Thread by @asymmetricinfo

Well, in the past two weeks I have run two columns on the Catholic Church. I think these are the only two columns I have ever written on the Catholic Church. Let that be a lesson to you: life never stops surprising.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/to-st…

washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-…

The earlier column was written in a white-hot rage; the later one, in a combination of sadness and frustration at watching people retreat back to the old battle lines rather than uniting in at least a temporary alliance to win a vital battle.

The traditionalists identified the problem as homosexual priests. The liberals, celibate priests and excessively narrow sexual morality. Funnily enough, it turned out that the scandal just happened to confirm what everyone already wanted the Church to do.

I think that the Church can fix this--or at least try to fix it--without settling its larger theological disputes.

But to do so, people will actually need to decide that fighting the Vatican's self-protective networks and calling scofflaw bishops to account for the terrible things that were done to innocent children is more important than yet another proxy battle in the long war.

Anyhoo, onto addressing some of the response.

First, to all the atheists who took the opportunity to ask Catholics why they don't just stop with the magic sky fairy already: thanks for bringing that up. No Catholics have ever heard that argument before, & they needed to

Second, to the Protestants who viewed this as a splendid moment to refight the Reformation: I'm glad you brought it up, because Catholics didn't even realize there was an alternative to the Church! Or how wrong they were about all that popery!

Third, to the "You don't need a Church to worship God" spiritual-but-not-religious folks--no, I'm going to stop with the sarcasm and just say: If you want to have that argument with a Catholic, you're going to need to read up on about 2000 years worth of theology.

Now, onto the serious objections, which mostly centered around my use of the 2011 John Jay report to dispute both the modernist and traditionalist claims about why this scandal occurred.

Let's dive into that a little.

Now, look: the report has weaknesses. I'm not making any super-strong claims, because we just don't have super-strong evidence. The true numbers of priests who abused kids are going to be a "dark figure": there is a true number, but we will never know it.

In particular, I am worried that the report is skewed by cultural change that may--strong emphasis on *may*--have made it easier for boys to report that a priest touched them inappropriately.

And secondarily that changes in law enforcement, changes in journalism, and the declining power of the Catholic Church in many areas may have made it somewhat easier for these reports to come out.

Because of that, I you can't make strong claims that this is definitely a problem of the sexual revolution--it may be the level of abuse was fairly constant, but a combination of kids more willing to report, and liberalizing parents more willing to believe them, raised reporting.

That said, I think there's some reason to disbelieve this. Catholic parents were already liberalizing in the 1950s--my Dad is of that generation, and according to him, his family/parish expected Vatican II to go much farther than it did.

Also, priests from earlier generations were still active in the 60s & 70s, and kids from the 50s and before were still mostly alive in 2002 when the scandal broke. If this is really all reporting, the curve should look pretty smooth, reflecting demographics, instead of spiking

I am now going to try the technically difficult task of replying to a tweetstorm by @DouthatNYT within my own tweetstorm:

https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1034812866854047744

If I land this, I expect a perfect 10 from the judges.

@DouthatNYT So first, yes, people who think of this as a pedophilia scandal are wrong. Pedophilia level (pre-pubescent children) is low and basically constant. The abuse scandal is about pubescent and post-pubescent children, mostly boys. And it spikes in the 1960s, starts declining in 1980s

I'm not arguing that there isn't a cultural component here. I think there *is* a cultural component--many, in fact. Like the sexual revolution, which radically changed understandings, including Catholic understandings of sexual behavior.

Also the belief that Freudian psychiatry and other forms of quackitude could cure sex offenders. A decline in vocations that left priests more isolated, with less community to supervise them. Many, many things.

I also suspect environmental led may have played a role.

Lead damages impulse control. Where is environmental lead highest? In the urban "ethnic" areas where the generation of priests who formed vocations from the late 1950s on would disproportionately have grown up. Throw in a disinhibiting culture, and you have a mess.

I am specifically rejecting only the "homosexual influx into the seminaries caused this" theory. The timing is all wrong for that theory to work.

And you can't get around it by lagging the data, because the phenomenon peaks *before* the alleged homosexual subculture is reported to have arisen at some seminaries. It just won't work.

So I think we have to look elsewhere for cultural stories. I think you can tell a plausible story where the sexual revolution and Vatican II throw everything into question, including things that should never have been questioned. This happened in the secular world as well.

And this shows up as predominantly men hitting on male teens because the Catholic Church has always taken pains to limit priestly access to girls; there's a reason that convent schools taught girls, and monks and priests taught boys, and co-ed schools had a lot of nuns around.

I think that the John Jay report gets read in light of larger battles within the Church that may or may not need to be fought--I'll leave that argument for another day. What I will argue is that they do not need to be fought in order to resolve the current problem.

If celibacy does indeed attract pedophiles, you can solve that problem by ruthlessly weeding out what seems to be a fairly small number of pedophiles if they abuse. Patronage networks can be broken up whether the patronage is sexual or other.

You might have to alter celibacy in order to fix the vocation problem or some other problem. But you don't have to alter it to keep pedophiles out of the church; you fix that problem by reducing opportunity and increasing enforcement.

But this is not a thread on the church's vocation problem. It's a thread on its former abuse problem, and its current old-boys-network problem.

Which is symptomatic of the whole debate, and why there's this drip-drip-drip of scandal, and disgusted Catholics announcing they're done: digression into less urgent but more emotionally salient fights instead of keeping focus on the problem that everyone agrees should be solved

I'll add, however, that people outside the Church (a group that includes me, as my relationship to the Catholic Church is somewhat complicated), should read the report to understand something else: the Catholic Church is not special where abuse is concerned. What is is is big.

To be clear, this doesn't absolve the Church from covering up for abusers. Nor, of course, does it absolve the abusers themselves. But the problem is not that your kids are somehow uniquely at risk from priests.

The Catholic Church is the biggest denomination in the United States. By a lot. It's four times the size of the next biggest denomination.

It also exercises more control over, and responsibility, for its clergy. And it keeps much better central records.

All these things mean that it is possible to amass a reasonably good record of the abuse that took place over decades. This is much harder to do in a protestant church. Closest parallel is probably the Mormons, but for various reasons, those records are less likely to come out

(While hierarchical, the Mormon church cycles people in and out of bishop status, meaning greater church in clergy networks. Also the church is so concentrated in Utah that it's hard to imagine the state government vigorously delving into church records as PA did w/the RCC.)

To be clear, rate of abusing in the 1960s and 1970s does seem to have been somewhat elevated, though it's hard to know because we don't have a comparable contemporary secular or Protestant institution to compare. But not by a factor of 4. Less than 2x on a low base rate.

And it's possible that it wasn't elevated at all; we just don't have a good comparison class.

Keep that in mind when you generate very Catholic-specific explanations for the phenomenon.

To repeat, however, this doesn't excuse the Church coverup. Or cycling priests through unsuspecting parishes, something harder to do (though by no means impossible!) in protestant denominations where the minister has to be called by the congregation to a pulpit.

The Church still needs to make the men who made those decisions fully accountable, before they are beyond human judgement.

Which brings us to the end of another Tweestorm! Columns are here:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-…

washingtonpost.com/opinions/to-st…