Ovulation is not always suppressed by oral contraceptives. In these cases, the egg is fertilized, conception takes place, and a new human being begins to develop. These abortifacients interfere with the pregnancy by changing the lining of the uterus so that a newly conceived child cannot implant in the womb. This hostile environment causes the child to die.
Janet Morana, Associate Director of Priests for Life and co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, shares her personal story:
"Three months before my wedding date I started taking birth control pills. I continued taking the pill for two years until it seemed like it was time to start a family... Eventually, I had a tubal ligation.
"As I began to study the teachings of the Church I learned about God's beautiful plan for marriage, including what NFP was all about.
"My grief finally hit me as I watched a video about the wonder of life and I realized completely what taking the birth control pills really meant: aborting new life. I came to grips with the fact that I had not only shut myself off to life, but had also destroyed an unknown number of children. At the end of that video I began to sob uncontrollably. I was overwhelmed with sudden feelings of grief and remorse. I was able to come to grips with these feelings of grief and loss recently at a Rachel's Vineyard Retreat. It was a first step in having my feelings validated, and I began to deal with my loss in a new light."
The Church has always asserted that the method by which a child is killed, or the age at which the killing occurs, do not make an abortion any less real or wrong. The Church can therefore serve at the forefront in ministry to the countless hearts wounded by abortifacients. Our church continues to be a prophetic guide in a new movement to re-claim inner voices that have been silenced, paralysed and obscured by the demands of a contraceptive and abortive culture.
Priests for Life invites all who have experienced the grief of abortion to share your testimony. Contact janet@priestsforlife.org
To find out more information about attending a Rachel's Vineyard Retreats for healing after abortion, visit www.rachelsvineyard.org
7.03.2004
Victims Unseen
By Anthony Esolen
Imagine a rash of fires, lit by fire chiefs, in certain ghettos of Eastern Europe during the 1930s. A synagogue burns to the ground in Kraków, another in Prague, a Jewish community house in Danzig, the Beth-salem Orphanage in Leipzig, and yet another synagogue in Bratislava. All are destroyed. Imagine that half of the leaders of the governments involved respond by insisting that laws against arson are outdated and oppressive; that the desire to burn things is natural in man and needs a healthy outlet; that our customs regarding pyrophilia are hypocritical; and that one cannot expect fire chiefs always to be putting out fires without wanting to set a few themselves. Imagine that the other leaders notice that the problem seems not to have been arson but hatred of Jews. Imagine that while these groups fight it out—the one surely in the grip of dementia, the other correct but still half-blind and impotent—the Jews still have no synagogues, no orphanages, and no community houses, nor is it proposed that they get any. In fact, any real thought about who the Jews are, what they give, and what they need is uncomfortably set aside, if it ever arises at all.
That is an analogy for what has happened in our Church, with this one exception: While there’s no natural connection between arson and the very being of a Jewish worshiper, there is a connection—a terrible one—between the seduction of boys and the manhood that was ruined or vitiated in them.To burn a man’s house is to sin against his property, perhaps his posterity. To burn his house out of hatred is to sin against his person. But to seduce a boy, to corrupt his manhood while it is yet in the bud, is to sin against his nature, his essential created being.
We have ignored the boys. And we ignored them, as we have been ignoring them, these many years. Governments and foundations shovel money into programs to teach math and science specifically to girls, but not a penny, not for any subject, devoted specifically to boys. Why is that? Nowadays in some places a boy growing up with a father is as rare as an orphan used to be. These boys need more than ever the male discipline of sports—so what do we do about it? We cut their rosters. Sometimes, against common sense, against plain decency and charity, we force the boys to play on the same teams with girls, even when there are girls’ teams available. Why that happy cruelty? We know that these same boys—often fatherless—are less likely to go to church than are their sisters. That’s all right by us; we set up committees to study women’s participation in the Church. We stock up on female lectors and female directors of religious education. We showcase our altar girls. Why?
Young men are strong enough and aggressive enough to commit—but also vulnerable enough to suffer—the bulk of violent crime in our country. Everyone knows the former; does anyone care to consider the latter? One in ten black men aged 20 to 30 is currently in prison. Do we sponsor any initiatives to reach the boys before they fall into that abyss? Boys are now far outnumbered by girls in college. Exactly how this state of affairs is to be a boon to the civilization, the country, the family, and the Church, no one has bothered to examine. I think it heralds the onset of catastrophe. But is there a single program anywhere designed to address the issue? Boys find school detestable—I found it so, and I have met few young men, even those I teach in college, and most especially the brightest, who say that they loved high school, and few young women who say they hated it. Does anyone care?
Catholic conservatives—I am tempted to place that word in scare quotes—have noticed that nearly all the victims in the scandals were teenage boys. Bully for them; it was hard not to notice it. But that’s where the noticing stopped. I fear I know why. To press the issue is to venture into a minefield, for we have failed the boys and would prefer not to be reminded of it. How else to explain the delicate attempts by many to soften the perception of the crime?
It’s true that conservatives have called on us to recommit ourselves to the Church’s teachings on homosexuality, and justly so. But their focus has been entirely on the priest, not at all on the boy. For when they discussed the scandals they noted carefully that the cases of pedophilia were rare; what we were dealing with, they said, was ephebophilia, the seduction (not rape, sometimes not even statutory rape) of teenage boys. True enough. But what then about those teenage boys? Ephebophilia may not be rape, but it is, I think, something more insidious, and possibly more destructive. To understand the sins of these priests, we need to understand what was peculiarly sinful about their seduction of the boys.
It is a rotten time to be a boy. Loveless feminists can carp all they want, but being a boy has never been easy, and now we seem bent on making it as arduous and as grim as possible. The boy knows that he will not have achieved manhood by reaching a certain age or by the maturation of his reproductive system. Manhood, though we find it convenient to forget the fact, must be won and won again. Boys cannot forget it, and so they naturally form gangs, blood brotherhoods, teams: If you’re a member, you have won approval—you’re a real boy, a real man. But your membership is contingent upon your holding up your end of the deal. You must be brave; you must be loyal.
There is nothing inherently wrong with such brotherhoods. Saner societies than ours used to foster and direct them: Boy Scouts, Junior Achievement, ROTC. They, or something like them, are necessary for the boy’s development. If the boy is rejected by the other boys, he needs a man to take their place, to be his mentor, to bolster him in his uncertain manhood, to assure him that his arms are growing stronger, to holler and rail if need be as he straps on the helmet or grabs the next knot in the rope, and to nod (a laconic nod of approval more powerful to that boy than any mother’s smile can be) when he stands in victory.
So let us look at our ephebophile and his prey. Pardon me as I condense several accounts of crimes we have read about to present the deed in its essence. Between the man and the boy in question, there’s a curious affinity. Father Mike, let us call him, was, as a boy, intelligent but shy, not terribly athletic but admiring of athletes. He was the boy who looked out the window, in resentment yet with aching attraction, at the other boys playing king-of-the-hill in the yard next door. He cannot be like them, he thinks, but he wants to be like them. They may barrel into each other with innocent rivalry or boyish affection, but he has never felt that crush of bodies, or the few times he has felt it, it meant too much to him because it was too rare. He is skinny or pudgy or short or nearsighted or asthmatic or coddled by a hypochondriacal mother or ignored by his father. He wears his body awkwardly, wishing he looked like one of the other boys. He is not privy to what they whisper and snort about behind the shed or up the woods. He suspects the ribaldry he doesn’t know. The grosser he supposes it to be, the more he despises it, and the more he wishes he were part of it.
This lad I’m describing was not born so. The thoughtlessness and cruelty of others have made him so. He will say he has always felt an attraction for members of his sex. He isn’t lying. He has. But he’s mistaken about it nonetheless: His longing for male comradeship is something he shares with every man who has ever lived. His feelings, in themselves, show how David admired Jonathan, how Oliver wished to die beside Roland, how Gilgamesh wept inconsolably beside the body of Enkidu the strong. The problem is that when he reaches puberty, the longings natural to every boy and man may become—by being unmet, by having been a source of pain—unnaturally sexualized. If so, he becomes a homosexual man: that is, a man who still wants to be one of the boys, even as he resents boys who are comfortable and easy with their masculinity.
He is drawn to those like him. He sees a boy, possibly better-looking than he was or more athletic, but still lonely, unsure of himself, needing the approval of a man. Perhaps the boy’s father is far away; perhaps that distance is the doing of a selfish mother. Perhaps the father is all too near and is cruel and angry. It may be that the boy is not exactly rejected by his peers, but not exactly welcomed, either. Enter the older man, the apparently (but only apparently) confident priest. At this crisis of the boy’s life the priest comes on the scene as the male friend, the mentor, the older comrade. He takes the boy to the basketball game—something the boy wishes his father had done. He slaps him on the back with what seems like nonchalance. He praises him for his cleverness, asks him if he’s all right with the girls, laughs when the boy tells of some trouble he got into at school, and wisely advises him how to get out of it again.
Soon Father Mike—Father Mike, not Reverend but Father—has taken the boy into his own confidence, too. He encourages him to be comfortable with, actually a trifle loose with, his body and his sexual feelings. He may ply him with a few of the secrets of pornography. Now the boy—remember, this is a lonely sort of boy looking from the outside into the mysteries of manhood—feels that he’s finally being taken seriously, that he’s finally being considered a man by another man. At the same time, the pathetic Father enjoys what for him is the rare pleasure of being admired as a man by anyone at all. At last he’s the lead boy on the field, the captain of his team in Capture the Flag.
Inevitably it comes round to undressing. I assert that there is not one woman alive who can really understand this, not one. I also assert that there is not one man alive who does not immediately understand this, as painful as it may be to admit. The nakedness of both is enjoyable. For the change from boy’s body to man’s body is stark and embarrassingly conspicuous. The boy is intrigued by his own body (all boys are) and is excited to be in the presence, naked, of one of his own kind who will accept him for what he is and not laugh at him. Boys go skinny-dipping even before puberty—they always have. Were it not for the keyed-up emotions and the subtle sexual undermining of the mentor—the Father—this too could be healthy. Peter and his comrades did not wear wetsuits when they fished! There is a great ease and pleasure in such frankness. So the two of them are in the shower, let us say, after a workout in the gym; the older man diseased and unscrupulous but deeply lonely, the boy excited and pleased, finally, so he thinks, having arrived at the port of his manhood.
Then the Father touches him—there—and all is ruined, corrupted, soiled forever.
I know there are variations on this account. Sometimes the priest has gathered around himself a kind of sexual gang, a brotherhood of carnality. Pornography can work wonders for establishing such a thing. Sometimes the boy struggles to pretend that he was not violated, that he wished for the encounter after all. Sometimes the priest verges upon the ghoulish; sometimes he even believes, and teaches, that there is a sacramentality in this abuse of the body. Sometimes he even says that it is a manly thing to do.
Whatever the gross details may be, it is important to consider that touch. The terrible thing is that the boy, confused, is excited; he cannot believe what is happening and is too surprised to know immediately what to do. This is the man he has, so to speak, fallen in love with—fallen in admiration of, as a boy will admire a man, a hero, his own father. He feels at once ashamed and prized; he does not pull away. His body betrays him. Never will he be able to say, as the raped woman can say (and please, I am not making light of that horrible crime; it is a different sort of crime), “I was overcome.” No, he was willing, certainly not wholly unwilling, and that is the ugly horror of it. Never will he be able to say, “I felt no pleasure in it.” Till the day he dies the nerves of his own body will testify against him. He is not raped. Would that he were; he is seduced, made to cooperate in the perversion of his own manhood. At the most vulnerable time of his life, as he tries to steer that most perilous strait, he is corrupted not only in his body but in his being, in his manhood, by the very “man,” the Father, who seemed to promise to him safe passage. Does he wish he had been raped? Talk to some, and they will say they wish they had been strangled.
Why have the commentators not seen this? Grown men speaking about their experiences have collapsed into tears on national television. Are we to believe they would do so had they been seduced by nuns? Had any one of those men been so seduced, it would, we hope, be a source of shame to him, as any sin ought to be. More probably he would himself ensure that tales about the shameful sister never died down.
Why have we not seen it? Because all of us, conservative and leftist alike, have too much invested in feminism. Boys with rotten lives may be the most obvious and poignant reminders of the misery spread by our latest version of the egalitarian heresy. But men are too busy pushing their daughters into ice hockey, and women are too busy reading Redbook on the subway home from the bank. Besides, boys are sloppy, unruly clods, no? So says the popular culture. And they can take care of themselves, can’t they?
Jesus would not have thought so. I have read, and I accept as valid, the argument for the all-male priesthood that notes that Jesus chose only men to be His apostles. But could He not have had an additional reason for it, a very human reason? Jesus often chose to be alone: We see him retreat into the wilderness, to the mountains, to a boat offshore. He also seemed to enjoy the occasional crowd and celebration, and in fact He mentions that His detractors jeer at Him for His eating and drinking. We see Him do what no self-respecting rabbi of his day would do; that is, talk alone with women, teach them, whether the good Mary of Bethany or the not-so-good-yet Samaritan woman at the well. But He chose only men for His apostles. He traveled with them, He confided in them, He huddled against the cold with them, He spoke to them about His coming agony. They were more than His friends: They were His brothers. Sometimes, in His humanity, Jesus wished to be alone with other men.
And in their company we see Jesus as a man among men. In one of my favorite passages, the names of the apostles are recounted, and when we come to the brothers James and John, we learn that He called them “Boanerges, which is, The Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17). I love that nickname; it fits the brothers who wanted to sit at either side of Christ when He came into His glory. I love it, too, because it shows us a glimpse of Jesus the Man—for giving nicknames is a thing men do, out of affection, sometimes even, as is the case here, out of an ironical affection. Jesus did the same for Simon Peter. I am struck not only by what He called Simon bar-Jonah, but that He called him anything new at all. Of course, the new name signaled a new birth for Simon, a new being; but on a more human level, it meant that Simon was Jesus’ blood-brother, a man worthy to be given a new name.
No faithful woman should be so childish as to complain of this. We never hear Jesus utter a condemnation of a single woman; while his lashing out against the scribes and Pharisees is unmatched for vehemence. On the other hand, we never see Jesus predicting martyrdom for the women, nor does He share with Mary and Martha His agonies to come. Jesus did not truckle to women; note that while He obeys His mother’s wish at Cana, by His reply He yet asserts authority. Jesus loved women as women and men as men, and treated women as women and men as men.
What we need now are men like St. John Bosco, who won the attention of the homeless boys of Turin by impressing them with boyish tricks and athletics, and who then taught them chastity and temperance and courage and the unalterable truths of the Faith. We are not likely to see such men. If we speak about St. John Bosco, we say that he had a ministry to children. No such thing! His ministry, the peculiar grace he was given to preach the Word of God, was to boys. Now of all times, when fatherhood itself is under siege from no-fault divorce, from feminism, from a sneeringly misandrist educational system, from popular culture, and from our chase of the almighty dollar at the cost of sanity and order at home, in short from the manifold sins of men and women, now of all times we need a St. John Bosco. We need a man to slap a boy’s back and say, “Son, your name is Smoke, because that’s what you’re throwing.” We need it, and barring an extraordinary gift of grace, the need will not be met.
For how can it be met? The boys are invisible, and now that our Church has caved in ever so slightly but ever so noticeably on the issue of homosexuality, it has helped ensure that men with vocations to work with boys will not be able to fulfill them. Did it never occur to our soft-minded leaders that one of the reasons why we cordon off male homosexuality as unnatural is to give boys the breathing room to develop such friendships as Jesus Himself enjoyed? In poisoned air the most salutary meal will smell sour.
And the poison lingers. The original evil was perpetrated by a few of our priests, allowed by some of our bishops, and unwittingly encouraged by all of us Catholics who have found it a bit too comfortable to condone the kissing cousins of androgyny and sexual license. But that evil has not ended with the corrupted youths of the boys who were abused. Because of that abuse, now when ministry to boys is needed most, ministry to boys is all but unthinkable. What man now dare play the part of John Bosco? When in some places you cannot utter the word “mankind” without being scolded, who would even think it worth his time to propose to the bishop a new effort to help boys see what true manliness and true Christianity look like?
But nothing is impossible for God. Therefore with hope in Him—certainly with no hope in the leaders of my Church, or in myself and my fellow Catholics, so blandly indistinguishable are we from the most secular of our countrymen—I wish to issue a challenge. Millions of dollars are being siphoned away from dioceses to settle civil litigation in this scandal. Let some money also go toward righting the wrong, the particular wrong of the abuse of the boys. I propose that for every boy corrupted by a priest, ten boys be educated at some new, Catholic, all-boys school; or for every ten boys abused, one new boys’ school be built to teach 100. Needless to say, these schools would have to be staffed with healthy men, not adult males stuck in the neutral of everlasting puerility, and they would cheerfully violate every tenet of political correctness spit forth by the great Despiser of the Sexes from his ice hole below.
The manhood of the boys was undermined, destroyed. Then build up the manhood of others. The abusers took advantage of the boys’ desire for comradeship. Then meet that desire now by giving others the chance for comradeship that is upright and sane. The psychology of the boys themselves was turned to their sexual corruption. Then use that same psychology to teach boys courage and cleanliness in body and mind. Father engaged in the sickest of incest. Now show others, in the company of men, what a true father and a true man is. So did St. John Bosco. So did Jesus Christ.
What about it, leaders of my Church? Do you yet have any trace of the Sons of Thunder in you? What about it, my fellow Catholics, fellow squishers and squeezers of the sixth commandment? We have our share of repenting to do. Repent by building. Stop ignoring the boys.
Anthony Esolen is professor of English at Providence College and a contributing editor for Touchstone magazine. He has recently translated and edited Dante’s Divine Comedy, in three volumes, for Modern Library (Random House).
Imagine a rash of fires, lit by fire chiefs, in certain ghettos of Eastern Europe during the 1930s. A synagogue burns to the ground in Kraków, another in Prague, a Jewish community house in Danzig, the Beth-salem Orphanage in Leipzig, and yet another synagogue in Bratislava. All are destroyed. Imagine that half of the leaders of the governments involved respond by insisting that laws against arson are outdated and oppressive; that the desire to burn things is natural in man and needs a healthy outlet; that our customs regarding pyrophilia are hypocritical; and that one cannot expect fire chiefs always to be putting out fires without wanting to set a few themselves. Imagine that the other leaders notice that the problem seems not to have been arson but hatred of Jews. Imagine that while these groups fight it out—the one surely in the grip of dementia, the other correct but still half-blind and impotent—the Jews still have no synagogues, no orphanages, and no community houses, nor is it proposed that they get any. In fact, any real thought about who the Jews are, what they give, and what they need is uncomfortably set aside, if it ever arises at all.
That is an analogy for what has happened in our Church, with this one exception: While there’s no natural connection between arson and the very being of a Jewish worshiper, there is a connection—a terrible one—between the seduction of boys and the manhood that was ruined or vitiated in them.To burn a man’s house is to sin against his property, perhaps his posterity. To burn his house out of hatred is to sin against his person. But to seduce a boy, to corrupt his manhood while it is yet in the bud, is to sin against his nature, his essential created being.
We have ignored the boys. And we ignored them, as we have been ignoring them, these many years. Governments and foundations shovel money into programs to teach math and science specifically to girls, but not a penny, not for any subject, devoted specifically to boys. Why is that? Nowadays in some places a boy growing up with a father is as rare as an orphan used to be. These boys need more than ever the male discipline of sports—so what do we do about it? We cut their rosters. Sometimes, against common sense, against plain decency and charity, we force the boys to play on the same teams with girls, even when there are girls’ teams available. Why that happy cruelty? We know that these same boys—often fatherless—are less likely to go to church than are their sisters. That’s all right by us; we set up committees to study women’s participation in the Church. We stock up on female lectors and female directors of religious education. We showcase our altar girls. Why?
Young men are strong enough and aggressive enough to commit—but also vulnerable enough to suffer—the bulk of violent crime in our country. Everyone knows the former; does anyone care to consider the latter? One in ten black men aged 20 to 30 is currently in prison. Do we sponsor any initiatives to reach the boys before they fall into that abyss? Boys are now far outnumbered by girls in college. Exactly how this state of affairs is to be a boon to the civilization, the country, the family, and the Church, no one has bothered to examine. I think it heralds the onset of catastrophe. But is there a single program anywhere designed to address the issue? Boys find school detestable—I found it so, and I have met few young men, even those I teach in college, and most especially the brightest, who say that they loved high school, and few young women who say they hated it. Does anyone care?
Catholic conservatives—I am tempted to place that word in scare quotes—have noticed that nearly all the victims in the scandals were teenage boys. Bully for them; it was hard not to notice it. But that’s where the noticing stopped. I fear I know why. To press the issue is to venture into a minefield, for we have failed the boys and would prefer not to be reminded of it. How else to explain the delicate attempts by many to soften the perception of the crime?
It’s true that conservatives have called on us to recommit ourselves to the Church’s teachings on homosexuality, and justly so. But their focus has been entirely on the priest, not at all on the boy. For when they discussed the scandals they noted carefully that the cases of pedophilia were rare; what we were dealing with, they said, was ephebophilia, the seduction (not rape, sometimes not even statutory rape) of teenage boys. True enough. But what then about those teenage boys? Ephebophilia may not be rape, but it is, I think, something more insidious, and possibly more destructive. To understand the sins of these priests, we need to understand what was peculiarly sinful about their seduction of the boys.
It is a rotten time to be a boy. Loveless feminists can carp all they want, but being a boy has never been easy, and now we seem bent on making it as arduous and as grim as possible. The boy knows that he will not have achieved manhood by reaching a certain age or by the maturation of his reproductive system. Manhood, though we find it convenient to forget the fact, must be won and won again. Boys cannot forget it, and so they naturally form gangs, blood brotherhoods, teams: If you’re a member, you have won approval—you’re a real boy, a real man. But your membership is contingent upon your holding up your end of the deal. You must be brave; you must be loyal.
There is nothing inherently wrong with such brotherhoods. Saner societies than ours used to foster and direct them: Boy Scouts, Junior Achievement, ROTC. They, or something like them, are necessary for the boy’s development. If the boy is rejected by the other boys, he needs a man to take their place, to be his mentor, to bolster him in his uncertain manhood, to assure him that his arms are growing stronger, to holler and rail if need be as he straps on the helmet or grabs the next knot in the rope, and to nod (a laconic nod of approval more powerful to that boy than any mother’s smile can be) when he stands in victory.
So let us look at our ephebophile and his prey. Pardon me as I condense several accounts of crimes we have read about to present the deed in its essence. Between the man and the boy in question, there’s a curious affinity. Father Mike, let us call him, was, as a boy, intelligent but shy, not terribly athletic but admiring of athletes. He was the boy who looked out the window, in resentment yet with aching attraction, at the other boys playing king-of-the-hill in the yard next door. He cannot be like them, he thinks, but he wants to be like them. They may barrel into each other with innocent rivalry or boyish affection, but he has never felt that crush of bodies, or the few times he has felt it, it meant too much to him because it was too rare. He is skinny or pudgy or short or nearsighted or asthmatic or coddled by a hypochondriacal mother or ignored by his father. He wears his body awkwardly, wishing he looked like one of the other boys. He is not privy to what they whisper and snort about behind the shed or up the woods. He suspects the ribaldry he doesn’t know. The grosser he supposes it to be, the more he despises it, and the more he wishes he were part of it.
This lad I’m describing was not born so. The thoughtlessness and cruelty of others have made him so. He will say he has always felt an attraction for members of his sex. He isn’t lying. He has. But he’s mistaken about it nonetheless: His longing for male comradeship is something he shares with every man who has ever lived. His feelings, in themselves, show how David admired Jonathan, how Oliver wished to die beside Roland, how Gilgamesh wept inconsolably beside the body of Enkidu the strong. The problem is that when he reaches puberty, the longings natural to every boy and man may become—by being unmet, by having been a source of pain—unnaturally sexualized. If so, he becomes a homosexual man: that is, a man who still wants to be one of the boys, even as he resents boys who are comfortable and easy with their masculinity.
He is drawn to those like him. He sees a boy, possibly better-looking than he was or more athletic, but still lonely, unsure of himself, needing the approval of a man. Perhaps the boy’s father is far away; perhaps that distance is the doing of a selfish mother. Perhaps the father is all too near and is cruel and angry. It may be that the boy is not exactly rejected by his peers, but not exactly welcomed, either. Enter the older man, the apparently (but only apparently) confident priest. At this crisis of the boy’s life the priest comes on the scene as the male friend, the mentor, the older comrade. He takes the boy to the basketball game—something the boy wishes his father had done. He slaps him on the back with what seems like nonchalance. He praises him for his cleverness, asks him if he’s all right with the girls, laughs when the boy tells of some trouble he got into at school, and wisely advises him how to get out of it again.
Soon Father Mike—Father Mike, not Reverend but Father—has taken the boy into his own confidence, too. He encourages him to be comfortable with, actually a trifle loose with, his body and his sexual feelings. He may ply him with a few of the secrets of pornography. Now the boy—remember, this is a lonely sort of boy looking from the outside into the mysteries of manhood—feels that he’s finally being taken seriously, that he’s finally being considered a man by another man. At the same time, the pathetic Father enjoys what for him is the rare pleasure of being admired as a man by anyone at all. At last he’s the lead boy on the field, the captain of his team in Capture the Flag.
Inevitably it comes round to undressing. I assert that there is not one woman alive who can really understand this, not one. I also assert that there is not one man alive who does not immediately understand this, as painful as it may be to admit. The nakedness of both is enjoyable. For the change from boy’s body to man’s body is stark and embarrassingly conspicuous. The boy is intrigued by his own body (all boys are) and is excited to be in the presence, naked, of one of his own kind who will accept him for what he is and not laugh at him. Boys go skinny-dipping even before puberty—they always have. Were it not for the keyed-up emotions and the subtle sexual undermining of the mentor—the Father—this too could be healthy. Peter and his comrades did not wear wetsuits when they fished! There is a great ease and pleasure in such frankness. So the two of them are in the shower, let us say, after a workout in the gym; the older man diseased and unscrupulous but deeply lonely, the boy excited and pleased, finally, so he thinks, having arrived at the port of his manhood.
Then the Father touches him—there—and all is ruined, corrupted, soiled forever.
I know there are variations on this account. Sometimes the priest has gathered around himself a kind of sexual gang, a brotherhood of carnality. Pornography can work wonders for establishing such a thing. Sometimes the boy struggles to pretend that he was not violated, that he wished for the encounter after all. Sometimes the priest verges upon the ghoulish; sometimes he even believes, and teaches, that there is a sacramentality in this abuse of the body. Sometimes he even says that it is a manly thing to do.
Whatever the gross details may be, it is important to consider that touch. The terrible thing is that the boy, confused, is excited; he cannot believe what is happening and is too surprised to know immediately what to do. This is the man he has, so to speak, fallen in love with—fallen in admiration of, as a boy will admire a man, a hero, his own father. He feels at once ashamed and prized; he does not pull away. His body betrays him. Never will he be able to say, as the raped woman can say (and please, I am not making light of that horrible crime; it is a different sort of crime), “I was overcome.” No, he was willing, certainly not wholly unwilling, and that is the ugly horror of it. Never will he be able to say, “I felt no pleasure in it.” Till the day he dies the nerves of his own body will testify against him. He is not raped. Would that he were; he is seduced, made to cooperate in the perversion of his own manhood. At the most vulnerable time of his life, as he tries to steer that most perilous strait, he is corrupted not only in his body but in his being, in his manhood, by the very “man,” the Father, who seemed to promise to him safe passage. Does he wish he had been raped? Talk to some, and they will say they wish they had been strangled.
Why have the commentators not seen this? Grown men speaking about their experiences have collapsed into tears on national television. Are we to believe they would do so had they been seduced by nuns? Had any one of those men been so seduced, it would, we hope, be a source of shame to him, as any sin ought to be. More probably he would himself ensure that tales about the shameful sister never died down.
Why have we not seen it? Because all of us, conservative and leftist alike, have too much invested in feminism. Boys with rotten lives may be the most obvious and poignant reminders of the misery spread by our latest version of the egalitarian heresy. But men are too busy pushing their daughters into ice hockey, and women are too busy reading Redbook on the subway home from the bank. Besides, boys are sloppy, unruly clods, no? So says the popular culture. And they can take care of themselves, can’t they?
Jesus would not have thought so. I have read, and I accept as valid, the argument for the all-male priesthood that notes that Jesus chose only men to be His apostles. But could He not have had an additional reason for it, a very human reason? Jesus often chose to be alone: We see him retreat into the wilderness, to the mountains, to a boat offshore. He also seemed to enjoy the occasional crowd and celebration, and in fact He mentions that His detractors jeer at Him for His eating and drinking. We see Him do what no self-respecting rabbi of his day would do; that is, talk alone with women, teach them, whether the good Mary of Bethany or the not-so-good-yet Samaritan woman at the well. But He chose only men for His apostles. He traveled with them, He confided in them, He huddled against the cold with them, He spoke to them about His coming agony. They were more than His friends: They were His brothers. Sometimes, in His humanity, Jesus wished to be alone with other men.
And in their company we see Jesus as a man among men. In one of my favorite passages, the names of the apostles are recounted, and when we come to the brothers James and John, we learn that He called them “Boanerges, which is, The Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17). I love that nickname; it fits the brothers who wanted to sit at either side of Christ when He came into His glory. I love it, too, because it shows us a glimpse of Jesus the Man—for giving nicknames is a thing men do, out of affection, sometimes even, as is the case here, out of an ironical affection. Jesus did the same for Simon Peter. I am struck not only by what He called Simon bar-Jonah, but that He called him anything new at all. Of course, the new name signaled a new birth for Simon, a new being; but on a more human level, it meant that Simon was Jesus’ blood-brother, a man worthy to be given a new name.
No faithful woman should be so childish as to complain of this. We never hear Jesus utter a condemnation of a single woman; while his lashing out against the scribes and Pharisees is unmatched for vehemence. On the other hand, we never see Jesus predicting martyrdom for the women, nor does He share with Mary and Martha His agonies to come. Jesus did not truckle to women; note that while He obeys His mother’s wish at Cana, by His reply He yet asserts authority. Jesus loved women as women and men as men, and treated women as women and men as men.
What we need now are men like St. John Bosco, who won the attention of the homeless boys of Turin by impressing them with boyish tricks and athletics, and who then taught them chastity and temperance and courage and the unalterable truths of the Faith. We are not likely to see such men. If we speak about St. John Bosco, we say that he had a ministry to children. No such thing! His ministry, the peculiar grace he was given to preach the Word of God, was to boys. Now of all times, when fatherhood itself is under siege from no-fault divorce, from feminism, from a sneeringly misandrist educational system, from popular culture, and from our chase of the almighty dollar at the cost of sanity and order at home, in short from the manifold sins of men and women, now of all times we need a St. John Bosco. We need a man to slap a boy’s back and say, “Son, your name is Smoke, because that’s what you’re throwing.” We need it, and barring an extraordinary gift of grace, the need will not be met.
For how can it be met? The boys are invisible, and now that our Church has caved in ever so slightly but ever so noticeably on the issue of homosexuality, it has helped ensure that men with vocations to work with boys will not be able to fulfill them. Did it never occur to our soft-minded leaders that one of the reasons why we cordon off male homosexuality as unnatural is to give boys the breathing room to develop such friendships as Jesus Himself enjoyed? In poisoned air the most salutary meal will smell sour.
And the poison lingers. The original evil was perpetrated by a few of our priests, allowed by some of our bishops, and unwittingly encouraged by all of us Catholics who have found it a bit too comfortable to condone the kissing cousins of androgyny and sexual license. But that evil has not ended with the corrupted youths of the boys who were abused. Because of that abuse, now when ministry to boys is needed most, ministry to boys is all but unthinkable. What man now dare play the part of John Bosco? When in some places you cannot utter the word “mankind” without being scolded, who would even think it worth his time to propose to the bishop a new effort to help boys see what true manliness and true Christianity look like?
But nothing is impossible for God. Therefore with hope in Him—certainly with no hope in the leaders of my Church, or in myself and my fellow Catholics, so blandly indistinguishable are we from the most secular of our countrymen—I wish to issue a challenge. Millions of dollars are being siphoned away from dioceses to settle civil litigation in this scandal. Let some money also go toward righting the wrong, the particular wrong of the abuse of the boys. I propose that for every boy corrupted by a priest, ten boys be educated at some new, Catholic, all-boys school; or for every ten boys abused, one new boys’ school be built to teach 100. Needless to say, these schools would have to be staffed with healthy men, not adult males stuck in the neutral of everlasting puerility, and they would cheerfully violate every tenet of political correctness spit forth by the great Despiser of the Sexes from his ice hole below.
The manhood of the boys was undermined, destroyed. Then build up the manhood of others. The abusers took advantage of the boys’ desire for comradeship. Then meet that desire now by giving others the chance for comradeship that is upright and sane. The psychology of the boys themselves was turned to their sexual corruption. Then use that same psychology to teach boys courage and cleanliness in body and mind. Father engaged in the sickest of incest. Now show others, in the company of men, what a true father and a true man is. So did St. John Bosco. So did Jesus Christ.
What about it, leaders of my Church? Do you yet have any trace of the Sons of Thunder in you? What about it, my fellow Catholics, fellow squishers and squeezers of the sixth commandment? We have our share of repenting to do. Repent by building. Stop ignoring the boys.
Anthony Esolen is professor of English at Providence College and a contributing editor for Touchstone magazine. He has recently translated and edited Dante’s Divine Comedy, in three volumes, for Modern Library (Random House).
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