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Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis. By A. W. Richard Sipe. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1995, 218 pages. Hardcover, $24.95.
Reviewed by Robert T. Francoeur, Ph.D., Fairleigh Dickinson University, Department of Biological and Allied Health Sciences, Madison, NJ 07940.
Sexuality, celibacy, and Roman Catholic priests have been recurring topics of news and scandal in the media since the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. But only recently the issue of clergy using their positions of authority to abuse women and children sexually emerged as a growing crisis in all churches and religious denominations. (This issue has also reached into the secular community of psychologists, therapists, and health care professionals.)
In 1990, Richard Sipe, an inactive (resigned) priest psychologist who has worked with John Money, startled and unnerved many Roman Catholics, clerical and lay alike, with his controversial conclusion that fully half of American Roman Catholic priests were sexually active. In his follow up to A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy (Brunner/Mazel, 1990), Sipe now carefully documents and analyzes the many and complex dimensions of sexual abuse of women and minors by priests and male Catholic religious-he does not deal with sexual abuse by religious women, which has only surfaced as a problem topic in recent months. Sex, Priests, and Power focuses on the Catholic province of what has become a major public scandal and crisis for all religious institutions, Protestant and Jewish, as well as Catholic.
In Part 1 of Sex, Priests, and Power, Sipe lays out the history and symptoms of this religious and civil crisis. Until recently, charges of sexual abuse by clergy were treated as an internal problem within the individual church's jurisdiction and not reported to police. The main issue for church officials, all the way up to the Vatican, has always been to control damage to their institution's image. 1990, however, marked a watershed, as confused church authorities began losing their damage-control efforts to the rising tide of victims' voices expressed in civil and criminal lawsuits against priests, dioceses, and religious orders. Support groups for survivors spread across the nation: Victims of Clergy...