In response to Silence and shame at the Sheldonian, Clovernews commented:
…it seems to me that Church teaching was historically more about the preservation of the virtues of unmarried girls rather than ‘child sexual abuse’ as such. Those challenged to quote anything about the matter from the Bible usually fall back on the one about people having millstones hung around their neck and thrown into the sea if they ‘offend one of these little ones’ [Luke 17:2] – clearly ‘offend’ can mean anything you want it to, especially after 2000 years, and in any case scholars think that passage refers to recent converts to Christ’s teachings rather than children. (See Mark 9:42 and Matthew 18:6.)
I replied to this, but forgot to mention that MacCulloch justifies his contention that the church has always recognised and abhorred child abuse not by reference to the Bible or to specific doctrinal pronouncements but by giving a historical example of “child abuse” in the church in the 17th century which the church recognised as such. Specifically, he points to a study by Karen Liebreich, Fallen Order: A History (London, Atlantic, 2004).
The clerical order in question was the Order of the Clerics Regular of the Pious Schools, known as the Piarists, which was given formal papal recognition as an order after its founder, Joseph Calasanz, had spent a quarter-century building up a network of free schools for poor children. But by 1629, according to MacCullouch, scandal arose over the sexual abuse of boys by one Father Sefano Cherubini at a Piarist school in Naples. Calasanz (who would eventually be declared a saint) covered up for Cherubini, but the scandals continued and Cherubini, from a powerful family, eventually gained control of the order, and contrived the arrest of the aging founder by the Inquisition. By 1643, with the support of the Inquisition, Cherubini was promoted Universal Superior of the Order. This led to a “chorus of outrage” from conscientious Piarists across Europe, but the response of Pope Innocent X was simply to dissolve the order in 1646.
So, in MacCulloch’s telling, we have Cherubini as a really rotten apple in the barrel; there is a classic cover-up, much the same as in the scandals of recent times; and then, finally, drastic action from the top.
All very clear and simple. Except that the story is quite dizzyingly spun by MacCulloch, so I’m not sure we can trust a thing he says. For instance, with the seeming intention of making sure the “paedo” comes out as the bad guy, MacCulloch concentrates not on any terrible sexual abuse (it may have been horribly coercive, but perhaps not) but on Cherubini’s unscrupulous use of the Inquisition. However, in a Guardian review of Liebreich’s book, we learn that the guilty party in grassing up the founder was someone quite different:
There is nasty Mario Sozzi, who shopped his enemies to the Inquisition, and was struck down by a kind of leprosy. His treatment involved being wrapped naked in the still pulsating body of a recently slaughtered ox. Sozzi died anyway – but his colleagues enjoyed eating the ox.
Also, was the alleged sexual abuse the real reason the Piarist Order was dissolved? What MacCulloch does not tell us is that the Piarists in Florence embraced the teaching of Galileo that the Earth moves around the Sun – a doctrine which could easily have cost Galileo his life when the Inquisition put him on trial over it. This dangerous connection with Galileo was alone sufficient to put the future of the order in doubt. And there was more. The Piarists were opposed by the increasingly powerful Jesuits. And Pope Innocent even had a personal reason to put the knife in: Calasanz had once slighted his sister-in-law. But what really brought about the order’s downfall, according to Liebreich, was not sex but a lack of sufficiently powerful backers.
Of this complex swirl of difficulties for the Piarists we hear absolutely nothing from MacCulloch. Instead, in his account, the downfall of the order had to be attributed entirely to a sex scandal perpetrated by a pantomime villain of a paedo and his co-conspirators. This is simplistic trash. It is History by Numbers, designed not to paint a rich and subtle picture of 17th century history, but to colour in, luridly and crudely, a pattern dictated by 21st century obsessions.
A footnote worth recording briefly is that the Piarists were later resurrected. They apparently did a rather good job of teaching the poor really useful stuff: mercantile arithmetic, such as how to calculate the interest on loans, and exchange rate mechanisms. Calasanz hoped these skills would help the pupils find jobs in banks, warehouses, counting houses and other trades. And if that sounds a bit dull, well, be it also known that among the schools’ later pupils were such totally non-dull figures as Mozart, Goya, Haydn and Victor Hugo, so perhaps the Piarists were doing something right.
Another footnote: Heretic TOC emailed MacCulloch yesterday, inviting him to read Prof. Igor Primoratz on the ethics of paedophilia, plus Jon Henley’s recent Guardian article Paedophilia: bringing dark desires to light, in a bid to encourage a less absolutist stance on his part against non-coercive “child abuse”. The email concluded:
If, however, you are content to be just another strident voice in the unedifying cacophony of hate-speak that passes for current public debate on this matter, just carry on as normal! Be as cowardly and mediocre as you wish! The high esteem in which you are held will suffer not one whit, quite the opposite!
Sir Diarmaid did at least deign to reply, this morning, albeit in brief and uncompromising terms. He said simply, “Thanks for your mail. We will have to agree to differ on this”. Oh, well, one can only try. Full marks to him, at least, for keeping his cool.
Actually, history knows attempts to develop some pedosexual Christianity. In the Oneida commune created by John Humphrey Noyes (1811 – 1886) in 1848 women were teaching boys how to delay ejaculation. In the Family of God commune created by the Californian TV Preacher Moses David Brand Berg (1919 – 1994) in 1967 or 1968 parents were teaching little children how to get orgasm.
For some reason pro-sexual Christianity has never been as popular as anti-sexual one, though when Christians talk too much about love addressed to everyone I feel originally it was an orgastic cult. At least, ancient Romans believed in Christian orgies with children according to Minucius Felix (*200) and in “Oedipal relations” between Christians according to Eusebius of Caesarea (260 – 340). But later all paedoerotic motives of the Christian culture (like the Song of Solomon 8:8, or marriage between St. Catherine and baby Christ shown in Rubens’es painting of 1627 – 1628) were interpreted non-literally by the Church. Why?
Hey! How do I format/edit/delete comments I’ve just made and haven’t been moderated????
[TOC: It’s the block quote part of your comment that went a bit wonky, right? I fixed it, so I hope you feel it looks OK now. I took the liberty of putting the quoted part as a single paragraph, even though several paras were better in the original. In quoted form it is more obviously a single quoted entity when rendered as a single para. However, this is open to objection on the grounds that it makes it look as though you have taken liberties with the original, so perhaps I should have signed my edit. I will do that if you want. In future, if you urgently want to alter a comment, it’s probably best to email me: tomocarr66@yahoo.co.uk This email address was on the About page the last time I looked.]
I think McCulloch is mostly right, if for the wrong reasons. It just so happens that today I have been doing some research on the doctrines of the early church (never mind why, we all have our private weaknesses). One of the earliest and most interesting documents from the earliest period of Christianity is a doctrinal statement called the Didache, or the “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” parts of which may predate the Gospels themselves. Looking through an English translation of it in a respectable anthology, I was surprised to find the commands: “You are not to murder, you are not to commit adultery, you are not to molest children, you are not to commit fornication…” Well that sounded a bit too smooth to be credible, so I went to the Greek. The phrase translated as “you shall not molest children” is “?? pa?d?f????se??” – a rather rare term which does seem to mean “have sex with boys.” Still, the attempt to make this term square with the semantic field of “child molestation” seems unnatural. In the Greek-speaking world of the first century, did pa?d?f????? carry the same implications as “molestation” or “abuse” today? That the writers of the Didache seem to have thought it appropriate to encompass it under the Old Testament commandment against adultery (and sexual immorality generally) suggests not (which, of course, is not to underestimate the severity with which adultery was viewed in Second Temple Judaism and indeed in the Roman world).
All this is to suggest that while the church did indeed condemn sex with boys from an early date, this was part of its attempt to separate itself from the sexual values of the Greco-Roman world, where pederasty was fairly common, along with a smorgasbord of other sexual behaviours. It was not, particularly, because such relationships were always seen to be “abusive,” though I imagine plenty of them were (and are any of us here actually in favour of child abuse??). Of course, the church would have taken an equally dim view of Professor McCulloch’s own proclivities – the Didache’s condemnation of p???e?a (fornication/sexual immorality) in the very next breath would certainly have included adult male homosexuality. What has changed over the last 1900 years is not the Church’s teachings on these activities, but the whole discursive context in which sexuality is constructed and experienced. “Homosexuality” has been constructed, and so has “child molestation”. Whether a first-century code of sexual ethics really speaks profoundly to the experience of modern people in this respect is an open question. A conservative hermeneutic might take it as evidence of the church’s general opposition to any sex outside of sacramental marriage; a more liberal reading might suggest that care for children and their protection has been an imperative for Christians throughout history. But glossing over the strangeness of the ancient world by, for example, translating pa?d?f????? as “a paedophile” (as one online Greek dictionary does!) is bad history and poor theology.
Goodness. What a boring post. TL:, as our Lord said, DR.
[TOC: Boring? Not at all! Extremely interesting!]
I’d like to read this book, but I don’t think that I can afford the time.
I’ve discussed this with Tom by private e-mail. Having listened to Sir Diarmaid on television, I believe that he has a vendetta against the Roman Catholic Church for insisting of celibacy amongst priests and for promoting celibacy as “spiritual excellence”. This in my opinion has caused Christendom at large to mistreat homosexual persons, including Sir Diarmaid. As an act of perhaps, unacknowkledeged, revenge, Sir Diamaid is now seeking to link celibacy to child sexual abuse. Seeing as he is a household name, it does not matter to him, at least for the forseeable future, that his arguments lack any academic credibility. I think we all know, that adult-child sex did not start in C17th as any study of ancient Greece will tell you. Seeing as Sir Diarmaid has such good academic credentials he can rely on people have blind faith for the forseeable future.
Some of the discussion here makes little sense to me because here we have such little access to what’s going on around the other side of the planet, apart from what gets filtered through the media and making even less sense.
So, to be fair, I downloaded ‘A History of Christianity’ and have been watching it. In the series, MacCulloch is merely arguing that the Roman Catholic Church is not catholic, but very specific.
This is not a new argument, and I have raised this issue of presumptive universal subjectivism here myself.
What I find unwarranted and annoying is MacCulloch’s somewhat Anglican triumphalism, but that’s hardly a vendetta merely someone typically up themself. The Poms are like that anyway. [TOC: Pom-bashing is a great Australian tradition, Gil, and cannot seriously be condemned as racist bearing in mind that those doing the finger-pointing are generally from the same racial background. But it is indiscriminately abusive. Slagging off British, or Anglo-American or Anglophone culture is one thing – or three things! – but bashing Poms per se is out of place in the civil and thoughtful discussion Heretic TOC aims to encourage.]
Rather than being stuck in the same rut, I am thinking lately that it might be worthwhile to assume instead that if paedophilic activity were made legal, what difference would it make, and to whom?
While access to some children might be facilitated, my view is that access to many other children would be made even more difficult, especially for career paedophiles arriving in a country, not part of the society, wanting to ‘line them up in the wire’ as one guy making his way through Asia like a sex tourist once related to me.
I don’t agree with that, and if I heard someone like that were in town, like most people I would do whatever I could to protect my kids from them. That’s the issue needing to be addressed.
If you did that, you would be run out of town. If something is made legal, in a few years it magically becomes acceptable, even obligatory (in its acceptance at least). Think gay marriage.
I have been attracted to the lowering of the age of consent. I am of the view that if you want minority groups to behave well, society has to treat them well. It is clear to me that the quality of homosexual relationships has improved considerably as a result of changes in the law and more tolerant attitudes. I think that there would be less abusive treatment of children if there were reforms of the law in this area. When one hears of child sexual abuse, I think we have to ask ourselves precisely what it is that makes adult-child sex abusive. I cannot help but feel that it is the taboo and the law that consolidates the power of the adult, thus making it abusive. In short, I believe it to be a problem of society’s own making. The paedophile is not the abuser of the child but the instrument of that abuse.
For some reason the point I continue to make continues to be missed; again, the tyranny of distance perhaps, though my sense of humour may also be getting in the way.
What is NOT being addressed here is not whether the age of consent is lowered, but assuming it is, whether it will be open slather for any adult to have sex with any child they wish.
I suggest not. The wrinkled aging Westerner floating around Asia trying to line children up ‘on the wire’ is common in this part of the world, drawing by far the most vociferous protest.
Sexual relations between individuals are always discriminate, always conflicting in some way, always needing to be carefully negotiated among numbers of significant others who in all events need to trust and be trusted.
No matter what laws are in place, there are always those who will be denied, and those who are missing out, and who will always find cause to complain, and seek to work actively around it.
And again, just because it is illegal neither means that nobody is doing it.
I continue to wonder how many activists for changing such laws are doing so because they are not getting any, or are getting it and don’t want to be caught.
These are not fine distinctions, but very relevant and immediate.
I’m not sure I think DM has a “vendetta” against the RCC, but – like an awful lot of English church historians – his whole outlook is quite stridently Protestant. There is a certain smugness and (in the old-fashioned sense of the word) bigotry about his attitude towards the Church of Rome that I find irritating, even though I’m an English churchman myself. I disagree with Gil about almost everything as a matter of habit and of pure principle, but “Anglican triumphalism” describes McCulloch’s manner really well – even though he’s an abject failure at being an Anglican (and really, how hard is that?).
Ah, we’ll get along very well indeed, disagreeing from habit or on principle is fine with me. I won’y disagree on fact, however, merely invite you here to make your own observations.
At least, Tom, you can be satisfied by having done the right thing! As adamjohn2 says, we must ask Sir Diarmid to EXPLAIN what truly he believes?
Like a guitar with one string, though, this likely to be somewhat limited. In fact, it is pre-destined to be that tired, OLD refrain — and never mind the historical facts.
M T-W.
Isn’t this interesting. One thing you learn quite as much in writing history as ethnography, is that people do not change.
It doesn’t matter one iota whether one lives in Medieval or Modern times. Then as now, it seems, one is not raising children to enter university, or find useful and rewarding employment, no matter how well validated in the outcome, one is sexually abusing them.
It doesn’t matter, at university anyway, whether one has been sexually abusing children, only whether public scandal erupts and the student intake from the most prestigeous private schools might fall in the next academic year.
I mean, think of our image. Perish the thought.
Games people play . . .
Which raises the intriguing question on how well a liberal school’s students who they allowed to have a bit of fun did in their exams, and later progressed through their careers, compared to another school’s students subject to an ascetic regime?
We have already disposed of Cantor’s supposed low cerebral white matter in paedophiles, and setting so-called CSA-related PTSD aside as non-existent (apart from those being wheeled out 40 years later seeking compensation for years on alcohol and drugs and/or imprisonment), I mean, what of the life trajectories of such children, and how are they affected one way or another?
The old notion of history as the unfolding of how things happen has been challenged. You point out in this post how modern accounts are offered about how we got to where we are now. That account is told by someone who has an agenda or a point of view, remember, the old notion of history has reduced its grip, however a problem remains. Modern history tellers involving sexual abuse want us to accept their version without question – they are saying this is how it is, there is no other account that can be offered!
Think what it must be like to live in a world with only black and white; with nary a shade of grey! M T-W.
It may well have been forgotten by now that the English spent centuries in Gaelic Scotland and Ireland first weeding out and killing all the traditional shenachies, in Ireland seanchaithe, prior to the plantations and enclosures.
With them was lost an open story-telling, narrative mode of historiophony to coin a phrase, which could be checked for accuracy because immediate, with audience licensed to interrupt and correct the speaker.
These days the ‘historian’ is allowed it seems to opt out with the insipid idea of agreeing to differ, whatever that’s supposed to mean. I’m glad that for most of my years as a local historian I was considered to be the community’s shenachie.
Having said that, I must say that I do agree with Diarmaid MacCulloch on the new Pope, on decentralising the Roman Church, and not least set aside the law on priestly celibacy.
That may perhaps be the basis of his decision not to engage you, Tom.