The Faithful Departed

Philip F. Lawler’s The Faithful Departed: the Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture is an intelligent, thoughtful examination, by a committed Catholic (founder of Catholic World News) of what went wrong for the Catholic Church in Boston, a city which had been dominated by the Catholic Church for much of the twentieth century.

Prelate disaster
The initial focus is the sex abuse scandal. Lawler makes two key points about that. First, it was not errant priests who were the real blow to the credibility of the Church, but revelations about how much bishops had covered up abuse. This episcopal mendacity is an aspect of the scandal that Lawler holds the Church has continued to fail to address (p.xiii). Lawler notes that as early as 1985 US Bishops had received a confidential report on child abuse, and there had been court cases and payouts. Then, in 2002, a Massachusetts judge became the first to order public release of confidential Church documents and the full extent of episcopal cover-up and mendacity became public knowledge and public record: while a minority of priests where abusers, a majority of bishops were party to the cover-ups (Pp7-9).

Second, that the Church’s influence had been waning for decades. As a sign of this, Lawler notes that laws have been passed going against Church doctrine without a single dissenting vote by lawmakers. The “most painful” sign of the decline in Catholic influence being Massachusetts legalising same-sex marriage (p.4).

The essential problem Lawler sees as the hierarchy betraying Church doctrine and pastoral care in order to prop up the Church as an institution (Pp12-3). Lawler is judging the Church within an orthodox Catholic framework, arguing that it was betrayal of the divine mandate, the transcendental role of the Church, in order to further the institutional interests of the Church that was the fundamental problem. Hence the scandals being worst, and most disastrous, in Boston, where the process was most advanced, most successful (Pp14-5). What he is telling is a cautionary tale that Lawler holds carries lessons for any conservative Christian Church “fighting to preserve the integrity of the Gospel message against the advances of secularization” (p.16). The examples he lists of contentious issues – “abortion and contraception, divorce and same-sex marriage, sterilization and in vitro fertilization, stem-cell research and assisted suicide” (Pp16-7) – indicate how much issues of sex and gender are confrontation points. Issues with little actual Gospel support for most of the conservative Christian positions thereon.

Catholic struggle
Lawler then moves into a history of Catholicism in the US, particularly the Irish and particularly in Boston. It is a story of struggle against exclusion and discrimination. Alas, Catholic complaints about discrimination, given the appalling Catholic record of repression of (for example) the Jews, always come with a whiff of discount-for-hypocrisy. Especially when, as in Lawler’s case, no context is given for Protestant distrust of Catholics and Catholicism is given while he is clearly very much in favour of his same-sex oriented fellow citizens being denied equal protection of the law.

Still, it is a dramatic story, well told. The horror of the WASP elite as an overtly tribal Irish Catholic politician, James Michael Curley, proud of being convicted of fraudulent conduct because he “did it for a friend”, became mayor of Boston is well told (Pp30-1). The Catholic takeover did lower the probity of city government, but if one uses universal values as a weapon for tribal exclusion, you undermine the credibility of those values.

The cost of success
From a repressed minority, the Irish Catholics of Boston became a vigorous and confident majority: particularly under the episcopate of William O’Connell. O’Connell was a vigorous and successful administrator. Vocations, parishes, Catholic schools expanded greatly under his administration. He was an efficient and effective delegator, building up a system where institutionally effective priests were given considerable latitude and authority: this was the path to promotion (Pp33ff). In effect, O’Connell created, or at least was a prime facilitator of, a priestly managerialism (though Lawler does not use the term). Managerial authority and efficiency – the priest as professional – overtook vocation.
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O’Connell even had his own sexual scandal – a very heterosexual one – where his priest-nephew led a double life as a married man, possibly involving funds embezzled from the archdiocese. Cardinal O’Connell took years to do anything about it: a harbinger of things to come (Pp39ff).

Lawler then takes us through how mainstream, influential and self-confident postwar American Catholicism was. It had a positive “media presence” – a good relationship with Hollywood, a radio and later TV star in Father, then Archbishop, Sheen, who concentrated on pastoral advice, unlike the previous media star Father Coughlin (who Lawler casts as ‘fiery’, with the barest mention of accusations of anti-Semitism). Lawler presents the avuncular Cardinal Cushing, O’Connell’s successor and a practitioner of interfaith dialogue (his sister married a Jew and the Cardinal became a friend of his brother-in-law’s family) as the symbol of the era. A lenient man, friend of Joe Kennedy (who was very attentive to the institutional presence of the Church, rather than its teachings), publicly sympathetic to Jacqueline Kennedy when she married a divorced man, the Cardinal was at an appalled loss when confronted with angry students full of 60s rebelliousness. (Lawler never quite says so, but gives the impression that he would have preferred the Archbishop to have rejected, or at least publicly rebuked, his sister and his friend.) There was also an ongoing controversy over an evangelising Harvard priest, Father Feeney, who took a particularly strict version of no salvation outside the Church (Pp43ff).

So C20th Boston had two long-serving Cardinal-Archbishops: one who was respected, but not loved; one who was loved but not always respected. In 1960, a Catholic was elected President. In 1964, Catholics become the largest religious block in the US (as they still are). Yet the cultural revolution of the 1960s was sweeping through the US (and Western world more generally) (Pp53-4).

The distractions of democracy
Lawler is clearly a conservative Catholic, in both accepting Church authority and in politics: yet the most prominent political Catholic family were the Kennedy’s, notoriously liberal Democrats. This is an issue for Lawler, particularly given that they produced the first (and so far only) Catholic elected US President. Lawler examines candidate Kennedy’s September 12 1960 Houston speech to Baptist ministers where Senator Kennedy made it clear that he would not be an agent of the Catholic Church, that he would be guided by his private conscience. Lawler’s problem with this is that his speech in part signalled that on some of the issues of the day – recognising the Holy See, state aid to parochial schools, public funding of family planning – he would oppose Church teachings. Kennedy was accepting his position as the “tribal” Catholic but emancipating himself from the burdens of Church teaching. Lawler notes that he was following in the footsteps of Justice William Brennan who, at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, acknowledged the supremacy of the Constitution (Pp55-6).

Lawler comments:

But Kennedy’s message was—or at least should have been—unsettling to Catholics who believed that a properly formed conscience will adhere to the teachings of the Church (p.56).

The notion that the decisions of a serial group of celibate men operating in a particular tradition achieve a monopoly of moral truth is precisely what concerns people about Catholicism. How can someone be an agent of a wider society, or of a particular Constitution, while accepting that the decisions of a specific Church are always ultimately moral trumps? Particularly a Church with a somewhat grisly, intolerant and repressive past? If it had been up to the Catholic Church, Jewish emancipation would not have been achieved: nor intellectual freedom; nor religious freedom; nor sexual freedom. A story that Lawler does not tell, nor even allude to except in the most elliptical terms, is how outside pressures have forced change on quite basic issues of public life even in Catholic teaching (for example, on treatment of Jews). He is concerned with the Church’s failure to stand by its teachings without concerning himself with how those very teachings have evolved and what that implies about the Church’s own doctrines and processes.

Catholics may have become the largest religious bloc in the US, but it is still a majority Protestant country, with very different views of individual conscience and authority. The issue of Church authority and democratic agency is rather more complex than Lawler is implying.

It is all very well for Lawler to point out that the Church had failed to follow its own teachings in the child abuse cases, but those teachings are still decided upon by precisely the class of people who made such serially mendacious decisions, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction. Lawler wants to use the teachings of the Church as not only a benchmark to judge, but as a protection against, the implications of the Church’s profound moral failings. A certain selective blindness is required to carry this off. I am reminded of Orwell’s critique of Chesterton: that his commitment to the truth of Catholicism compromised his commitment to truth:

Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda.

Lawler strays into similar territory.

Lawler engages in a historical dissection and critique of the process by which being a Catholic politician came to have very little to do with following Catholic doctrine. He notes that the puritan elite of Boston had long been motivated by politics of salvation, this simply became more overtly focused on salvation in this world. (Modern progressivism does descend in part from transferred Protestant radicalism.)

What grieves him particularly about the process is that Catholic prelates led the way, accepting that religion was a matter of private belief, separate from public life. In 1965, when the Massachusetts legislature was debating on repealing a statewide ban of sale of contraceptives, Cardinal Cushing told a radio audience:

I am also convinced that I should not impose my position—moral beliefs or religious beliefs—on those of other faiths (p.60).

Lawler wants to differentiate Church teachings that are specifically religious (such as doctrines on the Trinity) with those which are based on natural law teaching (such as opposition to contraception and abortion): a separation between those with direct public policy implications and those without. This is also not a differentiation based on the authority of Church teaching – they are all equally that – but which are more readily open to building alliances and coalitions.

When a Democratic primary to replace Father Drinan (a Jesuit priest who, in defiance of the Church hierarchy, had repeatedly sought and been elected to the House of Representatives) was underway in 1980, Cardinal Medeiros issued a pastoral letter denouncing abortion and support for abortion. The timing was clearly aimed at supporting anti-abortion Arthur Clark over pro-abortion Barney Frank. There was a public outcry at religious interference in politics and Frank won the primary (Pp62-3). The notion that Catholic moral teachings apply only to Catholics had become widely accepted, becoming internalised even by those speaking for the Church (Pp63-4). Surely, the implication that Catholics ought to vote as a bloc was also causing some angst, not merely in defence of a position many disagreed with. (Though, in Lawler’s defence, many such commentators were and are completely comfortable with African-Americans voting as a bloc.)

For Lawler, the Church provides authoritative truth. Anyone can argue for something they believe is true: being a prelate gives one no special authority on such matters. Indeed, given the need to stay within doctrine, it may even be a handicap: particularly if such doctrine has decreasing resonance. In the wider society, that a Catholic prelate argues for it gives something no special authority. It may have importance, if it reflects a sizeable slice of opinion, but that is a separate question. The tension between Church authority, group identity and popular sovereignty is perhaps more complicated than a failure of the Church hierarchy to speak up for Church doctrine.

To put these issues in context, change ‘Catholic doctrine’ for ‘Sharia’ or ‘fatwa’ and how do Lawler’s arguments look? The claims of religious authority do not come in the “clearly right” and “clearly wrong” versions that Lawler implicitly claims. The state and public life must deal with them in general, not according to some form of privileging.


This review will be concluded in my next post.

Why Kids Kill Parents: Child Abuse and Adolescent Homicide

Criminologist Kathleen M. Heide’s Why Kids Kill Parents: Child Abuse and Adolescent Homicide is a lucid examination of how adolescents come to kill their parents. (Appropriately, the book was lent to me by a legal aid solicitor who is also a crime writer.)

Studying such acts (how much they are crimes rather varies) is inhibited by its taboo nature and its comparative rarity. In the US, between 1977 and 1986, more than 300 parents were killed each year. Which sounds like a lot, but is not in a country the size of the US: particularly given only a minority of the killers were adolescents. Few of the latter have been studied.

Fathers were killed at slightly younger ages than mothers, stepparents at slightly younger ages than biological parents. Adolescents were the killers for 15% of mothers killed, 25% of fathers, 30% of stepfathers and 34% of stepmothers. By comparison, only 10% of those arrested for homicide in the same period were under 18 (Pp3-4). (Children are wildly more at risk of abuse or murder by stepparents than by biological parents: the former likely affects the propensity for children to kill stepparents.)

The book is divided into three parts: facts and issues; case studies; implications, practical suggestions, and future directions.

The facts and issues section is fairly grim, but enlightening. Heide writes very clearly, which makes what she has to say more powerful. The first part includes things such as a nice differentiation of terror from horror:

Individuals experience horror when they are witnesses to events that are so shocking that their minds cannot fully comprehend them. Though there is no physical threat, the events are traumatizing to them and may stay lodged in their minds for years. Although fear may be an element of horror, the predominant feelings associated with horror are shock and dread, not fear. Individuals react with terror or experience intense fear when their physical survival is threatened. With terror, both body and mind are affected. Terror immobilizes the body just as horror stuns the mind. Events that are terrifying, unlike those that are horrifying, have a beginning and an end: one wins or loses, one escapes or is captured, one is assaulted or spared, one lives or dies (p.22).

Which is why people watch horror films for the intense experience but terrorism is a political strategy, and one that requires regular reinforcement to keep the fear alive.

So much of the story Heide tells is about power imbalances, abuse and despair. She is a notably clear and unsentimental thinker:

A child’s consent to be sexually expressive with a parent is meaningless because of differences in development and power between adult and child. A child who appears to consent to sexual behaviour with a parent may simply be acceding to the parent’s sexual demands in an unconscious effort to get his or her own needs for attention, affection, love, safety, and a sense of belonging met (p.23).

Her discussion of dysfunctional families is clear and comprehensive. But, as her analysis makes clear, understanding family dysfunction is necessary for understanding why children can be driven to kill their parents.

For that is what most such cases by children under 18 clearly involve. Heide covers physical, sexual, verbal, and psychological or emotional abuse, then physical and medical neglect, emotional neglect and emotional incest. Being a child of emotional abuse and neglect (a largely emotionally absent father, a very controlling mother apparently unable to provide praise or physical affection but very ready with the “why do you do this to me?” criticism) the analysis rang true for me. (The issue of abuse is largely independent of the question about whether parents love their children: indeed, if the child is convinced that the parent loves them, that can make the abuse more destructive, since the child is even more likely to blame themselves – after all, if a parent loves their child but shows no affection, then of course it must because the child is flawed and the parents are therefore heroic for loving such an unlovable person.)

Heide then examines the data concerning which youths kill. The serious study of such cases is relatively recent, the first study by a mental health professional being published in 1941 with fewer than a dozen case studies specifically addressing adolescent parricide appearing from then to the publication of Heide’s Why Kids Kill Parents. Her assessment interviews with about 75 adolescents charged with murder or attempted murder, which included seven cases of adolescents who killed parents, thus provide a significant expansion of available data (Pp35-6). She tabulates data from previous case studies to identify commonly identified factors (Pp40ff).

Heide notes that the small number of cases of adolescents killing parents makes it clear that it is impossible to identify which children will kill, but it is possible to identify which youths are at risk. She identifies the key risk factors as:

(1) The youth is raised in a chemically dependant or other dysfunctional family.
(2) An ongoing pattern of family violence exists in the family.
(3) Conditions in the home worsen, and violence escalates.
(4) The youth becomes increasingly vulnerable to stressors in the home environment.
(5) A firearm is readily available in the home (p.44).

A friend who was raised by a physically abusive malignant narcissist of a mother said the only useful thing his father did was bring home a copy of Lord of the Rings when he and his brother were 13 and 15, so that they were able to see what was happening in their house was small stuff and there were much bigger issues in a much wider world.

Heide identifies the characteristics of functional families before moving on to dysfunctional families. The rules of dysfunctional families can be identified as: don’t talk, don’t trust, and don’t feel (p.48). Needless to say, children in dysfunctional families are far more at risk of abuse than functional families. The children of addicted parents, for example, are at very high risk of emotional neglect. Part of the problem being that the non-addicted parent is often so busy attending to the issues arising from their partner’s alcoholism, drug use, gambling or whatever they have no emotional attention left for their children (Pp49-50).

This all leads to isolation as a serious problem for children of dysfunctional families. A pattern of increasing abuse, murder of partner or flight by the non-abusive parent followed by, in the case of flight, the child being expected to take over more and more household responsibilities (which both stresses the child and provides more points of potential conflict) is likely. If a downward spiral continues, the situation may become increasingly intolerable. If a firearm is present, the chance of the child killing the parent rises dramatically (Pp50ff).

The presence of firearm is the most common risk factor: 82% of fathers, 75% of stepfathers, 65% of mothers and 56% of stepmothers murdered by juveniles were killed by a firearm of some sort (p.53). Clearly, the pattern partly reflects whether a firearm more easily overcome an imbalance in size and strength.

Heide then examines the legal and psychological issues, since the two interact: particularly, but not only, in the question of mental competence at the time of the act – there is also the issue of whether the child is in situation of continual threat even if the threat was not immediate at the time of the killing. Part of the story here is increasing, if still erratic, understanding that there is often a much larger story behind the final, possibly desperate, act.

But part of the problem is the genuine complexities. If one puts homicides on two axes (intention to kill, desire to hurt) then we can identify situational (low desire to hurt or kill), intentional (low desire to hurt, high intent to kill), emotionally reactive (high desire to hurt, low intent to kill) and nihilistic (high desire to hurt and to kill) murders. Identifying which a case falls into is important, both for justice and because nihilistic killers are likely to remain dangerous individuals (Pp60ff).

In Part II, Heide precedes the case studies with an examination of assessment and its implications. This really ticked some boxes for me. Heide starts with:

Understanding why a particular youth killed a parent requires knowledge of the adolescent, his or her family, and the home environment (p.67).

This is why I tend to be deeply sceptical of therapy: the counsellor or therapist is, far too often, completely dependant on what the client tells them for their knowledge of the particular case. Taking into account self-delusion, ignorance, failure of perception, etc, how likely is this to be reliable information? Let alone sufficient information. Narcissists, for example, often get worse under counselling or therapy, as it validates their emotions – the physically abusive malignant narcissist of a mother mentioned above once announced to her children that her therapist had agreed she had not been hard enough on them (apparently, she should have broken more of their bones: in reality, the therapist probably had no idea that broken bones were an issue).

Forensic psychologist Nigel Latta’s point that he never bothers reading case files, since that is only a record of the lies the offender has told previous clinicians, may apply with particular force with the sex offenders who are his clients but the problem is extendable. Especially given Latta can use the trial records to find out what happened, a source of information not normally available about clients of therapy.

But it is worse than that. According to an article in Quadrant by Dale Atrens, Reader Emeritus in Psychobiology at the University of Sydney:

Treatments ranging from old-fashioned talk therapy through to modern cognitive-behavioural therapy are typically little better than placebos. Almost any treatment produces some benefit in the short-term. Alas, this therapeutic benefit is often short-lived. Therapy typically becomes less effective over time. More is not better: it is worse. Strange medicine

For example, those subject to therapeutic debriefing after a traumatic event are 22% more likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder after 3 to 5 months: one study that they were three times more likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder after 12 months than those who did not de-brief. Similarly, folk who “go it alone” in quitting smoking (or drug addiction, or gambling) are much more likely to stop and keep to it than those use therapy or support groups.

Between the wish that there be an effective available treatment and contemporary belief in The Awesome Power of Words, a dangerous superstition is widely supported: even, at times, legally mandated.

None of which negates Heide’s point that an in-depth personality assessment, analysis of the family dynamics and the home environment of the adolescent killer is necessary to understand what went on.

The three case studies Heide presents are fascinating, in a grim sort of way. They also include analysis, comments and asides on psychological processes and personality disorders. Such as:

The narcissist is absorbed with his image and invests himself in maintaining an image rather than being who he is (p.121).

Not quite how I would put it: I would say the narcissist invests in maintaining a fictional self rather than facing reality inconvenient to that such that their convenience becomes their reality principle. They invest rather a lot in being narcissistic.

Depressingly, there is evidence that narcissism is increasing and empathy decreasing, at least in the US. But wasn’t it John Kenneth Galbraith, or possibly Gore Vidal, who said the advantage of sharing a planet with the US is that you get to see what was going to happen in your society before it did?

The most vivid story is, however, not from any of the three in-depth case studies, but one that Heide relays in her Preface: of a 16 year old boy with two older sisters, who had left home, leaving him the sole target of abuse, trying to sneak out to leave himself. The house was arranged so he had to go through his parents’ bedroom. His father wakes up, knocks him down, pushes him over when he got up, then backs him into a closet. Which had a loaded shotgun. The terrified juvenile then shot his father. At this point, his mother awoke and sat up. The terrified juvenile then shot her too. In trying to recount the incident later, the teenager reported:

when she sat up in bed … the agony within the terror … The rest of its is more or less, sort of hazed out for me. I remember waking up completely. Standing there looking at the two bodies. Two people. What have I done now, you know. Like it was a dream (p.xiii).

Four petitions detailing neglect, abuse and physical abuse had been filed about that household. Three have been filed in the previous two years, all naming the son as being subject to abuse. He spent three months in foster care with an older sister and her husband. Then nine months in supervised care back with his parents. As Heide reports:

Ten months after the state agency terminated supervision, Mr and Mrs Adams were dead. Terry Adams was charged with two counts of first-degree murder (p.xiv).

Terry pled guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, was sentenced to life imprisonment and released on parole after seven years. The sentencing judge had presided over the dependency proceedings.

So, what to do? Heide is a supporter of therapy beginning as soon as possible after the killing and based, as indicated, on thorough and careful assessment. The issues she discusses are basically about providing after-the-fact replacement-parenting. While the discussion of the pattern and consequences of abuse is perspicacious, there is, alas, good reason to be sceptical about the prospects of therapeutic success. (Though Heide is, at least, advocating a course of action that avoids the normal epistemic problems of therapy.)

One of the themes is how often teachers, neighbours, relatives did nothing when told of abuse. Terry Adams is eloquent about why one should respond to a child who tells of abuse, while another case study killer, Scott Anders, is bitter about those who would not believe, would not help, when he told them. Since a sense of isolation and despair – that it will never get better – seems to be a key factor in adolescents killing their parents, this is a powerful point. (When I intimated to my mother’s younger sister – my Godmother – that there may have been a few issues with my upbringing, her response was so defensive of my mother – and hence so dismissive of what I had to say about my experience – that we have not spoken since. And I was in my 40s: how much more easily dismissed is a child or teenager?)

Heide suggests a range of measures such as having easily available classes in child development and parenting skills and school courses in child abuse and neglect (though the latter immediately make me wonder what use toxic kids may make of such information). Heide makes a point that is easily forgotten:

Abuse and neglect are not always obvious to their victims. When abuse and neglect are discussed in university classes, some students become aware for the first time that they were abused or neglected as children (p.54).

Or, in my case, they read an appropriate blog post by a psychblogger. If abuse and neglect are your “normality” and have been for years, are what you grew up with, it can be very hard to see it for what it is. Which helps create the pattern that Heide notes, that abusive parents were often abused children.

Heide suggests that Florida’s volunteer child guardian system is one worthy of wider adoption (Pp157ff). If isolation and despair are risk factors, providing an effective support and advocacy network is clearly likely to be beneficial. Heide suggests that the media can usefully popularise the existence of help services and centres, again breaking down the isolation and despair. Most of all, Heide hopes that criminal justice systems show intelligent mercy for an abused child driven to kill their parent or parents.

She concludes the main part of her text (there is a brief appendix, summarising the statistical evidence) with a story attributed to the Minnesota Literacy Council:

An old fisherman stood on the beach watching a young boy at the shoreline. As the fisherman approached, he saw that the boy was picking up starfish, which had been washed ashore by the waves, and was throwing them back into the sea. When the fisherman caught up with the boy, he asked the boy what he was doing. The boy did not stop his effort as he told the fisherman that he was throwing the starfish back into the sea so that they could live. If left until the morning sun, the starfish would die. The fisherman’s eye scanned the beach, revealing thousands of starfish ashore. He said, “But, son, there are thousands upon thousands of starfish on the beach. What difference can your actions possibly make?” As the boy hurled another starfish into the sea, he looked the old man in the eye and said, “It makes a difference to this one” (p.161).

Patterns of priestly abuse

This extends comments I made here and here. There is also a useful discussion of the “threat” to attempt to arrest Pope Benedict here.


The Catholic priesthood has likely always been disproportionately same-sex oriented. St Peter Damien complained about a "sodomite" Church-within-the-Church in the C11th. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's classic study Montaillou found evidence from the C14th of homosexual networks which were urban and clerical. Since Church teaching gave them no legitimate social space or erotic life other than celibacy, of course same-sex oriented men went into the priesthood: it gave their celibacy "more value" and was a way of "proving" that God did not hate them, of being "the best little boy in the world". It was well understood for generations that that "that sort of boy" would be steered into the Church.

What happened in the postwar period was that the social space for homosexuality expanded, so that those who went into the priesthood to escape their sexuality were paying an ever higher price in what they were giving up. It is not surprising that abuse increased. (I am referring here not to paedophilia as such, but primarily the inappropriate sexual relations with teenage boys.)

But, and here's the big "but", the same general patterns of social change were operating for all the Churches. It is the Catholic Church specifically which had an abuse problem of particular intensity and extent, both because it had so many priests who were refugees from their own sexuality and because the hierarchy—as celibates themselves—were far too solicitous of erring priests and far too dismissive of the pain and suffering of the abused. Being celibates, they did not have the visceral "it might be MY child" response one would get in the Protestant churches. Being priests, they held protecting priestly authority to be the most important issue, and, following Catholic teaching on sex, they judged sex in terms of its form, not in terms of its human experience. It is all very well to talk about "the Sexual Revolution of the 60s" but one needs to also focus on the very specifically Catholic nature of the extent of the problem.
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Note also that I am talking of the internal procedures of the Church, not their interaction with the civil authorities. Laying down Church policy for a global institution means covering a vast array of different polities and regimes, with the Church having often have very fraught interactions with various regimes. The Nazis, for example, used accusations of paedophile priests in an orchestrated attack on the Church in response to Pope Pius XI’s attack on Nazism. As a knowledgeable interlocutor has said in an email to me:

… it's impossible to understand the Church's "cover-up" policy, as we'd now call it, without understanding its relationship to civil governments going back to the Investiture controversy, Garibaldi, the Masonic French Third Republic, etc etc. The Nazis were just one instance (though one much in mind since the Nazis were still in Rome in 1944.)

A “one size fits all” policy has inherent problems. A city of Boston that is democratically run, has a Catholic majority—particularly among judges and priests—and operates in a democratic federal Republic where overt Christianity is entirely respectable is not quite the same as dealing with Nazi Germany. Indeed, one can argue that, precisely because the civil authorities were so friendly (and known to be so) that the Church hierarchy was particularly inadequate in its response within the Boston archdiocese. (Something similar may also apply in Ireland.)

But, the issue of making policy for the globe and such a range in Church-state interactions conceded, the internal failures of the Church loom large. Made worse by senior Vatican figures giving every appearance of being lost in their own moral universe, as the Pope’s preacher compares attacks on the Church over child abuse to anti-Semitism, the Vatican Secretary of State claims paedophilia is linked to homosexuality (not true and the Vatican is now trying to back away from) while Vatican radio blames an “anti-Catholic hate campaign”. They come across as morally tone deaf in a profound way, that just makes everything worse.

Some of the criticism is unfair: but mostly the Church has made a rod for its own back and is continuing to do so.

Suffer the little children

Summaries of Catholic priest sexual abuse scandals in various countries can be found in a sidebar in a Der Spiegel article on spreading sexual abuse scandals in Germany.

There are two aspects to such scandals: that the abuse occurred in the first place and the reaction of the Church hierarchy to cases of abuse.

Patterns of abuse
The former seems to be a mixture of opportunity (priests and other religious were placed in regular and authoritative proximity to vulnerable children and teenagers) and patterns of motivation. If one felt one’s own sexuality was problematic, then the celibacy of becoming a priest (or other religious) became a refuge: a place to hide from one’s sexuality. This includes genuinely problematic sexuality (notably paedophilia) and sexuality made problematic only by doctrine (homosexuality). Hence, according to American data (which is the most comprehensive) the only group where a majority of victims were female were the victims aged 7 years or less and almost a third of the victims were aged 15-17, with the proportion of male victims rising with age.

It is clear that the Catholic priesthood has always been disproportionately single-sex attracted. Peter Damien complained about a “sodomite” “Church within the Church” in the C11th; Ladurie’s classic study Montaillou found homosexual networks in the C14th which were urban and clerical; while modern estimates of the proportion of Catholic priests who are homosexual range quite highly, but it is clearly much higher than in the general population.

Given that the same-sex attracted are a persistent proportion of the population and Catholic doctrine essentially requires them to be celibate, of course they took refuge in the priesthood: it made their celibacy useful, provided status and “proved” that God did not hate them. It was a way of being “the best little boy in the world”.

Which, as I have previously discussed, was probably a relatively stable situation until gay communities started coalescing after the Second World War. As the legitimate social space for being homosexual expanded, those choosing the priesthood as a refuge were, in effect, paying an ever higher cost in foregone opportunities. Hence the pattern of rising rates of abuse from the 1950s to the early 1980s followed by a sharp drop. The drop being a product of the priesthood stopped being a “safe haven” for abuse as priests were increasingly prosecuted; training for the priesthood improved; and more same-sex attracted priests were motivated by genuine vocations than “making the best of bad options”.

The moral failure of the Church hierarchy
The reaction of the Church hierarchy had three features: complicity, denial, acceptance that there was a genuine problem, with each feature being dominant in turn.

Priestly celibacy not only made the priesthood a refuge from personal sexual turmoil, it also meant that the official Church response was by male celibates. That is, men who were not fathers so who lacked the visceral reaction of “that could be MY child” which clearly marked the reaction of many Catholic parents once they became aware of the extent of the problem.

Lacking that visceral reaction, it is clear that the hierarchy’s dominant concern throughout has been protecting priestly authority. Hardly surprising, it is the dominating motivator of the behaviour of the Catholic Church generally. For example, most of those who organised the Holocaust were born and raised Catholic yet no one was ever excommunicated for the Holocaust. Conversely, if you challenge priestly authority, then excommunication is extremely likely.

So—in order to protect priestly authority—for decades the Church hierarchy was essentially complicit in abuse: shuffling abusing priests around rather than dealing with the problem, trying to deny the extent of the problem and only publicly dealing with it when it had got to the stage that failing to do so would cause even more damage.

But there was a more subtle problem with Church doctrine. Catholic (and Orthodox) teaching on sexuality is the Christian natural law position: the final cause of sex is procreation so the only legitimate form of sex is unimpeded penile-genital intercourse within marriage. Despite the burbling on about the joys of “unitive sex”, human experience is irrelevant: the form is everything.

So, for example, if a husband gives his wife a massage, that is fine. If he also gives his wife orgasms from oral sex, that is evil. The pleasure of the wife, that it be an act of love by the husband, that is all irrelevant: such sex is wrong in form, so evil.

Which means the human experience of sex does not matter, only the form matters. (Remembering it does not matter if the husband is sterile and/or the wife post-menopausal--i.e. procreation is impossible--as long as the form of unimpeded penile-vaginal sex within marriage is adhered to.) Now, as it happens, Jesus had something to say about thinking form matters over human purposes, but that apparently does not count.

But, if it is the form of sex that matters—not the human experience of it—then that encourages adherents of such views to not merely discount the human experience of sex in joy (as they clearly do: the anathematisation of homosexuality profoundly discounts human experience and human agency) but also in abuse (as they clearly did in so many child abuse cases).

So, Catholic doctrine and practise is directly connected to the moral failures—particularly the massive moral failures of the Church hierarchy—exposed by the abuse scandals.

While it is tempting to quote Matthew 12:33-36 on knowing things by their fruits, the more appropriate passage is when Jesus talks about what is or is not “unclean” and quotes Isaiah:

"'These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.' You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men."

Priestly abuse and rational choice

Want to hook up with a gay guy at university? Go to a seminarian party. That the Catholic priesthood is strongly disproportionately gay helps explain why the priestly sexual abuse of minor cases are overwhelmingly of males (along with access: when in 1994 the Church allowed girls to be altar assistants, the proportion of female victims of clerical sexual abuse rose). But, given that gays are such a small proportion of the population, if they are a large proportion of seminarians and priests, then naturally the average level of vocation is probably going to be lower. The real point being that Catholic doctrine doesn’t give believing gay Catholics much choice: decreed to lives of erotic solitude by Church doctrine, the priesthood becomes the least-worst option for gay Catholics who accept the Church’s teaching on sexuality. A point reinforced by one study that found only 1-in-7 heterosexual priests strayed from celibacy, but 3-in-8 homosexual priests did while 76% of heterosexual priests said they would certainly chose the priesthood again but only 53% of homosexual priests did.

The above figures come from a fascinating rational choice analysis of priestly sexual abuse of minors—Sexual Misconduct of Roman Catholic Priests: A Rational Choice Perspective by Christine Brickman—whose major flaw is a failure to grasp this point about why Catholic priests are so disproportionately homosexual.
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The version of the study I found when it was online was a draft, and had a few obvious editing mistakes (note 13 says falsely perceived by homosexuals when it clearly means heterosexuals, on page 13 it says uncompromising positions when it means compromising positions) and uncompleted footnotes. But it is still full of information and a largely persuasive analysis. The model adopts a two-stage rational choice model of deviant behaviour. The first stage is a matter of constraints (resources and standards) and the second of utility maximisation:

expected utility = benefit of crime – (probability of punishment * cost of punishment)

It uses the data from the John Jay study of priestly abuse from 1950-1992. The study found a low, but rising, level of abuse in the period to 1960, a high and rising level of abuse in the period 1960-1980 and a rapidly falling level of abuse since 1980. The author divides this into the pre-conciliar period to 1965, the conciliar period 1965-1980 and the post-conciliar period. This does not quite accord with the evidence given the sharp increase in 1960-65, but if one assumes that conciliar changes were ‘in the wind’ before Vatican II wound up, it does not seem a major problem.

Basically, the author argues that, prior to the Vatican II changes going through, priestly training (particularly in assisting developing psycho-sexual maturity) was poor. Strong normative constraints kept this in check prior to 1960 (though rates of abuse were rising). Vatican II and the social changes of the 1960s saw a loosening of constraints (both internal and external) that resulted in a sharp rise in abuse coinciding with a flight from the priesthood (reducing the incentive of the Church to deal with the issue in the face of a priest shortage). In the post-conciliar period, strong normative constraints were re-imposed, priestly spare time and other access declined, the likelihood of punishment increased and training improved (the average age at ordination also rose significantly). Hence the lowering levels of abuse, and a rise in the average age of the victim over the 52 year period of the study from 11.5 to 13.87 years. (In the period 1990-2002, 55% of victims were boys aged 15-17, 30% were girls aged 15-17: the proportion of victims who were 15-17 year old boys had risen continually from almost 20% in the 1950s, while the proportion who were 15-17 year old girls had risen from almost 10% in the 1950s to almost 30% in the 1970s then plateaued.)

The author notes that elementary economic theory would predict homosexual priests would be more likely to abuse than heterosexual priests: if it is harder for a homosexual than a heterosexual priest to have a sexual relationship with an adult (likely on simple available-partners grounds) but the cost is greater for a heterosexual priest (since folk tend to be more outraged by abuse of girls and homosexuality is already disapproved of), then it follows that the relative cost of sex with a minor is less for a homosexual than a heterosexual priest. Of course, this is, at least in part, a typical case of disapproved behaviour on the part of the objects of bigotry being a consequence of said bigotry. (Jews being banned from owning land or otherwise insecure in their property rights going into money-lending, pawnbroking and other activities involving intellectual capital being a classic example of such.)

There may be some legality effect also: if all homosexual relations are illegal, then the relative cost of having sex with a minor is also lower.

The author further notes that if more homosexuals become priests and homosexual self-identification increases—what she calls

a problematic rise of homosexual subcultures within seminaries

theory would predict abuse becomes more likely. But, of course, Catholic doctrine itself both encourages believing gay Catholics to be disproportionately drawn to the priesthood—since it already enjoins celibacy for them making the celibacy cost of the priesthood lower for homosexuals than heterosexuals, with a likely lower level of vocation—while also putting them under greater psychological stress. The sort of stress that, as the author notes, psychological research suggests makes inappropriate sexual expression more likely.

Futhermore, if the social space for homosexuality expands (more gay neighbourhoods, more openly gay people), the cost of celibacy for homosexual priests would rise because there would be more sense of an alternative being available after all. Eventually, you would get to the situation where there were fewer homosexual men entering the priesthood as their “least bad option” and a higher level of vocation amongst those who did. This would fit with the average age of the priest at the time of the first incident rising—with the average age being 38 in the 1950s, 37 in the 1960s & 1970s, 42.5 in the 1980s and 47 in the 1990s—and with the drop in levels of abuse.

The issue of wider social choices also has implications for the age of victims. A third (33%) of victims were 15-17 and of them 84% were male. The percentage of the victims who were female rises as the age lowers, with the 1-7 age group being the only ones where a majority of victims were female (51%). A celibate priesthood can be a refuge for anyone who feels their sexuality to be problematic for whatever reason. So the older victims tend to reflect homosexuality being problematic due to Church doctrine, the younger victims paedophilia being problematic for more basic reasons.

The other effect priestly celibacy would have is that the senior priests making decisions in dealing with abuse would not be parents themselves, so more likely to identify with the accused priest than the victim, hence the notoriously inadequate response of the Church hierarchy, particularly prior to about 1980.

While the author is generally perspicacious about the influences after ordination, she does not seem to have entirely thought through why Catholic priests are disproportionately gay in the first place, and the implications thereof. But, that aside, it is a thought-provoking and informative study.

Deliver Us From Evil

Amy Berg’s documentary on priestly child-abuse Deliver us from evil is extremely well done. Apart from occasional short statements up on the screen, there is no narration. Victims, their families, their helpers, a paedophile priest and excerpts from depositions by senior clergy speak for themselves.

So, watching it, one alternates between disbelief, horror, rage, sympathy and a certain numb awareness. Having read Betrayal, the Boston Globe book on the priest scandals, I was aware of the background but there is an immediacy to listening to the slow build up from families and victims, interspersed by comments with Oliver O’Grady (“Father Ollie”), a paedophile priest, which is very powerful.

The lack of narration and the slow build-up makes the recounted experiences more vivid. A psychologist who specialises in dealing with victims of clergy abuse pointed out the importance of the lack of sexual experience, and family ties, within the hierarchy in explaining the pattern of evasion and cover-up. A lawyer who has years on such cases tells us that, having spent 23 years listening to depositions, he has encountered evasion, deceit, lies and perjury from cardinals, archbishops, bishops and senior clergy.

A priest and canon lawyer who is an advocate for the victims and their families points out that the monarchical structure of the Church—and the ambition of members in it—is central to understand the cover-ups. The scapegoating of homosexual priests is mentioned in passing: the psychologist points out that most paedophiles are heterosexual. (That is, sexual interest in children of whatever gender is a different matter from the direction of adult sexual interest.) The point is also made that, as all sex was forbidden to priests, it was all just "bad sex": the nature of the victims did not differentiate in the eyes of the hierarchy.

Father O’Grady was a priest in California, in the diocese of Stockton whose Bishop—Cardinal-Archbishop of Los Angeles—was clearly ambitious for higher office and continued the pattern (seen again and again by Catholic hierarchs in cases of paedophile priests) of simply transferring O’Grady to a new parish every time there was a “problem”.

Deliver us from evil is a very powerful film about an appalling problem and deeply entrenched institutional moral failure.

Betrayal

Betrayal: the Crisis in the Catholic Church by Boston Globe reporters covers the Catholic church child-sex abuse scandal. The scandal was concentrated in—but hardly restricted to—the Boston archdiocese, the only US archdiocese where Catholics are a majority of the population and the Cardinal Archbishop was expected to be a tribal leader.

At some point, gay folk tend to take the hateful, deceitful and hypocritical nature of the Catholic Church—and particularly the Church hierarchy—for granted. Yet the story that Betrayal tells is so shocking and outrageous, that it goes beyond one’s worst expectations. The title itself comes from a quote from Cardinal Archbishop Law, driven out of office by the scandal:

Betrayal hangs like a heavy cloud over the Church today.

The book starts with the Rev John J. Geoghan case as the trigger point for the public explosion of the scandal. Geoghan was an unrepentant serial predator. In a court case, the role of Cardinal Law in protecting Geoghan came to light. A story about a child molesting priest became a story about the Church hierarchy protecting a child molesting priest which became a story about a pattern of abuse, abusers and the complicity of the hierarchy.

Which turned out to extend way beyond Boston and way beyond Cardinal Law—Bishops resigned in the US, Poland and Ireland (p.4). The moving of accused priests from parish to parish was a common pattern (p.5). The Santa Fe archdiocese and Dallas diocese were both threatened with bankruptcy over law suits from victims (pp.42-3).
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There is a chapter on the Geogham case. Geogham was a completely un-self-reflective offender: regularly being accused, regularly being moved and “cured”, regularly re-offending. A pattern ultimately extending across decades.

A chapter on the pattern of cover-ups follows. Then a chapter on the predators, focusing on various individual priests. One Paul Shanley is a pin-up boy for everyone’s prejudices. Openly gay, sexually radical, connected to the man-boy “love” movement, Shanley publicly and flagrantly contradicted Church doctrine. Yet was protected every bit as thoroughly as any other of the paedophile priests. Doctrine wasn’t important: protecting the authority of the priests and the standing of the Church was.

The chapter on the victims is fairly harrowing. Then a chapter on the eruption of the full extent of the scandal in to the public limelight—particularly after the Boston Globe Jan 31 2002 report that scores of priests were involved—and the resulting public anger.

Chapter 6, The Decline of Deference looks at the damage in the standing of the Church. One theme is that career women—naturally pre-disposed to be a bit askance at the claims of the Church hierarchy—were important in various breakthrough prosecutions and judgements. While married men had been very much part of the soft-complicity the Church had relied on (such as exempting priests from mandatory reporting laws, p.134). However, once the extent of the problem became increasingly obvious, it was precisely such married men who felt most betrayed and very angry.

Kevin Burke, DA in Essex County puts it well:

… what really struck me, in communications with the archdiocese, was that there was never any concern shown for the victims. Not the slightest nod of concern for these young people whose lives were turned upside down by this abuse. In hindsight, it’s striking and shocking that Church leaders failed to meet their moral responsibility. … They weren’t sorry for what happened to those kids. They were sorry they got caught. I don’t think the cardinal and the rest of the hierarchy ever really got that they were dealing with kids here. I don’t think they see that even today. They see them as adults coming forward, not as kids to whom this despicable stuff was done (p.130).

As does Attorney-General Reilly:

What really offended me was knowing how the Church had been harsh on and intolerant of people who had done things which, by comparison, paled in significance. Look at the way the Church treats divorced Catholics, like pariahs, not allowed to remarry in the Church. Look at how intolerant and tough they were on gay people< (p.130).

Or on a 72-year old nun who was evicted for baptizing two boys:

This was a nun who gave her life to the Church. And then look at how they treated priests who raped children. We throw this word abuse around, and it’s a nice, inoffensive word. In many of these cases, it wasn’t abuse. It was rape. They were raping children. Where’s the indignation? Where’s the moral outrage? The intolerance and the hypocrisy of the Church lies at the heart of a lot of this. All of this came to a slow boil for me. To be covering up for those who rape children while being so judgemental of others, the hypocrisy is just breathtaking (p.131).

Of course, both protecting paedophile priests and expelling the nun protected the authority of priests. While dealing with the pain caused by Catholic doctrine would imply the Church had been wrong on major matters, with all sorts of implications for its authority.

The chapter ends with a chilling case of a brother and sister whose abuser was prosecuted. The prosecutor in question became a judge and was shocked, ten years, later to find the girl suicidal and the boy working on the streets as male prostitute (pp 138ff).

A chapter on Cardinal Law follows: his ambition (he wanted to be the first American Pope) and moral failure. Then a chapter on sex and the Church, including issues such as homosexuality, celibacy, use of in-house treatment centres and seminary training. (The last has clearly improved greatly in recent years.) The wish by the hierarchy to scapegoat homosexuals and homosexuality was clear early on. Not helped by a refusal to separate paedophilia from homosexuality, despite lots of evidence that homosexuality has no more to do with paedophilia than heterosexuality does.

It is certainly true that much of the betrayal of trust with adolescents was homosexual and that the priesthood is disproportionately homosexual. But the priesthood always has been. St Peter Damian denounced a secret “sodomite” church-within-the-church in the C11th. Ladurie’s classic study Montaillou reports networks of homosexuals who were urban and clerical. Given that Catholic doctrine decrees no social place for the same-sex oriented—and for centuries the Church successfully laboured so that there would be no public place for them—where else did they have to go except the Church?

The ninth and last chapter is about efforts for change in the Church either encouraged or created by the scandal. It includes the (correct) suggestion that the Cardinals would likely choose an elderly successor to John Paul II upon his death, in part to encourage decentralisation from Rome, since long reigns encourage centralisation (p.201). An Afterword brings things up to date.

There is no equivalent in the Protestant Churches in the US for this sustained indifference by the Catholic hierarchy to the molestation and rape of children. In the words of a sociologist who studies clerical misconduct:

There are absolutely no Protestant equivalents … You don’t have rapacious serial predators and the Protestant establishment doesn’t tolerate it the way the Catholic establishment has (p.167).

Why? Betrayal reports rather than analyses. Still, conclusions can be drawn.

The most obvious reason is a simple, even banal one: the Protestant establishment is overwhelmingly married-with-kids. They were much more likely to empathise profoundly with any abused children and the parents because they were parents themselves.*

The second reason is the centrality given to priestly authority. It is clear that, again and again, protecting the authority of the priesthood trumped protecting children. It is the same outlook which effectively holds that one can kill any number of Jews and not get excommunicated (Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann were all born and raised Catholic, none were ever excommunicated): but threaten priestly authority and excommunication will be wheeled out.

There is a third, less obvious, reason: the patterns of Catholic doctrine.

Catholic doctrine on sex is not a structure of morality based on human purposes, but one of taboos based on form and function: one based profoundly on ignoring people’s (inconvenient) feelings and aspirations, no matter how intense and heartfelt. Not merely ignoring them, but deeming them of no warrant (or worse).

Any system of taboos parading as a system of morality must be fundamentally based on the denial of human feeling and aspirations, no matter how intense such feelings. The Catholic hierarchy were just doing what comes naturally according to the underlying patterns of Catholic doctrine. It was just a matter of ranking taboos, and the taboos of priestly authority and the standing of the Church came first.

So, again and again, people in priestly authority steeped in Catholic doctrine ignored the (inconvenient) intense feelings and experiences of the victims of sexual predators, not despite being steeped in Catholic doctrine but as a natural consequence of being so steeped. The (inconvenient) experiences of the children—not matter how intense—could be (and were) systematically treated to be of much lesser importance, indeed discounted and ignored: sacrificed to maintaining priestly authority. Thereby following the underlying pattern of Catholic doctrine: with no parental feelings to counteract them.

A couple of thousand years ago, some words were uttered to another group who thought rules about forms and taboos were the best way to serve God: were, in fact, the Word of God. Words that have certainly not lost their potency.

* One may then well wonder if that does not have wider implications for Catholic doctrine. Yes, of course it matters for Catholic doctrine that it is the creation of celibate males. That truth-is-true regardless of who propounds it shields Catholicism from considering this point. If however, Catholic doctrine is seen as something other than merely The Considered Truth, that doctrine on sexual matters is only-decided-by-celibate-males immediately becomes more problematic.

Father Figure

It would be wrong to call Beverley Nichols’s memoir of his upbringing, Father Figure, a tale of unremitting horror – that would be unfair to the moments of wit, humour and insight. Yet the moments of light only serve to create counterpoints for the darkness and cruelty which shadowed and twisted his, and even more his much-adored mother’s, life.

The darkness and cruelty came from his father, John Nichols, a handsome and successful solicitor able to retire in his thirties as a gentleman of leisure. He thereafter devoted himself to his passions for domestic cruelty, spurious self-importance and drunkenness: ego inflation via pomposity and pain to hide and feed the emptiness within.

John Nichols was an alcoholic: or, as Beverley Nichols describes him, a drunk and a dipsomaniac. John Nichols was a drunk of regular patterns. Early on, Beverley Nichols was able to discern precisely, from his father’s behaviour, at precisely what stage in the cycle of drunkenness he was at: great training for a writer, no doubt.

While John Nichols was capable of great cruelty towards his sons – his destruction of young Beverley’s musical aspirations is almost unbearable to read – it was to his wife that he directed the full force of his clearly great and honed talent for cruelty. (Beverley thinks a certain physical fear of his sons retrained him towards them.) Beverley never describes any physical or sexual abuse by his father. The abuse was all emotional, but still cruelty in all its evil.
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The person Beverley describes is, in many ways, not really a person at all. Father Figure is a redolent and telling title: everything was driven by the demon drink that possessed him. And possession is exactly what Beverley took it to be.

The great comfort of his upbringing was the deep mutual love between his mother and her sons. At one stage, he writes about his frustration in not being able to bring her sufficiently alive in his writing. As he says, that is partly because he cannot – as one would in a novel – create fictional moments that reveal character. He can only describe and rely on the limitations of memory. (Particularly as he wrote the book over thirty years after her death.)

But one can also see another limitation that haunts him. Why did she put up with it? That a woman of her time (she died in 1939)—the income from whose (significant) money had been handed over to her husband—had very poor choices is true enough. (Though her basic capital was beyond his reach, important at the end.) Her notion of the married state was that, once in, there was no way out. That one endured. And yet she also served as the ideal victim to possessed man she married: having been a youthful beauty with a golden childhood. Beverley describes his parents as two people perfectly formed to destroy each other. Enduring was not resisting: indeed, it was providing an object, an outlet and victim who was also a live-in nurse and protector.

Over time, she acquired various defence mechanisms, various substitutes for the autonomy and control she surrendered. Beverley describes these well, and his frustration with them. His frustration with her is a bit more removed, and seems to have got in the way of fully invoking her. In any family life of cruelty, there is the perpetrator and the facilitator (though sometimes the role shifts back and forth). Stoic endurance facilitated, even encouraged: it did not genuinely shield.

Beverley’s descriptions of his attempts to kill his father fit perfectly in with the twisted horror of it all. As do the steps of the final revenge. Her sons prevailed upon her to change her will to leave all her money to them, cutting out their father and her lifelong tormentor. Even that level of resistance was almost beyond her.

After her funeral, Beverley took his father to Plymouth – which he had nominated as having pretty girls to look at. His father was full of anticipation of getting a woman to share his well-funded old age, now he would be inheriting his wife’s money. He has one last glass of wine, then Beverley delivers the blow. He tried to use the weapon he always used against his sons – I will tell your mother! But, of course, he cannot. She is no longer there to torment and she has delivered this first and final act of resistance. His father never drank again.

Even though Beverley tells us the ending of the story, there is a certain reticence in delivering the full implications. The reader can work it out, and Beverley is certainly forthcoming on the dynamic from his father’s side. But that last element in the horror, that in his mother leaving and resisting his father’s drinking stopped, he cannot spell out anywhere near as clearly. How could he? (Those of us who had difficult upbringings will perhaps be more aware of the silences.)

In his introduction, Beverley mentions his play, The Shadow of the Vine, and receiving letters from women asking how could he have possibly have understood their lives so well, the little horrible details of living with a drunkard. As he says, the book is an answer to that. But perhaps not to the question that haunted him.