The publication of terms of reference for the commission of investigation into child sexual abuse in schools is long overdue. Among the many questions it must answer is whether priests who abused children were psychologically damaged by their years of seminary formation.
The social psychologist Erving Goffman would say “yes”. In his book Asylums (1961), Goffman included monasteries and seminaries among his range of asylums.
Researchers who have challenged conventional thinking on priests who abused children include Prof Marie Keenan of UCD, who, when providing a therapeutic and compassionate service to priests who had been condemned for abusing children, recalled Goffman’s discoveries.
In her 2012 book Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church, Keenan theorised that some priests who aspired to priestly perfection were so conflicted by seminary demands on them that they resorted to child sexual abuse. Goffman, followed by Keenan, wrote that the inmates of such “total institutions” responded in four different ways: by withdrawing; by challenging; by colonising; or by surrendering.
Deadly earthquake rocks pillar of a Buddhist nation: its monks
Distressing news about Elton John and Madonna. We don’t get too many cask-strength feuds any more
Willa White: ‘Drugs removed all the stuff a seven-year-old kid should not have in their life’
Breda O'Brien: How is a school with €8,000 supposed to pay €10,000 worth of bills?
The abusers emerged from this latter group, as they sought to fit perfectly into the seminary system.
It is a legal principle, which must be upheld by the commission, that where evidence emerges challenging the guilt of priests convicted of abusing children – and who will be investigated by the commission – that such evidence must be thoroughly examined.
The new commission must not repeat omissions of predecessors. For example, the Ryan Commission, which reported in 2009, had 101 staff, took 10 years to complete, cost €136 million, yet failed to investigate that question. It, seemingly, did not address Goffman, who published his research long before Ryan was established.
Goffman’s Asylums insights were not unique. Prof Ivor Browne and others were then closing down some of Dublin’s damaging lunatic asylums. The late Fr Liam Ryan, professor of sociology in Maynooth, compared the national seminary there with Goffman’s lunatic asylums.
[ An open secret: Ireland’s lunatic asylums and mental hospitalsOpens in new window ]
For the new commission to investigate fully the alleged guilt of relevant priests, it must include specialists in the Catholic Church’s Council of Trent (1545-1563). The purpose of the post-Trent seminary was to constantly remind its typical seminarian to “surrender all to God” through his vow of obedience to superiors, who stood for God. It would be disobedient of him to say: “I want me, to be free, to be me”.
After 12 years of formation – five of secondary boarding school and seven of senior seminary – little was left of his own to the seminarian. He had responded “without delay” to the seminary’s 60,000 (Pavlovian) bells. Day after day, the relentless bells summoned the seminarian to his endless duties: class, Mass, study, recreation, and so on.
To his vow of obedience, he added vows of poverty and chastity. At his ordination he prostrated himself on the altar, swearing total allegiance to his bishop or superior.
What saved some seminarians from complete surrender to the totalising institution was their reluctance “to surrender everything to God and his superiors”. His games of football, soccer or hurling let him “keep back something for himself”.
In that predictable and unchallenging world, the seminarian’s process of maturing was compromised as he negotiated one or other of the Goffman-Keenan four responses to his total institutionalisation.
If the new abuse commission affirms the Keenan-Goffman insights, then one of the most important decisions ever made by the Catholic Church, the development of Trent’s “total institution” seminary model, must be replaced by a model based on the UN’s 1948 Declaration on Human Rights and Vatican II′s 1965 Declaration: On Human Dignity – based on the inviolable rights of the human person to freedom from coercion.
The church must replace not alone its Trent seminary model, but its evangelisation model too. Indeed, Ireland’s total institutionalising church, especially in its avoidance of public accountability and cover-ups of child abuse, must come to an end.
One way or the other, the 20th-century Irish church’s evangelisation, non-accountable power model, is over.
Dr Tony O’Dwyer was a missionary priest in the Philippines from 1963 to 1973. Later, he managed training and evaluation services for APSO (Agency for Personal Services Overseas). He is author of Betrayal by Silence: the Collapse of the Irish Catholic Church – has it a Future?
