THE NEAR-PORNOGRAPHIC propaganda of the anti-Catholic tracts of a century and a half ago came directly from the great British gothic novels such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, in which virginal English gentlewomen found themselves trapped in haunted castles and decaying chapels, pursued by ghosts and lustful lords. It wasn’t much of a reach for Monk and Reed to recast the Roman Catholic Church — with its occluded rituals, Latin prayers, medieval trappings, steadfast loyalty to the Papacy, and congregations of immigrants who seemed repellently "foreign" to most Protestant Americans — into the stuff of WASP nightmares. It was but a short step from the ruined castles and eerie chapels of the gothic imagination to the allegedly real sinister convents, torture chambers, and hidden passages described by Reed and Monk. But it was an all-important shift that rendered Roman Catholicism palpably insidious, a genuine threat to freedom-loving, democratic America.

It was not for nothing that the early-gothic works were called "sensational literature" — that is, they forced readers to stop thinking and simply experience the "sensations" they felt. Just as the power of Reed’s and Monk’s books enticed the reader to feel and not think, much of the media coverage of today’s sex scandals is having the same effect. There has been a stubborn insistence on calling this a pedophile-priest scandal when, in fact, most of the priests accused of abuse have not been targeting young children, which is what pedophiles do; instead, they have been targeting teenage boys. There has been a disturbing refusal to look at other abuses in the Church, such as the rape of nuns by priests. And there has been a weird blurring of the lines among various scandals. The real outrage committed by Milwaukee archbishop Rembert Weakland, for instance, was his apparent payoff — with church funds — to a spurned former lover. To compare him with an alleged serial sexual predator like defrocked priest John Geoghan (who’s been convicted, so far, of one charge of child molestation) is ludicrous. But these distinctions are seldom recognized.

Then there’s the language of the accusers, which often resonates with the florid rhetoric of the anti-Catholic harangues of a century and a half ago. Take this emotional statement delivered during a press conference by Arthur Austin, who has accused Father Paul Shanley of abusing him during a six-year relationship between the two that took place when Austin was in his 20s: "Bernard Law and Wilson Rogers have behaved throughout this catastrophe with a deviousness, cunning, and lack of good intent that crossed long ago into the realm of criminality, however much the ever-elastic niceties of the law may protect them. But in stooping, now, to defend, by delay and specious appeals to the court, a walking plague like Paul Shanley, they have lost forever any right to regard themselves as decent men. They are not decent men. They are merely a pride-filled prelate [Law] who lusted so shamelessly after the papal tiara that he came to see any form of unbridled and ruthless appetite as acceptable among the ‘ordained’; and his equally Machiavellian and surreptitious adviser [Rogers], deftly guiding him through the spring-traps of potential legal disgrace. Bernard Law and Wilson Rogers knew of, and countenanced, indeed abetted, the ongoing rape and sexual defilement of children and young men and women by known sexual predators. There is not a spark of decency or goodness between the two of them. The stains they have on their hands now will never come off; neither will the stains on their souls."

Austin’s language is eerily similar to the charges against 19th-century Roman Catholic prelates. Take this passage from "The Oath of Secrecy Devised by the Romish Clergy," which appears in an appendix in the second edition of Reed’s Six Months in a Convent: "I do renounce and disown any allegiance as to any heretical king, prince, or state-named Protestant, or obedience to any of their magistrates or officers. I do further promise and declare, that notwithstanding I am dispensed with to assume any religion heretical for the propagation of the mother church’s interest, to keep secret and private all her agent’s counsels from time to time, as they intrust me, and not to divulge, directly or indirectly, by work, writing, or circumstances ..."

Even the more provocative sexual details of today find their rhetorical roots in the past. Here is Austin again:

"Shall I start with the cabin in the Blue Hills? — where he [Shanley] kept me on my knees all night, servicing him in ways that would make you vomit, if I told you? And how, when he was finished with me, he told me that I could now call him Paul, I didn’t have to say ‘Father Shanley’ anymore? Or should I move right along to the ruined house in Vermont, where, in a rage, he left me, without heat or food for an entire day, in the dead of winter, in the middle of nowhere, to teach me that I must never, ever say ‘No’ to him when he wanted to use me sexually? Or shall I just start first with the dreams that still wake me in sobbing terror and sick to my stomach?"

Maria Monk recounts similar experiences when she refused to obey the whims of the Mother Superior or resisted the sexual advances of the priests: "[A]fter exhausting my strength, by resisting as long as I could against several nuns, I had my hands drawn behind my back, a leathern band passed first round my thumbs and round my hands, and then round my waist, and fastened. This was drawn so tight that it cut through the flesh of my thumbs, making wounds, the scars of which still remain. A gag was then forced into my mouth, not indeed so violently as it sometimes was, but roughly enough: after which I was taken by main force, and carried down into the cellar ..."

Even the slightest infraction brought severe penance: "Sometimes we were obliged to sleep on the floor in the winter, and nothing over us but a single sheet; and sometimes we had to chew a piece of window-glass to a fine powder, in the presence of the Superior. We had sometimes to wear leathern belts stuck full of sharp metallic points around our waits, and the upper parts of our arms, bound so tight that they penetrated the flesh and drew blood."

Much of the fascination with Maria Monk’s and Rebecca Theresa Reed’s memoirs came not only from the sexually tinged sadism of their writings, but from the general public’s fascination with the sheer — and literal — foreignness of Roman Catholicism. To some degree, this is still true. Look at how the idea of priestly celibacy has gripped the media’s attention. Of course, the question of enforced celibacy has been actively and seriously debated by the Catholic laity for more than four decades. But many commentators are now fixating on celibacy as the root cause of all instances of alleged sexual abuse. Oddly enough, such concerns were raised by anti-Catholic writers in the mid 1800s, too. Here is a prime example of an attack on priestly celibacy from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun: "Here was a priesthood, pampered, sexual, with red and bloated cheeks, and carnal eyes. With apparently a grosser development of animal life than most men, they were placed in an unnatural relationship with women and thereby lost the healthy, human consciousness that pertains to other human beings, who own the sweet household ties connecting them with wife and daughter ..."

Substitute "altar boys" for "women" and modify the extremist language and you’ll find the same sentiments in recent media accounts of the scandals. Even a temperate commentator such as practicing Catholic Garry Wills raised the same questions, in a more moderate tone, when he wrote in a Boston Globe Magazine article: "Does anyone seek out a bachelor doctor on the ground that lack of a wife to love will make him care more for oneself? Does anyone think women would not be more at home with the counseling of female priests than with men?"

Even recent testimonials of how priests brought up the subject of sex in the confessional to induce their young penitents to engage in sexual activity has roots in this earlier literature. Maria Monk notes in Chapter III that "while they heard me confess my sins [they] put questions to me which were often of the most improper and revolting nature, naming crimes both unthought and inhuman." And again Wills notes that "prayer with the boy was often a part of the seduction technique. Praying with others at any time of day did not look suspicious when done by a priest. The pathos of many cases was the way the priest traded on the trust given him precisely because of his priestly aura. That gave him access, cover, and further opportunity" — which was precisely Monk’s point as well.

WHAT ARE WE to make of these similarities? On a basic level these news stories are our new gothic — our new sensational literature. Like Grimm’s fairy tales, in which children are constantly put in harm’s way (and then generally harmed as well), they provide a visceral and unholy thrill — a guilty pleasure, if you will. It’s the same impulse that allows audiences to watch films like Friday the 13th or Halloween and shiver and cheer as one teen after another is dispatched in gruesome fashion after engaging in some form of sexual activity. Most people — whether they admit it or not — like to be shocked and sexually titillated. Make no mistake: most of us are deeply outraged by the sex-abuse scandals. But while this may be a "Church" scandal, no one has ever forgotten that it is primarily a "sex scandal," and for many non-Catholic Americans it is, in particular, "a Catholic Church sex scandal" — wreaking, that is, with otherness. (For Catholics, it’s also a church scandal, but since it’s internal, they have difficulty viewing it as a spectator sport.) This is clearly an important story, but the amount of space, time, and energy that the print and electronic media have spent on it is truly astonishing — and can only be explained, in part, with reference to rhetorical structures that lie deep in the American psyche.

While the point of view and intent of today's coverage of the priest sex-abuse scandal differs markedly from the anti-Catholic political propaganda that drove the writings of Maria Monk’s and Rebecca Theresa Reed, it can be said that history is repeating itself. Karl Marx noted in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that "all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.... the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." But in this case, the second time around, the events are just as tragic as the first.

Michael Bronski is the author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (St. Martin’s, 1998). He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com