The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (20 page)

Of all the sins associated with the sixth commandment, and what the moralists termed ‘morbid sexuality’, masturbation is the subject of the most keen, obsessive, and extensive discussion and analysis in the manuals. The point is stressed and reiterated that enjoyment of orgasm in both men women—whether the orgasm was voluntary or not, alone or aided by another, by the married or the unmarried—is deemed to be ‘against Nature’, in that the pleasure of the sex act being procured is detached from its true purpose—legitimate procreation. The coverage in the manuals spans an extraordinary variety of combinations and possibilities, as if a penitent might present in confession any of the following: orgasms achieved by eunuchs; males who reach orgasm but without ejaculation; coitus interruptus; orgasm while horse riding or on a bicycle; orgasm while dancing; spontaneous orgasm while viewing erotic pictures. All such actions, and many more, performed in the knowledge that orgasm might occur, are condemned as mortal sins even if the action does not result in orgasm. There is not even allowance for men who need to give specimens of their sperm for medical reasons, such as for sperm count. Davis writes: ‘If for a just
cause, for example, to test for sterility of disease, the doctor wishes to examine the sperm of a married man (it would not be possible for the obvious reasons, in view of what follows, to test that of an unmarried man), it is suggested to pour into a test-tube the remains of sperm which remain in the urethra after sexual intercourse.’
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At the same time, the manuals declare a catch-all definition: that the sin of masturbation ‘consists in the use of any sexual act for the wrong purpose’:

Therefore masturbation is possible for women as well as men; in young men and in old men . . . despite the fact that the ejaculations of the latter might be slight; in men who have had vasectomies, even if they eventually cannot produce semen, and adult castrati if they are capable of erections and reaching orgasm; in prepubescent children, even though they cannot produce semen, so long as they can achieve an erection and reach orgasm; yet not infants who are incapable of producing a full erection, or orgasm, even though they are capable of emitting a prostatic liquid from the urethra.
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The obsession with masturbation and other forms of auto-eroticism in the moral and pastoral manuals reflects the acute anxiety that it evidently occasioned for many seminarians and priests, including moral theologians, canon lawyers, and prelates right up to the pope, through much of the twentieth century. No wonder if, as claimed by the psy
chotherapist and former priest A. W. Richard Sipe, who conducted an investigation in the 1990s, ‘80 percent of the clergy masturbate’. Richard Sipe’s estimate may well have been conservative, both for today and in the past. In 1969, when Dr. William Masters of the archdiocese of St. Paul conducted a survey of 200 celibate Catholic clerics, 198 reported having masturbated that year. The remaining two, according to Masters, did not understand the question. Richard Sipe also drew attention to those clerical non-masturbators who suffer from hypogonadism, known as Kallmann syndrome—the virtual absence of sexual libido—who typically have penises no larger than three centimetres, and small testicles to match.
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If Alfred Kinsey’s figures on masturbation are modest for the twentieth century, it seems fair to assume that the rate of practice was also similar among celibate seminarians and priests in the nineteenth century. The difference was that harsh prohibitions in the ecclesial sphere in the nineteenth century were matched by equally harsh prohibitions for psychological and medical reasons in the secular sphere.

P
IUS
X
WAS ELECTED POPE IN 1903
, the same year as the publication in Germany of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
, which strongly influenced Freud on the topic of masturbation. In 1905, the year that Pius X advocated frequent communion, and at least by inference confession, for children aged seven and up, Freud published
his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
. In his memoir of mental illness Schreber first employed the term ‘soul murder’, cited earlier, commenting that it was invoked because of an ‘idea widespread in folk-lore and poetry of all peoples that it is somehow possible to take possession of another person’s soul’. ‘Soul murder’, within Catholic theology, is a precise description of mortal sin—a sin that ‘kills’ the soul.

Schreber suffered from phases of schizophrenia, featuring delusional states that were often God-centred, religiose, and sexual. He thought that God was attempting to emasculate him. The value of his memoir is the insight it gives into the effect of a morally tyrannical father who is obsessed with combatting, above all, the destructive evil of masturbation in his children. Daniel Paul Schreber’s father was Dr. Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber, a famous German physician and pedagogue who published a number of best-selling books on child development, discipline, and child-rearing in the mid-nineteenth century, with a profound and widespread effect on parenting, and hence, it is widely believed, on generations of German children. Son Daniel Paul ended his life in a mental asylum, and another son committed suicide.
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Dr. Schreber’s peer specialists on child-rearing and theories of reproduction—along with parallel ‘experts’ in Britain, the United States, and other parts of Europe—put masturbation highest on the list of mental, moral, and spiritual dangers for the growing child. Unchecked, it was widely believed, the individual child was headed for insanity; worse still, such behaviour could lead to the deterioration of the
purity of the race. An example of this was Dr. John Laws Milton’s theory, originally reported in
The Lancet
in 1854, and appearing as a book in 1857 entitled
On the Pathology and Treatment of Gonorrhoea and Spermatorrhoea
. The book eventually was published in many editions. His thesis, in brief, was that seminal emission, whether from voluntary masturbation or nocturnal emissions, would damage the sperm, leading to ‘epilepsy, phthisis, insanity, paralysis, and death.’ One of his recommendations for avoiding such emissions was to sleep on the floor. Yet, as the psychoanalyst Morton Schatzman suggests in his book
Soul Murder
, the obsession with masturbation by doctors, teachers, and parents, and their determination to cure it, were principally symptomatic of their own adult sexual and moral anxieties. What we are seeing in the mania for treatments and prohibition, he concludes, is adult anxiety projected onto the child. The ‘clinical’ measures, going well beyond Milton (who incidentally also recommended a bottle of claret a day—as ‘it is useless to expect any medical action from less than a bottle a day’), included such tortures as castration, application of electricity (known as ‘faradisation’), cautery of the spine and genitals, and tying bags of pebbles to the back to keep a boy from lying on his back. For the girls, the physicians applied such measures as ovariotomy (excision of an ovary), clitoridectomy (removal of the clitoris), surgical separation of the prepuce hood from the clitoris; and the use of splints.
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Pius X’s initiatives to impose early confessions, with its strict prohibitions on impure behaviour for children barely
out of infancy, and concomitant warnings of the fires of Hell, correspond in the spiritual sphere with the adult anxieties that underpinned Schreber’s child psychology. Pius X’s acute anxiety about priestly chastity is patently evident in his exhortation to priests published in 1908 on the golden jubilee of his own priesthood. He likens the priesthood to a boy in danger, for whom he is the fretful father—reminiscent of Schreber Senior. He writes of his anxieties in the third person as of a ‘father’s loving heart which beats anxiously as he looks upon an ailing child.’ The priest, he goes on, ‘must fear the insidious attacks of the infernal serpent. Is it not all too easy even for religious souls to be tarnished by contact with the world?’ The priest who is ‘corrupt and contaminated is utterly incapable of preserving [others] from corruption’. The fear of ‘pollution’ in the priesthood runs through the document: ‘Woe to the priest who fails to respect his high dignity, and defiles by his infidelities the name of the holy God for whom he is bound to be holy. Corruptio optimi pessima.’
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And yet, in the sentences that follow he displays a classic instance of reaction formation—the defence mechanism invoked by psychoanalysis whereby the origins of acute anxiety are challenged, in order to be eliminated, by assuming possession of an opposite impulse. He reminds his priests of their status—they are higher than the angels—as if defilement and pollution were unthinkable in a priest. ‘May chastity, the choicest ornament of our priesthood, flourish undimmed amongst you; through the splendour of this virtue, by which the priest is made like the angels, the priest wins greater veneration among the Christian flock . . .’

There is a clear connection between the Catholic moralists’ condemnations and the physicians’ dire warnings of masturbation’s threat to the integrity of soul and body. Just as the physicians insist that the decay of adult society must be checked by salutary disciplining of the child, so Pius X’s sacramental initiatives for children betray a parallel antidote for the moral pollution that, unchecked, will corrupt the priesthood. The clinical anti-masturbation antidotes inflicted on children by Dr. Schreber’s methods thus connect with the Catholic moralists’ insistence on the spiritual antidotes: exclusion from the Eucharist, and hence a form of self-excommunication from the Church, and fear of the ‘death of the soul’ and the eternal fires of Hell.

If Pius X was intent on purifying the priesthood of ‘graver sins’ by inculcating children with guilt and fear, the project was bound to have repercussions for those Catholic boys who would carry such guilt into their lives as priests. For clerics, the vows of permanent celibacy and chastity raise the stakes of repression and anxiety. Constant repression by psychological, moral, and physical methods is not without consequences. As the influential psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel pointed out: ‘If masturbation is performed with a bad conscience and anxiety which prevent its running its natural course, this circumstance has . . . pathological consequences.’
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Richard Sipe’s interviews with priests revealed that attempts to master masturbation were leading ‘to all sorts of compromises in order to control it.’ He reports on priests who ‘masturbate only under great internal pressure, with no fantasy and with little pleasure. Afterwards they feel compelled to go
to confession immediately, sometimes at great disruption to their lives and reality’, sometimes seeking out a fellow priest in the middle of the night.
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Sipe found instances of anxiety so severe that some priests suffered breakdowns and other illnesses. In certain extreme cases, he found strategies that resembled, and perhaps shed light upon, the self-mortifications of Jean-Marie Vianney (who slept every night on the bare flagstones), the man held up as an exemplar by Pius X. Along with priests who self-flagellated and starved themselves, Sipe had treated priests with masturbation anxieties who had considered castration. ‘One priest did in fact castrate himself, precipitating his admission to a psychiatric hospital’, he reported.
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I
HAVE KNOWN PERSONALLY
three sexually abusing priests, starting with Father Leslie McCallum, who attempted to abuse me during confession in the late 1950s, and who was educated for the priesthood at Oscott, my own seminary. I have written extensively about that encounter in
Seminary Boy
, published in 2006, and will describe it more fully in
Chapter 10
of this book. Father Joe Jordan, sentenced in 2002 to seven years for offences against boys just two years after leaving the Venerable English College in Rome, was the second. And the third, Father Bede Walsh, was also educated at Oscott College; he was sentenced in August 2012 to twenty-two years in prison for sexual molestation spanning
twenty-two years of his ministry. Another priest confessed to me and my wife that he had decided to ‘seduce’ a teenage student. This man was educated at the Beda College in Rome and was the chaplain of a college, but, as far as I know, he never carried out the decision. He died in 2005.