Posted on 04/22/2015 6:43:45 AM PDT by marshmallow
A Roman Catholic priest in Scotland who alleged there was a culture of sexual bullying in seminaries stretching back decades has been found guilty by a Church tribunal of injuring the reputation of the Church and its clergy.
Father Matthew Despard, who was suspended from his parish at St John Ogilvie in High Blantyre, Lanarkshire, made the claims in a self-published book entitled 'Priesthood in Crisis'.
The e-book has been removed from sale on Amazon's Kindle service following legal threats by priests who said they had been defamed, but its description says that it is "a story of one priest's experience in the priesthood and his efforts to live out his vocation honourably despite his awareness of corruption in parts of the Church that he loves".
Fr Despard alleged that a "powerful gay Mafia" was at work. He said that as a trainee priest he was approached inappropriately and that other seminarians who spurned the advances of others were bullied.
However, he was the subject of formal complaints by those he had named. The Bishop of Motherwell, Rt Rev Joseph Toal, said that 21 of the 26 charges against Despard were proven.
"In the majority of cases, the tribunal ruled that Father Despard had injured the good reputation of a number of people, both lay and clergy."
His letter added: "The bishop regrets that a penal case had to be pursued against Father Despard, but felt it necessary in order to vindicate the reputation of those wrongly accused by him."
(Excerpt) Read more at christiantoday.com ...
They’ll do anything to silence comments about the Church’s gay mafia (which does exist).
Similar claims were made in a book called “Good Bye, Good Men,” which I think is still available. I’ve also seen such claims in a Protestant context in books by Leanne Payne, a lay Protestant minister whose long ministry has devoted particular attention to the problem of homosexuality in the church and the seminaries.
"In the majority of cases, the tribunal ruled that Father Despard had injured the good reputation of a number of people, both lay and clergy." His letter added: "The bishop regrets that a penal case had to be pursued against Father Despard, but felt it necessary in order to vindicate the reputation of those wrongly accused by him."
See related 2013 thread:
Catholic Church in Scotland Has Covered up Culture of Sexual Bullying Among Priests, Claims.
My brother in law was in seminary years ago and left due to the very gay mafia that the church still ignores.
This, and the new pope, pretty much guarantees the church is doomed.
Hopefully, the pendulum will swing...and swing hard, before the church is no more.
Gads, there will be so much to do during the sure to come CW-II. We better start a to do list.
Not until the Church purges homosexuals from the clergy will the molestation of young boys and the vulnerable by vile phony priests cease.
Celibacy isn’t the cause - if these men were straight and couldn’t control themselves, they’d be out assaulting women. It’s the practice of taking gay men into seminaries and then promoting them on through.
Whenever homosexuals get together, especially in a same-sex environment, obviously, they actually do form a sort of clique. And this means that as they get more powerful, they only admit and promote other homosexuals, and that they cover up for each other - by any means.
You are precisely correct. The Vatican introduced its draconian, illogical, and irrational policy of compulsory clerical celibacy at the First Lateran Council in 1123. The policy was instituted largely to confront rampant corruption in the Church at that time, specifically simony and nepotism. Over the centuries the policy has helped create an atmosphere attractive to a rather substantial homosexual subculture.
Of course there is ABSOLUTELY NO BASIS WHATSOEVER for compulsory clerical celibacy in the Bible. Quite to the contrary. Priests were married men in the Bible, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Priests were expected to be married and have families. The New Testament specifically permits a married clergy. Many of the early popes and most priests and bishops were married men for the first ten centuries of Church history.
Although I am not at all a fan of the current pontiff, he has said some things rather recently which could be encouraging for those of us who would like to see this truly ridiculous policy reviewed and reconsidered and reformed. The Pope has stated:
1) Compulsory clerical celibacy is a discipline, not a dogma or doctrine of the Church. True.
2) Compulsory clerical celibacy is a policy which was implemented many centuries after the founding of the Church. True.
3) Compulsory clerical celibacy is a policy subject to change. True.
Let us pray. God bless!
I dont think it does. I think some homosexuals join to hide from society but then get aroused by being around boys all the time. Not all of them but some.
Just like there would be some straight men who would make moves on 14 and 15 year old girls if they were prevented from having sex. Or if they were Woody Allen :)
They say the Tibetan monks do it with no sweat. They must alter their mind.
A part of the symptoms of my head injury is I only get interested in the opposite sex maybe twice a week instead of 14000 times a day like before.
So if you can control that part of the brain, which must be damaged in my case,, you can control your urge like the monks do. I guess I was wrong in my assumption lol
But it must be VERY HARD to do
Married clergy didn’t seem to stop gays from being accepted in the Episcopalians or Anglicans. Heck, they can openly be bishops and actually have a ‘gay marriage.’
Try to find one liberal of any faith that accepts things like abortion and ‘gay marriage’ but thinks the Catholic discipline of celibacy is valuable and should be continued. Liberals invariably hate it, just ask any liberal Catholic what they think about celibacy for clergy.
Freegards
I tend to agree with you. Celibacy does not cause homosexuality. I think the real answer is that priests are more likely to be homosexual than are Catholic men in general.
Having an attraction to other men is not in and of itself sinful, or at least is a lesser sin, according to Church teaching. It is acting upon that attraction and actually engaging in sex with another man that is a grave sin. A devout Catholic man who finds himself attracted to other men would therefore be compelled to remain celibate. Given a man with a devotion to Catholic belief great enough to overcome his sexual urges and with the determination to remain celibate, it seems pretty natural that such a man would gravitate to the priesthood.
I am not saying that all gay Catholics end up becoming priests, nor that all Catholic priests are gay. Rather, I am saying merely that it seems likely that there would be more gay men in the priesthood than there are in the population in general.
Wow. I always know I am going to get such informative and well written responses by people who know a lot more than me on this board. That’s why I love it!!
Thanks.
No problem. I have read many books on Church history and have thoroughly researched this policy.
The only good thing I can say about the Pope’s apparent sympathy to homosexuality and his doctrinal ambiguity is that it is forcing us to take a really good look at what has been happening - not only for the last 50 years since VII, although it entered a critical phase then, but even before that.
There was obviously a lot of leftist and Modernist infiltration of the Church, and that was one of the reasons that Vatican II swept everything away so easily. It had already been weakened from the inside.
So this makes us all take a good look at everything and I think it is actually helping many of us affirm our commitment to the teachings of the Faith, instead of our opposition to them, as many under Francis seem to be doing. Ultimately we will be stronger and able to stand up to whatever is going to happen.
Huh?
If he named names and said that specific priests were predatory homosexuals, and they were not, and that can be proven, why isn't Despard facing libel suits, let alone Church tribunals?
And if the tribunal reached the conclusion that 21 of the 26 allegations of homosexual intimidation were false, that means at least 5 of them were true: but I don't see anything about the ecclesiastical investigation of these 5 cases, and appropriate penalties against the offenders.
The whole thing has the stink of corruption.
I am not familiar with this case in Scotland. The above article was the first I’ve ever heard of it. I can tell you we had a remarkably similar situation in my own archdiocese-—Los Angeles-—the nation’s largest Catholic archdiocese at the seminary St. John. Here is what Wikipedia com has said about it:
“Alumni of St. John were accused in the sexual abuse scandal, which broke into the public in the late 20th century, of molesting the underaged. Of approximately 625 St. John’s graduates to be ordained by the Los Angeles Archdiocese between 1950 and 2005, 65 had been accused in the sexual abuse scandal, reflecting a rate higher than what studies have found for U.S. priests in general.”
Further, it goes on to say:
“In May 2002, Newsweek had an article entitled “Gays in the Seminary” it opened with a description by a recent alumnus of St. John’s, saying it may be one of the country’s gayest facilities for higher education. Depending on whom you ask, gay and bisexual men make up anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of the student body at the college and graduate levels”
I would further like to add-—to give you an idea of the sheer enormity of the problem here in my archdiocese, our local archdiocese was forced to settle in court for a whopping $660 million! Something which will weigh on us for decades to come.
The Diocese of Phoenix stopped sending their seminarians to St. Johns years ago. I know one priest who, upon graduating, literally removed his shoes and left them behind.
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