I was moved to write this post by two things: an article in The Times, reproduced in last week’s Sunday Star Times and headed ‘Satan to blame for church’s sex woes’, and a video clip, sent to me by my friend Ivan Strahan, of Stephen Fry taking part in a 2009 debate in the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, London.

The motion was that, ‘The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.’ Fry and Christopher Hitchens spoke against the motion. Conservative  MP Ann Widdecombe and a Nigerian archbishop spoke in favour. The debate was originally broadcast on BBC4 and you can see the whole thing at http://www.intelligencesquared.com/iq2-video/2009/catholic-church.

The vote at the end of the debate was 268 for and  1876 against.

Fry’s contribution is one of the most passionate and brilliant addresses I have ever seen. Regardless of your views of the Catholic Church, it is simply a delight to watch.  This post begins now. 

Why have thousands of Catholic priests taken to abusing young boys in their charge? According to Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist, as reported in The Times, Satan is to blame: ‘All evil is due to the intervention of the Devil, including paedophilia.’

It must be nice to have such a simple answer to such a difficult question. And comforting to at last know the identity of the real villain in the piece – not the men who raped the bodies and minds of those children, not the bishops and cardinals and popes who sheltered and protected them, but the Devil who placed such irresistible temptation in their path. Good men at heart, tested beyond endurance. One could almost feel for them.

I have a more complex answer.  It is that the sexual dysfunction of the paedophile, often a result of early abuse in his own life, may make the Catholic priesthood an attractive career choice. Not because it is a job which offers opportunity for contact with and power over children – though that is also a reality – but for the very opposite reason, that the Church’s requirement to live a life of celibacy may seem to offer a degree of enforced protection against the powerful sexual impulses which drive such men. Lust and guilt cohabit in the mind of the paedophile; a celibate life, spent in the service of God, may seem to offer relief from both.  

But the reality is that, for any normal man, celibacy is itself a dysfunctional state. Freudian psychology tells us that the suppression of our instincts and desires almost never succeeds. On the contrary, suppression merely makes things worse, as those suppressed instincts and desires fester within us, often later reappearing in more distorted and unwelcome form. Misguided attempts to change the sexual orientation of gay men provide an excellent example of the total failure of such ‘re-educative’ programmes. The vast majority of these men return to their former practices; many are left depressed and suicidal.

However good his intentions, the imposed self-denial of a celibate life within the church therefore offers the paedophile not redemption but opportunity. The evidence of that is now all around us.

Worse than the paedophile priests are those who, to avoid damage to the Church, protected them from exposure and, in so doing, exposed more and more children to risk. Satan again? Well, if we simply want to use ‘Satan’ as a convenient synonym for evil, Satan it can be, for this is certainly a great evil that stains the reputations of the highest officers of the Catholic Church. Indeed, it seems to me more unforgivable than the abuse itself, since it is not the product of compulsion, but the coldly calculated perversion of justice and the truth.

In his contribution to the debate, Stephen Fry notes that in 2003 the current Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, in his role as Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, was charged with looking into the burgeoning cases of child abuse among priests. His first act was to write a letter to the bishops ordering them ‘on pain of excommunication’ not to talk to the police or anyone else. Investigations into cases of abuse ‘should be handled in the most secretive way, restricted by perpetual silence’.  Ratzinger’s solution to the problem, according to Fry, himself a gay man, was to stop homosexuals being allowed into the Church, a futile gesture since homosexuality and paedophilia are entirely different and unrelated phenomena.

A partial, but much better solution, it seems to me, would be to allow priests to marry.

As for Satan, I’m inclined to adopt my wife’s position on crime, that being tempted by the Devil may be a reason for doing bad things, but it isn’t an excuse. And I’m almost tempted to agree with Nigel Latta that when it comes to the crunch, each of us has a choice between good and evil. Almost.