Posted on 07/09/2011 11:27:26 AM PDT by armydoc
For residents of Rome, the sight of courting priests is hardly an anomaly. But a recent exposé is rocking the Catholic Church.
In the basement dining room of Le Mani In Pasta, a trattoria in central Rome, a young, glossy-eyed couple stare at each other across a table for two. They smile and blush over a private joke. There is no handholding or kissing, but they are clearly more than friends, even though they are both wearing dark shirts and the telltale white clerical collar.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Sorry, but I lived in an Orthodox environment in the 1970s and they had huge problems with gays, which they never solved because they could never discuss them.
I remember when a certain rector of an American Orthodox seminary had to say he didn’t want to be in charge of a group of pot-smoking homosexuals...after a (married) candidate for the priesthood was caught parading around in vestments mocking the Sacrament. And then there was the time when gay men in the SF diocese, mostly deacons but some priests as well, actually felt confident enough to complain to the elderly, confused, foreign-born bishop about the behavior of other gays. And finally, of course, the then Metropolitan was revealed to have had a number of “relationships” while he was busy stealing the church blind.
Homosexuals infiltrate everywhere. Orthodox bishops must be monks or widowers, and priests must be monks or married. But being married (to a woman) doesn’t bother them in the least, and the seminary was full of women who went there, theoretically studying to be catechists, to snag a priest husband and ended up with somebody living a double life.
Many of the corrupt Orthodox traded on the fact that some of their bishops were from the Old World and barely spoke English and were out of the loop on a lot of things. But having known a flamboyantly gay Orthodox priest in PA who wore his velvet blazer and clerical collar to every gay bar in PGH, and occasionally met the future Metropolitan there, I don’t think the Orthodox have much to boast about.
Yes, we are to condemn it.
Sometimes though (I am not saying you are doing this) it is implied that since we are all sinners, we should not oppose sin because that makes us hypocrites.
Obviously I disagree with that argument.
I don’t want to see homosexual men in any position of influence. It is a particularly pervasive sin that upends the biblical order in many ways. Even though I am a sinner too and must fight sin in my own life as well.
My experiences with the Orthodox don't include much boasting from them. Remember that I didn't say that they didn't have any problems with it, but that they didn't have the problem to the extent that the Latin Church developed in the 60s and 70s. That became rather horrific.
I was an altar boy, but never experienced, or even heard of anything like that. My home diocese was thankfully spared from this horror.
let me preface this by saying i consider myself a faithful Catholic, but one who is very privy to the “sausage factory” that is the inner workings of church governance and administration. My parents were regular hosts to travelling priests and religious passing through area, active in their parish council and frequent guests at the dinner table of the local archbishop.
I myself count among my friends many priests and religious who serve in fairly high offices in Rome and elsewhere, several high ranking church laity, and a psychologist who serves at one of several secure hospitals operated in the US for treating mentally ill priests (yes including THOSE kind).
SO I say this with all the love possible for mother church, but truth is truth.
At this point, The majority of ordained priests from the 1st world are gay. Simple as that, and this has been true for probably 50+ years and the Church has been well aware of it, and seen it as a “win-win” of sorts.
Once the ranks of the priesthood were swelled , especially in America by the ranks of children of Catholic immigrants, particularly Irish and Italian who had large families and held to the tradition of “one for God”-that is that one of their sons, usually the youngest, was expected to join the priesthood.
As these immigrant groups marched up the ladders of material success, they became less devout, and what was once seen as an honorable job, (and one with a steady income and job security) became seen as more of a burden, largely owing to the celibacy requirement-which meant no grandchildren at a time when family size was shrinking anyway.
Into this gap came a generation of men who embraced celibacy, in part, out of a fear of their own sinful, sexual desires. The Church has always said that homosexuality per se is no sin, only homosexual acts are. Therefore, even knowing many of these men for what they were saw this as a “win-win”- a way to keep young men away form a life of sin and a way to keep the ranks of the priesthood strong and vibrant.
Unfortunately this acceptance paved the way for the pedophilia scandals in which we are now embroiled. The “gay rights movement” and the “sexual revolution” came along and told men gay and straight to embrace their desires, not be ashamed of who they were. embrace promiscuity, abandon marriage etc. As this message spread through our culture, The celibate priesthood started looking like an archaic and unattractive thing to most healthy young men, who were being told by their culture that there was something wrong with them if they wanted to live a life without sex.
Vocations all but dried up by the mid 1980’s in the US. Seminaries that once graduated classes of 50 or 100 were ordaining only 6-7 priests a year. And because of that scarcity, to their everlasting shame, the administrators or those seminaries began overlooking things that once would have gotten people thrown out on their ear, and they either eased the complex psychological screenings they used to use to weed out the unfit.
This how so many pedophiles got in. Most of them were horrified at their own desires and so like the gays before them ran to the shelter of celibacy. They should have been screened out, but the Seminary administrators were simply too desperate for bodies. Likewise homosexuals were permitted to be a lot more open, and even active about their sexuality because they were needed so desperately.
It is my opinion that this will not stop until we take a real serious look at lifting the celibacy requirement altogether. There already are married priests in the Roman Catholic rite, and the sky has not fallen. If we don’;t want Benedict “Glory of the Olives” to be the 2nd to last Pope as St Malachy reported prophesied, we need to take a very serious look at re-opening vocations to married men again.
Very good. Now, the hard part is in actually getting our people out there and active and I don't mean that in a pant suited Wiccan lesbian nun fashion.
my point was we should oppose all sin, even if we ourselves are guilty of that sin. we also need to look at our own walk as Jesus taught. i think you and i agree on these points.
I don’t know if he’s still there, but I went to a mass in Rockford, Ill. and the priest there was a total flamer.
I have long suspected that. That viewpoint isn’t going to go over well with the Catholic crowd around I fear.
What authority would the SBC have over that little 80 member family cult, what relationship do they have?
Thanks for posting.
Y'all saw the date on this article, right? It's July, 2010.
So....... now that we're 12 months down the tracks, I guess we can look back and ask; what was the upshot of this Newsweek article? How much did it "rock" the Church?
What have been the consequences for Catholicism? Are we still here?
Discuss among yourselves.
Since it’s clear that the SBC has no authority over cults that call themselves Baptist, and since the number of cults using the Baptist name is unknown, and since their beliefs and practices are unobserved, the true number of pedophiles in the SBC is actually also unknown, as is the way the Baptists deal with them.
Non-Catholics often praise themselves for the way they take legal action against child molesters in their churches, but there is no way to know that, is there? Churches that drive out the complaining witnesses, that blame the victims, that pass the perpetrator along without advising the next congregation of misdeeds are not unknown and examples have been published on this forum.
It is not a case of perfection in one church, and a problem solely of Catholics, no matter how pleasant that thought may be to some.
Why can’t the Pope just solve this problem?
What is he? What is his role?
I belonged to ELCA affiliated Lutheran Church.
When the ELCA did the job on human sexuality policy our congregation split. We left the building and took the senior Pastor with us. We worship weekly in a rented facility. We feel that we have been very blessed because of this.
What is a Catholic Parish to do if they know their Priest is gay?
Jesus is simply sorting the sheep from the goats just as he had promised.
It appears that you true Catholics will have to make some sort of personal choice at some point.
I don’t keep up with the homosexual priest thing much, although I always assumed that the priest that I was counseling with was a homosexual.
I’m guessing that people are surprised by the Catholic church institutionalizing of homosexuality as described in post 64. I think that the Catholic church has a much more serious problem than just catching a few stray dogs when they pop-up and get busted.
I will not wast time with the garbage you wish to feed me. I would prefer that you yourself show some spine and post your thoughts rather than hide behind some garbage giggling like some spineless leftist would.
Get thee behind me Satan. You seem to be clueless. Are you sure you are not some leftist troll?
And do people realize just how many priests there are in Rome? It’s not like your average city. Every 4th car seems to be stuffed with priests. With whatever number of total priests in Rome, it is probably a teeny %age of them that are gay like this. There are people with sex issues in every clergy in every religion.
Why is this trolling? We HAVE married priests in the Eastern Rite of the ROMAN Catholic Church. Our Eastern Orthodox and Anglican brothers have done this for centuries without a problem. The Church itself has see-sawed on the question for almost all of its history. Peter himself, the rock on which the Church was built was a married man. Was it not God himself who said “it is not good for Man to be alone”? and is marriage not a holy sacrament because we see it as a blessed and good thing? So why do we deny this to our priests?
I’ve seen a lot of good men, holy men, men who were truly gifted in ministry leave the priesthood because they wanted to have expression of the urge that every human being has hard-wired into them, the urge to love, to procreate and have children.
If we believe that God calls the best of us to be priests, then isn’t denying them the right to have offspring counter-productive to the human race?
I have seen it happen.
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