Posted on 04/05/2002 12:32:54 PM PST by Notwithstanding
Homosexual Culture Undercuts Priesthood
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.comEditor's note: See part one of this series, Anti-Catholic 'Experts' Fuel Church's Scandals.
Friday, April 5, 2002
Father Andrew Greeley called it the "Lavender Mafia," a homosexual underground within the Catholic Church in America that has managed to dominate many of the seminaries and must bear the largest share of the blame for the sex scandals afflicting the church.
Like the gay underground in the British Foreign Office of the past where for scores of years the road to advancement was open only to homosexuals, the Lavender Mafia has been the gatekeeper determining who will be admitted to seminaries and ultimately to the Roman Catholic priesthood.
In Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood," author Michael S. Rose quotes a former Mundelein seminarian, Joseph Kellenyi, as saying: "The issue was never one of my suitability for ordination. Rather it was that the gay clique had been given veto power over who got ordained."
'Gay Profession'
In his book, "The Changing Face of the Priesthood," the rector of St. Mary's Seminary in Cleveland, Father Donald B. Cozzens, warned that the priesthood was becoming a "gay profession."
And in the seminaries it wasn't merely a preponderance of gay students, but also "a disproportionate number of homosexually-oriented persons," including faculty, he wrote.
That kind of atmosphere, Rose notes, "deters the heterosexual man from continuing to study and prepare for the priesthood."
Rose wonders how can "any healthy heterosexual seminarian expect to be properly formed and prepared for the priesthood when constantly subjected to that which is so clearly contrary to Church teaching and discipline?"
'Threatening Atmosphere'
He asks: "How many heterosexual seminarians, whether orthodox or not, have decided to leave the seminary and abandon their vocations because of the 'gay subculture' they were forced to endure, because they had been propositioned, harassed or even molested? We're not talking here about the presence of a few homosexually-oriented men who conduct themselves with perfect chastity. Rather there exists an intense and often threatening atmosphere."
Indeed, so horrific is the situation that "certain seminaries have earned nicknames such as Notre Flame (for Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans) and Theological Closet (for Theological College at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.); St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore has earned the nickname 'The Pink Palace.'"
Visiting the Gay Bars
At some of the seminaries, faculty and students would don their gay apparel and head for gay bars. In March 2000 the liberal Greeley, often called the church's resident pornographer for his racy novels, testified that seminary professors "Tell their students that they're gay and take some of them to gay bars, and gay students sleep with each other."
Greeley is not alone in exposing the homosexual behavior rampant in many of the nation's seminaries:
Rose cites numerous instances of gay domination at many of the nation's seminaries. One priest described the situation at Chicago's Mundelein seminary in the 1970s. Many of the younger students would be placed into situations where they compromised their sexual integrity," said Father Wayne H. Wurst during a radio broadcast.
"This would be used against them by older students for favors. And those older students actually had faculty members who would request from time to time a friend who would come and visit them because they were lonely. And these students would supply fresh meat.
"So there were madams, pimps and prostitutes all in a major seminary system that from outside, if you were to walk through, would look very holy."
Heterosexuals Driven Out
Heterosexual students at a number of seminaries were persecuted by the gay subculture. Reporting homosexual behavior by classmates could get them expelled, as could resisting homosexual advances. Rose cites scores of cases of heterosexuals driven out of seminaries because they refused to accept the gay culture.
In Cozzen's book, "The Changing Face of the Priesthood," he wrote that there has been "a heterosexual exodus from the priesthood" due, Rose notes, in part to the unrestrained gay subcultures in some seminaries, the resulting "overwhelming gay clergy culture will have an effect on how the laity views the priesthood and it will have an effect on incoming vocations. Potential candidates for the priesthood who are heterosexual will be intimidated from joining an institution where the ethos is primarily that of a gay culture."
Anyone wondering how the church could have got itself in the mess it is now experiencing need look no further than the pages of Rose's extraordinary book. What we are seeing today are the results of a gay priesthood being loosed upon parishes all across the nation, where they have abused impressionable young men they treated as "fresh meat" to satisfy their unnatural sexual urgings.
Next: Bashing orthodoxy: how false teaching demoralizes and discourages aspiring priests.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
I was watching a program on MSNBC the other day and was amazed at the pains one of the guests took to tap-dance around the fact that all of the molestation victims were boys and none were girls. He kept repeating that a pedophile is a pedophile is a pedophile and the gender of the victim is irrelevant. When the other guest questioned as to why no girls had been molested, the first guest accused him of trying to turn the subject into a gay-bashing agenda. He never did answer the question.
Speaking for my area, it has been proven we have 6 priests with problems in the last 15 years.
That works out to 1/5th of 1%.
Zero is acceptable, but this attempt to call everything a homosexual culture is going to far from what I have read so far.
There are many against Christianity in the press that will use this to sell papers.
I also see a witch hunt forming.
This is getting to be like when after 9-11 people who were not family of the victims were trying to access disaster money.
Where there is money there will be lawyers and false folks trying to mix in with the real problems.
Not a good situation.
Same thing in Poland. In the most of seminaries, my friends told me there used to be a constant "hunt for homosexuals" to get them out of the closet and then to get them out the door. But I am told that in the last years this vigilance got lax. Maybe the scandal in America will be a warning and will work as a vaccine.
The second possibility is that the Bishops are just as, ah, disoriented as are the priests--and the "I'll out you if you jail me" response was given.
Another, more technical problem, is that once ordained, a priest is a priest forever (sort of like marriage.)Thus, one could be reluctant to simply toss the guy into jail.
Recently the Vatican has been waving a document (1961) forbidding the ordination of homosexuals which was obviously ignored.
From these bits of info you may deduce that ignoring the Vatican document was deliberate--from which you could also deduce that at least a few of the Bishops in this country have an orientation problem, and are subject to blackmail.
Sorry mess, isn't it??
Even more: don't send your pearls off with the swine for a weekend "retreat." (Lay off the flaming--I am a Catholic.)
Of course, our Bishop is a leader of the 'to hell with the Pope' gang in the USA--and it shows.
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