Comment: sins.(The Talk of the Town)(priests, celibacy and sexual exploitation)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 01-APR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

When a man (always a man) becomes a priest in the Roman Catholic Church, he takes vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. All three -- and their opposites, and their corruptions -- have been sometimes ironic themes of the internal crisis that currently afflicts the American branch of the Church and seems to be the leading edge of a crisis within the entire worldwide institution. The priestly vows correspond, roughly, to the id, the ego, and the superego, into which a less venerable orthodoxy divided the human psyche; and these three, too, have been playing their roles, in mostly unbalanced and distorting ways. The precipitating factor is a cascading series of disclosures detailing the sexual exploitation of children and, more commonly, adolescent boys by a large number (though a small minority) of priests, in many dioceses throughout the country. The wave began in January, in Boston, where a dogged investigation by the Globe established that a...

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