ABSTRACT

This chapter produces vulnerabilities and psychodynamics that significantly contribute to a tendency on the part of a small subgroup of priests to engage in sexual relationships with minors. There are some highly successful, relatively healthy men having mature heterosexual or homosexual attachments who, under a variety of life circumstances, will occasionally fondle a young child. The major contributions to the literature on the psychological characteristics of priests who sexually abuse minors have been generated by clinicians who have devoted much of their professional lives to the treatment of clergy referred to them for a history of such behavior. Leslie Lothstein has emphasized that individuals who sexualize children represent a population heterogeneous in the presence of additional paraphilias, parallel psychiatric, or neurological diagnoses, and the relative contributions of other relevant variables. Lothstein also described a smaller number of priests from his sample as having more primitive personality organizations, including antisocial, narcissistic, borderline, and histrionic personality disorders.