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Lurking Behind the Altar By Perry Brass
Wow, man, that is a shocker! The Mother Church had to do two things to get itself into this mud hole. First, it had to demonize sex so much that anything outside of the Missionary Position favored by the late Mother Theresa and her Sisters in Saris, is a total no-no. In other words, dears, the Papal See had to turn sex into a sin that made murder look good, therefore making the worst sin of them all, abortion, become, what else? Murder-Through-Sex! The Church did this, of course, as part of its constant battle to allay the fears of the working classes, who might find any form of alternative sexuality a release from their constant drudgery and baby-making. Keep the girls barefoot-and-pregnant and the boys working fourteen hours a day to support big families . . . and you got something going. In the mid-1970s, the New York Times in responding to the Vatican's unyielding position on any form of birth control outside of spit and a bassinet, declared, in an editorial: "There are two forms of totalitarianism in the world today, the Soviet Union and the Catholic Church." The Church has outlived the Soviets, but it still won't give an inch. Of course, there has always been a reason for this: the Church wants to-in fact must-remain the only source of "magic," of "faith and unexplainability" in the lives of the "faithful." Since sex is still fairly magical and darn unexplainable, the Church has always wanted to keep it as far under wraps as possible.
The trade off is that the Catholic clergy often do a lot of good, despite all that ruler-snapping over the knuckles of kiddies caught touching themselves "down there." So there are people who want to give themselves over to goodness, kindness, love, and the B.V.M. And the Church has certainly attracted enough of them. All humans are not all rapacious Joe Kennedys and Donald Trumps. Thank God. But we do all have Joe and Donald's desire to "spill our seed" in one form or another. What the Church has done, either overtly willingly or covertly willingly, is to make it so that a large number of priests has no recourse except to spill seed in, about, or with young, unsuspecting boys. Here we come into a "the chicken or the egg" situation: do "celibate" priests become pedophiles out of desperation, or does the priesthood attract secret pedophiles anyway? Sometimes it seems that we are talking either "the chicken or the chicken," since the situation ends up the same. In the early seventies, when I was working at the Gay Men's Health Project Clinic in Greenwich Village, the first health clinic for gay men on the East Coast that I had helped found, a Catholic priest came to us to be tested for STDs. He was short, slightly chubby, middle-aged, and very, very nervous. He was afraid that he "had something," and he kept repeating over and over, "God forbid anyone should find out about this!" I was taking his blood-I had learned how to draw blood for syphilis testing-and he kept repeating it, while looking right at me. Finally, I said to him: "God forbid I ever become as scared of myself as you are." Now, this might have been a lapse in taste on my part, but frankly I was not used to the routine hiding (and hypocrisy) of the Church, or any religious "fundamentalism" for that matter. (We had antsy orthodox Jews with yarmulkes who came in; Moslems who would not give us their names; devoutly Christian husbands, etc. Since we were the only place in the city to do cheap, available smears for anal gonorrhea, we became a magnet for many, many men.) But my "issue," as we say now, is that he was "mortally" afraid of anyone knowing that, basically - sexually - he was the same type of guy I was. For this you can use the term "gay," "same-sex-loving," or any other moniker you want. We're now back at the same situation, in the year 2002: that "God forbid" people should find out that priests are having sex; and, God forbid, they've been doing just that. So this would lead any sane, intelligent person to ask: why doesn't the Church just allow priests to come out? The Catholic Church has finally agreed after 400 years that Galileo was right, so why can't they allow their priests, on this round earth, to come out? Now, they don't have to come out to the whole world, but why can't the Roman Catholic Church allow priests to have discreet, fulfilling relationships with other adult men; instead of harmful, furtive sex with kids? And why can't priests pair up in some "religious" way, and give one another the kind of deep, adult, emotional support that they need? If soldiers in the Italian army can have "best friends," why can't Father Ted and Father Dugal stop all that horsing around and kiss every now and then? And they do need it, because along with pedophilia, alcoholism is rampant among Catholic priests, and so is depression. Now both of these problems may not be caused solely by blue balls (urologists used to speak of something called "priests' syndrome," caused by blocked up sperm), but total sexual repression is not helping the matter. For years, alcoholism and depression were considered simply items that "came with the territory," along with a kind of iron-bound, Bing Crosby Know-Nothingism that refused to see anything that might contradict a Catholic "reality." Having known a good number of priests and ex-priests myself, I have long understood this: that lying inside the Church is considered part of the liturgy. You do it in order to survive and keep an institution going that you really do love. Of course love, as we say in our contemporary Newspeak, is often "co-dependent," and the fact that the whole "comfortable" fabric of Catholicism encourages this "co-dependence," is usually kept locked away, with the wafers and the wine. But the sheer, grinding sadness of this is now coming out: for the good - in any definition of that term. It is "good" that people are now speaking out about sexual abuse among priests. It is "good" that they are no longer allowing this to be covered over with "blood money." And it is blood money, because a lot of human toil has gone towards making the money that the Church has spent covering up pedophilic sex. But what is really not good is that everyone here, victims, priests, and the families of both, will pay for something that the Church will still try to keep a secret. Cardinal Egan of New York will declare pedophilia among priests, "an abomination" and dotty Pope John Paul II will say it is an "inherent evil," and a year from now it will still be swept under the rug, along with the deeper needs and problems of its dwindling priests. 
Perry Brass's newest novel is WARLOCK, A Novel of Possession,
that does deal with the interesting intersection of business and evil.
His "domestic partnership" is not underwritten by any of the Fortune 500.
He can be reached through his website www.perrybrass.com. For more information
on WARLOCK, go to http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ASIN/1892149036/107-8161877-7587701
Telephone: 1 (800) 365-2401.
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The 1994 Canadian made-for-TV-movie The Boys of St. Vincent's depicted sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests, a topic that is now being addressed in the United States 
© 1997-2002 BEI