Back in 2002, when the homosexual priest scandal broke over the levy, thousands cried and demanded that the church defrock and toss out homosexual priests.
The Catholic church failed to do so then, and it fails to do so today.
This former priest told me that his gay clerical colleagues constantly taunted the straight priests in their diocese, telling them that they might as well get girlfriends, because nobody cared. In fact, said the former priest, this was true: the bishop was in their corner, and nobody would care at all. The former priest said the rigors of the celibate life were tough enough without having to deal with many of one's fellow priests making a mockery of it. This man told me every heterosexual in his ordination class eventually left the priesthood, demoralized.....Sipe, who is probably the expert on the sexual lives of Catholic clerics, told me that the seminary system is the problem. Many seminaries are run by corrupt gay clerics, he said (Fr. Doyle agreed). If a seminarian struggling with homosexuality and chastity is admitted, the attempt will quickly be made to corrupt him by getting him involved in sexual activity. If he falls, he's done for. Even if he repents and lives a blameless celibate life thenceforth, the network has something on him, and is willing to use it. He's been neutralized. Besides, the network takes care of its own. It's impossible to say for sure how many bishops are thus compromised.
As it turned out, I interviewed a woman who had worked for him closely in one of his previous assignments, and who had gone to him to report that one of his priests was engaged in some very perverse sexual acts in the church. The woman told me that Bishop X. did nothing about it, and even informed the malign cleric, who taunted the woman by saying, "He's not going to touch me. When you have them by the balls, their hearts follow." This priest eventually went to prison (I checked) for sexually abusing minors, and this bishop's career advanced to a plum see. Unless you've spent a lot of time talking to people who have dealt with this stuff personally, it's hard to believe this situation really exists. I interviewed a seminarian who had been studying in a religious order's seminary, but who left for a diocesan seminary because, he said, gay sex was open and rampant in the particular order seminary in which he was studying. He told his own parents about what he was dealing with, and they didn't believe him. They couldn't believe him: priests didn't do these sorts of things, as they saw it. I firmly believe that John Paul II was so dreadful on the scandal because he couldn't face the extent and degree of the corruption.
Fr. Cozzens was, and is, correct. And Fr. Shaughnessy, the Jesuit who identified the Catholic Church's inability to deal straightforwardly with the powerful gay subculture in its clerical ranks, is also correct about the broader institutional effect of this culture of denial. But I don't look for the Roman Catholic church, or other churches dealing with the issue in its clergy, to talk about this honestly, or at all, anytime soon. Too many people, gay and straight on all sides of the issue, inside the churches and outside, are too invested in keeping up appearances. UPDATE: I ran across just now an old post from Grant Gallicho at the Commonweal blog asserting that conservative Catholics are distorting statistics to make the scandal seem like an exclusively gay problem. Grant quotes directly from the John Jay Report: The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female.
The church and whine and complain all it wants about how "unfair" the criticism has been. The real issues is that the church REFUSES to deal with the cancer of rampant homosexuality in its ranks.
Father Cozzens estimated on Meet the Press several years ago that the number of homosexual priests was probably 50%, or higher. Father Doyle agreed.
This isn't a "problem." This is a cancer that has just about succeeded in killing the body, but the patient still denies he is sick.
