Sex, drink and shaky faith drive priests to seek help

Holy orders may not be the pastoral idyll portrayed in the likes of Ballykissangel. Priests are increasingly using therapy to help them cope with the stresses and strains of the job.

Doubts about religious commitment, sexual advances from parishioners, false allegations, loneliness, overwork, marriage breakdowns, dilemmas over sexuality, and illusions of greatness, are all causing problems for men of the cloth of all faiths.

Elizabeth Mann, psychologist and wife of an Anglican priest, who heads a team which offers psychological services to priests, says that the church hierarchy, once reluctant to support psychological research, is now more willing to collaborate.

In a report to a British Psychological Society conference on counselling, she said that priests were vulnerable people. "The lifestyle of many good priests with its inherent honesty, humility and simplicity, has a downside of rendering them vulnerable to the manipulations of others. Their vulnerability is particularly acute in the area of sex, and at times of transition and loneliness."

She said that priests referred to her team because of allegations of sexual offences could be naive.

"Jim was accused of rape by a women parishioner. She had phoned him late at night to ask for spiritual direction. He was lonely, working in an inner city parish, so he invited her to come around straight away and stay for supper. They had drinks then sex together. They each blamed the other afterwards and the woman complained to the church. He had no insight into how this situation could have been prevented from arising," she said.

She said those in the Anglican and Nonconformist churches also face stresses and strains over the change from a world where everything was clearly defined to one of uncertainty. Discrimination against women priests and gay clergy can also cause problems.

In mid-life some churchmen have second thoughts. "Religious priests who entered before adolescence and other boys who came strongly under a kind of parental influence in their teens from older priests, may realise in middle age that they did not make their commitment by free choice,"said Mrs Mann.

"Daniel entered a junior seminary at the age of 11 because he was too shy to say 'no' when the rector asked him if he would like to be a priest. In his forties the longing for a family life of his own became almost unbearably strong. He developed a relationship with a woman and suffered deeply in the tension between his vows of celibacy and his desire to marry her."