Memories of a ‘Collapsed Catholic’

For many of us who were raised Catholic, it’s only a matter of time before the public drumroll of priestly sexual transgression reverberates in private memory. My moment came when I read of the Rev. Christopher Kearney.

Kearney was dismissed as head of a seminary in late March because he allegedly had molested boys during impromptu wrestling matches more than a decade ago at a Catholic high school in La Canada-Flintridge, where he had taught for 25 years.

When I was 13, the pastor of a nearby parish, a friend of my family, would sometimes invite me and various combinations of my younger brother and my friends to watch television with him. He was a fat, sissified man, outspokenly censorious of the dating habits of teenagers. Although we were young, he would give us wine and would end up getting us in bearhugs and headlocks on the couch of his den.

He never did anything overt, such as grabbing for our genitals, but it was clear the physical contact wasn’t just roughhousing to him. I recall the sharp smell of armpit odor that would rise from him when he held my head fast against his side.

I am a thoroughly collapsed Catholic, gratefully godless. I left the church when I was 16, convinced that I couldn’t live by its sexual proscriptions. Even though I believed at the time I was choosing eternal damnation, that seemed preferable to the recurrent misery I experienced trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.

A part of my alienation was the memory of the parish priest, who I’d come to think of as the worst sort of repressed, pious hypocrite. I bore my contempt for a long time. After he delivered the homily at my father’s funeral more than 30 years later, I barely managed to be civil to him. The priest himself died not long after that.

The current pedophilia scandal inevitably and unfairly paints all priests the color of the offenders, which is why I want to mention another priest I encountered as a Catholic schoolboy. He was my 10th-grade biology teacher, a smart young martinet of a cleric named Robert T. Francoeur.

Even we students could tell that Francoeur far outclassed our high school. This was confirmed a few years later when, via studies at Johns Hopkins, Fordham and the University of Delaware, he earned his doctorate and became a professor of embryology at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.

That, however, is not all he became. He was a founding member of the National Assn. for Pastoral Renewal, an organization working for optional celibacy in the Catholic church. In 1967, with the support of his bishop, he married, and the Vatican, probably through a fluke, never laicized him. Still married and the father of two grown daughters, he remains “canonically and technically,” as he puts it, a Catholic priest.

Francoeur also became an expert on human sexuality, authored 22 books, edited “The International Encyclopedia of Sexuality” and received the American College of Sexology’s Public Service Award. A follower of the French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he expounds a modern view of sexuality, and advises clergy and religious leaders on the subject.

Now 70, he keenly remembers the sexual deformation that boys of his generation endured in the seminary, particularly if they entered directly from eighth grade, as he (and the parish priest above) did. He knows the loneliness and longing that beset a young man at his sexual peak who is compelled to suppress the most fundamental of human drives.

“Seminary was a horrendous environment,” he told me in a telephone conversation. “We lived in an isolated world, and many of those priests, including myself, came out psychologically crippled. I was fortunate because my path was very different from the average parish priests, and I can empathize with them because they were really screwed up by this system. I think it left many of these men with arrested development.”

None of this is to excuse those priests who, discerning that the church hierarchy would protect them, turned the children entrusted to them into their private sexual playground. They deserve prison, and so do those who covered up their crimes.

This phenomenon, however, didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Its roots are in the suffocating sexual policies the church inflicts on its ministers, policies that are willfully out of touch with evolving human experience.

Perhaps the current din about priestly sexual abuse is reaching decibel levels that will finally shake the American church to its core. “Day by day,” Francoeur says, “I become more convinced that it is going to force a major change, maybe even a schism, a sort of silent schism, that will result in a unique American church. The majority of Catholics would accept and welcome a married clergy. The patriarchal, authoritarian hierarchy, top down, isn’t going to work anymore. Sooner or later, it will come. I think it might come sooner than we think.”

To which I say, from his lips to You-Know-Who’s ear.