Fr. Jerry Pokorsky: The Damaging Culture of Silence
The Damaging Culture of Silence
by Fr. Jerry Pokorsky
First appeared in The Catholic World Report. Digital edition courtesy of Catholic Culture.
In vino veritas. In wine, truth. In the early 1980s, after I announced to an elderly priest friend my plan to enter the seminary, he took me to a restaurant for dinner. During the meal, he noticed a retired priest and beckoned him to our table to introduce him to me. The retired priest never looked at me. He was angry and inebriated enough to speak his mind. Directing his attention to the priest alone, he asked:
Do you remember when we were seminary professors in the 1960s and the advice we gave the [orthodox] seminarians? We told them to keep their heads down and get ordained. But do you think they were any damn different after ordination? No! We trained them that way.
He meant that good priests kept their heads down. They didn’t speak out when they should have, and they still don’t.
This incident came to mind recently after I received a copy of a questionnaire administered to a class of seminarians during a “sexuality workshop” at a major American seminary in 1978. Here is a sample of the more than 80 questions:
- Who last touched you?
- Where did he or she touch you?
- What is your favorite feeling?
- Who is the person you are most likely to kiss next?
- Is there anyone else you would rather kiss?
- What part of your body first senses a drop in the temperature?
- After feeling chilled what part of your body wants to get warmed up first?
- What part(s) of your body do you almost entirely ignore?
- What is your favorite part of your body?
- When was the last time you can remember being conscious of your ankles?
- When, where, and with whom did you have a really good, loving kiss?
- Write a detailed account of your first sexual experience.
It is not difficult to imagine what would have happened to any seminarian objecting to the questionnaire. All of the cliches of the pop-theology era would be unleashed. He would almost certainly be identified as “uptight” or “rigid and conservative.” It would be said he likely has a good deal of unhealthy sexual “hang-ups” himself. Seminary formation personnel would fear that he would not be a “team player” as a priest. And he would not be long for the seminary.
Of course, it is equally easy to envision the naive trust of all the immature candidates entering the workshop and “spilling their guts” to the other seminarians and facilitators, setting themselves up for future “grooming” by gays—or maybe blackmail. But it is a near certainty that the orthodox seminarians “kept their heads down” and played along, in order to ensure that they would be ordained. Now, years later, have their attitudes and behavior changed since they were ordained? The question is important because, as I will argue, it leads to an explanation of the widespread active and passive complicity in the clerical sexual abuse cover-up scandal.
