Historian in demand: Appleby takes low-key approach to explosive religious issues

"Ubiquitous" is the term Frank Corrado, communications director of the National Federation of Priests' Councils, applies to Appleby. In May, Appleby addressed the annual meeting of the federation, where he prepared a four-pound manuscript on the historical context of the sex abuse scandal for the nation's Catholic priests. "He's extremely well-respected," said Fr. Robert Silva, president of the federation. "He is an incredible scholar and that makes him a very credible witness. And then he has courage, the courage of his faith that frees him to say what he says grounded in historical and social analysis. You see the skill, the tremendous ability to articulate an analysis of history unfolding."

Pleasant, professorial and cherubic-looking, Appleby seems unfazed by the journalistic limelight. A church historian who has written books about both the left and the right in the U.S. Catholic church (Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America and The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism), Appleby explains his interest in such discrepant topics as fundamentalism and modernism as part of the same question he's spent his scholarly life pursuing, that is, how does a person remain faithful to a religious tradition in the modern world, after the French Revolution, after the Industrial Revolution, after Freud and the Sexual Revolution have all had their impact?

"The modern world is about change. Rapid change. Adaptation," Appleby said. "In the modern age, conditions are fluid, ever evolving, and the importance of roots, time-honored traditions and the wisdom of the past--the values that religion trades in--rest uneasily with our modern sensibility."

Modernity's effect in the church

Appleby views the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church as modernity catching up with a church that hasn't educated its priests either in the reasons for its own traditions or in a modern understanding of sexuality. Seminaries should be doing a much better job of both, Appleby maintains.

"Here are Catholics priests trying to maintain a tradition that goes back at least to the 11th century and trying to valorize it and yet they did not have the training that would have allowed them to work through it. As a result, they didn't always know the theology behind celibacy--why in fact celibacy was integrally tied to priesthood. If you ask 10 priests, 8 of them will not give you a persuasive accounting of it," Appleby said.

"The question is not that they are not disciplined or not believing, it's that the church in training them in the seminary stunningly didn't sit down with them or have a course in which they said let's really talk frankly about eroticism or sexuality and the challenge of celibacy Instead, for a lot of complex reasons, including Victorian attitudes toward sexuality that were mostly cultural--attitudes that had little to do with religion--these bishops and priests were often unprepared for the impact of the sexual revolution."