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"protect the church"

I remember when an ex-priest from my old parish was accused and convicted of molesting boys. I asked my mother if she knew that Father D..... was a homosexual. She looked at me and said, oh yes, we all knew he was probably a homosexual. I looked at her with amazement and asked why somebody didn't do something about it. She just shrugged and said nobody did much about those things in those days. I couldn't believe it.

But the attitude of parisioners in those days (fifties and sixties) was much more submissive than what people tolerate today. My parents (especially my father) attitude was the Church and priests could do no wrong. Even when they did wrong. I guess they just couldn't deal with the idea of a pedophile priest. If I found out some cleric had molested my child, he had better be hiding in an undisclosed location. I wouldn't be very tolerant or forgiving.

One always had the problem and the people were usually less tolerant than your mother. A popular priest at a San Antonio church was "sent away" at the request of parishioners because he got too " friendly" with the baseball players he was coaching. One of the players "clocked the priest" and the pastor, after the complaint was delivered to him by the boy and his dad, got on the phone to his superior --these were Franciscans--and the guy was gone in a week. It was done "quietly," because that was how it was done on those days--by every institution. Many were the tales of young men who were flunked out of the seminary and sent home because they were too "nervous." The paradox of all this, IMHO, is that we are part of a society that easily tolerate homosexuals but is outraged when a homosexual is caught doing what homosexuals do every day. The myth has grown up that homosexuals were persecuted. The truth is that they were shunned. But shunned not for what they were--unless they happened to look like a girl--but after they got caught, or were dumb enough to hang out at a gay bar, where they were likely to get busted down and then by cops who really were "homophobes."