True. However, I think that any incidents are too many, and that this is useful to remind Catholics that they need to watch the clergy a tad closer than they have in the past.
No sin ever going to be stopped all the way. The Devil goes about like a roaring lion, and sin enters anywhere it can. During the 1960s and 70s, the authority structure of the Church broke down, and a lot of these people got into the priesthood at that time and then rose through the ranks and, like all gays, promoted the brotherhood.
The Lavender Mafia did great harm.
This is a bad thing and the Church knows it and has been trying to stop it for years. JPII was a lousy administrator, although even he managed to get some procedures in place for reviewing seminaries and religious orders. However, BXVI has done a lot, and he’s the one that Newsweek is trying to stop.
I know, but this article ultimately fails to do that. All that's going to happen is that the people will get more riled up and be much more likely to turn in priests for bad behaviour. I encourage it. The Orthodox do not have the problem to the extent that the Latins developed in the 60s and 70s precisely because they beat their clergy in the streets with sticks when they depart from Orthodox Christianity. We need to raise our behaviour to their level.
“True. However, I think that any incidents are too many, and that this is useful to remind Catholics that they need to watch the clergy a tad closer than they have in the past.”
Totally agree.
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.