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.
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I will very gladly pay. Let's see a study.
On another note, did I just read here that Jesuits have 50% gay men?
Let's see the study. My wallet is wide open. Who wants in?
Ah yes, Gramsci. Well I did not mean to imply that because a few bad apples in the catholic church . . . the other spinoffs (denominations) have made their share of mistakes, too. I've read quite a bit about the "communist plot" to take over the church but I think it is lame. Whatever the church is going through is self-inflicted for not sticking to biblical truths especially concerning morality and gross heresies that almost any denomination would have rejected up until the last half century.
Despite having a Christian president, it used to be pc to be a Christian in this country. That is no longer the case.
Actually, there were still fairly good morals among the common people even under communism, much better than what you see today here in the US, no drugs, little stealing, core family values (too much alcoholism), etc. It was the murderous leaders and power-grabbing underlings who perpetrated most of the atrocities.
Many were, but not all. Again, refer to Council of Elvira, 295-302 AD, Canons XXVII and XXXIII.
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I will very gladly pay. Let's see a study.
Did someone put a clause into the bible? As much as I search for it, I can't seem to find it
I've already referred you to Jenkins book Pedophiles and Priests and provided several links to Protestant pedophilia, ephebophilia and sexual misconduct. You do the legwork yourself, or does the lead in your backside prevent that? Perhaps it is the bigotry you harbor that won't allow that to occur. By the way, since you have all the answers, how about giving us the names of the Apostles wives? You can find the answer in Scripture can't you? You want to bet on that? Ever heard of lex continentiae or viri probati and their relation to those receiving Holy Orders in the second, or third, or fourth centuries ...? While you're at it, brush up on an unabridged, uncorrupted Bible, since you have demonstrated that you simply don't know what is and isn't actually contained in Scripture.
The Weekend will include:
Prayer
Time to meet others like yourself.
Massage Workshop
Social Time
Quiet Meditation
Eucharist
Relaxed atmosphere
David Birchall is a Jesuit priest who has worked with many gay and lesbian individuals and groups. He has been running similar weekends for ten years.
David currently works at the Jesuit Communication Centre, Dublin, after having spent 13 years at Loyola Hall.
David qualified as a massage therapist at San Francisco School of Massage.
What does this mean?
1999 The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of His own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it. It is the sanctifying or deifying grace received in Baptism. It is in us the source of the work of sanctification:(48)
Therefore if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself.(49)
48 John 4:14; 7:38-39
49 2 Corinthians 5:17-18
I understand it as a gift. Are you saying that it is weakened by sin? What do you mean by deifying? Is baptism the only way to get it?
Or maybe they're paying the price for keeping women out of the hierarchy. After all, men who are exclusively around other men all the time (prison, pirate ships, biker gangs, prolly navy ships) will pretty much end up doing the same kind of stuff with each other regardless of how straight they are.
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