Recommended to understand the cultural atmosphere leading up to the present absurdities.
We've been complaing about this stuff for years.
Posted on 03/07/2002 6:29:25 PM PST by Antoninus
Liberal Catholicism's Just Deserts
By George Neumayr
Published 3/1/02 12:04:00 AM
The very liberals who wanted the sexual revolution to enter the Catholic Church are suddenly shocked at its effects on the priesthood.
After Vatican II, the American Catholic church very stupidly took the advice of the secular culture and adopted a permissive attitude toward sexuality. "Loosen up," "Don't be judgmental," "Accept nontraditional types into the priesthood," the secular culture outside and inside the church told the American bishops. And they did.
Seminaries soon became havens for sexual oddballs. Conservative Catholics predicted that this collapse in seminary admissions standards would lead to tragedy. But liberal Catholics -- heady with the "fresh air" in the church and scoffing at the old morality -- dismissed these traditionalists as cranks out of touch with the Zeitgeist.
True, the introduction of moral liberalism into the American Catholic church is not the only cause of the pedophilia problem in the church. Man's power to choose evil freely is the primary explanation for scandal. But moral liberalism -- which tends to rationalize and even sanctify the effects of Original Sin -- abets the spread of sexual sin in the church.
Psychologist William Coulson knows this well. In the 1960s, he counseled priests and nuns to "get in touch with their feelings," as he told me in an interview for a 1997 story in the "San Francisco Faith" newspaper. "My theories made priests and nuns feel good about being bad."
Working with his mentor Carl Rogers, an icon of 1960s relativistic non-directive therapy, Coulson conducted "sensitivity" training and "self-esteem" workshops for the Jesuit Order and several other religious groups eager to absorb the New Morality.
"Once we began to peel the onion at these workshops, there was no end to the shocking things people would say," he said. "They became persuaded of this subjective theory of morality which says that the highest morality is the one you locate within you. And after a while these religious forgot about the teachings of the church."
"After our workshop at Alma [the Jesuit seminary then in California], one of the young Jesuits wrote, 'Never in my life before that group experience had I experienced ME so intently," he said.
"The Franciscans were so enamored with our psychology that they introduced it to Saint Anthony's seminary in Santa Barbara. Years later, 11 or 12 friars were accused of molesting 34 high school boys. I'm afraid we planted the seeds and they carried the seeds to the next generation and they germinated."
Both Coulson and Rogers later repudiated their relativistic theories. "I greatly underestimated the reality of evil," said Rogers. "I hope Rogerian theory goes down the drain."
But the liberal culture in the American Catholic church -- aping the moral collapse in the secular order -- did not reject those theories. The bishops continued to accept deviants into the seminaries, telling appalled conservative Catholics that God wants the church to use "broken people" as instruments.
Now the church is paying for its betrayal of Catholic tradition. The remedy to its problems is to recover that tradition, not further weaken it.
But that is precisely what the liberal elite -- with crocodile tears blurring their vision -- are demanding of the church. They call on the church not to enforce the priestly vow of chastity with pre-Vatican II gravity, of course, but to abolish it.
"Celibacy is an onerous burden that can easily distort a person's psyche," says writer Andrew Sullivan in "Time" magazine. No, it is sexual immorality that distorts psyches. The pedophiles who entered the priesthood weren't celibate before ordination or afterwards.
Sullivan says "many sexually conflicted men gravitate to the priesthood precisely because it promises to put a straightjacket on their compulsions and confusions." No, they gravitated to the post-60s priesthood because the newly liberated church wouldn't put a straightjacket on their compulsions. Cultured deviants flocked to orders like the Jesuits because they knew the American church's new "enlightened" ethos was forgiving toward sexual irregularity.
"How can a church that preaches the impermissibility of so many forms of consensual, adult sex simultaneously tolerate, ignore or cover up the sexual abuse of children by its own priests?" asks Sullivan.
Very easily: It hasn't preached the impermissibility of "so many forms of consensual, adult sex" for decades. Rather, it largely accepted the anything-goes sexual revolution and is now facing the consequences of that corruption.
George Neumayr was recently a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. --Matthew 18:6
Ab
It's fun to blame it on the 60s and Vatican II, but it's complete BS. It happened before all of that.
This article is a case of someone with an agenda making up facts to support it.
Why don't you fess up to what your real problem with Catholicism is? Until you do you will look like nothing but an opportunistic Catholic-basher. Anyone who thinks that there is something about celibacy that will lead an otherwise straight man to molest boys is toting less than a full six-pack. Likewise anyone who thinks that forcing marriage on the otherwise lavender will guarantee that they will avoid the practice of that which flips the switch of a homosexual pederast.
If you are married, do you think that is all that keeps you away from ten-year-old boys? If you are not married but are attracted to what adult female paramour has to offer, whether you practice that or not, can you imagine pursuing and molesting a ten-year-old boy as a substitute?
Inquiring loyal Catholics would like to know. So would some of our solid friends and fellow soldiers of Christ in this fallen world who are of the Reformed Christian persuasion but are so joyous in their love of the Lord and in the Word of the Lord that they practice and spread their own faith on the merits and do not define themselves by bashing Catholics and Catholicism.
That was one heck of a homily, and a rousing battle cry! Your moving essay should be read from every pulpit of every Catholic Church on Easter Sunday.
So many Catholics have forgotten WHO we are and WHY we are here.
Soldiers in the Army of Christ, go out and fight!
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The problem is the Church is so compromised thet there is nobody to do the cracking, or there is too much protective compromise infiltrated within the church.
It shows the power of Jesus' words and the guidance of the Holy Spirit sent by God to protect His Church that the Catholic Church still stands and will forever. Jesus also told of the trials of His true Church and all you have to do is look around to see the truth of it. So pray hard and pray often because God will continue to bless the Church even in trials.
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