12/5/2005

by Louise Haggett

New Book Links Clergy Sexual Abuse to Mandatory Celibacy

Freeport, Maine—A new book entitled The Bingo Report links for the first time, sexual abuse to mandatory celibacy in the Roman Catholic priesthood. The report includes a 2004 update of a prior quantitative priest study, a 1999 victim study and a literary study, providing documentable evidence of the connection.

Some of the key points:

• Nurture rather than nature is the culprit in the clerical priesthood
• Unless he has received the gift/charism of celibacy (2%), the longer a priest is in the priesthood, the more he will struggle with mandatory celibacy, many leading to psychological problems, deviance and criminality
• The majority of priest perpetrators are not born perpetrators
• The profiles of both the prepetrators and the victims and characteristics of abuse are totally different from general population abuse, with the exception of abuse of adult women that mirrors abuse in other religious denominations as well as among the general public
• Clergy sexual abuse has nothing to do with homosexuality among priests, at least not in abuse that took place prior to 1980
• Priests freely admitted that the church disciplined only when the abuse became public knowledge
• The church hierarchy has been aware, through its own professional research, that priests cannot biologically or psychologically live up to their vows

According to author Louise Haggett, Director of the Center for the Study of Religious Issues, “For years, the church denied that clergy sexual abuse was more than a few isolated cases. The public now know the truth. Since 2002, the church has continued to deny that mandatory celibacy is linked to clergy sexual abuse. Ten years of sociological research say differently.”

“The evidence is so strong that we can predict a continuation of the crime as long as mandatory celibacy exists in the Roman Catholic priesthood. Every priest needs to read this report, every priest’s mother needs to read this report, indeed every Catholic needs to read The Bingo Report.”

According to Haggett, “We believe that Bingo will open doors to significant discussion and future research.”

The Bingo Report is available at a cost of $17.95 plus $3.95 shipping ($21.90) from CSRI Books, P.O. Box 246, Freeport, ME 04032.
The ISBN number is 0-9770402-0-8.
Contact: Louise Haggett, 207-729-7673/ cell: 508-740-3365
CSRI99@aol.com