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Book: Sex, Priests and Power Author: A.W. Richard Sipe Brunner/Mazel, Inc. 1995, pp.193 Excerpt from Introduction: Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis can be understood as part of a massive contemporary project of revision and reconstruction within Christianity. Many Christians are presently recognizing that some central affirmations of Christian faith have been either ignored or too slenderly developed to merit a place in mainstream Christianity. When one considers the strong affirmations of human bodies implied in the doctrine of creation, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and the resurrection of the body, it seems odd that management of one of the human body’s most intimate functions, sexuality, has not been considered a crucial part of one’s religious identity. It would be simplistic to blame the inclusion of philosophical ideas in Christianity for this. All the religious and philosophical movements of the centuries in which Christianity was being formed struggled to define the role of the body and sexuality in religious practice. Moreover, it does not solve the problems of the present merely to identify the historical origin of ideas that live and have their effects in the present. Augustine is frequently and unfairly blamed for distorted sexual doctrine because he worried about and addressed, with the conceptual tools available, issues of sex and the body. The relative silence of Christian authors prior to and contemporary with Augustine and their own inadequacies in addressing sexuality have, ironically, guaranteed their immunity from twentieth-century criticism. Finally, Sipe admires celibacy, not as legislated and institutionalized, but as a personal “quest of spiritual relationship and religious reality based on unflinching self-knowledge and radical truth about one’s innermost desires.” As a sexual orientation, those who have the gift, and have undertaken the hard work of self-knowledge required for productive celibacy, he say, evidence “an interior freedom and integration that unite their individuality and their service.” Those who are gifted with celibacy are, in Sipe’s word, ‘awesome.” And, in his studied opinion, they are rare. The goal and spirit of this book, then, is not the overthrow of an institution that damages people, but scrutiny of a destructive strain within a church that could be so much more powerful for healing and blessing if it were willing to examine and revise its celibate/sexual system. It is a book that exemplifies and advocates what therapeutic programs call “tough love,” the ruthless honesty and relentless analysis that exposes the self-deception of an individual or an institution in order to heal, not to destroy. Table of Contents: Symptoms of the Crisis 1. Priests and Children Scope of the current crisis History of clergy Abuse of children Which priests abuse minors? 2. Crime, Sin, and Sickness Crime Priest offenders Legal intervention Sin: moral dimensions Sickness Treatment Obstacles Treatment modalities Victim voices Memories true and false Church response 3. Discourse: The Sexual Tower of Babel Need for discourse Intuitive perception Celibacy defined 4. Patterns of Celibate/Sexual Adjustment Those who profess or practice celibacy Heterosexual relationships and behavior Patterns Sexual experimentation Homosexual relationships and behaviors Transvestism Sexual abuse of minors The validity of estimates Method 5. System: Function/Dysfunction The celibate difference? The physiology of the system in crisis Celibate/sexual balance Private and public function Homosexuality Power: individual and systematic Guilt and forgiveness: a dynamic Women: the function of idealization and denigration The secret system 6. Priests and Women Myths about priests and women Code of sexual ethics for priests 7. Priest and Men Homosexualities and the clergy Psychological denial of the homosocial structure The male matrix The system of secrecy Development questions and variations Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) The Structure of Crisis 8. The Structure beneath the crisis Blame The superior group Power Subjugation Nature and God’s will Sexual inconsistency Necessary violence 9. Priests who suffer: priests who succeed Suffering servants Struggling servants Suffering of experience Secretly reformed Exposed in recovery Image and economy 10. The Christian Experience Respect for the biological base The early Christian experience Conclusion |