Questions that must be faced
Before we breathe a sigh of relief now that many of the allegations against John Geoghan have been settled, we must realize two things: there are outstanding allegations against six other archdiocesan priests; and these scandals have raised serious questions in the minds of the laity that simply will not disappear.
· Should celibacy continue to be a normative condition for the diocesan priesthood in the Western (Latin) Church?
· If celibacy were optional, would there be fewer scandals of this nature in the priesthood?
Celibacy is an act of resignation to the Divine Will of God, giving all to Him, not self. It is Scriptural in its roots and in the Tradition of the Church for one very good reason. You cannot serve two masters. The reason that there are questions re celibacy among Catholics is that Catholics don't understand the beauty of celibacy in relation to Holy Orders by sacrificing self for Christ.
· Does priesthood, in fact, attract a disproportionate number of men with a homosexual orientation?
The revelations in Michael Rose's new book, "Goodbye! Good Men" are proof positive that that those inclined to the developmental disorder that homosexuality is were encouraged to attend seminaries because those seminaries encouraged sexually perverse behavior.
· Lastly, why are a substantial number of Catholics not convinced that an all male priesthood was intended by Christ and is unchangeable?
See ibid. on celibacy. The problem is not celibacy. The problem is heresy and apostasy in the chanceries of dioceses throughout the country which encourage dissent from the faith, brainwashing their seminarians into believing that dissent is good for the Church, when it is destroying the Church in America.
These questions are out there in the minds of Catholics — more so in the United States than elsewhere. They have been answered in the past but now these questions have taken on a deeper intensity in more Catholic minds than prior to these sexual scandals.
Even if our present woes in the archdiocese were suddenly to disappear, these questions have taken on an urgency and will not slip quietly away.
Before intelligent answers can be given, we must realize that there is no panacea; that a married clergy presents its own distinctive problems and liabilities, and that more studies with concrete data will be necessary before an intelligent response can be made. Right now emotions are running too high.
For example, if the number of archdiocesan priests accused of pedophilia over the last 50 years is approximately 60, it is essential to know how many priests there were in 1951, how many have been ordained since that date and how many others have been incardinated into Boston’s diocesan priesthood from other dioceses and religious orders.
A fair total estimate would be 3,000 — making a ratio of approximately two percent. What is the percentage of American males afflicted with this psychosexual pathology? Is this devastating sin/crime/illness more common in the priesthood than elsewhere?
This overlooks the result of the research of Rose who documents in detail the encouragement of dissent, and the gay subculture being allowed to flourish in our seminaries. You admit homosexuals to seminaries, you're putting out the welcome mat for clerical pedophilia given the considerable evidence showing the direct correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia per organizations such as NARTH, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality.
The New Testament clearly prizes an embraced celibacy “for the sake of the kingdom” and by the earliest centuries it became associated with ordination to the episcopacy and, later, to the priesthood. The Council of Nicea, the first ecumenical council, addressed the issue in the year 325.
We Americans live in a popular culture that simply does not understand, let alone prize, celibacy as an expression of love for the Lord and His kingdom. Would abandoning celibacy be the proper answer to new data from the contemporary sciences or would it be surrendering to popular American culture?
The Church is supposed to stand in contradiction to the world, not in accommodation to it. The celibacy of its clerics is a witness to this for the love of Christ in following His example, i.e., acting in persona Christi, in the person of Christ, which is what Catholic priests are supposed to do.
A further question is this: What does the Church do to attract a sufficient number of priests for the service of its people in a culture that does not consider celibacy a Gospel ideal?
Since when does the secular culture dictate to the Catholic Church?
Another question would be: Would a married clergy, in a culture in which there is a 50 percent divorce rate, be the answer? Data from Protestant and Orthodox churches might provide a helpful insight.
Regarding the question of homosexual orientation and the priesthood, the following questions come to mind. Is sexual orientation an either/or? How do we know anyone’s sexual orientation unless they candidly admit it — or their past history confirms it? Is there a valid screening tool that can evaluate such an interior world?
There most certainly is, given the Pope's latest directive on psychological screening where the psychologists in question are to be Catholic in more than name only, understanding the Church's teachings for the sake of the souls of the faithful. What is happening is that many of these same psychologists are militant pro-homosexual activists who have committed public heresy in regards to scandalizing the faithful by their vociferous support of homosexual lifestyles. Such is the situation in our diocese (Altoona-Johnstown, PA)
Is every male who is sensitive, caring, and even somewhat effeminate a homosexual?
Was Christ effeminate? No! Is being effeminate good for the priesthood, where priests are supposed to be acting in persona Christi? Clearly, the answer is no.
Is every male who is macho, a jock and seemingly overflowing with testosterone a heterosexual?
There are enough natural problems that our priests must overcome in a world that mocks their vocation. Why should we make their crosses more difficult by also asking them to overcome unnatural problems, a sin much greater than the former, which is also Scriptural, and directly addressed as such by the most famous doctors of the Church, Augustine and Aquinas. We see the consequences of admitting those to the priesthood suffering from unnatural problems on an almost daily basis.
We know that our sexual orientation is neither morally good nor evil.
What we know, in fact, is that an orientation to homosexuality is unnatural. It is an "ordering to an intrinsic moral evil". That being the case, how can those being so inclined be considered as candidates for the priesthood? Answer - they can't.
We know the following from the Teaching Magisterium of Holy Mother Church, where the definitive position on homosexuality is presented in a "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual persons" given at Rome, 1 October 1986 by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The major excerpts from that letter follow.
"Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.
"Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not."
This truth is reinforced in the Universal Catechism which calls inclinations to homosexuality "objectively disordered."
Evidence now seems to indicate that it is a genetically inherited condition.
This is a lie! There is absolutely no evidence, nor has their ever been any credible evidence which would indicate that homosexuality is a genetically inherited condition. All evidence along these lines by "homosexual" researchers has proved fallacious.
Morality comes in to play only when we deliberately choose to act contrary to our conscience, the natural law and the teachings of the Church. True, the Church teaches a very high morality in matters of sexuality, but not higher than its teaching on truth and honesty — our individual behavior to the contrary not withstanding.
What kind of double-talk is this? Yes we must act according to our consciences. But we are OBLIGED as Catholics to inform our consciences with the teachings of Holy Mother Church. That is what truth and honesty demands, especially when God is Perfect Truth.
Space prevents our addressing the questions that circulate around the issue of ordaining women so The Pilot will focus on that next week.
Save your ink on the issue of ordaining women! That issue has been infallibly closed for quite some time thanks to Ordinatio Sacerdatolis, and the subsequent Responsum ad dubiam, two documents from the Magisterium which say that the Church cannot ordain women. Why is this so difficult to understand? How can a priest act "in persona Christi" if the priest isn't a man as Christ was? The ministerial priesthood is inextricably related to the person of Christ.
There are twenty-two rites (i.e. churches) in the Catholic world that are in formal union with the Pope. The Latin Rite (what we think of as "the Catholic Church") is only ONE. Virtually every other rite (Maronite, Melkite, Byzantine, Ukrainian, etc.) allow the ordination of married men. The Orthodox Christians (who separated from Rome in the early 11th century) have *always* allowed for the ordination of married men - so they were doing it back when they were Catholic!
It is NOT a "Gospel mandate" to have priestly celibacy. You cannot argue that it is mandatory, or that it is "traditional" (as I pointed out above, it is NOT), or that it is even prudent. It is *disciplinary.*
This discipline can change within the Latin Rite, and it would also be very nice if the Latin Rite would *leave the other rites alone* and let them continue with their time-honored practice of ordaining married men as parish priests. Ironically, the Latin Rite *already* has married priests, because those Episcopal priests who converted to Latin Rite Catholicism and became ordained as Catholic priests *brought their wives with them,* and now are *married* Latin Rite Catholic priests. I have even heard of Lutheran pastors getting ordained as RC priests and keeping their wives. So it is already being done even in the Latin Rite.
The quid pro quo was secrecy, deniability, and (more or less) repentence and chastity. This model served everyone well-it made a laudable and on occasion saintly opportunity for service out of a mistake of nature or nurture. A hand job once in a while in a cloister was easy to overlook or to confess and repent.
Two things destabilized this long-lasting pragmatic arrangement. Heterosexual religious were freed by the "spirit of Vatican 2" to act out, and boy, did they ever! One consequence of this was that they married each other in large numbers. In so doing, they "outed" each other in a public way, and left the clergy, in each case reducing by two the number of heterosexual religious.
The other thing, of course, was gay liberation and the impetus to "outness". This seemed impossible at first for RC clergy, leading to the "inclination is not a sin, only action" formulation. But this eliminated the repressive call to repentence which, I postulate, had been operating since forever for gay religious.
Also, there were many fewer heterosexual religious to do the repressing. This is the actual role of the ban on marriage in this fiasco-it doesn't create homosexual predators, but it eliminates the competition, so to speak.
When the need to repent of one's orientation was gone, and the heterosexual colleagues were greatly diminished in numbers, and the angry gay liberation dynamic became the order of the day, the result was what we have now-except that residual reticence, veneration of the clergy by the most devout, and what is probably a conspiracy of silence by implicated and blackmailed superiors has prevented up until now widespread true knowledge among lay Catholics of the actual state of affairs.
Andrew Sullivan’s Gay Problem-- And mine.
March 13, 2002 12:25 p.m.
Andrew Sullivan is a brilliant journalist whose work I treasure, but he is wrong on the gay-priests issue. He attacks me today for having a "gay problem" when it comes to homosexuality and the Church. He's right; I do. So does he. And it's on this dispute that the future of the Catholic Church in America rests.
Sullivan is angry that in my comments in The Corner, I've often connected the homosexuality of priests accused of pederasty with their alleged crimes. He resents my comments about the "lavender mafia" running much of the institutional Church (the phrase is Fr. Andrew Greeley's, and he's hardly a Catholic conservative). He disdains my remarks about how some gay priests in control of seminaries and chanceries use their power to persecute orthodox, heterosexual priests and seminarians, and he resents my remarks about some seminaries being not much better than "gay brothels."
I draw those dire conclusions not on "hearsay," as Sullivan says, but on reporting and years of conversations with priests, who have told me more than I wish I knew about what it was really like in their seminaries. It will be interesting to see how Sullivan will react to author Michael S. Rose's forthcoming Goodbye! Good Men, which is the first book I'm aware of to systematically compile these stories from the seminaries, and to name names.
I've just finished an early copy, and what it documents is absolutely astonishing, and cannot be ignored except by those who do not want to see. This bombshell book reveals a seminary underworld in which homosexual promiscuity and sexual harassment is rampant, in which straight men are marginalized and demoralized, and seminarians who support the Church's teaching on sexuality and the priesthood are persecuted, even to the point of being sent off, Soviet-style for psychological evaluations. Many of these guys are rejected from entering the seminaries, expelled, or driven by depression to leave.
The book was substantially written before the Boston scandal broke, and it contains damning information about the homosexual domination of St. John's Seminary in Boston during the time that many of the priests accused in the current scandal there were ordained. How can you blame people for wondering if there's a connection between the outlaw homosexual culture of that seminary, and the outlaw homosexual culture that some 80 priests in Boston participated in?
Even seminary rector the Rev. Donald Cozzens, in his much-praised book The Changing Face of the Priesthood, writes that the increasing presence of homosexuals in the priesthood causes particular problems for straight seminarians, and not for the usual bugbears of "homophobia." The Catholic laity have a right to know if their Church's priesthood is becoming heavily gay, and what that means. Fr. Greeley writes, "The laity, I suspect, would say it is one thing to accept a homosexual priest and quite another to accept a substantially homosexual clergy, many of who are blatantly part of the gay subculture." What's more, I have been told by a number of sources, including psychiatrist Richard Sipe — no Church conservative he — that there does in fact exist a network of gay priests who support each other, sometimes through sinister ways (e.g., blackmailing bishops and others who threaten their activities).
I have connected the homosexuality of those priests who have been publicly exposed as pederasts to their alleged actions for one main reason: The media will strain to avoid making the connection, for fear of being accused of homophobia. But this scandal cannot be understood and honestly dealt with in its absence. We hear over and over again that "pedophiles are mostly straight men." That may be true, but what we're seeing with priests is not pedophilia, which is a deep-seated psychological illness. What we're seeing is gay men who cannot or will not keep their pants up around teenage boys. Not teenage girls. Teenage boys.
You cannot blame people for asking if there's something about the culture of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood that fosters this phenomenon, if it's something more than a few bad apples, but a systemic problem. Maybe it's not. But it is not homophobic to ask, and the questions do not go away because Andrew Sullivan doesn't want to face them, for fear of what the answers might be.
One reason this matters goes beyond the safety of teenage males, to the theological integrity of the Church. It doesn't take a sociologist or an investigative journalist to determine that people will go to great lengths to believe things that will justify their sex lives. It's very human; most of us have done it at one point in our lives. We've seen gay priests and theologians, aligned with feminist nuns and other dissenters (including heterosexuals, to be sure), working to change the substance of the Catholic faith, particularly on issues of sexual morality. And they're succeeding. In my experience, the only time most Catholics ever hear anything orthodox said about sexual morality from the clergy is when the Vatican says something. You can just as effectively change the belief of the people by not teaching the truth as you can by teaching falsehood.
No serious Catholic could object to a homosexually oriented priest who is both chaste and openly supportive of the Church's teaching. We're not talking about these brave and faithful men. Does Andrew Sullivan believe gay priests should have a special dispensation giving them the right to be sexually active (as he apparently believes about himself as a Catholic)? Does he believe they don't have an obligation to live by authoritative Church teaching? Does he believe that good works and heroism in other aspects of their priesthood exempts them from fidelity and integrity in others (e.g., does Fr. Judge's bravery at Ground Zero earn him a pass on the fact that he was unfaithful to the Church on sexuality?)
Or is it more important to Andrew Sullivan to be sexually active gay man than a faithful Catholic? You cannot have it both ways. Hence Andrew Sullivan's gay problem. Hence my own. Hence this painful discussion, which will soon occupy center stage in the public square as the scandal unfolds, and American Catholics are forced to deal with the homosexualization of the Catholic priesthood in America.