The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession

by John Cornwell

  Dr. Schreber’s peer specialists on child-rearing and theories of reproduction—along with parallel ‘experts’ in Britain, the United States, and other parts of Europe—put masturbation highest on the list of mental, moral, and spiritual dangers for the growing child. Unchecked, it was widely believed, the individual child was headed for insanity; worse still, such behaviour could lead to the deterioration of the purity of the race. An example of this was Dr. John Laws Milton’s theory, originally reported in The Lancet in 1854, and appearing as a book in 1857 entitled On the Pathology and Treatment of Gonorrhoea and Spermatorrhoea. The book eventually was published in many editions. His thesis, in brief, was that seminal emission, whether from voluntary masturbation or nocturnal emissions, would damage the sperm, leading to ‘epilepsy, phthisis, insanity, paralysis, and death.’ One of his recommendations for avoiding such emissions was to sleep on the floor. Yet, as the psychoanalyst Morton Schatzman suggests in his book Soul Murder, the obsession with masturbation by doctors, teachers, and parents, and their determination to cure it, were principally symptomatic of their own adult sexual and moral anxieties. What we are seeing in the mania for treatments and prohibition, he concludes, is adult anxiety projected onto the child. The ‘clinical’ measures, going well beyond Milton (who incidentally also recommended a bottle of claret a day—as ‘it is useless to expect any medical action from less than a bottle a day’), included such tortures as castration, application of electricity (known as ‘faradisation’), cautery of the spine and genitals, and tying bags of pebbles to the back to keep a boy from lying on his back. For the girls, the physicians applied such measures as ovariotomy (excision of an ovary), clitoridectomy (removal of the clitoris), surgical separation of the prepuce hood from the clitoris; and the use of splints.12

  Pius X’s initiatives to impose early confessions, with its strict prohibitions on impure behaviour for children barely out of infancy, and concomitant warnings of the fires of Hell, correspond in the spiritual sphere with the adult anxieties that underpinned Schreber’s child psychology. Pius X’s acute anxiety about priestly chastity is patently evident in his exhortation to priests published in 1908 on the golden jubilee of his own priesthood. He likens the priesthood to a boy in danger, for whom he is the fretful father—reminiscent of Schreber Senior. He writes of his anxieties in the third person as of a ‘father’s loving heart which beats anxiously as he looks upon an ailing child.’ The priest, he goes on, ‘must fear the insidious attacks of the infernal serpent. Is it not all too easy even for religious souls to be tarnished by contact with the world?’ The priest who is ‘corrupt and contaminated is utterly incapable of preserving [others] from corruption’. The fear of ‘pollution’ in the priesthood runs through the document: ‘Woe to the priest who fails to respect his high dignity, and defiles by his infidelities the name of the holy God for whom he is bound to be holy. Corruptio optimi pessima.’13

  And yet, in the sentences that follow he displays a classic instance of reaction formation—the defence mechanism invoked by psychoanalysis whereby the origins of acute anxiety are challenged, in order to be eliminated, by assuming possession of an opposite impulse. He reminds his priests of their status—they are higher than the angels—as if defilement and pollution were unthinkable in a priest. ‘May chastity, the choicest ornament of our priesthood, flourish undimmed amongst you; through the splendour of this virtue, by which the priest is made like the angels, the priest wins greater veneration among the Christian flock . . .’

  There is a clear connection between the Catholic moralists’ condemnations and the physicians’ dire warnings of masturbation’s threat to the integrity of soul and body. Just as the physicians insist that the decay of adult society must be checked by salutary disciplining of the child, so Pius X’s sacramental initiatives for children betray a parallel antidote for the moral pollution that, unchecked, will corrupt the priesthood. The clinical anti-masturbation antidotes inflicted on children by Dr. Schreber’s methods thus connect with the Catholic moralists’ insistence on the spiritual antidotes: exclusion from the Eucharist, and hence a form of self-excommunication from the Church, and fear of the ‘death of the soul’ and the eternal fires of Hell.

  If Pius X was intent on purifying the priesthood of ‘graver sins’ by inculcating children with guilt and fear, the project was bound to have repercussions for those Catholic boys who would carry such guilt into their lives as priests. For clerics, the vows of permanent celibacy and chastity raise the stakes of repression and anxiety. Constant repression by psychological, moral, and physical methods is not without consequences. As the influential psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel pointed out: ‘If masturbation is performed with a bad conscience and anxiety which prevent its running its natural course, this circumstance has . . . pathological consequences.’14

  Richard Sipe’s interviews with priests revealed that attempts to master masturbation were leading ‘to all sorts of compromises in order to control it.’ He reports on priests who ‘masturbate only under great internal pressure, with no fantasy and with little pleasure. Afterwards they feel compelled to go to confession immediately, sometimes at great disruption to their lives and reality’, sometimes seeking out a fellow priest in the middle of the night.15

  Sipe found instances of anxiety so severe that some priests suffered breakdowns and other illnesses. In certain extreme cases, he found strategies that resembled, and perhaps shed light upon, the self-mortifications of Jean-Marie Vianney (who slept every night on the bare flagstones), the man held up as an exemplar by Pius X. Along with priests who self-flagellated and starved themselves, Sipe had treated priests with masturbation anxieties who had considered castration. ‘One priest did in fact castrate himself, precipitating his admission to a psychiatric hospital’, he reported.16

  I HAVE KNOWN PERSONALLY three sexually abusing priests, starting with Father Leslie McCallum, who attempted to abuse me during confession in the late 1950s, and who was educated for the priesthood at Oscott, my own seminary. I have written extensively about that encounter in Seminary Boy, published in 2006, and will describe it more fully in Chapter 10 of this book. Father Joe Jordan, sentenced in 2002 to seven years for offences against boys just two years after leaving the Venerable English College in Rome, was the second. And the third, Father Bede Walsh, was also educated at Oscott College; he was sentenced in August 2012 to twenty-two years in prison for sexual molestation spanning twenty-two years of his ministry. Another priest confessed to me and my wife that he had decided to ‘seduce’ a teenage student. This man was educated at the Beda College in Rome and was the chaplain of a college, but, as far as I know, he never carried out the decision. He died in 2005.

  My personal acquaintance with these priests—in addition to the interviews conducted by Marie Keenan of University College, Dublin; the work of Richard Sipe; and my further interviews and correspondence with priests and nuns over a span of two years—has shown me the importance of the so-called sexual revolution and its effect on potential and actual clerical abusers. While the term ‘sexual revolution’ normally applies to the late 1960s, and to student action and unrest in France and the United States, it had a longer, gradual flourishing. Among its early discussants was the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who wrote in his 1936 book The Sexual Revolution of the psychological dangers of sexual repression. The era of sexual permissiveness and ‘sexual liberation’ occurred at a time when many were noticing spasmodic recourse within seminaries and the priesthood, but mostly within the confessional, to the principle known as epieikeia.17 The principle was ancient, but it was resurrected amongst the Catholic clergy, it is arguable, to resolve the rising problems of sexual liberation in the twentieth century.

  I first heard the word ‘epieikeia’ at Oscott in 1960 when a fellow student, whom I will call ‘Rev S’, raised it one night when he and I were alone, breaking the rules of the house. We were drinking wine and smoking together in his room long after lights out, during the Greater Silence when speak
ing was forbidden. Rev S was a warm and friendly man, several years above me, who had been to Cambridge and had done National Service in the British Army. He managed to be ‘singular’ and even ‘ostentatious’ at times because of his decidedly camp exterior, which he managed to blend with his clericalism. He walked in a mincing manner, and unlike most of us, affected a clerical sash and cummerbund. He had an effeminate manner of speech that lent a tone of affection and intimacy to those admitted to his inner circle. Rev S made overtures to me because he was trying to ingratiate himself with a friend of mine in my year who had primly rejected all of Rev S’s advances to take walks in the grounds or have coffee alone with him after lunch. The circumstance provides an impression of the quality of our lives. I knew what the Rev S was up to, and I felt guilty about what we were doing, and told him so. Pouring another glass of wine (he murmured as he did so: ‘Drink up, it’s sacramental!’), he informed me that our activity came under the heading of ‘epieikeia’. It was a Greek word, he explained, applied by Aristotle to the notion of ‘equity’ in jurisprudence, and developed by Thomas Aquinas and later moral theologians. It meant that one could interpret a rule in a particular case against the ‘letter of the law’ so long as one kept reasonably within the spirit of what one assumed the legislator intended. Later, epieikeia came up in our morals classes, although we were strongly advised that the notion did not allow us to simply dispense with any law we happened not to like.18

  By the 1960s, epieikeia was becoming an instrument of enormous power and latitude for releasing penitents in confession from burdensome situations of conscience relating to sex and difficult marital situations, such as divorce and remarriage without annulment. Just as we were being informed that it was natural to express oneself sexually (which most of us were probably managing to do anyway), here was a principle—epieikeia—that could be invoked to resolve a multiplicity of moral scruples.

  In the whirlpool of cross-currents that occurred at the time of the Second Vatican Council, many Catholics expected that Rome would sanction the use of birth control pills within marriage. Ahead of that expectation (which was dashed in 1968 with Pope Paul VI’s encyclical confirming the ban), many Catholics were already practising contraception. Those who had qualms took them to their confessors. There were those confessors who kept strictly within the Church’s teaching; but there were others who were taking the troubled scruples of penitents onto their own consciences. The epieikeia principle was useful if such a confessor was to sleep soundly at night. There was even Thomas Aquinas to appeal to. Aquinas wrote, in defence of the principle, ‘Since the lawgiver cannot have in view every single case, he shapes the law according to what happens most frequently, by directing his attention to the common good. Wherefore, if a case arise wherein the observance of that law would be hurtful to the general welfare, it should not be observed.’19

  The principle, also referred to as ‘internal forum’ in the confessional, became widely used by confessors when dealing with penitents who wanted to go on the pill (with sound reasons, in the view of the confessor), and couples who wanted to remarry after divorce in good conscience and remain communicant members of the Church. But the pastoral use of epieikeia, not surprisingly, coincided with the use of the principle to resolve the private consciences of priests in their personal sexual lives. It was in fact a clerical form of ‘liberation’ at just the time when ‘sexual liberation’ was gathering strength.

  Not every seminarian would study the principle of epieikeia, or even knew the term, but once the genie of the general principle was out of the bottle, through confession, spiritual direction, discussion between seminarians, and the workings of individual consciences, it was available to square any number of moral circles. Confessors and sexual abusers have admitted that the new spirit of clerical permissiveness was being applied to masturbation. Hence Father McCallum attempted to reassure me that it was not only okay, but ‘normal’—everybody did it, including all the priests in the junior seminary.

  Dr. Marie Keenan’s interviews in Ireland with priests charged with sexual abuse reveal that these offenders used the same exculpations for masturbation as they would apply to their molestation of children. Their sexual activities with children, being largely masturbatory, never broke the oath of celibacy, in their own minds, nor could those actions be described as fornication. Convinced, according to their studies in moral and pastoral theology, that children were eager and apt for sexual experience (and if it was okay for a cleric, then why not for a child), who better than a priest to introduce them to some innocent, harmless, perhaps beneficial, sexual expression, for the sake of mutual comfort? Although, from our interviews, few, if any, priests saw their molestations as ‘beneficial’ for their victims—they were mostly relieving their own repressions.

  Among the professionals in clinical psychology and psychoanalysis whom I have consulted is the distinguished London psychoanalyst Dr. Josephine Klein. She wanted me to consider the following idea:

  Here you have a group of men who have been told from early childhood that autoerotic play is not just bad for your health, and not just morally wrong, or naughty (which is how a child would think), but deserving of an eternity of punishment. So most of them tried very hard, even if occasionally they gave in, to repress the urge. Now they become priests and they are constantly, frequently, in a circumstance of extraordinary intimacy with children, often, to begin with, in strict privacy and darkness. Some of these children may be confessing to touching themselves and engaging in autoerotic play. The prospect now presents itself to project onto the child their own repressed desires. They do to the child what they would have liked to do to themselves, without anxiety, in their own childhood.20

  Exploring the circumstance further, Klein explained that the priest’s chosen victim serves as an ‘object relation’—an extension of himself—someone on whom he has transferred his own childhood emotions. Just as the child is in danger of bonding with the priest, the priest bonds with his victim. The child becomes an object of childhood desires that he subconsciously seeks to recapture. The child becomes a means to act out, relieve, and come to terms with the suppressed emotions and fantasies of his own childhood.

  THE EVIDENCE FROM the huge circuit of depositions, police and official diocesan reports, court accounts, interviews with victims and perpetrators, journalists’ investigations, and academic sociological research is that the clerical sexual abuser of children, as portrayed in the media, ill accords with clinical and criminal definitions of paedophile behaviour in men who are not members of the clergy—which is usually restricted to infants and even babies. The mismatch has been extensively demonstrated by Philip Jenkins in his Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis. Based on the widest and most recent statistics, the age range of clerical sexual victims typically spans seven to fourteen years old (the same span to which Pius X extended first confession). It is no exaggeration, nor is it to treat the topic lightly, to say that, based on the stories in previous chapters, priest-confessors have shown themselves to be equal-opportunity abusers in every sense within that age range: boys and girls pre-pubescent and post-pubescent. At the same time, the contention, widely held, that the number of priest ‘paedophiles’ is no greater than the number of paedophiles in the general population is both questionable and unhelpful. Research conducted by Professor Gerry Kearns at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, reveals spikes in sexual abuse rising to 10 per cent of priests in certain dioceses, more than three times the calculated average percentage of paedophiles in Western countries. Professor Kearns’s researches, yet to be published, may yield interesting reasons for these spikes. What we know about the phenomenon in the United States, for example, is to be found in the report of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York—‘The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950–2002’, commonly known as the John Jay Report. Published in 2004, the report had been commission
ed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops based on surveys completed by Roman Catholic dioceses in the United States. The report revealed that in the years covered by the report, some 10,667 individuals had made allegations of clerical child sexual abuse. The dioceses had been able to substantiate 6,700 accusations against 4,392 priests, about 4 per cent of all 109,694 priests who served during the time covered by the study. The number of alleged abuses increased in the 1960s, peaked in the 1970s, declined in the 1980s, and returned to the levels of the 1950s by 2005. The discoveries have been slow in coming, but similar figures are to be found in other countries around the world, not least the Republic of Ireland and Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, France, Chile, and Brazil. It is also claimed that beyond those figures are large numbers of unreported incidents.21

  It was originally suggested by the Vatican that the problem was one primarily of English-speaking countries, and was further sensationalised by the media in those countries. It soon became obvious, however, that the reason for the higher numbers in these countries had to do with the more assiduous legal discovery processes in the British and American traditions of law, as well as the more active practice of tort law. In other words, the phenomenon was worldwide, but remained unreported in many places.

  The danger of shrugging off the abuse crisis within the priesthood as merely typical of the population as a whole is that the nature of priestly abuse of the young in the twentieth century comprises not only forms of sexual molestation, but the wider phenomenon of psychological oppression. The two forms of confessional terrorism are inextricably related, and the boundaries between the two are often indistinct. At the same time, failure to appreciate the link between abuse and the practice of confession makes it likely that Rome will not learn from the mistakes of the past.