A few years ago I stumbled across an article by way of an acquaintance that was published in Latin Mass magazine in 1996 (and reprinted in The Traditionalist in 2016). The author is an American cleric, published as Anonymous. I could not find the article anywhere online, and had it sent to me via scanned pdf, so I had until now been unable to post it due to formatting.
The reason I am took the time to transcribe it (and cramped up my hands doing so) was that when I read it, a lightbulb went off; it offers a incisive psychological insight into certain, we’ll say, priest-personalities (I will leave it to your deductive reasoning to ascertain who might fit the description). I have abridged portions for the sake of brevity.
Read it carefully, and feel free comment.
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TAMES IN CLERICAL LIFE
The profound problems that beset priestly life today have been discussed for the most part by means of categories that reflect the preoccupations of our time and the way in which the problems have come to our attention. Because sexual scandal has figured so largely in the contemporary crisis, the now conventional division of male populations into gays and straights has, not surprisingly, played a large part in these discussions. But the reality is considerably more complex than the standard vocabulary of “sexual orientation” would suggest. Though it seems contradictory, even the battles over issues of sexuality among priests may have their basis in personal factors in which sexuality itself plays a relatively minor role.
What is here proposed is that the contemporary priesthood exhibits a disturbingly high number of one particular sociopsychological type, to be designated by the neologism “tame,” and what follows is a first attempt to sketch a profile of the tame priest. The author is innocent of training in psychology and the data have been neither collected nor analyzed systematically; they are simply the result of twenty years of observing the subject at close hand. The description is addressed to the experience of those familiar with the current condition of clerical life, and to the common-sense intuitions of others.
Perhaps the most universal and distinctive characteristic of tames is their paradoxical combination of great sociability with an incapacity for true friendship. Tames are great mixers at parties and all social functions, and they have the ability to join in almost all conversations and project friendly interest. In the jargon of the MBA they are abundantly endowed with “people skills.” Yet their friendliness itself makes them unfit for friendship. They exist on the level of superficial companionability, and lack the depth of personality and character necessary to make and keep a friend. Whereas most men in their late twenties unconsciously begin to narrow the number and deepen the quality of their friendships, tames preserve a kind of adolescent gregariousness and live on in the world of the fraternity or freshman dorm. While they tend to be cheerful on social occasions, the mask occasionally slips to show a characteristic expression of apprehension, hunger, and puzzlement. Strong friendships draw one apart from the crowd, and being out of the mainstream and on the margins is something a tame cannot tolerate. Tames prefer instead to exercise their talent in the public arena, where they can flit from buddy to buddy, chatting, telling jokes, fetching drinks and collecting from as many as possible external tokens of friendship.
Being tame is not itself a sexual orientation, yet within the clerical life tames tend to behave politically, socially, and morally in a manner as uniform as that of gays. It is part of the syndrome that tames are not conscious of themselves as tames: there is no question of their forming a caucus as do gays. Yet because their responses to concrete crises and problems are so uniform tame comprise a black de factor, and have an influence in the Church disproportionate ot their number. In fact the defeats and frustrations visited upon straights in the clergy are primarily due not to gays but to tames.
It is usually very hard to know whether a particular tame priest is heterosexual or homosexual. THey are seldom obviously effeminate; most laymen will assume, in default of indications ot the contrary, that they are straight. But they wear their masculinity as a businessman might wear a baseball cap at a picnic; his support for his team is not necessarily insincere, but you get the feeling that it is displayed as an emblem of good will--”I’m an easy-to-get-along-with kind of guy”--and not as a constitutive part of who he is. Tames never seem entirely at peace with this aspect of their lives and, in situations where gays and straights are clearly at dds, live in a kind of emotional No Man’s Land. This is not because tames waver between competing appetites like bisexuals, but because any definitive involvement risks isolation, and isolation terrifies them.
One external indication of the tame seminarian or priest is the changes of dress to which he will subject himself. Sometimes he will change clothes four of five times a day, depending on the activity planned and (more importantly) on who will be in the company. Tames will own the full array of clerical gear, but are also outfitted as laymen for a wide range of formal and informal occasions. Tames live in the present, in the “now”; they are extraordinarily sensitive to the people in the same room with them, they intuitively grasp the balance of power, the divisions of opinion, the dominant party or ethos. Their overadaptability in clothing is symptomatic of their overadaptability generally. Tames are capable of astonishing changes of opinion depending on the composition of their company-at-the-moment; it is not quite accurate ot say they are chameleons, because in a sharply contrasted environment they will not adapt themselves to the majority if the minority clearly has greater power and prestige. Always and everywhere, tames will go with a winner.
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Tame priests are without exception worldly. Their worldliness, however, is always a nervous worldliness, and they never allow themselves to wallow in pleasures as do gays or simple hedonists. Tames dress better, dine better, drink better Scotch, take more expensive vacations, and generally entertain themselves at a higher level than their fellows, but their enjoyment is poisoned by constant reference to what others may think of their acquisitions and recreations. They are always on guard against equal and opposite dangers: censure for unbecoming profligacy or for unbecoming rusticity. Even at his favorite restaurant a tame is seldom at ease, not knowing who may walk through the door and see him: is the wine too common or too extravagant, his dress too clerical or too casual?
A ‘giveaway’ characteristic of a tame is panic. Tames live in terror of being caught out--of being discovered on the wrong side of an argument, backing the wrong horse, having committed too deeply to reverse course with grace. As a consequence a tame will often register a momentary flash of panic when something occurs to make him unsure of his surroundings--for example, the entrance of an unknown party into a conversation in which he has prematurely taken a stand, or the friendly approach of a pariah at a public function. Tames see failure and unpopularity as contagious, and will oil their way out of contact with either as soon as possible. In their dealings with equals tames often make them feel used--not because they deliberately and cynically set out to manipulate, but because they are virtually incapable of exchanging a human (or supernatural) good with another person.
Tames have a morbid lack of curiosity about the first principles of things: metaphysics, the grounding of moral arguments, dogma. This does not come from any lack of brainpower but is simply a reflex of their concern for the here-and-now. The functional/pragmatic/political is supreme. A tame may hold an office that obliges him to defend some moral or dogmatic principal as inviolable and he may do it competently, but always with an eye to the occasion; even defense of principle, for a tame, is itself not principled but simply a means to realize some practical good. In general, tames have a distaste for confrontation and avoid situations where they are forced into conflict. In most controversial situations tames hedge their bets by showing mild support for both sides as long as possible, only declaring allegiance when it is clearly to their advantage to do so. Tames are capable of professing directly contrary opinions within a matter of hours, and frequently shock others by their apostasies. Because they adapt so spontaneously to the environment they are sometimes unconscious of inconsistency and puzzled when it is brought to their attention. Tames are rarely capable of loyalty in the strict sense, but only the kind of loyalty salesmen show to their products of lawyers to their clients-of-the-moment; they are Company Men, spirited defenders of the institution in which they wish to advance.
Tames tend to be dutiful in the same way that they are loyal. They are “responsible citizens” in the places where they live and work. They are team players and willing to work long hours; they are eager not to give others cause for complaint, and they tend to make themselves--if not indispensable--important worker bees in the machinery of the chancery or seminary or office of religious education. In addition to the energy that comes with ambition, tames have the sort of managerial affability that attracts favorable notice in any bureaucracy. They are relatively unlikely to leave the priesthood; thus, if tames make up only 30% of a seminary entrance, they may well compose 70% of those still working as priests ten years after ordination.
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In the contemporary Church tames serve the agenda or gays in the long run, even though they sometimes find themselves forced to take a contrary stance. Tames are extremely susceptible to emotional blackmail of all kinds, and gays are adept at putting a thumb on the emotional windpipe of weak men in order to manipulate them. Of course this takes many forms; one of the simplest (playing on the tame avoidance of conflict) is to engender a stormy atmosphere in a room in which the gay agenda is under discussion, with the threat of outrage and vengeance if the correct conclusion is not reached. Tames will often sell the pass to avoid the risk of having ot fight for it before a wider public.
Gays have also pulled tames into their service by the gambit of discussing chastity and sexuality in terms of “affective maturity.” This is how it works: first, one wins the admission that “affective maturity” is the principal gauge of authentic celibacy. Once this is conceded, it is stipulated that the condition sine qua non of affective maturity is “comfort” with one’s own sexuality (mature men are comfortable being themselves), and this in turn is seen to preclude disgust or moral censure directed at a “sexuality other than one’s own.” ...The paradoxical truth is that tames are more effective agents of the gay agenda than gays themselves; on one hand they are more presentable advocates (uneffeminate, good at reassurance, good at string-pulling), on the other they are motivated by a terror of the either and of being thrust to the margins of the institution--a terror stronger even than the hopes and anxieties of gays. The tame commitment to be noncommittal is the engine that powers progress in the Church.
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The public arena brings forth from tames another side of their personality. Tames lack the resources of character to remain indifferent to hostile news media; moreover, the techniques of evasion and equivocation refined earlier in their lives are largely useless as bishops, when the media (and general public) reflexively attribute to them as their own the positions of the Catholic Church. A few tames are able to charm the media into a kind of truce: good ink in exchange for a blind eye toward heterodoxy; several others can be seen to engage in a disastrous cycle of appeasement and recrimination. They sue for the favor of the press by taking pains to portray themselves as moderates and by lashing out at more aggressive conservatives, causing dismay to many of the Church’s friends and giving delight to her enemies.
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From this provisional attempt at description it will be clear that the distinguishing characters of tames are for the most part destructive of what they Church needs to accomplish through her clergy. The U.S. Church may be especially instructive in this regard. Seventeen years into the pontificate of a “conservative” Pope, concerned to appoint dutiful and orthodox bishops, the problems of clerical homosexuality and pedophilia, doctrinal dissent of the professorate, liturgical abuses, acceptance of contraception, etc. have improved in no respect and worsened in many. It is reasonable to assume that there is not a single cause for this strange paralysis, but it is worth asking whether the prevalence of the tame priest does not go far to explain the combination of outward managerial competence and personal moral cowardice that has examined these problems so often, so “professionally,” and never lit on the obvious steps toward their solution.
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