Posted on 04/12/2002 1:40:46 PM PDT by aristeides
THE news from America is not good. In my day, there was none of that sort of malarky. At school (in England), the priests who taught me were good and holy men who did not, as a rule, indecently assault the boys.
The only incident I can recall that might now be classed as paedophilia involved a friend who was given one-on-one counselling about masturbation by his housemaster. My friend was told to take down his pyjama trousers. There was no "inappropriate touching", at least by hand, but there was a bit of close and apparently expert scrutiny and . . . But that's enough of that. We thought it was a bit of a lark.
What is happening now, in America, is not a lark. The sex scandal rocking and roiling the Roman Catholic Church there is serious. Even if, as I suspect, many of the weeping "victims" of pervert priests are on the make, there is still compelling evidence that very bad things indeed have been going on, and are still going on.
The scandal stretches back 30 years and more. It involves allegations against as many as 2,000 priests - among them the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles - and has cost the Church about $1 billion. On Thursday in Holy Week, the Pope felt compelled to denounce paedophilia in priests as the work of the Devil.
It's not just paedophilia, either. There is a flourishing gay culture among Catholic priests in the United States. There have always been homosexual priests, of course, many of them very good men. What is new is that such priests now claim the right to indulge their preferences. According to an estimate from within the Society of Jesus, roughly half the American Jesuits under 50 are homosexual, and most of these are sexually active.
In California, the Jesuits have an official website that defies parody. Until recently, it was displaying pictures of novices cuddling one another in Mardi Gras costumes. The pictures carried captions such as "Pretty Boy and Jabba the Slut" and "Lambada, anyone?". These images were not found in some spotty novice's desk drawer, note, but were intended to place the Jesuits in a good light before the 700 million people around the world with internet access.
There is a very serious problem in the Catholic Church, but let's be clear what the problem is not. It is not, as so many believe, the rule of celibacy. ("I mean, if they was allowed to get married, they wouldn't be rogering them choirboys, would they?" The same sort of reasoning, in posher language, can be found in broadsheet newspapers.) If you want proof that celibacy is not the cause of child molestation or promiscuous homosexuality, look at the Church of England, or visit your nearest internet paedophile circle. The truth is that celibacy is the only hope that paedophiles - and their potential victims - have.
The real problem is the legacy of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). It is no coincidence, as the Marxists say, that the revolutionary "spirit" of Vatican II began to kick in at about the time much of the sexual abuse began.
By opening itself up to the world - the aim of Vatican II - the Church hoped to foster a renewal of spiritual life. The renewal never materialised. On the contrary, pews emptied, seminaries and schools closed, annulments soared (in America, from 338 a year in 1968 to 52,000 in 1983), nuns started reading Germaine Greer and priests left to get married (giving greater scope to the non-marrying kind).
What followed the Council was decline: moral, intellectual, cultural and spiritual. It spread far beyond the Church. By ditching its ancient Latin Mass - the Mass of Bach, Beethoven and Palestrina - in favour of a participatory vernacular service of praise and thanksgiving, Rome committed an act of vandalism just as surely as it would if it had ordered the destruction of all the great cathedrals of Europe.
As it is, huge sums of money - though perhaps not as much as has been shelled out to the victims of paedophilia - have been spent on smashing altars, ripping out communion rails and generally trashing sanctuaries to make room for the new, man-centred liturgy. It is as though Rome had been seized by a frenzied hatred of beauty. No wonder the churches are empty; no wonder the culture of the bathhouse and the internet chat room has such a secure footing in the Catholic - and for that matter the secular - world.
The Pope has stamped out some of the worst abuses, and has even allowed the old Latin (or Tridentine) rite of Mass to be celebrated publicly, if in moderation; but it is hard to forget or forgive the fraud and experimentation that attended the introduction of the new liturgy in the 1970s. There were clown Masses and bunny rabbit Masses and dancing girl Masses and rock Masses. Christ, it was embarrassing. Celebrants began to get in touch with themselves, and, as we can now see, with others. Out went repression, in came expression. Altar boys paid the price. So did a new, inclusive presence: altar girls.
A measure of the frivolity that infected the Church in the 1970s is to be found in the statement issued last month by the Bishop of Palm Beach, when he resigned after acknowledging impropriety with a 15-year-old boy in 1977. The poor fellow was reduced to trying to account for his behaviour by saying, inter alia, that he had fallen under the influence of the "sexologists" Masters and Johnson, but added that he had made "wonderful Jewish friends" and "wonderful friends in the Muslim community". He asked for prayers and "expressions of love". He suggested that those who were a bit miffed should "pray for their ability themselves to forgive".
It is no good just blaming the Yanks, however. The decline of the Church in America mirrors the decline of the Church elsewhere in the West, and indeed the decline of the West in general. The sex scandals will eventually disappear, but the rot is almost certain to continue, and perhaps grow worse when John Paul II dies. We'd better watch out.
They are SUPPOSED to be celibate - whatever they are.
Man, I miss those days...
Never thought I'd say that.
Do ya' really need to know any more? On the Roman Catholic Website ,http://rcf.org Where people are checking this stuff out,under communication there is a whole subculture of Clergy Organizing and holding "retreats for Homosexual clerics", and giving explicit instructions for giving Oral Sex safely to their partners".
Man O Man this really gives me the Creeps,to think these guys are acting as spiritual leaders in our Church.
Gruesome ! While Vatican II may be partly to blame most of these guys are REAL CRIMINALS..
Cardinal Law and Egan supported these criminals.
That is so utterly, utterly perfect. It captures the whole catastrophe. Thanks for posting it.
Can't help myself.......
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
------W.B. Yeats
"...I doubt if Goebbels would have bothered to make pederasty the center of his propaganda against the Catholic Church if the charges had been entirely without foundation....
I'd never thought of analyzing Goebbles genius in quite that way. The more ugly the propanganda, the more likely it was to have some foundation. Hmmmm.....
God might as well have chosen your mother (or mine) I guess.
You guess correctly! Mary was a sinner in need of a Savior (Luke 1:47), just like my mother (and yours).
Over and out. :-)
Couldn't part of the problem be that there are too many bad priests with homosexual desires. So that instead of receiving support from fellow priests, a weak struggling priest receives temptation? And is turned into a bad priest himself? If some of these stories about certain seminaries are true, then it's not a surprise that so many fall into temptation.
The Garden of LoveIt wasn't easy growing up Catholic, believe me.
William BlakeI went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt no, writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore,And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.
Jesus says 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone'
A rock whizes by his head and strikes the harlot right in the temple, she drops like a sack of potatoes.
Jesus slowly turns and says in an exasperated voice 'Mother....'
Or if the civil authorities throw large numbers of priests and bishops in jail, and the lawyers sue many dioceses out of existence.
When "Cardinal" Law is reduced to saying Mass in Ted Kennedy's garage, you know the mess will have been cleaned up.
Who is talking about women priests? Then again,
I don't see anything wrong with it. We may be
talking historical male domination being
threatened by this issue and in the covering-up
of priestly crimes by the bishops, though. If
men can't be trusted in positions of authority
around children, it isn't a stretch to cede the
operation to women. Amiee Semple McPherson
was merely a fraud, not a rapist.
Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to follow them.
* When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
* I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
* I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
* Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
* I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
* A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev.11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
* Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
* Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
* I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
* My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev.24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted disciple and adoring fan.
But yea, growing up Catholic was a hoot and to think I am still one says something... about me... about the church... maybe about what faith is and how it works no matter what. I don't know. I just know that I'm comfortable with my faith. Maybe not a good thing, but nontheless it's how I feel. I can't imagine being anything else.
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