CCI Editor’s comment:  This is a rather long article, but an extremely important article.  I urge you to follow the link and read the full article.

BY ROD DREHER • August 10, 2018

This is almost cinematic: A.W. Richard Sipe, one of the foremost figures in the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal drama, died Wednesday night at his California home. He was 85. In a retrospective of Sipe’s life, Terence McKiernan of the Bishop Accountability site writes:

W. Richard Sipe truly invented the rigorous study of the clergy abuse of children: he created a disciplined method for thinking about the unthinkable. His groundbreaking books – A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy (1990) and Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis (1995) – made activism and change possible in the Catholic abuse crisis, and ultimately prepared the way for the #MeToo movement.

Sipe’s work anticipated the convergence that we’re witnessing now in the activism for victims’ rights and child safety. He always saw the molestation of children by Catholic clergy as part of a larger reality in Catholicism and beyond. Sipe’s approach to the abuse of children by Catholic clerics was an unusual one. Beginning as a Benedictine therapist-monk, he helped hundreds of priests and religious with their difficulties in religious life, especially the challenges of celibacy.

Because of those conversations, Sipe viewed the abuse of children by clergy through a wider lens than anyone else. Clergy abuse was better understood, he felt, within broader trends of clergy sexual misconduct, and by the same token, the Catholic system was brought into sharper focus if the clerical abuse of children was acknowledged to be a crisis basic to that system.

Richard Sipe was fundamentally a scholar of clerical culture and the clerical system. His work in the early 1990s created a paradigm for understanding that system and the reasons why the abuse of children by clerics has flourished within it. His books emerged from his therapy practice, and were in a sense anecdotal, yet the statistical conclusions he came to have been borne out by events.

His thinking on celibacy and the abuse crisis were informed by his happy marriage to psychiatrist Marianne Benkert, their parallel and mutual careers in therapy, especially with the victims of clergy abuse, and their experience of family life, raising their son Walter.

Recently the Cardinal McCarrick case has confirmed Richard Sipe’s warnings, going back decades, that McCarrick and many other prelates were harassing and abusing seminarians. Sipe had long emphasized the genealogy of clergy abuse. Rectors and staff at seminaries, he insisted, were often guilty of sexual misconduct with their students, who sometimes after ordination offended against young people. The same dynamic plays out in chanceries and the provincial houses of religious orders. Sipe worked to help seminaries teach celibacy as a mindful practice. But too often they remained places where abuse and harassment were countenanced and even encouraged.

The New York Times obituary captures here the most important aspect of Sipe’s work:

“Sooner or later it will become broadly obvious that there is a systemic connection between the sexual activity by, among and between clerics in positions of authority and control, and the abuse of children,” Mr. Sipe wrote in a letter to Bishop Robert W. McElroy of San Diego in 2016.

“When men in authority — cardinals, bishops, rectors, abbots, confessors, professors — are having or have had an unacknowledged-secret-active-sex life under the guise of celibacy, an atmosphere of tolerance of behaviors within the system is made operative.”

Do you understand this? Sipe is talking about the clerical sexual underground — homosexual and heterosexual — and how it is impossible to separate the sexual abuse of children and minors from the general sexual corruption among bishops and priests. One leads to the other. This is a conclusion that the mainstream media, for all the years I have been writing about this issue, has refused to consider — because, I believe, journalists do not want to look clearly at the widespread gay sexual networks.

Richard Sipe didn’t care. He told me back in 2002 that no gay man should enter the seminary at that time, not because he believed gay men could not make good priests, but because he believed that they would be targeted relentlessly by priests, other seminarians, and others trying to get them to submit to sex.

I don’t know how much longer Sipe’s website will be up, but I urge you to go to it and search it out. Here is a link to his 2016 letter to San Diego’s bishop, a liberal Francis appointee. Excerpt:

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been reported by numerous seminarians and priests of sexual advances and activity. A settlement with one priest was effected by Stephen Rubino, Esq.

In that record the operation of McCarrick in sexual activity with three priests

is described. Correspondence from “Uncle Ted” as he asked to be called, is included. One of the principals is now a lawyer who left the priesthood, two men remain in the priesthood, but refuse to speak publicly despite the fact that the settlement document is open. One priest was told by the chancery office, “if you speak with the press we will crush you”.

Priests or seminarians who speak up about a sexually active superior are

threatened with the loss of everything—employment, status, etc. Those who report are greeted with disbelief or even derision if they know but were not personally involved. If they were a partner in the sexual activity and “come out” they become a pariah and labeled a traitor.

I have interviewed twelve seminarians and priests who attest to propositions, harassment, or sex with McCarrick, who has stated, “I do not like to sleep alone”.

One priest incardinated in McCarrick’s Archdiocese of Newark was taken to bed for sex and was told, “this is how priests do it in the U.S.”. None so far has found the ability to speak openly at the risk of reputation and retaliation.

The system protects its impenetrability with intimidation, secrecy and threat. Clergy and laity are complicit.

Sipe adds at the end of his letter:

Enclosed you will find a list of bishops who have been found wanting in their duties to the people of God.

I hope that in his last will and testament, Richard Sipe has directed for this list to be independently vetted and made public.

You know how we now hear cardinals and bishops saying they had no idea that Cardinal McCarrick was a sex abuser? Richard Sipe made it public as recently as 2010, writing about the homosexual derring-do of Uncle Ted. Here Sipe quotes from documents that were part of the settlement with McCarrick’s accusers:

On another occasion McCarrick summoned the young man to drive him from the Newark Cathedral to New York City. He took him to dinner; and after, rather than returning to Newark as anticipated McCarrick went to a one-room apartment that housed one bed and a recliner chair. McCarrick said that he would take the chair, but after showering he turned off the lights and clad in his underwear he climbed into bed with his guest. Here is the account from the documents:

“He put his arms around me and wrapped his legs around mine. Then He started to tell me what a nice young man I was and what a good priest I would make someday. He also told me about the hard work and stress he was facing in his new role as Archbishop of Newark. He told me how everyone knows him and how powerful he was. The Archbishop kept saying, “Pray for your poor uncle.” All of a sudden, I felt paralyzed. I didn’t have my own car and there was nowhere to go. The Archbishop started to kiss me and move his hands and legs around me. I remained frozen, curled up like a ball. I felt his penis inside his underwear leaning against my buttocks as he was rubbing my legs up and down. His hands were moving up and down my chest and back, while tightening his legs around mine. I tried to scream but could not…I was paralyzed with fear. As he continued touching me, I felt more afraid. He even tried several times to force his hands under my shorts. He tried to roll me over so that he could get on top of me, but I resisted, I felt sick and disgusted and finally was able to jump out of bed. I went into the bathroom where I vomited several times and started to cry. After twenty minutes in the bathroom, the Archbishop told me to come back to bed. Instead I went to the recliner and pretended to fall asleep.”

In a letter dated four days after this incident McCarrick wrote a note signed “Uncle Ted” that said in part: “I just wanted to say thanks for coming on Friday evening. I really enjoyed our visit. You’re a great kid and I know the Lord will continue to bless you…Your uncle has great spots to take you to!!!”

It may be the case that Catholic bishops don’t read Richard Sipe’s blog, and so remained legitimately ignorant of this situation. But when you have the foremost social researcher figure in the area of clerical celibacy and priest sexual abuse publishing evidence from a court settlement with McCarrick’s victim, it’s hard to believe that this information wouldn’t be passed through the episcopal grapevine.

Sipe lived long enough to see his work bear fruition, though not in the ways he would have liked. He saw McCarrick face a kind of justice, which had to have been gratifying. I wonder what he would have thought of a blog like @Sacerdos, a new one launched by an anonymous Catholic priest (whose name I know) fed up with sexual corruption in the priesthood, and determined to speak out about it. Excerpts:

Notice how the bishops are presenting themselves as the “victims?” They are “horrified,” “shocked,” “hurt,” “angry” and some admit to have been “naive” or to have “misplaced” their trust in some of their brother bishops. (One bishop even confessed that this crisis has caused him to believe in the devil!) In formulating their statements it would seem that every bishop consults his thesaurus looking for that one word to use that will make him sound more hurt and more angry than the other bishops. I think it is safe to say that we do not care about their feelings. An opportunity to correct what is ailing the Church was given to them back in 2002 when the scandal first broke. An extensive independent study was prepared by the John Jay Institute clearly identifying the problem, but the bishops did not like the findings of the report and so they archived it and forgot about it.

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-death-of-richard-sipe/