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Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis. By Philip Jenkins. Oxford University Press, New York, 1996, 214 pp., $36.95 (Canadian).
Starting in the mid-1980s, The National Catholic Reporter, a liberal Catholic newspaper, began publishing articles about "pedophile priests" in North America, culminating in reporter Jason Berry's (1992) influential book, Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children. In Andrew M. Greeley's foreword, he describes its content as revealing "what may be the greatest scandal in the history of religion in America and perhaps the most serious crisis Catholicism has faced since the Reformation" (p. xiii). Berry reports that in the decade after 1982, about 400 Catholic clergy in North America were accused of sexual misconduct with minors, part of what he saw as a larger issue-the homosexual subversion of the Roman Catholic Church-with estimates that up to half of all Catholic priests in North America may be homosexual. Berry's book ends with an accusatory indictment of the church hierarchy, which he says has allowed the erosion of seminary formation and gay behavior patterns in rectories and religious communities-all in the name of celibacy. Berry describes mandatory celibacy, which has been in effect since 1139, as a political and theological model that has failed and whose continuity is propagated by an ecclesiastic, pedophile-harboring power structure that rules the church out of fear of loss of their own power.
With the above as background, enter the volume under review, in which Berry's book is cited 39 times in endnotes. Jenkins claims that, "In reality, Catholic clergy are not necessarily represented in the sexual abuse phenomenon at a rate higher than or equal to their numbers in the clerical profession as a whole" (p. 8). Both Berry and Jenkins acknowledge that almost all of the reported cases involve priests and pubescent boys, which technically is called either ephebophilia or pederasty, rather than pedophilia. Jenkins estimates that between 1960 and 1992, approximately 150,000 Roman Catholic clergy served in North America. Only a handful of Catholic priests were publicly accused of sexual impropriety with minors in the period prior to 1982. Of the approximately 400 that were publicized after 1982, many involved behaviors that had occurred decades earlier. Jenkins argues that 400 priests accused...