The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (22 page)

In the next chapter we will explore the emerging links between confession and criminal attacks on children, the use of confession by the priests to square the circle of their pastoral and offending lives, and the far-reaching consequences for victims and their families.

PART THREE

‘SOUL MURDER’

Ten

Sexual Abuse in the Confessional

The Church was showing a quite new aspect of itself, devouring its own children.

—Carlo Falconi,
The Popes in the Twentieth Century

W
HEN PRIESTS SEXUALLY ABUSE CHILDREN THEY VIOLATE
a trust between spiritual innocence and sacred fatherhood. Specialists in childhood trauma have used the term ‘soul murder’ to describe the profound damage that can ensue when a priest abuses a young member of the faithful. Psychotherapist Richard Sipe, a former priest who specialises in treatment of clerical child-abuse survivors, writes: ‘A person who has been grounded since childhood in one faith, where their self-worth, acceptance, spiritual identity, and salvation were vested, cannot simply forget, put it behind them or join another faith. They can go on with their lives, but the part
that is missing cannot be restored. Something is dead; something has been truly killed.’ The spiritual empowerment that might have aided recovery has been profoundly undermined. For children, it is especially difficult to separate the abusing priest from the auspices of the Church, with all its comforting and healing associations.
¹

The consequences of clerical abuse of minors have been emerging in reports of contemplated suicide, attempted suicide, and actual suicide of victims. In Melbourne, Australia, five men who claimed to have been abused while serving as altar boys in the church of the priest Ronald Pickering committed suicide. These deaths, uncovered by lawyer Judy Courtin, add to the forty other suicides in the state of Victoria by victims who had been abused by priests, according to documented police reports. Courtin is conducting investigatory research into clerical sexual abuse for Monash University’s law faculty.
²

When the original grooming, or sexual attack, occurs in the circumstance of confession, the auspices of the sacrament aggravate the harm. Sexual abuse of children linked to the confessional has not only been widespread, but is known to be especially destructive to the children involved. A priest in England, ordained thirty years ago, and for twenty years a psychotherapist treating clerical sex offenders within his diocese, wrote to me that ‘in all those cases [of clerical abuse of minors], the sacrament of confession was used [by the molester] to discover vulnerability and groom candidates for abuse.’
³

In March 2010, when the Catholic Church in Germany set up a hotline and invited victims and their families to report instances of clerical abuse in parishes and schools, more than 8,500 people responded. Andreas Zimmermann, the expert responsible for analysing the results, told the German Catholic news agency KNA that the abusing ‘priests had used their moral authority and psychological effect of
rites like confession
’ [my italics] to gain power over children, ‘even to the point of telling them that the assaults were an expression of “God’s special love” for them.’
⁴

C
RIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS
and Church authorities have failed to identify the link between confession and the access, opportunity, and special trauma of clerical abuse. When I was in my early teens I experienced the connection at first hand. In the course of interviews and extensive correspondence, I would come across many similar instances.

In my Catholic junior seminary in the late 1950s I was sexually propositioned during confession by a priest who, I discovered, had used the sacrament as a seduction tactic with other boys. I had chosen him initially as my confessor, as had other pupils in the college, because he made a point of merging his priesthood with the role of counsellor and mentor. He combined an exterior sense of piety and devotion with an extroverted, fun-loving personality. Confessions, held in his private quarters, became a treat and a privilege,
the religious auspices nevertheless creating an atmosphere of unquestioning trust.
⁵

Although I told him that I preferred to kneel to make my confession, this priest, Father Leslie McCallum of the archdiocese of Birmingham in England, insisted that I sit in an armchair and accept a glass of Madeira. How different from the more traditionalist priests on the staff, who avoided familiarity and sociability. Father McCallum’s priest colleagues seemed, in contrast, cold and austere; they continued to conduct confessions impersonally, behind a screen in the college sacristy. Father McCallum was a picture of devotion when robed and in the sanctuary, where I had often served his Mass. His manner of making his thanksgiving at the back of the church was a model of recollection, as if communing directly with the divine. Outside of the church he offered warmth, humour, and friendship: he seemed to understand our adolescent ways of thinking. He was up to date with the latest novels and films. He had a record player on which he played Elvis Presley numbers, music we would only otherwise hear on our vacations back at home.

On the occasion in question, having imbibed the usual glass of Madeira, and before I could finish my laundry list of peccadillos, he interrupted to ask: ‘Have you had problems with sexual sins?’ Then he said that I shouldn’t feel any guilt about masturbation because not to masturbate was abnormal. The American Kinsey report on sexual behaviour, he said, stated that 99.9 per cent of all males masturbated.

Then he asked if he could see my penis so that he could manipulate it to discover whether I had any of the ‘well-known deformities that led to excessive erections’. Nothing wrong with masturbation, he was saying: just not good for the health to do it too much. Five years earlier I had been abused in a public toilet in London by a man who started his overtures with similar blandishments. Now, I stood up and left the room. I said nothing about the incident to anyone in authority in the college because I felt that it would be my word against Father McCallum’s. In any case, even penitents in those days believed that the seal of confession applied to them. Thereafter, whenever we passed, he would smile and greet me as if nothing had happened.

The following year, Father McCallum was removed from the junior seminary and appointed chaplain to a boy’s preparatory boarding school, to care for the souls of an even younger age group of boys than ours. He had clearly been trying his seductions on other students, and his superiors had got wind of it. The decision of the archbishop of Birmingham to move him to a place where he might continue his grooming activities was typical of Catholic hierarchies at that time. Another feature of this experience was his mention of the Kinsey report, indicating the view, acceptable among some clerics by the 1950s, that despite the vow of celibacy, sexual expression in the form of auto-eroticism was not merely okay, but essential: here was permissiveness revealing a despotic streak. The beginnings of the sexually permissive society were affecting elements, restricted but significant, within the long
repressed Catholic clerical caste for whom confession now became an opportunity for grooming potential victims.
⁶

A
LTHOUGH EXTENSIVE STUDIES
of Catholic clerical sexual abuse have been conducted in the United States and Ireland, there have been less detailed reports in other countries where it is known nevertheless that abuse has been widespread, including Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Australia. Obstacles to rigorous research continue to arise, a result of clerical secrecy and reluctance on the part of Church authorities to cooperate. For example, on 9 January 2013, the German bishops’ conference cancelled a research project it had agreed to undertake in 2011 in combination with the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony, headed by Professor Christian Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer accused the bishops of trying to censor abuse investigations. A Forsa Institute poll published in
Christ & Welt
, a supplement of the Germany weekly newspaper
Die Zeit
, claimed that the closure of the enquiry had done further damage to the reputation of the Catholic clergy in Germany. According to the poll, 75 per cent of the German respondents believed that the Catholic Church was trying to prevent a comprehensive investigation.
⁷

Yet even where reports of clerical abuse have been open and extensive, statistics have failed to show the connection between abuse and the practice of confession. As we saw earlier, the principal American report on sexual abuse in the Catholic
Church, commissioned by the US bishops and conducted by John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, found that, from 1950 to 2002, 10,667 individuals had made allegations of child sexual abuse. Of these, 6,700 accusations of abuse had been substantiated against 4,329 priests. The John Jay Report cited the locations of attacks, separating, for example, the confessional box from the sacristy, where the priest vests in liturgical robes (or other private places within the church building); the priests’ living quarters; and locations outside of the parish. The numbers were misleading, however, since the methodology suggested that confession as a context of abuse occurs only within a traditional confessional box. By the late 1950s, not only was the practice of confession moving out of the box, but the boundaries of the sacrament were also being blurred—as with Father McCallum’s socializing-counselling mode as confessor. By the 1960s confession was routinely taking place at different locations within the church precincts and beyond. As it happens, the John Jay figures for boys showed that 29.6 per cent of abusive encounters took place in the confessional box, elsewhere within the church building (such as the sacristy), or in the priest’s house, where children’s confessions were frequently taking place by the late 1950s; for girls, the figure was an accumulated 27.8 per cent. Trips and social events as locations of abuse accounted for almost 40 per cent of incidents for both sexes.
⁸

According to my interviews and the letters I received from respondents, as well as official reports in many countries,
abusive relationships between cleric and child have almost invariably begun as a continuation of the sacrament of confession. Although the statistics about the locations of abuse cited in the John Jay Report are an important feature of the evidence, it is only in the stories of abuse that we see the repeated connection between the initial trust accorded the priest as sacramental minister—confessor—and his multidimensional status as trusted spiritual ‘father’, counsellor, mentor, and friend that continues in other contexts and places. That status, with the unequal power relationship it implies, the access the priest has to the child, and the child’s unquestioning trust, once in place, continues to govern the relationship on trips, retreats, country walks, social occasions (often in a priest’s private room), sporting activities, hikes, campfire parties, and journeys alone or in groups by car.