A long, painful saga of hypocrisy and human frailty

AS movies go, The Rosary Murders is well made. Donald Sutherland plays

a Roman Catholic priest in Detroit where priests and nuns are being

murdered by a man whose daughter committed suicide after his repeated

incest with her. What irritated me about it was the familiar plot line.

Sutherland gets to know who the murderer is, but will not tell because

of priestly confidentiality. We have seen it all before: Montgomery

Clift agonising furiously about his duty to Mother Church, while a

murderer ran free.

Another version of the same agony movie is the love story of the

priest who will not break his vows of celibacy, as in the Thorn Birds

syndrome. One way is to look at these men as heroes. Another is to see

their predicament as unnecessary, caused by the oppressive demands of an

institution which copes with human sexuality by denying it or licensing

it on its own terms.

Clerical celibacy is an aberration which the Catholic Church wished

upon itself around 300 AD and seems unlikely to get rid of since those

who can take the decision have spent the best years of their lives in

abstinence and are hardly likely to loosen the straitjacket on younger

men.

It has paid a price for this. Since a sex drive is normal, both

biologically and psychologically, in all persons whether ordained

clerics or not, pressures are built up and are not always coped with.

The medieval solution -- of

having clerical mistresses and turning a blind eye -- was

institutionalised hypocrisy and was abandoned at the

Counter-Reformation, although it has to be said that today in some

liberal Catholic countries, bishops are willing to allow priests and

social work nuns to share a house (and a private relationship) as long

as it does not become public.

Worse still, perhaps, is the fact that those priests who are honest

and open and ask to be given dispensation from their vows of celibacy

are either

given a flat ''No'' by the Vat

ican or their application is

left to gather dust while they

are forced to live in ''sin'',

having lost their job and the

right to receive sacraments;

and very often they are triply

punished by being boycotted by their former clerical friends.

That all this is the product of decent affection is bad enough, but

there are even worse by-products of celibacy which go against the grain.

Denied adult expression of their sex drive, a tiny minority of priests

are tempted into child molesting, as recent publicity has shown. Or, in

a modern society in which adultery is less of a stigma than it used to

be, the priest can be a easy target for the randy housewife who

considers him a ''catch'' and knows he will not expose their affair and

has no wife to do it for him.

However, the question ''To marry or to burn?'' is hardly confined to

the RC Church. Recent events in the Church of Scotland have shown that,

despite married clergy being the norm, ''burn-up'' still occurs in a

significant number of cases.

Last year I wrote a long article delineating this problem and citing

in support a number of cases in which ministers had left under a cloud

but received no publicity. No names were named but I was criticised by a

few ministers for making these cases public. When I pointed out the

anonymity of the case histories, I was told: ''But everyone knew who

they were, anyway!'' If you add these cases of adultery to the

publicised ones, you get a picture of sexual frailty within the Kirk's

ministry as well.

One less sensational way of stating this is to count the number of

divorced (and remarried) ministers within the Kirk. It is now at a level

which, age for age, probably reflects the pattern in the middle class as

a whole. You can use this fact in several ways. One is to bemoan the

moral quality of today's ministry . Another is to discuss the fatal

vulnerability of those who practise as pastors to the sins they seek to

prevent or the double standards inherent in any pursuit of holiness by

frail mortals.

I would suggest a more prosaic conclusion whether applied to Catholic

or Protestant clergy, namely that ordination should not be expected to

confer any moral or spiritual superiority ex opere. If a judge is human

beneath his wig, and a doctor beneath his white coat, why should we not

expect the same capacity for probity and frailty of the clergyman

beneath the cassock?