c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) On Sunday, Jan. 23, the New York Times Book Review devoted its front page and almost three more inside pages to reviews of two books on the torture and sexual humiliation inflicted by some American soldiers on captives in now-notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Abu Ghraib is being analyzed as if it were the first gusher of inhumanity ever to blow wild in plain sight. It is intimated that the investigative drill has tapped into inhumanity’s sole source, the vast pool of American corruption welling out of Washington, rather than the proven reserves of inhuman crude that bubble beneath every continent on the globe.

Along with many other news outlets, the New York Times has perennially celebrated what they term “edginess” or “pushing the envelope” on sexual references in movies and television programming. These are code words for performance kinkiness in trivial settings that banner the oxymoron of the year in their disclaimer that they are adult entertainment.

Some over-celebrated series, such as HBO’s “Sex in the City,” are more poignant than pornographic as they track the loneliness of those wounded by discovering that free sex is easy and committed relationships are hard. Other series feature humiliation as entertainment, such as Fox’s “American Idol,” in which the apparent payoff is laughing at little people with big dreams who are exposed to ridicule on national television.

It isn’t sinful, as some wild-eyed preachers might claim; it’s unsophisticated. And when you give even half a blessing to this immature separation of sex from human relationships, or enjoy the ritualized humiliation of others, can you be surprised that more potent and degrading combinations of these may be found in places like Abu Grhaib?

If all Will Rogers knew was what he read in the newspapers, what would he learn now? A Jan. 18 Los Angeles Times headline said, “Ex-Priest’s Trial Begins on Child Rape, Assault; Conviction May Be Difficult, Legal Experts Say.”

A month earlier, that same paper proclaimed, “Sex Abuse by U.N. Troops Continues … World body is powerless to discipline offenders, and only a few have been punished since inquiry.”

A short season before that, in the Oct. 11 New York Times, we learned that “British Boarding School Walls Hid Abuse” and read: “At least half a dozen men … say that they were molested by teachers at the Caldicott School in Buckinghamshire between 1964 and 1970. … The common view, many former students say, is that if it happened, you are not expected to whine about it.”

Then Superstation WGN reported on Jan. 24 that an art teacher in suburban Chicago had been accused of molesting teenage students and that duct tape was involved.

Nothing is more Catholic than accepting that the crack that runs across human nature was not discovered by television producers, though they may think they were the first ones to photograph or report it. And nothing is less Catholic than indulging in what old moral theology textbooks called “Pharisaic scandal” _ that is, the oohing and ahhing of hypocrites whose moral outrage often masks their own secret tastes for the stimulation of such behavior.

We may blame some soldiers at Abu Ghraib, but we cannot indict the whole army _ any more than we can indict all priests for sexual misdeeds by some of them. This behavior, whether at Abu Ghraib, the Caldicott School or the occasional rectory, is execrable, a word whose origin comes from Latin, meaning “deserving of detestation.” But the numerous reports of this behavior in a variety of settings suggest it is not egregious, in its original Latin sense of “standing out from the herd.” Wherever they occur, these degrading violations are surely assaults on the sacredness of human personality but, instead of working up a fake furor, we might better identify the common denominator of this not uncommon behavior.

Those who indulge in it need no choreographing by superiors, because it so often represents their urgent if blind search for the growth that is missing inside them.

Those who humiliate others sexually to gratify themselves _ whether guards, schoolmasters or monks _ are frequently found to have been denied, sometimes because of the conditions of their upbringing, the opportunity for full psycho-sexual development. Why and how this happens and what we can do about it (encouraging and supporting healthy family life is at the top of the list) is a far more important question to ask while we endure the trumped up moralizing and low down politicking that have so far surrounded this issue.

MO/RB RNS END

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)