Of Men, Women, and Capital Cities: Listening to Women's Word and Witness

I’ve been thinking about gender lately. And cities.

Capital cities are, of course, overweeningly masculine for the most part. Anywhere in the world that you encounter them, they’re likely to be dominated by men, since they were built by men for men. Men for whom playing power games is important: hence, places to play out the games of power.

I would not go to Washington, D.C., if I were seeking spiritual renewal. I might head to Albuquerque, Amherst, even Anchorage. But not D.C. Real power—spiritual power—does not thrive where men gather to play power games.

Certainly women can do well in capital cities. They can even enter into the male power games and play them with great skill. When they do so, they choose, of course, to play by the rules of the men who make the games, and for whom the games continue to be crucially important. And if their goal is not to make fundamental changes in those games—to open them up for more players, so that they begin to represent more adequately the complexion of those for whom the games are ostensibly being played—they sometimes find their souls desiccated after years of game-playing.

I’m thinking about these matters, in part, because of a conversation I had recently with my youngest nephew. He was telling me about the books that intrigue him lately. We’ve had a long spell of Noam Chomsky and Che Guevara. He’s now moved onto Malcolm X. He listens incessantly to old clips of George Carlin and Johnny Cash as he reads his mentors.

For the first time, as Pat and I talked about his heroes, it struck me: they’re all men. I suspect that, for many folks, that would not be worth remarking. Patrick is himself a man, raised in a culture that glorifies manhood. He played football a while in high school. Like his brothers, he watches sports—male-dominated sports—for hours on end.

What strikes me as I think about my nephew’s reading list is how different my own life has been, for reasons not always easy to identify. I would not—could not—be the person I am today, had my life not included, from early on, female heroes, female mentors, a list of female writers so long I can hardly begin to enumerate all of them in a single posting.

When Mr. Obama went on vacation this past summer and released his vacation reading list, Huffington Post invited readers to post suggestions about other books the president might read. I logged in to say that it struck me as significant that every book the president had chosen to read was by a male author—about mostly male subjects, about male historical figures, for instance.

I suggested that the president broaden his reading list to include books like Jane Smiley’s 1000 Acres or anything at all by Audre Lord. And, of course, it’s presumptuous for me to recommend reading lists to the president or to assume he hasn’t read and doesn’t read works by women on a regular basis.

Still. It strikes me as worth noting that many men, many powerful men, seem to go through their lives reading works written by men and avoiding books authored by women for the most part.

For my part, I can’t imagine having gone through my life without Jane Austen, Teresa of Avila, Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Lady Murasaki, Lillian Smith, Catherine of Siena, Marguerite Yourcenar, Mary Renault, George Sand, M.F.K. Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Willa Cather, Isabel Allende, Nella Larsen, Edith Wharton, Julian of Norwich, Pat Barker, Muriel Spark, Phyllis Whitney, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontë sisters, Mary Doria Russell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Geraldine Brooks, Alice Walker, Ruth Benedict, Mary Douglas, Hildegard of Bingen, Constance Perin, Dorothee Sölle, and . . . well, you get the picture.

The world might look very different if women had more of a voice in making it in the halls of power where the games of power are played. And if more women stood in the pulpits and the bemas and minarets. If the scriptures were in the hands of women as well as men, and if women’s interpretation of the scriptures carried the gravitas of any man’s word about the holy books.

And if the moral debates of our times were infused with even a touch of the insight many women have about key moral issues, as men continue to talk on and on about them, laying down the law and dictating the solutions.

Who Reads, Who Doesn't?

I haven't done one of those "who reads, who doesn't?" postings in a while, noting states in which this blog has had no readers in the past month, and states in which it is heavily read.

Bilgrimage continues not to attract readers in several Western states. This month, there have been no reads in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah.

By contrast, the blog has a heavy readership in the two coastal states of New York and California, as well as in New Hampshire. There are also significant numbers of readers in all the New England states, Ohio, and North Carolina, followed by Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and the two Pacific Northwest areas of Washington and Oregon. And Texas.

I continue to be interested by the number of readers who log in from other countries, particularly Canada--particularly because I think my focus is often parochially on the U.S. The little flag counter on the homepage of the blog shows the nations in which there have been readers.

I'm very inept with internet technology. I wonder if any reader can help me understand a discrepancy between the number of readers listed in the counter on the homepage, and the number listed in Google's analytics program. One day last week, for instance, the analytics program told me there had been 337 pageviews, whereas the flag counter for the same day showed 233 views.

So I gather these two programs track different viewing activity? Perhaps the flag counter tracks each viewer, whereas the analytics program tracks each page viewed?

If any reader of the blog can help me understand those discrepancies, I'd be grateful. And above all, I'm grateful that folks seem willing to listen to me keep on talking (sometimes obsessively) about the issues that concern me.

The Center Moves Left, but Media Continue to Tack Right: Continued Work for Religious Progressives

A smattering of sources today that pick up on themes discussed previously at Bilgrimage. I’ve noted, for instance, the tendency of the mainstream media to act as if progressive voices are not to be found in faith communities in the U.S. Two outstanding postings on blogs I esteem in the past several days offer more evidence for that thesis—as well as for the apparent resurgence of progressive voices in American churches recently.

At Queering the Church, Terry Weldon points to the results of a recent Pew Research Center poll which shows an increasing number of Americans (57%) supporting gay civil unions. As Terry points out, those supporting civil unions include a significant if discrete bloc of evangelical Christians in the U.S., as well as a robust percentage of American Catholics. Terry reads the support of many U.S. Catholics for same-sex civil unions as “signs of a strengthening and muscle flexing by the left at least among the Catholic laity and clergy outside the establishment.”

Noting Terry Weldon’s posting, Michael Bayly at Wild Reed also finds “the circle of awareness, love, and justice . . . expanding” among lay Catholics, despite the resolute resistance of the Catholic hierarchy to gay human beings and gay human rights. Michael links to a wonderful letter of a Catholic mother posted at Pam’s House Blend blog that had also caught my eye several days ago.

The mother writing this letter supports the Catholic mother in Maine who has been attacked for speaking out against the attempt to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens of Maine. I discussed this story several days ago (see the first link in this posting, above, for details). Writing in support of that Maine Catholic mother, the mother whose letter appears at Pam’s blog calls on Catholic officials who are spending massive amounts of money to undermine gay rights to stop attacking LGBT human beings and their families.

A posting by Anna Hartnell at Alternet this weekend (also cited by Terry Weldon) corroborates the rise of a strengthened progressive voice in American Christianity. Hartnell notes that almost all movements for progressive change in American history have been supported, if not driven, by a critical mass of believers who see their collaboration with secular progressive groups promoting justice as part and parcel of their religious commitment. As she notes, however, the media tend to miss this aspect of the American religious story, both past and present, as they focus more or less exclusively on right-leaning trends in American Christianity.

And that monomaniacal focus, which pulls even the extreme margins of the right-wing fringe into the center and treats them as legitimate political options no matter how destructive they are to our democratic institutions, continues. As Jamison Foser noted at Media Matters recently (also here), mainstream media journalists remain unable to see where the real political center of the nation lies. Even as the center moves leftwards, the media continue to speak of the United States as a “center-right” nation in which the views of right-wing extremists should be treated as more legitimate than those of a solid majority of Americans who prefer progressive policies.

We clearly have work to do, those of us with ties to faith communities in the U.S. who believe that our faith commitment has something to do with struggling for justice with those on the social margins. We with ties to the Catholic church have much work to do, when leading Catholic spokesmen for ruthless gay-bashing initiatives like Mark Mutty of the Maine campaign to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens seek insincerely to depict themselves as compassionate supporters of their gay brothers and sisters, who want to see gay folks thrive while removing the right of marriage from them.

As Right Wing Watch notes yesterday, that bogus argument for insincere compassion is hard to sell, given the consistent stand of the Catholic hierarchy against not only gay marriage but same-sex civil unions—indeed, given the consistent stand of the hierarchy against gay rights, period, anywhere in the world that the battle on behalf of human rights for gay citizens is being fought.

Welcoming the Stranger: Reflections on an Anti-Immigrant Initiative in Arkansas

And as a counterpoint to my posting a moment ago about the Arkansas State Fair, I want to take note of a piece of legislation pending right now in Arkansas. The Arkansas Times noted this week that a group calling itself Secure Arkansas has just succeeded in getting approval for a constitutional amendment to be placed on the 2010 ballot, to prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving public benefits.

One of the leaders of the movement to target undocumented immigrants has been logging into the Arkansas Times blog this week to ask why people are upset about what she sees as an eminently fair proposal to divide the state’s resources among its own citizens. Though she has invited responses to her questions, I haven’t chosen to enter the discussion on that blog.

But I have certainly thought through the issue, and would like to share my reflections with the readers of my own blog. Since attacks on immigrants transcend the boundaries of my state, some of these reflections may be of interest and use to others who are dealing with similar initiatives in other parts of the country. For what it’s worth, here are my thoughts:

First, it’s interesting to note that many of those spearheading this attack on immigrants are the very same folks who, in the previous election, worked hard to place on our ballot an initiative that denied adoption to unmarried couples. Search the list of names of those who signed to place the adoption initiative on the ballot (an initiative widely regarded by political commentators as aimed at the gay community, though it actually outlaws adoption by any unmarried couple), and you’ll find an overlap of names.

The same folks who pushed a gay-bashing initiative on the last ballot are now working hard to target immigrants. In fact, several of those fighting for the anti-immigrant measure have been active in their local communities trying to stir trouble in libraries and schools, with claims that children are being indoctrinated with pro-gay ideas and that libraries are buying books that introduce children to the gay “lifestyle.”

And so the first significant question that arises when one looks at the attempt to target yet another marginalized minority group in yet another election is, Why? Why keep targeting one vulnerable group after another—and why keep doing so in the name of Christ? (Another overlap: some of the key leaders in the anti-gay adoption initiative who are now leading the anti-immigrant initiative have also pushed hard to divide the generally gay-supportive Episcopal diocese in Arkansas over issues of inclusivity.)

The best answer I can give to these questions is that these “Christian” groups deliberately trade in hate to bring folks to the polls—to bring them to the polls to vote “right” in each election. In a sense, the specific group being targeted does not matter to them so much as does the utility of that particular group at a particular moment, to assure that conservative voters go to the polls in large numbers and vote for conservative candidates.

Immigrants may be more useful than gays right now because they are in the spotlight nationally with the health care reform initiative. Right-wing operatives are working adroitly around the country to fuel fires of nativist discontent with charges that “we” will all be paying for “them”—for the brown-skinned poor who are not even American citizens—if health care reform passes.

Most of these hard-line right-wing operatives pushing the immigrant-bashing initiative in Arkansas are in the area of the state that has experienced the largest influx of Latino immigrants in the past decade or so—the northwest part of the state, where chicken processing plants and the boom caused by Wal-Mart, whose headquarters are there, have brought large numbers of workers from Mexico and Central America to take jobs no one else is clamoring to take. Jobs for which we need workers. Jobs that these immigrants perform with great skill and a strong work ethic, for the most part.

But nativism is also very strong in that largely white, largely Anglo corner of the state. And immigrant-bashing plays well when folks feel that “their” nation and “their” culture are being overtaken by foreigners.

This initiative is, to my mind, all about urging people to fear, hate, and target. These crusades may use the name of Christ to promote themselves. But they have very little to do with the gospels, in the final analysis. They certainly have nothing at all to do with Matthew 25, with the Jesus who tells us we will be judged at the end of our lives by love, as we are asked whether we made the stranger welcome, visited the sick, clothed the naked, etc.

The second point I’d make, in response to questions about what is reprehensible about the anti-immigrant initiative, is that we don’t build a good society when we build around fear, hate, and abuse of vulnerable minorities. Our energies as a society could be far better used. It would be healthier, and we would create a more vibrant society, if we recognized the valuable contributions that targeted groups like Latino immigrants (yes, including undocumented immigrants) bring to all of us.

And that’s my third point: those being targeted by this initiative provide valuable services to all of us. We all benefit economically and in manifold other ways by their presence among us and by their labor. The jobs they take are generally jobs no one else wants. And they work hard at those jobs, and generally perform them well.

When I drive around the city in the evening, I routinely see crews of workers mending the streets and making improvements on them. These are almost always Latino workers. They work into the dark to make sure that the streets on which I drive every day are kept in good repair.

When ice storms come to the city in winter, as they tend to do with greater frequency in recent years, trees topple and power lines are downed. The men I see working long hours to cut up those trees and remove them from roadways and powerlines are almost always Latino. They work very hard to keep this city functioning in times of crisis. They do work I do not see others rushing to do.

Why target them? Why make them unwelcome?

I understand why, of course. I understand what the groups targeting first gays and then immigrants hope to gain by targeting those vulnerable minority groups around which there is social discontent today.

But I think that what those groups gain in the short term is not worth the long-term cost of this malicious activity. The society we build when we build around hate is never a healthy society. The energies these groups are putting into making others unwelcome could be far better spent building an inclusive, welcoming society that celebrates the differences of others, and the gifts we all receive through those differences.

Report from the State Fair: No Longer Granny's State Fair

My brother and sister-in-law had a gathering yesterday to celebrate a number of things—a new job for my sister-in-law, the Hindu feast of Diwali (they lived a decade in Sri Lanka and have traveled often in India), and the final arrival of crisp, clear fall weather. It was also a local football day, which means something to my aunt, who is a religious follower of all Arkansas sports teams.

As we enjoyed my brother’s first-rate guacamole and glasses of wine, we talked about the state fair. Philip and Penny had gone the evening before. We have fond memories of the fair from childhood. Since we all grew up in Little Rock (my family moved away when I was young, but returned almost every weekend to be with my grandmother), going to the fair every October was a constant part of our childhood experiences.

This year, Philip and Penny headed to the exhibit hall expecting to see the usual huge display of preserves, jams, jellies, pickles, and needlework entered for prizes in various categories. Penny’s mother and grandmother were first-rate seamstresses, who routinely entered tatting and crochet for the competition. For Penny, the fair is all about memories of sitting with her grandmother in the exhibit hall, talking with other competitors, surveying the rich array of local crafts around the hall.

Philip tells me when they got to the exhibits, they were surprised to find something totally different from the displays they both remember fondly from childhood. Big political booths now dominate the hall. And these are all propaganda booths hawking extreme-right brochures and materials.

One was a pro-life booth that, my brother believes, had a box of fetuses molded out of rubber for children to look at. He didn’t go close enough to see carefully, but that’s what he thought he saw from a distance.

Another booth was a tea-party display, full of right-wing this and that, anti-Obama trinkets, the stock-in-trade of the birthers and immigrant bashers and keep-America-mine crowd. Philip opined that this is what you have to expect in a place like Arkansas, where education has never been a priority, but misguided religious fervor (often translated into theocratic political crusades) carries the day. In Penny’s view, these displays are what America itself is coming to these days, in key sectors of popular culture. She believes that you could probably find displays like this at most state fairs nowadays.

In either case, as Philip says, it’s no longer Granny’s state fair. The days of the exhibit hall dominated by jars of ruby mayhaw jelly and carefully crafted doilies seem to be gone forever, replaced by boxes of rubber fetuses to teach schoolchildren about the evils of abortion.

Maybe Glenn Beck is right: the America we all think we knew, that apple-pie land of happy normal families untroubled by gender and racial divisions with everyone in her place for which Glenn Beck continues to shed tears is gone with the wind. Or maybe it never existed: as a reader of Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog notes, the period to which Beck points as he weeps in his latest lament for his lost America just happens to be precisely the period in which his mother drowned in a mysterious boating accident, a year or so after Beck’s parents had divorced and his step-brother committed suicide.

All things considered, maybe the America on which we need to focus and which we need to be building is not some imagined golden age in the past. Maybe it’s a nation in which our foundational democratic ideals finally receive some real play in our institutions and practices.

The Abuse Crisis: Catholic Responses at the Center

In the posting I just uploaded, I linked to a posting of Mollie Wilson O'Reilly at Commonweal yesterday discussing Laurie Goodstein's article about Father Henry Willenborg. The thread following this posting is fascinating, I believe, as a snapshot of where the center of American Catholicism is today, vis-a-vis the crisis precipitated by revelations of clerical sexual abuse of minors.

I continue to find the discussions of my Catholic brothers and sisters of the center stultifying, for the most part, for a number of reasons. There is, first of all, an apologetic defensiveness about having our dirty linen aired in public that is, in my view, entirely misplaced, when it comes to the abuse crisis.

The problem with the crisis of clerical sexual abuse is not the nasty secular media, with its need to take pot-shots at the Catholic church. It's us. We have a serious problem on our hands, with what we now know about clerical sexual abuse of minors and the hierarchy's cover-up of this.

Blaming the wicked old media is not going to get us anywhere with that crisis. If we expect to resolve it and address it effectively, we have to admit that it's our problem, and that all the excuses we offer for the hierarchy's indefensible behavior are part of the problem and not of the solution.

There is, as well, running through some of the comments on the Commonweal thread a malicious little subtext of blame for Pat Bond, the woman by whom Father Willenborg fathered a child. This is part of a larger cultural subtext that tends to blame women for the sexual indiscretions of powerful men.

I'm disappointed that my educated Catholic brothers and sisters of the center continue to appear oblivious to the malicious use of that cultural subtext both within the church and in the culture at large. Blaming women for the indiscretions of priests who sleep with women is not going to solve the problem we have on our hands.

I find it interesting, too, that centrist discussions still find it possible to speak of Bill Donohue as though he is a credible witness to Catholic values, when Catholics of the left tend to have no voice at all in the discussions of the center. Too many of our discussions of the center are simply silent about the real-life stories and real-life experiences of, for example, survivors of clerical sexual abuse, or gays and lesbians in the church.

Until those voices are incorporated into the discussion, it will remain parochial and largely irrelevant.

For my money, the most significant comment in the Commonweal thread discussing the Willenborg story is this comment of Bill Mazzella:

The unfortunate reality is that the Boston Globe did more to arrest the pedphilia coverup and scandal more than any one or group in the Catholic church. This is really an indictment of all of us that we remained silent and defensive during this whole imbroglio of pedophilia.

My intent in offering these reflections on the Commonweal thread is not to attack any poster in the thread, and certainly not to criticize Mollie Wilson O'Reilly for her fine posting about the Laurie Goodstein article. I highly respect some of those who post regularly in the discussions at Commonweal and other blogs of the American Catholic center.

But I find those discussions often beside the point, to the extent that they bend over backwards to justify what cannot be justified in the behavior of some Catholic leaders, to the extent that they continue to give the benefit of the doubt to power, to the extent that they legitimate the fringe right while discrediting all voices to the left of center, and to the extent that they continue to discuss abstract theological issues in isolation from the real-life experience of many of those affected by these issues--notably gay and lesbian Catholics.

We need to color with many more crayons, if we want to paint a representative picture of a church catholic.

Readers Respond: Crafting the Narrative of the Real Sexual Abuse Crisis in the Catholic Church, Beyond Scapegoating of Gays

My posting yesterday juxtaposing Bill Dononhue’s latest rant about the gays as the source of all evil with Laurie Goodstein’s story about Father Henry Willenborg struck a nerve. This had little to do with my posting, I feel sure. Goodstein’s article was at the top of the New York Times’ most-emailed list yesterday, and the thread of comments following the article was enormous.

And a thread started by Mollie Wilson O’Reilly at Commonweal re: the Willenborg story has picked up a large number of responses, far more than most threads at Commonweal usually garner. People—lay Catholics, in particular—are clearly eager to talk about this story. And our desire to do so may have something to do with the way in which church leaders do all they can to keep a lid on such stories in order to protect the childlike innocence of the laity, who would be scandalized, we’re informed, if we learned that priests misbehave.

Since the comments that have appeared in response to my posting yesterday are so valuable, and might be missed by readers who visit the blog but don’t follow threads, I want to lift several of them into one of my “readers respond” postings.

These are arranged in more or less chronological order, with a few editorial changes here and there that are merely corrections of typos and do not alter the original statement of each respondent:

Fran: As a thriving survivor of childhood sexual abuse (inside the family not a priest), one of my healing paths was to learn as much as I could about what makes people do this. It does not take an advanced degree to know that one's sexual orientation and inclination to abuse are unrelated.

In any case, the whole issue around women and abuse in the church - be it girls who were abused or women in relationships with priests, sexism is at the heart and soul of it all.

Ultimately all those who are abused in whatever way end up with the shortest possible end of the stick.

The idiotic responses by the church at large have been an insult and are morally suspect. I think of things such as adding greater philosophy requirements in the seminary (that will weed out those pesky and not philosophical gays!) and the other methods of purging the gay priests out is an insult to the very dignity of the human person. Talk about an overused line in the church - if the dignity of the human person mattered in all of these cases... well you see where I am headed with that.

Abuse of power is the foundation for all of this and it makes me very angry indeed. A double standard of something on already shaky moral ground is a very multifaceted problem and one that requires thoughtful, clear and intentional actions.

Terry: Fran, you’re right that this highlights another side of the story which is too easily hushed up: the appalling treatment of women in the church. Many studies have shown that the number of girls abused by priests is at least equal to the number of boys. (The bishops' own John Jay study disagrees, but I think that is explained by it covering only cases reported to and investigated by the bishops themselves.) As numerous female observers have noted, the disproportionate number of boys highlighted in popular reporting shows how the abuse of boys is seen as somehow more scandalous than that of girls.

You are also right to point out that “abuse” is not only that of minors. It also includes adults in religious institutions, where the low status of seminarians and religious women leaves them especially vulnerable to sexual pressures from superiors, and also to willing adult partners, who have to collude in the secrecy and cover-ups. This affects both women and men - but men are not left with the problems of pregnancy which ensues.

Colleen: The incidents of abuse of girls and women is hugely under-reported precisely because the girls get the blame.

Another point which is rarely made is that if teen age boys indulge in heterosexual sex that's just boys being boys, and this holds if the boy's partner is coerced or emotionally exploited into having a sexual relationship. But when it's gay sex it's a whole different story. The teen age boy is no longer the exploiter he is the exploited. I'm not saying this isn't true, I merely pointing out a huge huge double standard when it comes to male teen age sexuality. Sexual exploitation is sexual exploitation no matter which way one swings.

I think the Church has missed a huge teaching moment about the evils of sexual exploitation by males period. A moment which may have helped women and teen age girls immensely.

Instead we got gay bashing by supposedly celibate males.

I guess what this really says is that exploiting women is AOK, but men should not sexually exploit other men because that's twisted and not natural. Real men are not prey, they are predators. Fr. Willenborg is poster boy numero uno for this unstated principle. When I read this NY Times story I was furious with the Franciscans.

I suspect the real issue guys like Donohue have with gay men is that gay sex undermines the entire notion that real men have all the control in the world of sexual expression, and resent and are repelled by any other notion--especially notions of women's reproductive rights.

Terry: Bill, two sides as you say, each of them shameful but in a different way. I wish we could more easily publicise a third, adult response: those few priests who face their relationships, with men or with women, more or less openly and persist with great courage in their ministry.

I think for example of Fr Geoff Farrow, who has faced great opposition and difficulties, but can at least point to his honesty and integrity. Here in London, Fr Bernard Lynch regularly introduces himself as legally married to his husband, Billy. He too is under constant pressure from Westminster diocese but, (supported or at least tolerated by his order) courageously continues to work as a priest and therapist in private practice.

Or Fr Cutié in Florida, who refused to be bullied over his relationship, and joined the Episcopalians instead.

Clerical celibacy is a myth, as is the gay = pederast meme.

Excellent comments, all of them. Some important points I take from them:

1. To understand the crisis of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests, we need to understand the phenomenon of sexual abuse of minors in general. We need to learn more, for instance, about what is going on when this happens within families (since families are far and away the primary locus of sexual abuse of children in our society).

2. The attempt to blame gay priests for the abuse crisis is not an attempt to learn more about abuse of minors in general, and abuse of minors by priests in particular. It is an attempt to draw a veil over the problem in the expectation that people will stop asking pesky questions once they realize a despised minority group is responsible for the problem.

3. Any accurate account of the abuse crisis would quickly discover that both males and females have been victimized by priests.

4. As do studies of sexual abuse of children in general, any accurate study of the abuse crisis in the Catholic church would quickly recognize that sexual abuse of minors by adults is first and foremost about abuse of power and authority, not sexual abuse. It is about having power over others who do not have power themselves—a condition built into the very composition of the clerical system in the Catholic church.

5. The sexual orientation of the person abusing minors is not the salient fact to note about abuse of minors. In fact, the vast majority (figures seem to be well over 90% here) of adults abusing minors are heterosexual males abusing female children. And that abuse occurs primarily right in families.

6. Accurate, comprehensive studies of the abuse crisis in the Catholic church would also have to begin talking honestly about the fact that a significant proportion of priests also have either sporadic or ongoing sexual relationships with adults of both sexes.

7. In some of those adult relationships, there is a troubling element of abuse by priests as religious authority figures, insofar as they have power over those they are abusing. As Terry notes, when priests make sexual advances towards seminarians or religious women, the “low status” of members of both of those groups in the hierarchical structure of the church leaves them especially vulnerable to sexual pressures from superiors.

8. Even when the adults involved in these relationships appear to consent to them, there are other troubling factors that have everything to do with the disproportionate allocation of power institutionally within the Catholic church. Priests who have affairs with adult women and father children by them, but who then do not leave the priesthood to care for their child or who do not provide adequate care for the child while they remain in the priesthood, have secure economic lives and lives with a secure social status. Their partner, by contrast, often does not have such security and is subject to stigma if the affair is made public.

9. There can be a troubling element of exploitation in priests’ relationships with adults of either sex, even when those relationships appear consensual. That exploitation often has much to do with the power and privilege the church accords to priests, and the lack of power and privilege it accords to the laity.

10. The secrecy and lying fostered by such relationships is also troubling and morally repugnant. The entire church pays a tremendous price for that secrecy and lying.

The graphic is a chart from the Center for Public Media illustrating how the understanding and engagement of public issues is shifting due to online communication, which permits much wider constituencies to engage in discussion of public issues which shapes policy about them.