In an op-ed in Le Monde titled “To Fight Pedophilia, Abolish Priestly Celibacy” (March 5, 2010), Swiss theologian Hans Küng attributes the responsibility for pedophilia among some priests to the ecclesial dogma of celibacy, “the most striking expression of the tense relationship the Catholic hierarchy has with sexuality.” While “denouncing the misjudgments” of the president of the German Bishops’ Conference on this subject, he recalls the fundamental freedom stated, according to him, by the Gospel of a “freely consented vocation.” A “Charisma” reinforced by the “concession” of Saint Paul to humans, contained in the First Epistle to the Corinthians: “But if they cannot practice self-control, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion” (1 Cor. 7:9). While mentioning the marital life of Peter and “other disciples of Christ throughout their apostleship,” the author of the highly controversial “Infallible?” of 1971 combines in the same critique the “rule of celibacy, that of papal absolutism, and the strengthening of clericalism.” And their consequence: a separation between the Western clergy and the Christian people.
Despite a well-supported argument, Hans Küng’s thought seems to stop halfway. And ultimately misses the essential point. The sexuality of priests is one thing. The pedophilia of some of them is another. That the end of celibacy constitutes a soothing remedy for the former is self-evident. While it is not irrelevant, the option of marriage cannot exhaust the questions raised by the latter: the nature of pedophilia and the unconscious meaning of priestly commitment. Let us examine the two aspects of this issue.
The powerful repressive influence of the Church has always targeted knowledge assimilated to sexuality, of which the woman is, if one dares say, the exclusive custodian. Since the Middle Ages, the repression of knowledge demanded by Rome has provoked, in response, “a passionate quest for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life.” As for sexuality, behind the belief in malevolence, as Freud’s biographer already explained, hides the fundamental human fear of impotence or sexual dysfunctions. In trials of witchcraft, healers or midwives aroused mistrust by using their “consoling” plants and other derivatives of belladonna intended to soothe childbirth pains. They thus seemed to oppose the Church’s dogmas that held these pains as rightful punishment for sin. Whether it is “The Manual of Inquisitors” by Eymerich (1376) where the use of love potions leads to suspicion of heresy, “Malleus Maleficarum,” the first official collection of witch crimes (1486), which contains a detailed study on female means capable of causing impotence, or, finally, Jean Bodin’s paradigm (1580) associating “witchcraft and excessive femininity” where the witch poses a “permanent challenge to the father’s sovereignty by opposing him with a malevolent sexual and destructive power,” it is indeed the woman, the sexual being, who seems targeted by clerical curses. In the instructions intended to allow the Inquisition to expose a witch, the woman who engages in sexual acts by physically dominating the man signs her confession before the courts and thus seals her dire fate at the stake. What represents, by the way, a recurring fantasy among men remains today still linked to one of the great unconscious male fears of women: that which devours and monopolizes his sexual energy, as well as that which is also capable, as Françoise Héritier reminds us, of a “perverse diversion” of his seed, as evidenced by sometimes-heard reflections within the Church on new procreation techniques. Knowledge and sexuality thus stand at the intersection of notions of fault, guilt, and debts, pregnant with subsequent psychic suffering frequently encountered in psychoanalysis. Let us abolish celibacy, Hans Küng seems to say, and the “religious” fault, the most consequential one, will be eliminated.
This reasoning hardly suits the pedophile tendency, where the expression of sexual need follows more complex and pathological paths. Pedophilia indeed refers to infantile sexuality, where multiple bodily touching marks the polymorphic nature of excitement—the skin functions as a sexual organ—and often underscores the lack of object choice, male or female. It comes in place of a genital and adult sexuality perceived as inaccessible, whose non-transgression serves the pretense of maintaining a form of innocence in the psyche of its actors. In the case of pedophile priests, the perversion consists notably in the unconscious diversion, to their benefit, of the authority contained in the “divine word of the Father,” leading to this “language confusion,” a dialogue unbalanced and implicitly charged with sexuality between the adult and the child, a concept developed by psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi.
Where the marriage of priests would, so to speak, consecrate for those who wish it, the union of instinctual forces between psychic priesthood and physical sexuality, the end of celibacy would not resolve the pedophilia of certain prelates: marriage would barely offer the opportunity for a new pretense, guaranteed and codified by the structuring power of religion. The latter would still play a compensatory role concerning past experiences of frustration: the compulsion for repetition, the irresistible need for bodily proximity with the other finds, as we know, its provisional exorcism in the frenetic renewal of the rite, a means to limit the anxiety of guilt. “Prayer is often the cry of the threatened man, and religious intensity follows the curve of danger,” explains priest and psychoanalyst Antoine Vergotte, a recognized specialist in pathological forms of religion (Religious Psychology, Charles Dessart Publisher, Brussels, 1966). In this sense, the end of celibacy can only satisfy those religious individuals who are psychologically disposed to life as a couple. Many of them, both heterosexual and homosexual, already experience it, in concealment.
Is it ultimately conceivable to join the theologian’s reflection on the responsibility of the Church, particularly that, according to him, “of the discreet Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which has taken charge of all serious cases of sexual deviance based on the utmost secrecy”? This would be to forget one of the cornerstones of Christian dogma: “the religious fault is overcome the moment it is manifested to the subject’s conscience,” recalls Antoine Vergotte. For the Church, the fault dissolves in confession and “assent to the divine word.” At the risk, to remain Pauline, of simultaneity if not confusion between “failure” and “grace.”
With the end of celibacy as desired by Hans Küng, the New Testament revisited would join, let us dream a little, the Talmud where coupling on the eve of Shabbat participates in harmony with the Ineffable. Unfortunately, as Michelet reproached the Roman Church of his time, the “all-angelic spiritualism” professed by Rome rejects the vicissitudes of the body and reduces life to a “trial.” A woman who sleeps alone, says an Oriental proverb, sleeps with the devil.
