Posted on 03/26/2010 6:27:09 AM PDT by JoeProBono
ST. FRANCIS, Wis. (AP) -- Steven Geier says that four times in the mid-1960s, the Rev. Lawrence Murphy coaxed the then-14-year-old student into a closet at St. John's School for the Deaf just outside Milwaukee and molested him, using God to justify his actions.
Geier said when he told Murphy what was happening was wrong, the priest replied, "Oh, yes. God sent me. This is confession."
Geier, now 59 and living in Madison....
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
I would much prefer it if we waged war against homosexuals.
Gay Priests and Gay Marriage
What the one issue has to do with the other.
By Stanley Kurtz, from the June 3, 2002, issue of National Review
http://old.nationalreview.com/03june02/kurtz060302.asp
The sex-abuse scandal currently plaguing the Catholic priesthood has already grown to the point where it poses a serious threat to the power, prestige, and credibility of the American Catholic Church. The sky, so to speak, is falling. An institution whose fundamental strength and continuity (whatever its many problems) could once be taken for granted is experiencing a genuine crisis.
Yet, over and above its significance for the Catholic Church, the greatest lesson of this scandal has yet to be drawn. The uproar over priestly sex abuse — especially the calls to do away with both priestly celibacy and the Church’s traditional teachings on sexuality — offers spectacular confirmation of nearly every warning ever issued by the opponents of gay marriage. The argument over gay marriage has always turned on the question of whether marriage will reduce gay promiscuity, or whether gays instead will subvert the monogamous ethos of traditional marriage. The priesthood scandal is a stunningly clear case in which the opening of an institution to large numbers of homosexuals, far from strengthening norms of sexual restraint, has instead resulted in the conscious and successful subversion of the norms themselves. Historically and theologically, moreover, priestly celibacy and marital fidelity have always been intimately related. Indeed, there is already good evidence to suggest that today’s attack on priestly celibacy heralds tomorrow’s assault on the ethos of marital monogamy.
After Vatican II, and in conformity with the broader cultural changes of the Sixties, the U.S. Catholic Church allowed homosexuals to enter the priesthood in increasing numbers. The homosexual orientation itself, it was stressed, was not sinful. So as long as a homosexual adhered to the very same vow of celibacy taken by his heterosexual counterpart, there was no reason to deprive him of a priestly vocation. This was a compassionate stance, and one that promised to incorporate a heretofore stigmatized minority into a venerable institution, thereby strengthening the institution itself.
Yet imagine that an opponent of this new openness to homosexuals in the priesthood had uttered a warning cry. Imagine that someone had said, back in the 1970s, when homosexuals were flooding into Catholic seminaries all over the U.S., that substantial numbers of gay priests, far from accepting the rule of celibacy, would deliberately flout that rule, both in theory and in practice. Suppose that someone had argued that homosexual priests would gain control of many seminaries, that many would openly “date,” that many would actively cultivate an ethos of gay solidarity and promote a homosexual culture that would drive away heterosexuals — especially theologically orthodox heterosexuals — from the priesthood. Suppose this person went on to argue that, at its extreme, the growing gay subculture of the priesthood would tolerate and protect not only flagrant violations of celibacy, but even the abuse of minors. Then suppose that this person predicted eventual public exposure of the whole sordid mess, an exposure that would precipitate a crisis within the Church itself.
Naturally, anyone prescient — and foolish — enough to say all of these things in the wake of the Sixties would have been excoriated and ostracized as a hysterical gay-hater. It is simply bigoted, he would have been lectured, to claim that large numbers of homosexuals would take the vow of celibacy without making a good-faith effort to adhere to it; and even more so to claim that gay priests would embark on a campaign to deliberately subvert the Church’s sexual teachings. And surely our foolish (and hysterically homophobic) friend would have been assured that an institution like the Catholic priesthood would attract only the most conservative homosexuals, not a bunch of “queer” radicals. Besides, even if a very few homosexuals did go so far as to actually abuse the children who had been given into their care, surely the number of such cases could never rise to the point where the stature and credibility of the Church itself would be put into doubt.
SUBVERSIVE SUBCULTURE
Yet all of these things have happened. Consider Jason Berry’s extraordinary account in Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children (1992), all the more striking for coming from the pen of a liberal Catholic who would himself like to see a liberalization of the Church’s sexual teachings. According to Berry, as the proportion of homosexuals in the priesthood increased dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s, many gay priests were visiting the seminary “on the make,” frequenting gay bars, and “befriending” high-school students. Berry reports a study of 50 gay Catholic priests, only two of whom said that they were abstaining from sexual activity: “Sixty percent said they felt no guilt about breaking their vows. Ninety percent strongly rejected mandatory celibacy . . . and slightly less than half reported that they engaged in sex in public toilets or parks.” According to Berry, Richard Wagner, author of the original study of these gay priests, found that 34 percent of his interviewees called their sexual partners “distinctly younger.” (Wagner did not say how young.) What’s clear from Berry’s account is that sexual abuse of boys by homosexual priests (the typical form of abuse in the current scandal) was part and parcel of a larger gay subculture within the priesthood, a subculture that effectively enabled the abuse of minors by encouraging flagrant homosexuality, and openly flouting the rule of celibacy itself. Indeed, in a now infamous case, a priest who has been the subject of abuse allegations over a period of three decades, the Reverend Paul Shanley, went so far as to advocate abuse in an address to the convention that led to the founding of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Here, the connection between sexual abuse and an openly “queer” culture was frighteningly direct.
Of course, it is true that powerful conservative bishops, who were in no way part of a homosexual subculture, played a critical role in covering up the abuse. They bear responsibility for their actions, yet their cover-up was itself motivated by their knowledge of the size and significance of the problem: To expose any given case was to risk a public unraveling of the larger problem of sexual abuse, disregard of celibacy, and the place of the gay subculture within the Church as a whole.
It is also true that cultural changes abroad in America in the wake of the Sixties eroded the ethic of celibacy among heterosexual priests as well. Yet heterosexual priests disenchanted with celibacy tended to leave the Church. Gay priests who rejected celibacy, on the other hand, tended to remain within the Church and, in word and deed, opposed the requirement of celibacy.
The existence of an influential and intentionally subversive gay subculture within the Catholic priesthood has everything to do with the question of same-sex marriage. To show this, I want to hark back to “The Gay Marriage Debate,” an extended exchange I had (on National Review Online and in a number of other venues) in the summer of 2001 with Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch, the two most prominent conservative advocates of gay marriage. Although both Sullivan and Rauch have honorably and ably defended same-sex marriage as the best way to “domesticate” sexually promiscuous gays, the priesthood scandal is powerful proof that just about every one of their fundamental assumptions is mistaken.
In our 2001 exchange, Sullivan assumed that only those gay couples prepared to be governed by the traditional ethos of monogamy would marry. I challenged that view, citing an important sociological study by a lesbian advocate of gay marriage — which showed that many gays with no commitment to monogamy, indeed with a conscious desire to subvert it, planned to marry. The priesthood scandals take us beyond even this predictive research: They represent a concrete and historically important case in which a significantly expanded homosexual presence in an established institution did in fact result in the undermining of traditional sexual morality, rather than in a “sexual-domestication” effect.
In my exchange with Sullivan, I also challenged his “arithmetical rebuttal” of the cultural-subversion argument. Sullivan had argued that any subversive effect on marriage coming from the open promiscuity of gay-male couples would be numerically offset by the notable fidelity of lesbian couples. I countered this point with the example of a strict college honor code — one that leaves it up to students themselves to refrain from cheating, and to confront and report those who do cheat. It would take only a small number of rebels against this honor code to subvert it, I said, since any significant group willing to sign the pledge against cheating, while also openly acting and speaking in violation of the code, would tend both to “break the spell” of the code and to put honest students at a disadvantage. In effect, this is what has happened with the open subversion of clerical celibacy: The open flouting of the rule, in belief and in practice, has helped to demystify it, and also put those who continue to uphold it at an unfair disadvantage. And particularly when it comes to the sexual abuse of minors, we have seen that egregious violations of a sexual code of honor by even a relatively small number of individuals can bring suspicion and discredit on an entire institution — and to the code that governs it.
The priest scandal also teaches a critical lesson about the time that it takes to undermine an institution. Defenders of civil unions in Vermont, for example, are fond of saying that since the advent of civil unions two years ago, “the sky has not fallen.” The answer is that the effect of civil unions and gay marriage on the ethos of marriage will likely percolate for years before the harm becomes evident — after which time it will be too late to turn back.
THE SKY THAT FELL
This is exactly what has happened to the Church. It has been at least 30 years since the homosexual presence in the priesthood began to increase markedly. All along there were signs of trouble, yet no profound institutional crisis. Only now, after three decades, is the Church experiencing an authentic emergency, one that has provoked calls for at least two sorts of solutions — removing or reducing the presence of homosexuals in the priesthood, or the abolition of celibacy itself. The first solution would drive away liberal Catholics, and devastate a priesthood that is now substantially homosexual; the other would represent a tremendous blow to traditional Catholics. After 30 years of gay marriage, it would be equally difficult to go back — yet the subversive effects of gay marriage on the ethos of marital monogamy could, by then, have reached a similar stage of emergency.
Of course, the lessons I am drawing from the priest scandal all depend on the idea that priestly celibacy and marital fidelity are in some sense related. They are. Celibacy is premised, in part, on the notion that a priest cannot be entirely faithful to both his wife and his vocation. In effect, a priest is married to the Church, and his celibacy expresses his fidelity within that holy marriage. Nowadays, many have lost the feel for celibacy’s rationale. We are wont to ask how a priest can knowledgeably advise a married couple when he himself isn’t married. But a priest’s authority in these matters comes from his exemplary personal sacrifice for the sake of fidelity to his Lord, his Church, and his flock. Likewise, marriage is based on mutual sacrifice and fidelity. It is only from within a Sixties-inflected culture of self-fulfillment that the sacrificial ethos of celibacy, of marriage — indeed, of Christianity itself — seems puzzling. So there is every reason to believe that the deliberate subversion of the Church’s teaching on priestly celibacy prefigures a broader attack on the ethos of monogamy under a regime of gay marriage. And of course, as I documented at length during the gay-marriage debate, numerous advocates of gay marriage openly advocate and promise such “subversion.”
Indeed, Andrew Sullivan himself gives us good reason to believe it: He has taken contradictory positions on the issue of marital fidelity. In his book Virtually Normal, Sullivan argued that the “openness of the contract” in many gay unions would actually strengthen heterosexual marriages: The rather free gay unions would show straights that their marriages need not be threatened by adultery. This is a critically important passage, because in it, Sullivan effectively concedes the “subversion” argument. Once gay marriage is legalized, says Sullivan, the monogamous ethos of traditional marriage will be transformed by the sexual “openness” of gay unions. And that, Sullivan argued at the time, will be a good thing. In his exchange with me, Sullivan retreated from that position, at least on the surface, by arguing that gay married couples would likely be every bit as monogamous as heterosexual couples.
In the wake of the priest scandal, however, Sullivan appears to have moved back toward his more “subversive” position. Sullivan has responded to the scandal by highlighting his blanket opposition to Catholic teachings on sexuality — saying, for example, that he objects to the Church’s attitude toward “extra-marital sex.” So Sullivan himself has connected his attack on the priestly rule of celibacy with a broader set of objections to the Church’s position on all forms of non-marital sexuality — including, one presumes, those that require an open sexual contract. If this is the position on marital fidelity of the foremost conservative advocate of gay marriage, what are we to expect of the far greater number of gays who are not conservatives? The experience of the Church has clearly shown that even those gays who join the most traditional of institutions are radical enough to deliberately attempt to subvert its sexual mores. It is therefore no stretch at all to see the conscious subversion by gay priests of the rule of celibacy as foreshadowing the subversion of the traditional ethos of marital fidelity under a regime of gay marriage.
Of course, the mainstream press has done everything in its power to deny or minimize the connection between the priesthood scandals and homosexuality. Here is a case where the bias of the mainstream press on social issues matters tremendously. How can people debate the effects of social and sexual changes that the press barely even acknowledges to have taken place?
And the press’s fears are justified. For the gay-marriage movement to be successful, it must be perceived as a struggle for civil rights. The press therefore refuses even to acknowledge the possibility that gay sexuality might be of any greater social consequence than skin color. The sky will not fall, we are told; yet for the Catholic Church, the sky is already halfway down. Advocates of gay marriage are fond of comparing those who warn against it to racists who purveyed silly scare stories about the effects of miscegenation. But the real model for gay marriage is the priesthood scandal. Here is a case in which gay sexual culture has not been tamed by, but has instead dramatically subverted, a venerable social institution — an institution built around an ethic that is a first cousin to marital fidelity itself. Should the connection take root in the public mind, gay marriage may not become a reality after all.
>I would much prefer it if we waged war against homosexuals
How about pedophile child molesters?
“Father Lawrence Murphy – Pedophile Priest sexually abused 200 deaf children
New information about a pedophile priest as documents released detail how Father Lawrence Murphy sexually abused as many as 200 deaf children.
Peter Isely is the Midwest Director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests and says, “I can tell you that according to this file this is probably one of the worst pedophile priest cases in the United States.”
Most of the cases occurred at a school for the deaf in Saint Francis throughout the 1970’s. In Archdiocese of Milwaukee reports, a psychotherapist tells of how Father Murphy said “It was sex education for them [the children]. They were confused about sex.”
Father Murphy also said he believed his victims consented, also telling the psychotherapist, “I could tell if they like it because they didn’t push me away. So I knew they liked it.”
Arthur Budzinski is a victim of Father Murphy and, through his daughter, told that he still thinks about the abuse every day but has been able to “pick up the pieces and move on, but some other victims are just stuck with it and dealing with the issues.”
Father Murphy died in 1998. A victim of Murphy’s is now suing the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, alledging the organization was complicit in allowing the priest to continue to serve actively despite having knowledge of his pedophilia.
A spokesperson for the archdiocese calls “The abuse committed by Father Lawrence C. Murphy 30 years ago was a horrendous betrayal of his priestly vows,” also adding that checks now exist to “make sure that anyone who has abused a child no longer serves as a priest in any way.”
That is a terrible comment at the expense of children who have been abused. Have some humanity.
The Catholic Church claims an exclusivity that it does not possess. Part of exposing that error to the world includes disclosing the rampant personal frauds that are the men claiming to be "alter Christos" on earth. That Ratzinger hid them and continues to hide them exposes the RC organization for what it is...a self-aggrandizing cult.
Father Murphy (center) accepts a check for $16,000 on behalf of St. Johns School for the Deaf from the Knights of Columbus in 1966. Murphy, who was fluent in American Sign Language, was a tireless fund-raiser for St. Johns, where he worked from 1950 to 1974. By all accounts, Murphy was much revered in the deaf community.
If he is guilty he should suffer the full penalty of the law.
There can be no excuse for molesting children, the Church should co-operate in every way to see justice done.
If the Church had taken this in hand years ago this wouldnt be a big deal now. The way to deal with it now is with openness and cooperation and the expulsion of all guilty parties.
Steve Geier, at his Madison home with his wife, Ann, says he reported the sexual abuse by Father Murphy to three priests on three occasions through the years. Two indicated they did not believe him, and one told him to forget about it.
Instead, Murphy waved them away as if he were swatting at gnats and quickly went back into the cottage.
"That was a long time ago," Murphy said, both speaking and gesturing in American Sign Language. "Don't bother me."
Murphy, who died in 1998, is believed to have molested dozens of boys at St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis, where he worked for 24 years. Some of his victims are coming forward to ask the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to compensate them for their suffering. The Journal Sentinel interviewed eight of them.
Murphy's dark side might never have surfaced if not for Bolger, Budzinski and Gary Smith, who began having flashbacks in their 20s about the sexual abuse and started sharing their experiences with each other. In 1974, they decided it was time to tell their secret. They wanted to save other deaf boys from being molested by Murphy.
One year earlier, a deaf boy went to the St. Francis Police Department to report that Murphy molested him, records show. The case was dropped after Murphy told police the boy was mentally retarded, according to a deaf teacher who was at the school at the time.
When the men decided to work together to get Murphy removed from the school, he was well known in both the hearing and deaf community and had influential friends.
Murphy was Midwest adviser to the International Catholic Deaf Association and chaplain of the Cardinal Stritch Council 4614 of the Knights of Columbus, as well as the director of St. John's. A few years before the men began their protests, he had received the American Legion Award for Distinguished Service for Child Welfare.
By all accounts Murphy, who was fluent in American Sign Language, a tireless fund-raiser for St. John's and a wonderful teacher, was much beloved by the deaf community. Bolger, a graduate of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., knew it would be an uphill battle.
"I knew he was still molesting boys," said Bolger, who lives in Compton, Calif. "We got the cold shoulder from some members of the deaf community. There were factions. We were not together on this."
As the oldest member of the group, Bolger arranged for several adult victims to go to the Milwaukee County district attorney's office and the St. Francis Police Department to file complaints against Murphy. The men communicated by printing their statements on paper and then pushing them over the desk to the detectives, who wrote back with more questions.
Murphy denied the allegations, and the police investigation was dropped. No criminal charges were issued because the men were adults and the crimes were beyond the statute of limitations.
"It is just hard to communicate with hearing people," said Gary Smith, who lives near San Antonio. "It's like, 'Where do you go?' "
Steve Geier, 55, another of Murphy's victims, was living with his wife and two young children in Madison during the protests against Murphy. He said he reported the abuse to three priests on three separate occasions through the years. Two indicated they did not believe him, and the other told him to forget about it.
Good lord what a freak parade.
I never heard about anything like this from my parochial pals...just about sadistic nuns.
>If he is guilty he should suffer the full penalty of the law.
He’s dead
Damn! Just Damn!!
I had two friends, when we were teens in the late 1980’s who considered the priesthood. They both joined the Marine-Corp instead.
I asked myself why - as the two vocations seemed quite different. I realized that both boys were looking for direction, discipline, dedication to a cause, serving a greater good, manliness, and brotherhood.
I also realized that religious orders (for men) would be much more popular if they were similar to the Marine Corp. It seems that post Vatican II, religious orders went in the exact opposite direction.
AMEN!
LOL!!
Nuns were hell
That has always been the key point for me. I accept that any large organization can be infiltrated by criminals, in this case sexual deviants. However, it's the response that reveals the character of the leaders of that organization.
I watched the documentary "Deliver Us from Evil" recently and was surprised to learn that the Pope was given clemency by Pres. Bush. I believe a Priest would advise any person making a confession, where criminal acts occurred, to admit their guilt to the proper authorities. Yet the RCC has done the opposite when confronted with these criminal acts.
Should the Catholic church wage war against homosexuals within its ranks?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.