In a cultural environment where multiple perverse sex crimes against children have been laid at the feet of Catholic priests, it should hardly be surprising that anti-Catholic stereotypes have new currency and credibility. One such stereotype is that the Catholic clergy, supposedly celibate, is in fact riddled with hypocrisy and sexual predation. Criminal sexuality of priests belies their official image celibates. Meanwhile, priests are sitting pretty because all they have to do to get out of their guilt is confess their sins. This research looks at stereotypes of priestly imperfection and the Church's remedy for imperfection: the sacrament of Confession.
The Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes multiple issue fronts on celibacy when citing a comment by 19th-century French novelist and anticlerical "free thinker" George Sand, to the effect that a married priest could not be trusted to honor the seal of the confessional in a conjugal bed (Thurston, 1999). Service to the faithful undistracted by the attractions and obligations of home and hearth thus argues in favor of a celibate clergy.
However, the history of Catholicism is riddled with examples of squalid sexual behavior in the part of clergymen. Carroll (1992) reviews a biography of authoritative "Romanist" Boston bishop and cardinal William Henry O'Connell, who for some 50 years presided over a sumptuary and sexually deviant urban-American clergy while piously pronouncing numerous sexual-morality rules to the faithful. O'Connell also appears to have been a practicing homosexual (Carroll, 1992).
Carroll says O'Connell embodied "ambiguous, restless, and sometimes destructive energy of sexuality" while denying such ambiguity for the faithful, which made the Church culpable in politicizing the personal and sexual (Carroll, 1992, p. 95). Carroll associates O'Connell not with the tolerant spirit of Vatican II under John XXIII, but rather with Pius XII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, whos...