I'm obviously no C.S. Lewis. Neither am I any of the other far more experienced authors who have taken a swing at emulating his work, “The Screwtape Letters”. Nevertheless, this subject seems to be one that would benefit from that treatment.
I'm also no priest, nor am I a man. What follows is merely my best guess at what happens in the hearts and minds of the men who commit this sin. I am a survivor of clerical sexual assault, and friends with several more (all of whom who have suffered far more than I have), and my bits relating to that are based on what I've heard and seen.
My dear Fecal,
You asked in your last letter more about the delightfully nasty little mess we've managed to make with what the humans commonly call “the abuse crisis”. I understand that you've enticed your patient, Fr. Rolly, to a point where he is very near certain compromises and you'd like to make the most of it that you can.
I wish I didn't have to tell you this but I fear I must: this is a gradual process. Don't go charging straight for the man's libido. It will come into play of course, but be subtle with it and mask it for a bit. Like anything else, you have to encourage a small compromise here and a subtle one there before you land your catch. It's a tedious game, but a necessary one.
You by no means must get wholly rid of his sense of shame. We don't have ours taken away, why should they get a reprieve when we don't? Initially, let the shame be nothing more than a sense of unease underneath his rationalizations. “I do so much good, is this relationship really so bad? And it seems to do her/him so much good too, they really need me… I’m here because I care for this woman's college dance team, I'm being pastoral …I can't leave ministering to this youth group, so many of them would be crushed…” etc, etc, etc. Nevermind that he's engineered these situations himself, lying all the while about what they're really meant for. Let him catch himself in his own trap.
Later, let him be as ashamed of his lusts as he wants, so long as he's caught in them and has no real actionable plan to escape or get rid of them. The torture we can inflict by pairing shame with pride can be marvelous.
Once you get your patient to make that final compromise and loosen his pants, you've got not only him on the hook, but also his victim that much closer as well. A sexual wound is a deep wound, and by being attentive to the processes such a wound produces in the victim's brain, we can organize all sorts of delicious sins. All the normal sins of despair, self hating shame, victim status paired with one-up manship, and defensive hatred of course, but we can whisper the lie that the Enemy is utterly indifferent to them or that the Church is our tool rather than His, and it be all the stronger because of who's done the harming.
Back to your patient; do it long enough, and to a priest with the right sort of wounds (always match the temptation to the man's makeup and history, don't forget) and your patient's position as priest and his entire ministry will be little more than a cover he uses to feed his addiction. Let a man in this position be as talented in his ministry as he likes; so much the better to hunt with. If you can add a strong element of entitlement, so much the better.
The one perpetual fly in the ointment is that you can't wrest the ability to confect the Sacraments from him. That stands like a sword in all our carefully curated filth, ready to be suddenly picked up, wielded, and used against us. But we can pull even this reality towards our advantage a bit.
If you're fortunate enough to wrest him quite free from the Enemy's grasp, you can perform several quite sophisticated tricks that will bring not only him firmly to our Father Below, but bring his victim halfway there as well. You'll never be able to separate him from that fearsome ability to bring the Enemy physically and actually present, of course. But oh, what wonderfully dark tortures we can inflict on both the Enemy in that vulnerable state and the souls He's so desperately trying to reach.
It takes an advanced sort of tempter and a soul firmly seduced, but if patient can be convinced to commit his perversions more fully in the context of his station as clergy, we can poison his victim against many of the Enemy's best tricks. Let a rosary or a holy picture or a prayer enter the context of the abuse so that his victim can never be exposed to it again without associating it with what happened. Whatever prayer, devotion, liturgy, art, or even song we can taint with this poison is one less tool the Enemy can use to bring that soul closer to himself.
Through patient, ever widening compromise, we've managed to move cases of sacrilege from the rectory to the sacristy, from the sacristy to the confessional, and from the confessional to the altar itself. We've even managed to entice two or three of the little monkeys to rape in the context of a mass, putting up a large barrier to their victim ever being to able to attend the mass peacefully again, and making quite an insult to the Enemy. Quite as good or better than that crown of thorns Slugball came up with.
And to keep the word “sacralige” out of it, too! That was a stroke of genius from our propaganda department. In nearly the whole of the Church, that word doesn't seem to be associated with it anywhere. Not only does it lessen the seriousness of the thing in the minds of those more or less on the side of the Enemy, but it cuts the victims off from the realization that the God they think is indifferent to their pain was hurt and wounded right alongside them in the same instance! The irony is too delicious: we strike at Him and poison them against Him in the same stroke.
Though everything else remains a road to Him, blast it. We close as many as we can, but we can't wholly close the most important one. That's why we must destroy as much of their will as we can once they let us in. Even then, one friendship, one sunset, one piece of art we haven't reached or twisted (and even some we have!) is enough to demolish years of hard work. All it takes is a simple act of surrender.
Be warned, the Enemy occasionally turns all our hard won efforts into His glory. It's absolutely maddening when He does it: here you think you've got a soul dead to rights, and they turn right round and run straight into His arms. They can't even clearly see Him or receive consolation! Yet there they go, His by their free surrender and act of trust (sometimes such a infuriatingly small one too!) out of your grasp and into His heart. Sometimes bringing several more with them.
If I think of it any more, I shall metamorphosize.
Back to the subject at hand, your patient. The good news is that while retaining your patient's victims may be an uncertain thing, retaining your patient is not (at least, so far as it can be before they're safely below). Thanks to the hard work of our fellow tempters, even if your patient is discovered before we get him below he's got few visible paths to repentance. His superiors are likely to either ignore the gravity of what he's done and decline to remove him from the near occasion of sin (leaving us free to continue our program with only minimal interruption), or else wash their hands of him completely and layicize him. The second interrupts our program slightly more than the first, but it's generally a simple matter to find him new avenues to feed the addiction he's saddled with. Often we can introduce elements of disillusionment, anger, and wounded pride to his general confused state and add new sins to the mix as well.
Sometimes we can convince some of the people he shepherded to follow him. And there they go, bleating their way off the edge of a cliff, straight into our larders.
There's no easily visible path or program of repentance he can take on; he has to seek and more or less formulate it himself. This is a slight advantage, but it can be a significant one. For now, as always, the Enemy stands ready to receive him if he only repents, admits what he's done, and takes concrete steps to avoid doing it again. We must claim our advantages where we can.
For now, Fecal, be patient. Let him linger too long with that woman he's attached to here, or forget his divine office there. Start edging him away gently, and you'll soon be able to make a tool from him to bring half his parish down as well.
Your affectionately ravenous uncle,
Screwtape
Image credit: “Dapper Devil" by kureyonphoto is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
I'm a grown man, and I still long for Narnia.