OUR FATHERS

A flabby account of a dispiriting matter—namely, sexual abuse at the hands of priests.

In the 1980s and before, writes journalist France (Bag of Toys: Sex, Scandal, and the Death Mask Murder, 1992), without offering much in the way of evidence, little attention was given to instances of such abuse “thanks to cozy relationships among the Church, courts, and media.” That that priestly crime now commands the front pages of so many newspapers owes much to laypeople who, disgusted at what they perceived to be inaction and even cover-up on the part of the Catholic hierarchy, took matters into their own hands in communities across the country. American Catholics have effected such rebellions in the past, France suggests, offering as a useful example their overwhelming rejection of Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical on birth control, “the most disastrous for the Church in modern times,” which even the national conference of bishops opposed. That encyclical, France argues, was symptomatic of the Church’s unrealistic attitude on matters of sex, particularly in light of the sexual revolution sweeping the outside world at the time. The “generation of clerics who entered seminary in the buttoned-up 1950s and reemerged in the 1960s” behaved badly, so much so that a psychological report to the 1971 synod of bishops estimated that only “10–15 percent of all priests in Western Europe and North America are mature.” The bulk of France’s account is given over to campaigns on the part of the laity to remove “immature” priests from office, very often against the wishes of the Church itself, which has instead sought to protect the good name of bad people. His narrative, however, is excessively anecdotal and too often unfocused; a tighter, more economical argument would have been more useful, especially on so controversial a subject.

For such an argument, see John van der Zee’s Agony in the Garden (Feb. 2003).