ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Mary Gordon's explanation about the pedophile priests. It explains the ideal, image and icon, differ from the sacred beings available to the Catholic imagination. The two requirements for the priesthood are baptism and maleness. Apart from urination, the function of the phallus is sexual activity, what is the nature of a phallus in a male who must vow to suppress his sexual nature, to act out a maleness in which sexual arousal is only a problem to be overcome. As Flannery O'Connor said, turning on their heads the traditional terms of martyrdom, Catholics must suffer much more from the Church than for it. The doctrine of Transubstantiation requires that Catholics believe that this transformation is not symbolic, but actual, that the substance of bread and wine becomes the substance of Christ. Priests, then, were encouraged in a life of hyper-individuality; nuns were nuns by virtue of a relationship to other nuns.
