Tip of the Iceberg
I apologize for my long absence from this blog. This summer I protested a bishops’ meeting in town, argued with the local university over a Church-endowed chair, and went to Roswell for the 60th anniversary of the saucer crash (FUN!).
Most importantly, however, I’ve been writing. Can’t say much about that except stay tuned. The clergy sex abuse scandals are about to have the lid blown off.
Meanwhile, some of the research I’ve been doing has been needed to be mentioned. So in the meantime, there’s this:
Way back in 1880, an ex-priest named Charles Chiniquy published The Priest, the Woman, and the Confessional, one of the first exposes of solicitation in the confessional. It caused a sensation, with over 30 editions in less than 7 years.
He was an interesting character, having been a priest in Canada so renowned for his work against alcohol abuse that he was known as the “Apostle of Temperance”. When he fell out with the Catholic Church and became a Protestant, he was aided by a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who became his friend. He later accused the Church of being behind the assassination…
He had few stories, but they range from a woman who ran away and disguised herself as a man, even marrying a woman to be with her sacerdotal lover to a priest incesting the daughter of am earlier conquest. His description of the agonies of priests tempted beyond endurance by the answers to the questions concerning sex they were required to ask of women is very telling and worthy of a separate post.
For now anyway, here’s some interesting numbers for you. This part is based, he said, on the confession of a priest, one of whose victims supposedly died from shame.
“First: It was then that I understood why poor Mary [the deceased victim] was absolutely unwilling to mention the iniquities which she had committed with him. They were simply surpassingly horrible– unmentionable. No human tongue can express them– few human ears would consent to hear them.
“The second thing that I am bound in conscience to reveal is almost incredible, but it is nevertheless true. The number of married and unmarried females he had heard in the confessional was about 1,500, of whom he said he had destroyed or scandalised at least 1,000 by his questioning them on the most depraved things, for the simple pleasure of gratifying his own corrupted heart, without letting them know anything of his sinful thoughts and criminal desires towards them. But he confessed that he had destroyed the purity of ninety-five of those penitents, who had consented to sin with him.” – Chiniquy, The Priest, the Woman, and the Confessional, p. 62
By the way, the perpetrator was apparently never caught, and died unsuspected.
Chiniquy goes on to say:
“I have heard the confessions of more than 200 priests, and to say the truth, as God knows it, I must declare that only twenty-one had not to weep over the secret or public sins committed through the irresistibly corrupting influences of auricular confession. – Chiniquy, The Priest, the Woman, and the Confessional, p. 63
So, the first priest deliberately talked dirty to two-thirds of his female penitents, seducing almost 100 of them, and less than 10% of the priests in general remained chaste.
This is far greater, for instance, than the figures given by Richard Sipe for modern times. And yet, this was not during the 1970s in some swinging hotspot, this was in Canada in the middle of the sexually-repressive Victorian era!
Seems to me, either there was some exaggeration on his part or there’s been some massive underreporting done. While Catholic apologists have claimed he was highly biased, from the constant way the Church minimizes and denies, I suspect we still are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
Something to think about.