Vatican: Gays mustn't become clergy

By Rachel Zoll
Associated Press Religion Writer

Because many victims in the high-profile Roman Catholic sex abuse cases are older boys, some church members have concluded that many abusive clergy are gay, and suggested purging the priesthood of homosexuals.

Abuse experts say that's a simplistic approach.

"What I'm afraid of is we're going into this witch hunt for gays," said the Rev. Stephen Rossetti, a psychologist and sex abuse consultant to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. "We need to be careful that we don't make anyone — whether it's priests or gays — scapegoats."

In the Vatican's first public comments about the scandal, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, chief spokesman for Pope John Paul II, told The New York Times the church needed to prevent gays from becoming priests.

Estimates of the number of gays among seminarians and the 47,000 Catholic clergy in the United States vary dramatically, from 10 percent to 50 percent. But no credible statistics exist on the number of abusive priests who are homosexual, said Dr. Fred Berlin, a sexual disorders expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

There is also no evidence that homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to molest children, Berlin said.

The American Psychiatric Association defines pedophiles as adults who molest children who have not yet reached puberty. Cases of serial sex abuse of prepubescent children are considered rare in the church.

New Jersey attorney Stephen Rubino said that about 85 percent of the 300 people he has represented against the church were males who were adolescents when they were abused.

The distinction is important to clinicians, who say serial pedophiles have little chance of being rehabilitated, while adults who abuse adolescents — sometimes called ephebophiles or hebophiles — respond better to treatment in some cases.

The offenders' targeting of boys versus girls can be a clue to their sexual orientation, but not necessarily, experts say.

In the general population, girls are more often sexually abused, while among priests who target children, boys are more often the victim. Researchers believe one reason is the access clergy members have to boys.

"Some of the traditions within the Catholic Church put boys into closer proximity to priests than girls," said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. "If you had more young women serving as altar girls and there were more opportunities to have these close private encounters with priests, you might get more molestation with girls."

Until more research can be done on why boys are more often targeted, many researchers say the church should focus on improving screening of candidates to the priesthood, teaching seminarians how to handle the pressures of celibate life and strengthening supervision of priests.