The Silence We Keep: A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal (7 page)

If Augustine’s thoughts on sex, celibacy, and the inferior nature of woman sound familiar, that’s because they’re all around us. To this day, the Catholic Church teaches and preaches that any sexual pleasure for its own sake is sinful and to be suppressed. Celibacy is still promoted, even in marriage, as the only way to avoid the seductive evils of pleasure-loving women and pleasure-giving sex. But what is as true today (as it was in the Middle Ages) is that even when there are no women tempters in the priesthood or in the monasteries, these “men of God” turn their sexual desires on one another, or elsewhere. Even in the absence of evil and lustful women, monks become little more than their own sources of sexual temptation, and given their sexually obsessive thinking, that comes as no surprise.

According to Elizabeth Abbott, so many monks in the Middle Ages resorted to molesting novices that it was said, “With wine and boys around, the monks have no need of the Devil to tempt them.”
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She adds that female donkeys were other favorites of monkish lust. In the sexually obsessed minds of the monks, animals were also seen as nothing more than objects for sexual gratification. As we see over and over again, it’s what originates in the mind that makes us unclean. It’s our sinful inability to see in one another (including animals) the presence of God. The cause of sexual abuse we see today is the human failure to think and see with the mind of Christ. We have no idea how to love one another, much less our enemies, animals, and the earth. We no longer know how to look at one another and see the face of God.

Five hundred years after the death of Augustine we can see the results of his thinking in nearly every Church Father after him. The tenth century in the Catholic Church is regarded by historians as the saeculum obscurum, the dark century, and the beginning of some of the darkest time Catholicism has ever known. Dark because it appears as though the popes, monks, priests, and nuns of the Catholic Church could hardly be more decadent than they were then, ruled as they were far more by the devil within than by the God of Jesus Christ. Medieval Catholic morality was just as obsessed with sex as was its priesthood. The whole medieval world in the West became possessed by daily personal confession and abusive physical penance, paying particular attention to sexual sins that ruled life both in and out of the monasteries. After more than five hundred years of soulful obsession with the intrinsic evil of sexual pleasure, the medieval church explodes with sexual immorality and corruption of every kind, much of which was centered in the monasteries and abbeys.

In the early Middle Ages, monasteries became the sole centers of learning, reading, and writing. Monks and nuns held a monopoly on education, giving them the exclusive opportunity to impose their abusive beliefs and practices. Double monasteries—monks’ and nuns’ residences connected by tunnels—were common at the time.

In England, more than forty monasteries housing men and women together could be found between 1130 and 1165. In Germany, there was hardly a single house of monks without a nearby female house linked to it informally by exchanges of service and spiritual friendship.
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Apparently they shared a lot more than spiritual friendship. Double monasteries were eventually outlawed by the church because of the decadence and crimes that flourished there. Pope Martin V (1417—1431) shut down and prohibited double monasteries because they were too expensive and morally dangerous. As a result of the scandalous example of popes, monks, priests, and nuns, the whole medieval world exploded with sexual activity. So commonplace was sex in European monasteries that it became recognized as a way of life for monastic communities of nuns and priests, rather than a lapse of judgment or isolated incidents.

In Italy, for example, monks openly recognized and housed their concubines in certain northern cities, and in France, the monks of most abbeys were married. Medieval monastic life thrived on a culture of sexual permissiveness and privilege where homosexuality and the abuse of children were rampant, and in some situations probably believed to be divine, given the evil status of woman and the divine status of man. We will never know the true extent of the sins of these holy fathers, living as
they did in the midst of obscene luxury, rampant and deviant sexuality, and every other vice known to mankind, including theft, forgery, rape, slavery, even murder. What we do know clearly, though, is that criminal thinking became commonplace in the priesthood in the early Middle Ages.

The institutional hypocrisy that began with Catholicism in the fourth century took full root in the Middle Ages with the total corruption of priesthood and papacy. This is the era of what historians call the bad popes, the errant popes, and the anti-popes. This is
centuries
of papal corruption, papal forgeries, papal battles and murders, and papal trials. And though celibacy was increasingly becoming law in the priesthood, the promiscuous sexual lifestyle of clerics persisted even at the highest levels of the Catholic Church, with no desire to reform. That’s how powerful corruption is in the Catholic priesthood; it has no desire to change. And being
in persona Christi
, it has no need to change.

Among the many “bad popes” from which to choose, historians single out John XII (955-964) as the one guilty of the most grotesque debaucheries. E. R. Chamberlain, the author of
The Bad Popes
, writes that “John seems to have been urged toward a course of deliberate sacrilege that went far beyond the casual enjoyment of sensual pleasures. It was as though the dark element in his nature goaded him on to test the utmost extent of his power.”
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Chamberlain explained that John turned the Lateran Cathedral into a brothel, even stealing the offerings of the people for his personal use. He and his associates had a reputation for sexually assaulting women in the Basilica of Saint Peter, and he freely gave away church land and art treasures to his many mistresses. Not only was his sexual appetite insatiable and out of control, but so, too, was an inordinate fondness of gambling and torturing those who accused him of anything. “One had his tongue torn out, his nose and fingers cut off; another was
scourged; the hand of a third was hacked off”
⁴
—all in the name of God and the Catholic Church. In the end, Pope John XII died in the sight of God just the way he lived, in the bed of a married woman.

While one would most certainly expect vigorous papal and monastic reform to follow as a result of such deplorable degeneracy, no such spiritual movement takes place within the priesthood or the papacy. And even though by the late Middle Ages the papacy loses all of its religious and moral credibility and opposition to the Vatican increased tremendously, Rome continued to block any major reform. Sound familiar? Even the Renaissance resulted in no rebirth of the Catholic Church. When faced with its own soulful decadence, the papacy continued to demonstrate then, as it appears to be doing now, no desire or inclination to reform itself, even to admit an error. The divinely privileged don’t do that, they believe, nor should they have to.

On the contrary, the papacy did in the Middle Ages what it appears to be doing today: reinforcing the charade of perfect celibacy for priests, nuns, and all Christians; reinforcing blind obedience to the church and its priesthood; and continuing crusades to suppress, silence, and eliminate dissent. In talking with priests who recently returned from Rome (November 2002), a sister wrote about current Vatican efforts to whitewash the sex scandals:

The situation over there is terrifying. The men in the seminaries are now walking around in their floor-length cassocks, hands folded in prayer, services in Latin, looking very pale and rigid. Rome is flying right back to pre–Vatican II and with it all the repression and mental illness that goes with this attitude. Very scary.

Nothing essential or substantial appears to have changed in the priesthood of the Catholic Church over the past 1,500 years. We are stuck in the dark thinking of the Middle Ages with no desire to think any other way because the Catholic Church can’t be wrong. In the minds of the Church Fathers, that’s impossible.

Until the tenth century, celibacy, though rarely practiced, was primarily a monastic rule. A married clergy continued to flourish regardless of papal pressures to impose celibacy for all priests. But in 1073, Pope Gregory VII proclaimed celibacy for all Christians and a total priesthood of celibate men. Rome required of all clergy the renunciation of marriage and unconditional obedience to the pope. Even married couples were required to abstain from sex on Sundays and feast days, as well as on Fridays in Advent and Lent. I remember that rule. While celibacy became mandatory for all in religious life, the pope also decreed it necessary for the salvation of everyone else, married or not. The enforcement of celibacy turned up the volume on the need for blind obedience, both of which grew in importance, hand in hand.

By the thirteenth century, the thousand-year battle to enforce celibacy on the clergy finally ended in victory and became church law. In practice, nothing changed that much. The universal and compulsory law of celibacy was no more observed then than it is now. Neither priest nor people ever embraced the teaching as true, much less a law of God. What did change was the power of the papacy. While no one in the first thousand years of the church ever regarded the voice of the pope as infallible—obviously with good reason—the movement toward the absolute power of papacy proceeded by hook and by crook. Even in the ninth century, Nicholas I excommunicated anyone who disobeyed papal decisions regarding doctrine and practice. At the
dawn of its darkest and most decadent age, the Catholic Church moved to centralize all power even in its most errant of popes. It was a kiss of death on the Holy Spirit who speaks in and through the people. Blind obedience became an essential part of the priesthood and the church in the Middle Ages. We Catholics have been blindly obedient for a very long time.

Obedience to God became obedience to the Catholic Church, which in turn became obedience to the pope. The pope, in effect, becomes God on earth, the infallible voice of God to be followed not only by all Catholics, but by everyone in the world. Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274), as influential as Augustine in Catholic thinking (including his disgust of women), is the first to proclaim unequivocally that obedience to the pope is absolutely necessary for the salvation of humanity. Along with the universal goal of perfect celibacy in the Catholic Church grew the universal goal of perfect obedience to the Catholic Church. While Jesus invited into his community all non-Jews, not so Catholicism, which demands unconditional acceptance of its teachings, always identified as absolute truth, divine revelation. And contrary to the sacred traditions of equality and inclusiveness in the early church, the hallmarks of the church in the Middle Ages were its Crusades and Inquisitions.

The Inquisition became an essential defining characteristic of Roman Catholicism, so much so that it was believed to be approved by Christ. And lest we think that this is something we’ve outgrown, think again. While the Vatican may be less physically violent with those who question its divine authority and teachings, the Catholic Church still deals in an equally despicable way with any criticism and dissent, especially within its priesthood and sisterhood. There is today a litany of those who’ve been “silenced” by the Vatican, especially those for whom the voice of God speaks a truth contrary to that proclaimed by
the Catholic Church as infallible. Teilhard de Chardin was silenced for expressing his beliefs in
The Divine Milieu
, and Hans Kung has been censured for his writings on the Catholic Church. Within the sisterhood, Benedictine nun Joan Chittister has been challenged by Vatican attempts to stop her from speaking out in favor of women’s ordination. Church authorities alone define all matters of faith and morals, and those who refuse to obey their “infallible” voices must be silenced. Who is that God? The Inquisition may have changed its murderous methods, but there remains an unbroken tradition in Roman Catholicism of suppressing criticism and dissent, especially that of priests, nuns, and all believers compelled to follow a divine voice different from that of the Catholic Church.