The sex scandals involving Roman Catholic clergy and boys come in every morning with the regularity of terrorist activity in the Mideast. The stories engender heuristic discussion of problems if not cognate, at least tangential. What is happening to the Catholic clergy? Is what is happening conceivably welcome? What are we learning about the homosexual subculture in the clergy? What is it teaching us about such public questions as homosexual scoutmasters?

  • There is a new book called "Goodbye! Good Men," in which the author, Michael Rose, contends that individual Catholic seminaries are seedbeds for the perversions we are reading about. In the words of one reviewer, "Rose presents evidence that the leadership in some seminaries often discharged men (in the recent past) who were unabashed in their heterosexuality, while at the same time simply denying that an actual sacramental priesthood exists."

  • The prominent scholar Garry Wills, writing in The New York Review of Books under the heading "Jesuits in Disarray," speaks of the near dissolution of the religious order in which he once served as a novice. His tone about developments is that of the statistician, recording events without any sense of personal involvement in them. If Wills had been writing about a lesion of interest in civil liberties, or racial integration, or women's rights, there'd have been a poignant throb of concern; no such thing here. He is as detached in talking about the Jesuit disarray as a researcher would be about an atrophied body part.

    In the past, Jesuit novices "offered stirring models" for students who wanted to join them in their "high calling." But now we have the outward flood, and other exercise grounds for idealistic energy. "Many nuns discovered this while participating in, or watching other women participate in, the civil-rights demonstrations of the '60s."

    Mr. Wills quotes the authors of a book who note "the gaying and the graying of the Jesuits." Notwithstanding, the remnant Jesuit leadership is relatively in high regard: "I think the church is being governed by thugs," Mr. Wills quotes one Jesuit administrator, who would, however, not say this about the present leadership of his own order. And there is this "social bond" that is "the Catholic version of the gay movement." In some Jesuit quarters you have the beginning of a new form of social discrimination: "Some of those (straight) Jesuits interviewed express resentment at being excluded by the gays."