WHAT IS A 'PAEDOPHILE'? A brief reflection on 'man-boy love' and on the child-sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church I was marginally involved with the journal, Church and State, when it started publication in the 1970s. In those days it was highly critical of the Roman Catholic Church - indeed it has some claim to be regarded as the first outrightly anticlerical journal published in Catholic Ireland. I myself came from an Ulster Protestant background, but many of the authors had been Roman Catholic. They had been brought up under priestly supervision and attended Catholic schools. They disapproved of their own Catholic upbringing and they wanted to weaken the church by bringing it into disrepute. Yet I don't remember anything being said - I'm open to correction - about the sexual abuse of children.
Again, back in the nineteenth century, mainstream British culture was hysterically anti-Catholic, with a particularly sharp edge in Protestant Ireland. Although a perverse eroticism did feature largely in this literature (I think mainly of dreadful things done to nuns in convent cellars) I don't think there was much mention of child abuse.
A rather whimsical version of it did feature in the trials of Oscar Wilde. Edward Carson, defending the Marquess of Queensbury against Wilde's accusation of libel, asked Wilde for his opinion of a short story called The Priest and the acolyte. It concerns a love affair between a priest and an altar boy. It is a mutual love affair, if we accept that that is possible between adults and minors. When it becomes known the two commit suicide together beautifully (using a poisoned Host for the purpose). It is all very crude but so far as it goes the relationship is portrayed sympathetically. Carson asked Wilde if he thought it was immoral. Wilde replied that it was worse than immoral, it was badly written. The author, incidentally, an Oxford undergraduate at the time, later converted to Catholicism and became a priest.
But I am puzzled. What has been revealed in the Roman Catholic Church is just about the most discreditable thing that could be revealed, occurring on a large scale throughout the world. Are we to assume that this has been going on, on a comparable scale, during the whole history of the church without ever becoming a major issue in the often quite vicious polemics that have always characterised church history? Through the Reformation? the French Revolution? the Italian risorgimento? the Spanish Civil War?
Two possible hypotheses present themselves; the first that the problem has always existed on this scale but it has only recently become possible to talk about it; secondly that, although of course the problem has always existed, the scale of it is new. I am by no means committed to it but I am going to write on the basis of the second hypothesis and to ask why should the problem have become so much worse over the past fifty years. And, again without insisting that these are the only things to be taken into consideration, I am going to suggest two possible reasons:
1. the change in the church's own attitude towards 'sin'
2. the change in the attitude of the wider society towards sexuality.'Sin' is the church's raison d'être. It is not the same thing as 'crime' or 'anti-social behaviour', and punishment is not the appropriate means of dealing with it. It is a theological concept and makes no sense outside a theological framework. It is believed to be a universal condition, a disease from which all mankind - priests, bishops, saints included - suffer. It is a propensity that is problematical whether or not it issues in wicked deeds. It is experienced through various passions, which include lust, anger, pride. The mere entertaining of such passions, even if it is quite unnoticed by other people, is immensely damaging to the individual and calls for confession and repentance. In the traditional practise of the Roman Catholic Church all believers, priests included, regularly go to confession - it is a condition of taking Communion. And the atmosphere of the offices of the church is a continual reminder of the wretchedness of the universal human condition and the need for reconciliation with God.
'Is'. Or rather 'was'. Since, in the past fifty years, all that has changed. Fasting is no longer a regular part of Roman Catholic practise, confession is increasingly becoming the exception rather than the rule (what sort of confession did Mr Blair offer, we wonder, when he was received with such fanfare into the Roman Catholic Church?). The services are lighter and jollier, more emphasis on the kindness and goodness of God and much less on the problem of sin and its eternal consequences. All of which conveys an impression that our own sins and untoward thoughts (and the priest's sins and untoward thoughts) are not really such a serious problem and can surely easily be forgiven. Instead of becoming the necessary solution to a terrible, all-devouring problem, the church becomes a pleasant aesthetic experience, a place where we go to feel good.
That is one side of the recent developments that may have facilitated an atmosphere in which priests, no longer waging daily war with the Devil, may have felt more indulgent towards their own excesses. The other, obviously related, is the wider society's attitude towards sexuality. To illustrate this, I thought it might be interesting to give a brief historical account of the word 'paedophile' - or perhaps of my own personal experience of it.
BRIEF HISTORY OF A WORD
The word isn't found in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (1932 - nor is it in the 1972 addenda). So far as I can see, it first came into general use in the early seventies and was introduced by people who were themselves paedophiles and wanted to improve their image. It was a rather spectacular failure but the period was, we will all remember, a period when sexual liberation was in the air. Most obviously it was the period of gay liberation. The general argument was that, especially now that contraception had liberated heterosexual activity from the inconvenience of unwanted babies, there was no reason why society at large should interfere with anyone's sexual tastes, always assuming mutual consent. And no reason why we should not express our sexual tastes openly and proudly (thus increasing the chances of finding partners) however weird and wonderful they may be.
In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the question of 'boy-love', with its ancient, highly respectable, literary pedigree should have arisen. I am going for the sake of simplicity to concentrate on 'boy-love' though 'girl-love' also has its own pedigree - Dante's Beatrice and Romeo's Juliet were both very young and 'nymphomania' had become an issue in the sixties with the popularity of Nabokov's Lolita and the subsequent film. But as a male homosexual my own main concern was with 'boy-love'.
Any literary minded teenager in the pre-Gay Liberation days of the 1960s becoming aware of homosexual feelings and looking desperately for some sort of understanding of it all was likely to fall on a book called Greek Love by J.Z.Eglington. Greek Love was a lengthy and scholarly defence of pederasty, arguing that sexual relations between young boys and older men were a good educational experience for the boys. Eglington assumed that the men in question were probably married and perfectly capable of heterosexual pleasure as well. He was, as I remember it, actually rather contemptuous of men who wished to have sexual relations with men of their own age. Pederasty was manly; man-to-man homosexuality was effeminate (which he thought was a bad thing).
In this context it may be remarked that a usual French word for 'homosexual' is 'pédéraste' - the equivalent of 'queer' is 'pédé'. It is assumed that homosexual and pederast are the same thing. We might say that separating these two concepts was one of the great achievements of Gay Liberation in the 1970s. But we might also ask if it was an entirely honest achievement. Again back in the 1970s the publishing group that produced Church and State also produced a pamphlet called Bernstein on Homosexuality - writings by the German Social Democratic theorist Edouard Bernstein at the time of the Wilde trials. I wrote the introduction and notes and also proposed the cover - a photograph of a naked boy from the well-known collection of photographs taken in Taormina, in Sicily, by the Baron von Gloeden. It was very appropriate as a notable part of late nineteenth century gay culture but also very stupid because impossible to place in shops, especially Irish shops. I remember, however, being accosted by a leading member of the Irish gay rights movement, furious that we were perpetuating the stereotype of gay men being attracted to boys. In the course of the conversation I asked him if he didn't find the boy (who, incidentally, did have pubic hair) attractive. 'Of course I do' he replied, or words to that effect, 'but that's not the point ...'
(Our pamphlet is incidentally available - with a photo of a plain cover I don't remember - in pdf form at http://www.studiesinanti-capitalism.net/StudiesInAnti-Capitalism/BERNSTEIN.html My introduction, lightly criticised for not being in the forefront of the struggle for gay liberation, is attributed to Angela Clifford, who translated Bernstein's text.)
The paedophile liberation movement was, therefore, dangerous for the Gay Liberation movement but this was not immediately obvious, at least not to everyone. I remember two paedophile liberation groups - Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Awareness league, PIE and PAL (well, that was what I thought PAL was called. According to a very informative article at http://newgon.com/wiki/PIE, PAL stood for Paedophile Action for Liberation. The article says it folded into PIE which had originally been formed as a subgroup within the mainstream gay liberationist Scottish Minorities Group). The word 'paedophile' had been adopted, perhaps even devised, precisely because it didn't mean what everyone now thinks it means. Etymologically it simply means anyone who loves children (the Greek word 'paidi' usually refers to boys but could also be used for girls). So everyone, one might like to think, is a paedophile - except of course those who might get pleasure out of torturing or other wise maltreating children. Specifically, though, the paedophiles were using the term to refer to anyone who might find children sexually attractive with no implication that they would be engaging in actual sexual relations with them. The word 'pederast' was reserved for those who were engaged in actual sexual relations (the word used in the popular press at the time was the perfectly adequate 'child molester').
The emergence of an outright paedophile liberation movement (miniscule as it was) was something of an event for the British popular press, and the spokesmen for PIE were soon being characterised as the wickedest men in Britain. So the term 'paedophile' became a term of abuse, which I regret, because if the child abuse scandals - whether concerning the church, children's homes or the family - have shown us anything, it is that sexual attraction to children is very widespread. In a sense this, and the social usefulness of adults attracted to children, has long been discreetly acknowledged in popular culture through nudge nudge wink wink jokes about choirmasters and scoutmasters (jokes that would lose their savour if people thought real abuse was taking place). In an age when sexual gratification is widely misrepresented as one of the highest human values it seems to me important to assert that the fact of being sexually attracted to children or young people is not in itself disgraceful; and that it is perfectly possible for someone who is sexually attracted to children to mix with them and be of service of them without engaging in sexual relations with them; and that, indeed, such renunciation of sexual gratification under those circumstances is an admirable, even heroic, vocation.
So it would be useful to have a word that would serve the purpose the word 'paedophile' was originally supposed to serve. Having outlined what I think the proper use of the term could be, I hesitate to use it to describe priests who force their attentions on children against their will; but we can perhaps imagine the confusion in the priest's mind if he doesn't really believe sin is such a terribly serious problem, doesn't really think it has eternal consequences, doesn't really believe in celibacy or virginity as states desirable in themselves, and is surrounded by a culture which tells him, constantly and loudly, that sexual gratification is a) harmless and b) one of the chief ends of human existence.
But why, I wonder, should the church be so embarrassed by the problem and so hamfisted in dealing with it? That may strike readers as a strange question but this is a problem of Sin and handling problems of Sin is precisely what the the church is supposed to be good at. The church's basic idea, as I've already said, is that Sin is a universal problem, a disease from which we all suffer. That is what it means to say it is inherited from the biological father of all mankind. The church exists to address this universal problem which is not a matter of crime and punishment or preventing people from engaging in anti-social behaviour. Large numbers of people who, we assume, are not committing crimes confess their sins to a priest, do penance, receive absolution. There is no assumption that priests themselves are free of this universal propensity. I am a little ignorant of Roman Catholic practise but in Orthodox practise there are several occasions when the priest will ask his people to forgive his sins and even proclaim himself to be the 'chief of sinners'. We may hope that he is exaggerating but he is certainly proclaiming that he shares the sinful condition of the rest of us.
Given this understanding of the universality of Sin it is difficult to see why the church should be so badly fazed by the enormity of the problem in its own ranks. If anything it is proof of the rightness of a fundamental church doctrine. And it is equally difficult to see why the church should be so ignorant as to what should be done about it. Apologising isn't the church's proper response, nor is prosecution and punishment, not paying compensation, however right and proper such things may be in their own - secular - field. The church's proper response, however, is confession and repentance. When abuse on such a scale was revealed, the church's proper - one would have thought instinctive - response would be to go into mourning. A period of fasting and mourning should have been proclaimed, perhaps even a new regular day of fasting and mourning in the church's calendar. The triumphal, pompous, somewhat hectoring character of Pope Benedict's recent state visit to Britain was inappropriate. He should have come as a penitent, dressed in the simplest of cassocks, to comfort and commiserate with his people.
The Church as a divine institution cannot sin; but the church as a human collectivity can sin all too easily, and if they don't know what to do about that, who on earth does?