

























134   Formation, The Catholic Priesthood and The Modern Age   

 

 

 

 

 

C H A P T E R  9  
 

 

 

Contemporary Sexual Crises in the 

Church and the Challenge for Priestly 

Formation1 
 

SimonMary Asese AIHIOKHAI 

 

 

 

Introduction 
Priestly anniversaries are times for great celebrations and deep 

reflections on the part of the entire Church. Silver Jubilees ought to be 

celebrated with great pride and hope. I rejoice with Rev. Anselm Kole 

Jimoh as he commemorates this special moment in his priestly 

ministry. Many like him continue to be the hope of the Church even at 

times when ugly narratives of priestly sexual abuse have come to 

distort all that the Church stands for in our times. I have been asked to 

reflect on a topic that demands an honest engagement. On that note, 

let me transition to the purpose of this work.  

 In this work, I intend to do the following; shed light on some 

of the trends of the emerging sexual abuse cases; present a critical 

analysis of the formation styles within Nigerian seminaries with the 

intent to articulate a new vision of priestly formation that will help  

the Nigerian Church in particular and other national churches both in 

Africa and other parts of the world to prevent future scandals, while 

properly training the men who present themselves to be trained for the 

ordained state.  

 

 

 



 Contemporary Sexual Crises in the Church and the Challenge   135 

 

Trends of Current Abuses 

A critical question must be asked, one that demands an honest 

response. Does the Church have a sexual ethics problem, one that 

may be inadvertently contributing to the issues it is faced with today? 

I am convinced by the multiple evidence available that the response is 

in the affirmative. The ongoing ideological struggles between experts 

in the social sciences and pure sciences tasked with investigating the 

human mind, gender and sexuality on one hand, and church experts 

and theologians who argue for various theological positions on human 

sexuality demonstrate the point being made here. The dust seems not 

to have settled but many in the Church’s hierarchy are impatient with 
the perceived ‘slow’ analysis of the sciences and would rather prefer a 
particular reading of religious texts along with their own cultural and 

personal sensibilities. It might be important to offer a quick note of 

caution; science can be a gatekeeper of truth for the Church. When 

healthy relations are built with the scientific community, the Church’s 

doctrinal positions will be greatly advanced and best address the 

demands of the signs of the times. Science is today teaching us that 

gender binarism is a limited and sometimes a confusing way to speak 

of the breadth of our human condition. As noted by Judith Lorber, any 

discourse on gender ought to be predicated on cultural knowledge, 

which sometimes varies from one culture to another. In western 

societies, “until the eighteenth century, philosophers and scientists 

taught thought that there was one sex and that women’s internal 
genitalia were the inverse of men’s external genitalia: the womb and 

vagina were the penis and scrotum turned inside out.”2 Lorber further 

explicates, while looking closely to how gender identities are given in 

western societies, that the nuances found in the human person, 

ranging from chromosomal markers, anomalous genitalia, and other 

physiological differences tended to be rigidly categorized by the 

duality of male-female; man – woman; and heterosexual – 

homosexual.3 How is the Church’s theological anthropology 
responding to this new discovery? Is the Church’s preference to 
appeal to biblical texts to buttress a particular type of anthropology or 

is it to have an open mind to what is being discovered by scientists 

without making any moral judgement? These are options that lead to 

quite different and sometimes opposing conclusions.  

 Again, gender binarism is being challenged by new scientific 

discoveries in the area of intersex realities.4 Based on scientific 



136   Formation, The Catholic Priesthood and The Modern Age   

 

 

discoveries, it is common knowledge that there are “over 70 sex 
chromosomal” expressions within the human population.5 Thus, even 

language needs to be adjusted to account for such breadth of sex 

expressions in the human population. Male and female are at best 

labels of erasure and truncate the pendulum reality science is 

exposing us to.6 One conclusion can be made from these unfolding 

knowledge of the human organism; our knowledge of ourselves as 

humans is the knowledge that is not fixed. It is always progressive 

knowledge. Ignoring all these discoveries and simply upholding what 

is termed traditional views on gender binarism as was recently done 

by the Vatican dicastery, Congregation for Catholic Education in its 

recently released document on gender theory is problematic.7 An 

important question worth asking, when one hears arguments on 

human sexuality that is based on traditional views, is this: what 

cultural knowledge heritage is one alluding to and defining as the 

norm?  

 The document from the Vatican dicastery fails to address the 

fact that Christian anthropology is not constructed outside of a 

cultural locus with all the biases that play out in such a locus. What 

the document calls “right season” as the defining marker of the 
Church’s position on what it means to be human must be engaged 

critically for what it is.8 Reason is always culturally determined. The 

argument proposed in the document is to reject any “separation of sex 
from gender.”9  The Jewish and Greco-Roman cultural influences on 

how the Church reasons and its vision of what it means to be human 

ought to be acknowledged as such. The Church’s position does not 
exhaust the issue at hand. While the Church upholds a Greco-Roman 

metaphysical grounding of human sexuality, there are also legitimate 

arguments to be made based on other ways gender expressions are 

more fluid that are not grounded in metaphysics. Examples of non-

metaphysical views of human sexuality can be found among the 

“Berdache in North America and the Fa’afafine in the Pacific, and the 
Kathoey in Thailand.”10 Furthermore, if culture is the place where the 

divine-human drama is fully experienced, then cultural differences 

that define gender fluidity as found in different human communities 

should not be dismissed easily simply because they differ from those 

that have shaped the Church’s views. Rather than a rigid vision of 
what it means to be human, these differences can become the 



 Contemporary Sexual Crises in the Church and the Challenge   137 

 

possibility for embracing a richer vision of what it means to be human 

in a culturally diverse world. 

 The cautionary note from the American Jesuit theologian, 

James Martin that “the document is mainly a dialogue with 
philosophers and theologians, and with other Church documents; but 

not with scientists and biologists, not with psychologists, and 

certainly not with LGBT people, whose experiences are given little if 

any weight” is something that should make everyone to be very 
concerned.11 To have an informed opinion on an issue demands a 

deliberate and holistic engagement with all factors shaping that issue. 

To simply dismiss an aspect of the process and uphold views that are 

at best one-sided and/or incomplete should not be the approach to the 

teaching office of the Church should be following. Conclusions like 

these hurt people who are already at the margins of society and the 

Church. Perhaps, the following cautionary insight is helpful in 

shedding light on what is at stake here; “it is important to emphasize 
that although heterosexuality operates in part through the stabilization 

of gender norms, gender designates a dense site of significations that 

contain and exceed the heterosexual matrix. Although forms of 

sexuality do not unilaterally determine gender, a non-causal and non-

reductive connection between sexuality and gender is nevertheless 

crucial to maintain.”12   

 Thanks to the social sciences we are more knowledgeable 

about how human conditioning plays out even in the most private 

aspects of our lives, our sexual preferences.13 Even though no current 

study has been done in the context of Africa, the churches of Africa 

can also learn from the insights and experiences of those in the 

western world. It is on that note that I intend to call attention to some 

insights found in the recent study done on the sex abuse crisis in the 

United States of America.  

 There are some observable trends found in the John Jay 

Report of 2004 by John Jay College of Criminal Justice that was 

commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 

(USCCB). The report focused its studies of sexual abuse in the 

Church between 1950 and 2002. It found out that there were over 

10,000 sexual abuse allegations brought against priests and deacons 

working in dioceses in the United States. It also showed that the 

percentage of priests and deacons working in the country (109, 694), 

4% (4392) were accused of sexual abuse of minors and adults. I 



138   Formation, The Catholic Priesthood and The Modern Age   

 

 

should be clear here by stating the obvious; the report was not 

extensive enough. It did not study the members of the hierarchy and 

members of lay religious orders. Recent revelations have shown that 

the scandal is not just limited to priests or deacons or even to male 

members of the Church with leadership roles. Female religious 

communities have had their own share of the scandal as well. The sex 

abuse scandal is one that affects every aspect of the Church, ordained 

and lay. 

 The John Jay Report offers some interesting profile of the 

abuses and the abusers that may be of use to those interested in 

revamping priestly formation in the twenty-first century. Grooming 

tactics were prominent ways the abusers used in carrying out their 

illicit sexual contacts with their victims. The abusers took time to 

build a trusting relationship with their victims and then threatening 

them should they betray their confidence and reveal what abuses were 

occurring. The age profile of the abusers is also telling. Half of those 

accused of abuse were below the age of 35 when they first carried out 

their first sex crimes. Less than 7% of the abusers were themselves 

victims of sexual abuse as minors. 19% of them were also dealing 

with alcoholism. 70% of the abusers were formed in seminaries under 

pre-Vatican II seminary formation programs.14 What do all these tell 

us? They point to the fact that there is a very strong case to be made 

for using insights from the social sciences to address this crisis. These 

are not just accidental cases that played themselves out without any 

organic pattern in them. Rather, a closer study of these patterns 

reveals some innate deficiencies in the formative programmes 

operative during the years these abusers were in seminary and/or in 

ministry.  

 

Formation Styles and Lessons to be Learned 

My work as an educator has taught me the relevance of viewing 

formation as something that must be holistic; one that ought to engage 

the different aspects of human life if it is to have any transformative 

impact on the ones being formed. In 1992, Pope John Paul II gave to 

the Roman Catholic Church a post-synodal apostolic exhortation, 

Pastores Dabo Vobis (I will give you shepherds after my own heart – 

Jer. 3:15). Here, John Paul II articulates the need for formators of 

future priests to take seriously the need to tailor their education to 



 Contemporary Sexual Crises in the Church and the Challenge   139 

 

meet the needs of our times. He called for a clear understanding of 

holistic formation that accounted for the human, spiritual, intellectual, 

and pastoral. It is worth pointing out the bold claim made by John 

Paul II, who argued for human formation as the core of all holistic 

formation on which the other three aspects of formation hinge. His 

vision of the human is also very interesting; it is conditioned on what 

he calls “affective maturity.”15 In his words, “Affective maturity 
presupposes an awareness that love has a central role in human life… 
We are speaking of a love that involves the entire person, in all his or 

her aspects  - physical, psychic and spiritual – and which is expressed 

in the ‘nuptial meaning’ of the human body…”16 Following the 

release of this document, many houses of formation in the western 

world and in Africa began the much-needed conversation to figure out 

how to revamp their formation process to allow for a clear 

understanding and expressions of these four aspects of formation. I 

recall vividly, efforts made by some religious communities in Nigeria 

who began to explore ways of revamping their formation programme 

to account for this new guidance on priestly and religious formation.  

 Furthermore, to show how much work still needs to be done 

even by the religious communities that want to make a difference, it is 

proper to share an incident that occurred some years ago during my 

undergraduate studies. During my senior year as a philosophy student 

in the seminary, a course on human sexuality was introduced as an 

elective. It was going to be taught as two sessions. One was to be 

taught by a nun and the other by a member of my religious 

community. I happened to have registered for the latter. During our 

first week of class meetings, it dawned on me that what was needed 

was not just a course but a total re-education of all priests and 

seminarians for our lack of training in the area of human sexuality. 

The instructor kept referring to Origen, the great theologian of the 

Early Church, as someone who had cut off his ‘third leg,’ a 

euphemism for castrating himself. When I pushed further by asking 

the instructor to explain how humans mutated from having three legs 

to now having two, I was made to know that such types of questions 

were not going to be entertained by him. That was it for me. I realized 

that the issues at stake were deeper than just taking a class on human 

sexuality. The anthropological vision that has defined how we 

perceive ourselves as sexual beings, our comfort level with our own 

sexual conditioning, our linguistic comfort in carrying out such 



140   Formation, The Catholic Priesthood and The Modern Age   

 

 

discourses all needed to be critiqued deeply and if necessary, 

transformed radically if the vision of Pope John Paul II was to be 

realized for the Church, particularly in the Nigerian context. I am not 

alone in making this observation. Another “reason why renewal and 
transformation are constantly needed is the fact that our knowledge of 

reality is constantly increasing and changing and this inevitably 

affects the way we live our lives. For instance, it makes an enormous 

difference if our understanding of homosexuality changes from 

regarding those who engage in same-sex behaviour as either deviant 

or sick ‘heterosexual’ persons to seeing them as persons whose 
fundamental orientation attracts them to persons of the same sex.”17  

 No one denies the fact that the establishment of structured 

priestly formation has yielded some positive results. The intellectual 

formation has been a great success for priests over the centuries. 

Lovely spiritual practices have been developed through the quasi 

monastic settings of seminaries. A good sense of community among 

the future members of the clergy is developed during these formative 

years. However, with regard to sexual formation, the outcome has 

been very poor, if we are to be honest with ourselves. Since the 

Church is made up of men and women, one wonders what dictates the 

rationale behind having junior seminaries that house young boys who 

are excluded from substantive interactions with young girls their age? 

As part of their priestly formation, ought not these young boys be 

provided with healthy sex education and ways of appreciating 

personal boundaries in their interactions with each other and with 

women and girls? As reputable psychologists would opine, dating is 

part of holistic human formation. Through the dating experience, a 

young man or a young woman begins to learn how to negotiate 

appropriate boundaries for themselves and for those they may have 

feelings for. They learn to appreciate the fact that consent must be 

clearly given and sustained always, otherwise it is not consent. As 

these young men and women attain adulthood, their affective maturity 

aligns itself also with those of the spiritual and intellectual. When one 

listens carefully to all the traumatic stories of the sex abuse cases 

involving ordained men in the Roman Catholic Church, one thing is 

central, these accused have no sense of what healthy affective 

boundaries entail. Even with the level of intellectual education, they 

have attained in life, their poor social skills, manipulative 



 Contemporary Sexual Crises in the Church and the Challenge   141 

 

personalities, puerile tricks at luring their victims to enter into a 

relationship of trust speak to a disconnect between the different levels 

of their formation. It is as though one of the four integral pillars of 

formation (affects) is not properly aligned with others. This is not an 

accidental reality. This distorted alignment is traceable back to the 

very origins of the founding of seminaries. The establishment of 

formal structures for priestly formation came from the Council of 

Trent’s attempt at curbing ideas it had deemed injurious to 
orthodoxy.18 Men who were to serve the Church were to be trained 

clearly in ways that the radical ideas of the times could be curtailed.19 

Interestingly, the psychological background for this approach and 

attitude is intricately linked to a somewhat problematic attitude 

toward all things that do not fit perfectly well with the stated goals of 

raison d’etre for seminaries.20 Issues dealing with human sexuality 

would necessarily be seen as suspect, especially in a church with a 

strong Manichaean heritage; one that frowns at the sensual, and 

considers the sexual as the pathway for tempting and corrupting the 

purity of the soul. Rather than explore the broad nature of human 

sexuality as an essential condition for priestly formation for men 

whose ministerial duties will entail relating with other humans 

through the breadth of their human affects, a form of spiritualizing of 

the affects has come to replace that which needs to be addressed in a 

more pragmatic and concrete manner. Celibacy and chastity are 

spoken of using the spiritual motifs of the heavenly bride. Theological 

and spiritual works have flourished over the years in addressing the 

sexual urges and realities of these candidates for priestly and religious 

life. A huge mistake on the part of the Church is not to take seriously 

new fields of knowledge, especially in the social sciences, that deal 

with the human person as a sexualized being. It is on that note that I 

want to offer some concrete interventions to help articulate a more 

robust priestly formation programme for the Nigerian Church and 

other local and national churches that may be facing similar problems.  

 

Envisioning A New Formation Paradigm 

Priestly formation is not for its own sake. It is for the good of the 

Church. Those who chose to respond to the call to serve in the 

ministerial priesthood are chosen from the community of the baptized 

in churches located in particular cultures and societies. Understanding 

these facts is fundamental in helping to build up a formation 



142   Formation, The Catholic Priesthood and The Modern Age   

 

 

programme that is relevant for the times. Thus, any seminary 

formation today in the Church, be it in Nigeria or anywhere in the 

global north, must take seriously the reading of the signs of the times. 

The Church of the twenty-first century is not going to be similar to 

that of the twentieth century. We currently live in the age of 

technology. Different types of community are springing up globally 

that go beyond previous understandings of that term. New notions of 

ecclesial structures are being formed. A broader understanding of 

ecclesial leadership is fast becoming the norm. The laity is becoming 

very educated theologically and sometimes more informed 

theologically than the ordained as seems to be the case in the western 

world. Nigeria is not immune from these changes occurring. The 

existential and ultimate questions being asked by the young are 

conditioned by the totality of their experiences in more globalized and 

pluralistic contexts. With the above in mind, I offer the first of four 

interventions to help articulate new formative programmes for the 

future members of the clergy in Nigeria; priestly formation in Nigeria 

today should begin with a serious reflection on the signs of the times 

in the country. What does it mean to be a Church in today’s Nigeria, 
where religious and cultural pluralism are key components of the 

lived experiences of the people? What and how does it mean to be a 

Church in an era when Nigeria is positioned to become the largest 

economy in Africa and may become a prominent player in the global 

economy? How and in what ways can the Church be relevant to a 

society where women are rightly reclaiming their roles in society? 

Simply reciting old arguments to address new discourses is at best an 

insult to people’s intelligence.  
 To read the signs of the times is to position the Church for its 

role as an agent of the new evangelization. This new evangelization 

ought not to be focused solely on making Christians out of people. 

Rather, it ought to go beyond that. It must help people appreciate who 

they are as sexualized beings. Today, we live in an era of full self-

expression. This is the era of the #METOO Movement. This is the era 

of #BlackLivesMatter Movement. The Church in Nigeria cannot 

function as though it is isolated from these global social movements 

and concerns. It should also resist the temptation to want to appeal to 

catechesis that offers shallow answers to complex issues. Human 

sexuality is a complex matter, one that must not be seen anymore 



 Contemporary Sexual Crises in the Church and the Challenge   143 

 

from the locus of the problematic. The Church in Nigeria ought to 

come up with a holistic human formation that addresses the spectrum 

of human sexuality as embodied in the lives of candidates for the 

priesthood. To think and operate formation programmes with the 

mindset that all persons in the programmes are themselves 

heterosexual persons may not be doing justice to the needs of persons 

who do not identify with heterosexuality.  

 A recent poll conducted by The Initiative for Equal Rights 

(TIERS) found out that “39% of Nigerians approve of members of the 
LGBTQ+ community having equal access to public healthcare, 

education, and housing.”21 The Church ought to be leading this 

conversation and promoting inclusive social teachings that address the 

needs of these persons. The best way to account for this is to have a 

robust formation programme that speaks to these social issues. 

Making the hermeneutical shift that moves from the problematic to 

the locus of giftedness can help the Church to see possibilities of hope 

and new knowledge it may not have been capable of seeing 

previously. Stated differently, “a Christian theology of creation means 
that we accept the whole of reality, ourselves included, as given and 

gift. The task of human freedom is to become who we are and we 

cannot do that without continually trying to understand better who we 

are. This is a never-ending process.”22 Thus, reading the signs of the 

times is itself a form of prophetic response to the call of discipleship 

that is relevant to our era. The Church must be seen and must also see 

itself as an instrument of God’s mercy. Pope Francis has made his 
pontificate a reflector of this theological and ministerial stance. There 

is beauty in such a strategy. For too long, the Church has embraced a 

rigid normative approach to human sexuality that is defined radically 

by western notions of natural law, which, of it itself, is culturally 

conditioned. A legitimate question the Nigerian Church must respond 

to is this: are there no cultural insights from Nigeria that can help the 

Church to embrace a more humanistic, personalistic, and holistic 

understanding of human sexuality that is not radically limited by the 

dualism of good and evil or right and wrong that seems to have 

defined western understandings of sexual identities and expressions? 

This question calls for Nigerian theologians and the members of the 

Church to take seriously their responsibilities as educated members of 

the Church to articulate an Afro-Nigerian theology on human 

sexuality that speaks to what it means to be human in the Nigerian 



144   Formation, The Catholic Priesthood and The Modern Age   

 

 

context. Without denying the usefulness of the natural law tradition in 

western societies’ construction of knowledge, be it in their 

philosophical or theological traditions, I am of the view that an 

African pragmatic ethics needs to be the modus operandi for the 

Nigerian Church. What does this entail? Perhaps, the insight of 

Kwame Gyekye will help explicate the point I am making here. In his 

words: 

On what grounds are some acts (etc.) considered 

good? The answer is simply that each of them is 

supposed … to bring about or lead to social well-
being. Within the framework of Akan social and 

humanistic ethics, what is morally good is generally 

that which promotes social welfare, solidarity, and 

harmony in human relationships. Moral value in the 

Akan system is determined in terms of its 

consequences for mankind and society. “good” is thus 
used of actions that promote human interest. The good 

is identical with the welfare of the society, which is 

expected to include the welfare of the individual… It 
is clear that this definition does not at all refer to the 

will or commands of God. That which is good is 

decreed not by a supernatural being as such, but by 

human beings within the framework of their 

experiences in living in society.23 

In a very abbreviated form, natural law tradition makes a 

metaphysical assumption that imputes moral normativity on persons, 

objects, and actions irrespective of the nuances brought about by 

context or social locations of the acting subject. On the other hand, 

African pragmatic ethics situates the moral content of a being, object, 

or action within their complex relational interactions operating in a 

concrete community.24 

 Let me offer a second intervention. Christianity’s Achilles 
heel has always been a bias for a dualistic vision of the human person. 

Question three of The Penny Catechism begins by asking: In whose 

image and likeness are humans made? The corresponding answer is 

that it is in God’s image that humans are made. Then the next 
question asks categorically if the likeness of God is “in your [one’s] 
body or in your [one’s] soul.” The response is telling. “This likeness 



 Contemporary Sexual Crises in the Church and the Challenge   145 

 

to God is chiefly in my [one’s] soul.”25 For centuries, many Christians 

have recited these lines and have never stopped to question the 

theological rationale behind such glaring dualistic anthropology. If 

the soul is what “chiefly” represents the divine likeness in us, one is 
thus compelled to ask the question, what then does the body 

represent? Christian theology has a rich and yet very sad history in 

depicting the body and all that it represents as a pathway for 

temptations and the corruption of the soul. What does this mean in 

light of sexual ethics today? I would say, everything. The sexual crisis 

the Church faces today can be traced to this disjointed and 

paradoxical dualism inherent in the Church’s theological 
anthropology. Not being able to see the human body with all its 

embodied affectivity as epiphanic gifts of God’s encounter with 
creation reduces the Church’s capacity to mediate a rich narrative of 
how God works in and with us in the concreteness of our 

embodiment. God did not become human “chiefly” in our soul. 
Rather, the incarnation speaks of a God who chose to become fully 

one with us in all that we are except sin. In the incarnation, all 

dualistic arguments are rendered invalid. God became not just a 

human being but a sexualized being. It is important that theologians 

take this seriously. If I may be as vivid as possible, the sexualized 

God-human experienced all the emotions attached to sexual self-

discoveries and these entail all the hormonal realities involved. I 

recall a conversation I had with a fellow theologian some years ago 

when I made the comment that the adolescent Jesus must have had 

wet dreams and thought constantly of the persons he had ‘crushes’ on 
as do typical adolescents who are going through puberty. I could see 

my colleague almost having a nervous breakdown. He just could not 

conceive of his Jesus as being described in such ‘dirty’ terms. For 
him, sexuality is a dirty thing and at best sinful. The keyword here is 

an experience. “Though experience is always open to fallible 
interpretation, the bottom line is that experience is, and always has 

been, the most reliable source for discerning God’s will.”26 It is not 

the abstract postulations of reason as though the reason has its own 

embodiment different from its unity with the body. 

 The Church is in urgent need of a holistic approach to human 

sexuality, one that must move away from beginning the conversation 

from fallenness, sinfulness, and evil to a starting point that stresses 

the beauty, sacredness, and fulfilling nature of being a sexualized 



146   Formation, The Catholic Priesthood and The Modern Age   

 

 

being. There is too much shame in the current theological discourse 

on human sexuality. The Church should move to a locus of pride in 

addressing what it means to be fully human. This responsibility must 

begin with the actual formation of future ministers of the Church. One 

wonders how those who are called to mediate the fullness of God’s 
life to the Church and world and who are trained to see a fundamental 

aspect of that divine-human life as innately sinful can themselves be 

effective in their callings. Are they not being set up to fail even before 

they begin their ministry? The challenge for seminary formators today 

is to address the following questions: how comfortable and healthy 

are the discussions around human sexuality in the curriculum? How 

matured are the candidates for the priesthood to express who they are 

as sexual beings, and what concrete ways do they embrace to ensure 

that their affects are nurtured while also embarking on the formation 

of the other aspects of their lives? I do not think the Church is capable 

of bringing about this transformative move on its own. This leads me 

to offer a third intervention that may be helpful to the Church as it 

addresses the lacunae present in its vision of the human person. 

 Human collective wisdom has given us many angles from 

viewing and understanding our world. Groundbreaking research 

continues to be carried out in different fields. Disciplines such as 

sociology, anthropology, psychology, and many more continue to 

enrich our collective understanding of what it means to be human in 

the totality of our embodiment. Even the pure sciences have helped us 

to understand how our affects and decision-making processes 

continue to be shaped by the chemical makeup of our bodies. All 

these discoveries are a wealth of knowledge that can help the Church 

continue to grow in its theological articulation of what it means to be 

human. May I offer a very direct critique of a strand in the theological 

tradition of our church and maybe it might help us to make the much-

needed shift to help address the current sex abuse crisis. There is a 

strong natural law tradition in the Church. Many of the Church’s 
positions on issues dealing with human sexuality, reproductive health, 

and even the recent document from the Congregation for Catholic 

Education on gender theory demonstrate a clear bias for a particular 

way of reading the natural law tradition – one that is rooted in the 

Greco-Roman philosophical, theological, and cultural heritage. But 

one has to ask the critical questions, is this particular reading of 



 Contemporary Sexual Crises in the Church and the Challenge   147 

 

natural law done in honest dialogue with these other disciplines and 

their findings or is this reading of natural law based on an insular 

approach that preferences a specific narrative even when that 

narrative has no evidential credence? Why can’t the Church 

appropriate more than one approach to understanding humans as 

ethical beings that include both the western natural law tradition and 

the African pragmatic ethical approach? How can one cultural 

knowledge exhaust the richness of human knowledge of how God 

interacts with creation? 

 It is important to note here that at the core of one’s being one 
experiences one’s own identity as genderized and sexual being. To 
simply deny the legitimacy of that self-awareness and existential 

experience may be a dangerous path to follow for the Church if it is to 

fully be a medium of hope and life for many who seek its counsel at 

moments in their lives when they need the nurturing and supporting 

guidance of its counsel. I opine strongly that the starting point for the 

Church’s position on human sexuality ought always to be an open 

dialogue with other disciplines. The marriage of reason and faith is 

not a marriage of convenience. It ought to be one of authentic 

dialogue, however difficult that dialogue may be. I am not a 

psychologist. But I have had the honour of knowing persons who 

struggle with their sexual orientations and gender identities. These are 

not experiences that come from a place of abuse of freedom as the 

recent document on gender theory from the Vatican curia seems to 

suggest. These are existential struggles that sometimes lead to 

unimaginable trauma that words cannot describe. How ought the 

Church’s vision of human sexuality speak to these realities in ways 
that holistic embrace of oneself becomes the focus? This is the current 

challenge that a robust sexual ethics must address. Again, seminaries 

cannot exempt themselves from this process. Seminary curricula 

should have a robust number of courses in the social sciences and the 

natural sciences that shed light on what it means to be fully human. 

What is a course in theological anthropology that does not speak to 

the realities of cultural, social, philosophical, scientific, linguistic 

anthropologies? What does it mean to be made in God’s image when 
the embodied human’s social location is not the starting point of any 

God-human talk? Who is Jesus Christ without his social location as a 

Jewish man living in an occupied land under strict patriarchal system? 

Of what value is Jesus Christ to an adolescent who is going through 



148   Formation, The Catholic Priesthood and The Modern Age   

 

 

puberty and struggling with all the hormonal changes in their body if 

the said Jesus is not presented to him/her as one who went through the 

same experience and came out of it unscathed? Our theological 

discourses in the seminaries must now be as pragmatic and concrete 

as they can be if we are to have a handle on the sex abuse crisis. Our 

current crisis lies in the strong urge to flee to the utopic state of 

abstract discourses on what it means to be human. We are not words. 

We are embodied beings living in the concreteness of the here and 

now. 

 I want to begin my fourth intervention for a new paradigm for 

priestly formation that speaks to our realities today with a question. 

Why seminary formation? This question is the key to understanding 

how and why the Church is faced today with the crises of 

inauthenticity among those ordained and tasked with the 

responsibility to be the media of God’s mercy to God’s own people. 
This question comes also from my own experiences as one who had 

the pleasure of receiving priestly formation from two very different 

models, one that is aligned to a more traditional model and another 

more progressive that seems to be taking seriously insights from 

discoveries from the social sciences. Before I proceed, let me state it 

clearly, in no way am I ranking these two models. Rather, I am 

attempting to see how one can help the other grow even though I am 

convinced that priestly formation must be contextually shaped to help 

address the unique needs of the local church. Uniqueness does not 

mean isolationism.  

 A critical observation of priestly formation both in Nigeria 

and in the United States of America validates the following 

comments: in Nigerian priestly formation programmes that I am 

conversant with, one can conclude that there is a strong focus on 

weeding-out candidates for the priesthood who are judged to be 

lacking in virtue or character needed for priestly ministry. One could 

argue that the very fact that there are so many candidates for priestly 

formation along with fewer resources to carryout holistic formation 

may be contributing to this model. But there are grave implications 

arising from this model. Rather than helping candidates open up to the 

formative process with all candidness and knowing they would not be 

judged but rather helped to become better persons who through an 

elaborate discernment process may discover later their other callings 



 Contemporary Sexual Crises in the Church and the Challenge   149 

 

away from the priesthood or even to the priesthood, a state of 

paranoia is created in their lives and they end up being inauthentic 

and secretive about who they are. Paying attention to the study cited 

earlier in this work on the state of sex crisis in the Church in the 

United States of America, one notices that the height of the crisis 

came during the time when the Church was also experiencing some 

vocation boom and operating a weed-out model of formation. On the 

other hand, a different model that is currently being practised by a 

growing number of dioceses in the United States is what I have 

labelled the full-authenticity model. It entails a formative process 

where candidates for the priesthood are invited to self-disclose who 

they are, and that includes their sexual orientation. Whatever level 

one finds oneself in the sexual orientation spectrum is received as 

gifts that can be used to help the candidate to fully live out their 

calling to voluntary celibacy that the priesthood calls for. For this goal 

to be realized, concrete steps are taken to help the candidates in 

formation to embrace their inner truths as sexual persons. There are 

series of evaluations throughout the formative process and these 

include expert opinions from the social sciences. Candidates for the 

priesthood are considered human beings who are on a life journey and 

that means they need all the professional, formal, and informal 

support at the different stages in that journey. Knowing that one is in 

formation not to be judged or weeded out but to be helped to discern 

correctly and acquire the needed skills, talents, and virtues for the 

ministry ahead allows for these candidates to open themselves up at 

their core to the process even if that opening up means embracing 

their own vulnerabilities. There is beauty in such a process when it is 

done right.  

 Lest my readers think that the American model is free from 

error, let me offer a few comments based on my time in the seminary 

in the United States and my interactions with seminary formators here 

in the country as well; American seminary formation today needs to 

create a culture and climate that appreciates the beauty of intellectual 

formation. Due to the lack of vocations, there is the temptation to 

want to water-down the intellectual formation of future priests. There 

isn’t much, if any, philosophical foundation for seminarians before 

they embark on their theological formation. Even when engaged in 

theological formation, it has become the trend to see seminarians 

embracing a cafeteria approach to theological formation. They tend to 



150   Formation, The Catholic Priesthood and The Modern Age   

 

 

reject theologians and their works they have judged for themselves to 

be unorthodox. Also, American seminary programmes need to take 

seriously the discoveries in the social sciences on social issues like 

racism, and systems of oppression. Throughout my time in the 

seminary, not a single course was offered on such topics dealing with 

systemic racism and xenophobia. If at all there is an original sin of 

American society, it is racism. To educate men for the ordained 

priesthood who are supposed to be sources of life and hope for God’s 
people, and not prepare them on how to address the social sins of the 

society and the Church in this part of the world, is to diminish their 

ability to be agents of positive change. 

 

Conclusion 

In this work, I have intentionally moved away from the simplistic 

conclusions that tend to define the current clergy sex abuse crisis as 

being perpetuated by a homosexual mafia in the Roman Catholic 

priesthood. There is no evidence justifying such a sensational 

conclusion. I do not want to give a myth the legitimacy it does not 

deserve. However, there is clear evidence that the Church has a sexual 

abuse crisis amongst its clergy. The crisis seems to be growing as we 

begin to see that it goes beyond just priests and deacons. The entire 

clergy has a sex abuse crisis on its hands and it needs to figure out 

how to address this issue. The recent decision of Pope Francis 

instructing how the crisis ought to be addressed by leaving it in the 

hands of the bishops and Roman curia is a good place to start the 

much-needed reform.27 To now require a metropolitan to take the lead 

in the investigation of a suffragan bishop under his jurisdiction, as 

directed by Francis in his Motu Proprio, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, calls 

for some honest discernment process.28 It might be wise for the 

Church to move completely the investigative process of episcopal 

sexual abuse and priestly sexual abuse to a more neutral body that is 

comprised of laypeople. This approach will allow for complete 

transparency that may not always be the case when a bishop is tasked 

with the responsibility of leading an investigation into the 

moral/immoral actions of a fellow bishop.  

 It is worth noting that no institution can reform itself 

internally. It has never happened even in the history of the Church. 

One wonders why and how Pope Francis thinks this time around it is 



 Contemporary Sexual Crises in the Church and the Challenge   151 

 

going to be different. Yes, I know that the pontiff is canonically 

bound to act within the juridical tradition of the Church where the 

local church has its own autonomy. However, a greater good is now at 

stake, the integrity of the Church. This greater good calls for a new 

approach to Canon Law and its inherent tradition. Without reducing 

other bishops to mere secretaries of the Bishop of Rome, it might be 

useful for the Church to articulate new canonical regulations that offer 

to the laity deliberative powers in helping the clergy to be faithful to 

its commitment to the people of God, especially in matters dealing 

with monitoring the unfolding sexual abuse crisis among the ranks of 

the ordained. Each diocese ought to have its own deliberative process 

with each member having equal deliberative powers to arrive at 

decisions that should include the reduction of the ordained to the lay 

state. The fact that the baptism of the laity is what decides their rights 

and duties in the Church, the members of such a commission should 

be able to apply disciplines to those found guilty that are currently 

reserved to the Holy See. This is not going to slip into the ancient 

struggles between the ordained and the laity. Such fears come from a 

place of power.  

 It is time for the Church to abandon narratives and the 

psychology of power and embrace the psychology of service and 

humility. The current sex abuse scandal has injured the Church at its 

very core. How it heals from this self-imposed injury will be 

determined by its ability to embrace its own vulnerabilities. A church 

that speaks of vulnerability as the gateway of experiencing the divine 

must now demonstrate to the world and to itself that it does not only 

speak the words, it also knows how to live them out. 

 

 

Endnotes 

                                                      
1 A longer version of this work will be published under the title “Priestly 

Formation and Sexual Abuse in The Roman Catholic Church: In Dialogue with 

The Nigerian Church,” Journal of Black Catholic Theological Symposium 

(2019). 
2 Judith Lorber, “BELIEVING IS SEEING: Biology as ideology,” Gender and 

Society 7, no. 4 (1993), 568 
3 Ibid., 569 – 570. 



152   Formation, The Catholic Priesthood and The Modern Age   

 

 

                                                                                                                       
4 See I. A. Hughes, “Intersex,” BJU International 90, no. 8 (November 2002): 

769 – 776. See also, U. S. National Library of Medicine, “Intersex,” Medical 

Encyclopedia, accessed June 17, 2019, 

 https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001669.htm  
5 Christine E. Gudorf, Body, Sex, and Pleasure. Reconstructing Christian Sexual 

Ethics (Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 1994), 4. 
6 Lorber, “BELIEVING IS SEEING: Biology as ideology,” 571. 
7 See Congregation for Education, “Male and Female He Created Them” 
Towards A Path of Dialogue on The Question of Gender Theory in Education, 

June 10, 2019, 

https://www.lifesitenews.com/images/local/CONGREGATION_FOR_CATHO

LIC_EDUCATION_EN.pdf. 
8 Ibid., 1. 
9 Ibid., 8. 
10 World Health Organization, “Gender and Genetics,” Genomic Resource 

Centre, accessed August 27, 2019, 

 https://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html  
11 As cited by Philip Pullella, “Vatican Condemns Gender Theory as Bid to 
Destroy Nature,” Reuters, June 10, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-

vatican-gender-idUSKCN1TB20E  
12 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London and New York: Routledge 

Classics, 2011), 182.  
13 Gudorf, Body, Sex, and Pleasure, 5. 
14 For a detailed review of the report, see, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 

The City University of New York, The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of 

Minor by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950 – 2002 

(Washington D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2004). 
15 John Paul II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation: Pastores Dabo Vobis, 

March 25, 1992, 44, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-

ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_25031992_pastores-dabo-

vobis.html. 
16 Ibid. 
17 Kevin T. Kelly, New Directions in Sexual Ethics. Moral Theology and the 

Challenge of Aids (London and Washington: Geoffrey Chapman, 1998), 25. 
18 H. J. Schroeder, Canons and Decree of the Council of Trent. Original Text 

with English Translation (St. Loui, MO/London, 1941), 175 – 179. 
19 Ibid., 175. 
20 Ibid. 
21 Happiness Nleweoha, “Watch: A Recent Statistics On LGBT Community in 
Nigeria,” The Guardian, August 11, 2018, https://guardian.ng/life/watch-a-

recent-statistics-on-lgbt-community-in-nigeria/  
22 Kelly, New Directions in Sexual Ethics, 28. 



 Contemporary Sexual Crises in the Church and the Challenge   153 

 

                                                                                                                       
23 Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought. The Akan 

Conceptual Scheme. Revised Edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 

1995), 132. 
24 For a detailed treatment of this topic, see SimonMary A. Aihiokhai, 

“Embracing the Pragmatic In African Indigenous Religions: New Perspective 

for Interfaith Dialogue,” Christianity and Culture Collision: Particularities and 

Trends from a Global South. Eds. Cyril Orji and Joseph Ogbonnaya 

(Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016): 151 – 

163. 
25 The Penny Catechism: A Catechism of Christian Doctrine (Charlotte, North 

Carolina: TAN Books, 2012), 1. 
26 Gudorf, Body, Sex, and Pleasure, 12. 
27 See Francis, Apostolic Letter. On The Protection of Minors and Vulnerable 

Persons, March 26, 2019, 

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/motu_proprio/documents/papa-

francesco-motu-proprio-20190326_latutela-deiminori.html. See also, Law No. 

CCXCVII. On The Protection of Minor and Vulnerable Persons, March 26, 

2019,  

http://www.vatican.va/resources/resources_protezioneminori-

legge297_20190326_en.html . See also, Guidelines for The Protection of 

Children and Vulnerable Persons, March 26, 2019, 

http://www.vatican.va/resources/resources_protezioneminori-

lineeguida_20190326_en.html.  
28 See Francis, Apostolic Letter: Motu Proprio – Vos Estis, Lux Mundi, May 7, 

2019, 

https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/motu_proprio/documents/papa-

francesco-motu-proprio-20190507_vos-estis-lux-mundi.html  


