LETTERS

I find the articles in the November/December issue of Books & Culture quite well-written and thought-provoking. I was disturbed, however, by the surprising gullibility of Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen in accepting at face value the claims of A. W. Richard Sipe [made in “Sex, Priests, and Power”] about the sexual conduct of Catholic priests. In recent years we have had many examples of the tendency of “progressives” to indulge in wild statistical assertion. We have been told that 10 percent of men are homosexual, that there are several million homeless people in the U.S., and so on. (All of these numbers have been shown to be about ten times too large.)

Such claims are based on several factors: simple innumeracy and inability to think quantitatively, the desire to efface the distinction between the normal and the abnormal or exceptional, and the attempt to manufacture “crises” that would justify radical change. For example, if only a few men beat their wives there is something wrong with them, but if that were the normal practice of husbands, then there might be something wrong with the institution of marriage per se.

Van Leeuwen tells us that Sipe is an ex-priest who wants to remake the Catholic church according to the tenets of scientific materialism and sexual liberalism. But even if he had no axes to grind, his experience as a psychiatrist is likely to have exposed him to a skewed sample of clergy. Even those trained in statistical methods and doing systematic studies of large samples can get wildly inaccurate results by not having a statistically “fair sample” of the relevant population. Kinsey’s huge overestimate of the incidence of homosexuality is a well-known example. And Sipe admits that no random or systematic studies of priestly sexual behavior have been done at all by him or anyone else.

The claim that 30 percent of all priests are in ongoing sexual relationships is therefore worthless. While many Protestants might find this figure plausible and see in it confirmation of the most lurid sixteenth-century tales of Catholic clerical corruption, to most Catholics it will seem extremely far-fetched.

In order to guard oneself against being taken in by such statistical frauds one must develop the ability to match them to one’s own experience. For example, a typical person has hundreds of men among his acquaintances–friends, relatives, work colleagues, neighbors, former schoolmates, tradesmen, and so on. If Kinsey were right, each of us would have at least 30 male homosexual acquaintances. Even counting every doubtful person as certainly homosexual, this seems improbable–and, as we now know from many careful studies, it is indeed way off. . . .

I know many priests. I can count about two dozen as personal acquaintances, and half a dozen as friends. Nor am I unusual in that respect. Large parishes have several priests; priests’ assignments are rotated frequently, and people move so often that they become familiar with many parishes. Most Catholics will attest that the overwhelming majority of priests, whatever their shortcomings, are men of integrity who are at least trying to live up to their calling. I have not met a Catholic, lay or clerical, who finds Sipe’s 30 percent figure even remotely plausible. . . .

– Stephen M. Barr

University of Delaware

Newark, Del.

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen replies:

Stephen Barr is justified in expressing concern about my use of Richard Sipe’s statistics on the sexual conduct of Catholic priests. I noted parenthetically that none of his samples were randomly drawn, and thought it was obvious thereafter that I was quoting Sipe’s conclusions, not endorsing them wholesale. But apparently this distinction was not as clear as I intended.

I hope Barr and I would agree that even if the prevalence rate of priestly sexual abuse is more in the range of 3, rather than 30, percent, it is cause for concern. This is not just because of its “guilt by association” effect on morally upright priests, but because it is well documented that some (not all) bishops have in the past simply recycled abusive priests into new parishes without discipline, treatment, or advance warning, only to have them repeat their behavior in the new situation. Failure to “walk in the light” in such cases leads to feelings of betrayal and mistrust among the laity, and this problem must be faced honestly.

In no way did I intend to suggest that abuse–sexual or otherwise–is an especially Catholic problem. Indeed, my own denomination (the Christian Reformed Church) is–to my knowledge–the only one so far to have authorized a professionally conducted, random-sample survey of abuse prevalence in its own ranks. In that 1992 survey of church members eighteen and older, 12, 13, and 19 percent reported having experienced physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, respectively. Women were most often the abused, men most often the abusers–and they included pastors, youth ministers, teachers, parents, and other relatives. And 15 percent of those surveyed admitted to having abused others. Although one may quibble about abuse definitions at the margins (e.g., when does spanking children become abusive?), the larger survey findings confirmed that we have a challenging task in ministering to survivors and perpetrators alike.

Volume 2, No. 2, Page 5

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