Posted on 06/04/2002 3:03:30 AM PDT by maryz
The Catholic Church in America is at a watershed. The current crisis is the culmination of decades of bad management, errant theology, and sinful behavior. It is partly about sex and partly about bishops. It is also about deluded therapies and an institutional Church that often goes flopping along with the mainstream on moral issues. The crisis is mostly, however, about active homosexuals in the priesthood. Anyone (including an archbishop) who does not admit this is simply part of the problem.
The media have framed the issue as one of pedophilia – that is, the sexual abuse of prepubescent children. But the large majority of the cases in question involve not pedophilia but the sexual abuse of teenage boys. Sexual attraction to male adolescents is technically called “ephebophilia.” But don’t expect Mike Wallace to use this term on 60 Minutes. Not because it is a mouthful, but because the media prefer not to treat homosexual behavior as the issue. Still, it is issue, and if the hierarchy does not root it out – if it takes the easy approach of instituting “new procedures” for dealing with abuse only after it has occurred – then the devastation is going to continue.
In the Wake of Humanae Vitae
Let me tell you a story. Two decades ago, a friend of mine attended a large social gathering sponsored by a diocese in the Northeast. At one point, all the local seminarians arrived, and as the music was cranked up, they all began to dance with one another. My friend expressed puzzlement to somebody familiar with t he way things were under the local bishop, and the reply was, “Of course, all the seminarians are gay.”
The institutional Church has been deeply corrupted by the sexual revolution. Ralph McInerny was absolutely correct in his April 2002 “End Notes” when wrote that many of our problems can be traced to the widespread theological dissent against Humanae Vitae. That 1968 encyclical was the defining moment of modern American Catholicism. It put famous theologians into open rebellion against the Holy See. It made heterodoxy normative in many, if not most, Catholic institutions. In the wake of the dissent, many in the clergy began to issue permission slips to the laity for all sorts of sexual behavior. So why not give one to themselves?
I hope we are beyond the point where any discussion of homosexual behavior that is not entirely favorable is deemed “homophobic.” We are not talking here about priests with a homosexual orientation who are struggling to live the virtue of chastity. We are talking about active homosexuals who have broken their vows. We are talking about a lifestyle that is often marked by compulsive behavior. Homosexuals have a more serious problem with promiscuity and lack of restraint than heterosexuals (see, for example, Spence Publishing’s Homosexuality in American Public Life, edited by Christopher Wolfe). Forty percent of homosexual sex today is reportedly unprotected – this after two decades of safe-sex instruction. Active homosexuals also constitute a relatively high proportion of sexual molesters. And they have been welcomed into the Catholic priesthood.
How did this happen? At some point in the early 1970s, a gay insurgency within the Church began to gain control of at least part of the official Catholic apparatus. Once in place, this network expanded. Many seminaries were turned into “pink palaces” where young, devout, heterosexual men felt distinctly vulnerable. And this is not just a diocesan problem: Many religious orders run seminaries with openly homosexual cultures.
Is it surprising, then, that these scandals have occurred? If you allow into the priesthood men who in many cases have already chosen to flout Catholic moral teachings and are disposed to mix sodomy with their ministerial rounds, which include contact with teenage boys, there are going to be incidents of sexual abuse.
Where the Bishops Went Wrong
Ant let’s be clear about this: There is no greater scandal on this planet than a priest sexually violating a minor. Christ used the strongest possible language to condemn the abuse of the “little ones.” Such acts are the equivalent of spiritual and psychological murder. There are often perpetrated on confused youths who hunger for a father figure and never fully recover from the betrayal of trust.
Just as scandalous has been the handling of these incidents by bishops and administrators. And this brings us to a larger problem in the American Catholic Church. For decades, our episcopate has been in the hands of mildly “pastoral” men who (with honorable exceptions) chose not to see what was happening on their watch. This is true even of some visibly orthodox bishops. It is good and honorable to uphold Catholic doctrine in the public arena, but it is much more difficult to confront diocesan officials who dissent from Catholic teaching. Even in so-called orthodox dioceses there can be found legions of heterodox administrators who have ruined seminaries and made a hash of CCD and Pre-Cano programs. This is where the courage of many bishops fails: They would rather get on with their administrators – some of whom may be openly contemptuous of the magisterium – than be a sign of contradiction. They simply let things happen.
The grossly negligent response of certain bishops to incidents of sexual abuse is of a piece with this “I’m okay, you’re okay” style of episcopal management. Sexual predators have been shifted from parish to parish, their crimes buried in chancery files, and the families of victims in some cases bullied or bought into silence. Bishops have treated the threat of bad publicity, rather than the predators, as the problem. Their response to these wolves loose in the sheepfold has been bureaucratic rather than spiritual and moral.
Even now, I am not sure that some bishops really get it, given the solutions they are venting after meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome. The crisis is not going to be solved just be instituting new procedures, or tightening up reporting or using more psychological testing. It will disappear only when bishops understand the responsibilities of their office and are not afraid of striking at the root of the problem – which is going to involve, among other things, firing vocations directors, cleaning up the seminaries, and defrocking (with Rome’s permission) a number of priests. We are not talking about witch-hunts, and due process is important. But why should so many teaching centers of the Church be in the hands of people who not only reject Catholic doctrine but don’t seem to mind priests breaking their vows?
One of the benefits of the current scandals is the exposure of the therapeutic culture that has invaded the Church. The Catholic landscape is dotted with therapy centers that purport to treat sexually abusive priests. These centers give bishops the illusion that they are doing something about the problem. But they are often staffed with “experts” who are sympathetic to the gay agenda. These therapists are quick to label their patients as normal and harmless after a few months of counseling and send them off for a new parish assignment. It is worth noting that in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association officially decided to stop treating the homosexual orientation as a problem. In any event, anybody who knows anything about sexual pathologies knows that the rates of recidivism are high after treatment. The credulity of those who have bought into these programs for so long is truly astonishing.
What the Bishops Must Do
The current crisis presents an enormous opportunity for reform and renewal within the Church. There is also a great potential for error. One popular proposal is to allow priests to marry. But there is a good reason why celibacy is a Church discipline. On a practical level, the Church discovered early on that diocesan priests could not fully do justice to the vocation of priesthood and the vocation of marriage, both of which involve a total gift of self. Also, think about it: If the Church were to allow priests to marry, within a decade or so there would be a lot of divorced priests – some clamoring for remarriage. If the sexual revolution is going to adversely affect single priests, it will certainly affect married ones.
There are things the hierarchy can do right now to address the crisis, and there are other policies that will take years to implement. First, the American bishops have to admit that this is their problem, not Rome’s. One of the ironies of the current crisis is that for years parties in the American Church, including bishops, have complained about Vatican “interference,” implying that they have more to teach Rome than vice versa. But the moment the scandals broke, the cry became, “Why doesn’t the Vatican do something?” The Catholic Church is not an American corporation, and the bishops are not functionaries of the pope; they are the heads of the Church in their diocese and are fully responsible.
And they need to do a serious housecleaning. They need to ask a number of incorrigible offenders to leave the priesthood. They may have to close some seminaries or transfer their management to orthodox orders. I recently talked to their one young man who described life in the East Coast seminary from which he was expelled for orthodoxy: lavish parties, plenty of liquor, never any silence, an openly gay vice-rector, a liturgy professor who assigns Protestant textbooks on the Eucharist and refers to the Blessed Sacrament as “bread” and transubstantiation as a “theory.” The only “good” news was that not all his fellow seminarians were gay: One had a girlfriend who regularly visited his bed with the tacit approval of his superiors.
In the case of the abuse of minors, there should be a “one strike and you’re out” policy. The severity of this approach does not violate the Catholic understanding that all sinners are capable of change and repentance. It is simply a prudential recognition that a disproportionate number of sex offenders are likely to bide their time and strike again. We have a duty to protect our youth, and this means we have no business experimenting with more therapies and simply hoping for the best.
The bishops should also consider incorporating Rev. John Harvey’s Courage program in seminaries and treatment centers. Courage is a spiritual support system that helps men with a homosexual orientation to live an interior life of chastity. It works. Yet Catholic bishops and administrators are often hostile to Courage, preferring programs that are more to the taste of gay activists.
The bishops might also consider finally implementing the documents of the Second Vatican Council, which, among other things, are an antidote to the clericalism that still plagues the Church in this country. In too many dioceses, there is an impenetrable clerical culture that does not involve orthodox lay Catholics with real expertise in areas like management and organization – and theology, for that matter. I am not suggesting the “clericalization” of the laity, but it is important for both clergy and laity to grow out of the habit of viewing the church as a juridical machine run by a self-enclosed hierarchy. The current crisis would not have been so bad if the hierarchy had worked with consultative lay bodies that act as a reality check.
Like the Sons of Noah
What is the proper response of the laity to the crisis? Above all, it should be one of prayer and trust in God. We should also examine ourselves as Catholics. The laity constitute 89 percent of the Church, and these scandals among the clergy did not occur in a vacuum. Do we pray for priests? Do we foster vocations among devout and intelligent young men? Are we supportive of parish priests, who have very difficult jobs and often only hear complaints? Are we charitable toward their human failings?
Sometimes it is a good thing for the laity to behave like the sons of Noah, who covered their father’s nakedness with a cloak. St. Catherine of Siena, who lived in a time of great crisis in the Church, reports Christ as saying in one of her mystical dialogues: “It is my will that the sins of the clergy should not lessen your reverence for them . . . because the reverence you pay to them is not actually paid to them but to me.” Our outlook in these matters must be supernatural. Our attention should primarily be on God rather than the sins of others.
That said, the Church has serious work to do in putting its house in order. St. Catherine also wrote: “It is essential to root out from the garden of the Church the rotten plants and to put in their place the good ones.”
Now, I go out of my way to specifically talk about the difference between my feelings toward Catholics and the pope. I am then chastized for bringing it up too many times. Now I am labeled, once again, as disliking Catholics, or so it seems to me.
But I will happily go away and leave you to your discussion. Good luck!
I read my copy of Goodbye! Good Men only once before I lent it out, and I don't recall whether that seminary is mentioned. AC, TM -- can you be any help?
Gays and the Seminary
The schools that train U.S. priests require students to be chaste, but most allow them to be gay. A Vatican probe may change all that
By David France
NEWSWEEK
May 20 issue — There will never be a gay students’ group—or gay film series or gay dance—at St. John’s Seminary, one of the most respected training grounds for Catholic priests in the nation.
YET THE 64-YEAR-OLD institution, nestled in the hills of Camarillo, Calif., may be one of the country’s gayest facilities for higher education. Depending on whom you ask, gay and bisexual men make up anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent of the student body at the college and graduate levels. “I don’t want people to think that in a negative way,” says a 28-year-old gay alumnus, who believes all seminarians there are chaste, regardless of orientation. “It isn’t like Christopher Street or West Hollywood. But some seminarians are gay, openly gay, and very loud about it.”
Though they constitute just over 5 percent of the population, gay men may make up half the student body at the 76 high-school, college and graduate-level seminaries across the country, according to broad estimates. For decades Roman Catholic Church leaders have quietly reckoned with this surprising truth about seminary life. There is no rule against celibate gays as seminarians, theologians say. But for a church where priests preach that homosexuality is an “intrinsic evil,” it is at the least incongruous that so many would-be priests are gay.
What bothers me is that I get the feeling that the bishops in the U.S. are going to side step the homosexual issue in the priesthood. This is NOT good. The gay issue is THE issue.
I imagine that is what we are here for. For me, I am waiting to see what action(s) the Bishops will take - if it is less than acceptable (as in not dealing with the homosexual issue), then we have to swing into action. Letters, phone calls, faxes, etc. Plus much prayer, attendance at Mass and the Sacraments as often as possible and working our way to Jesus so that we might be the light.
I have two close friends that were given more than a hard time after their psychologicals and were at first refused admittence to the seminary because they were too "rigid". A third friend dropped out because of the rampant gay lifestyle at seminary.
How is it that a man who claims to be a homo, and lives a perverted lifestyle, who the Church claims is psychologically disordered, not only gets admitted to but recieves preferential treatment in these institutions? What kind of hypocrisy are we dealing with here? How do our bishops justify this kind of thing? Where the hell are the bishops?
The first category of "artificial" birth control also has two subdivisions: barrier methods and methods that kill the child (abortifacients). Barrier methods are forbidden because of the artificial separation of the unitive from the procreative (the deepening of the marriage bond which results from the total giving of one spouse to the other where the act is open to procreation as opposed to the essentially mutually masturbatory use of the partners merely as means for sexual satisfaction). The pill works by making the womb inhospitable to the implantation of the embryo. Although, the womb, on many occasions may be, for unintentional reasons, inhospitable to implantation, the intentional prevention of implantation is a killing. That there is no dramatic or even perceptable event to make the mother and father aware of the expulsion does not justify the abortifacient act any more than firing a gun into a dark room will absolve the shooter if someone is killed "unintentionally." The firing of the gun is intentional so is the taking of the pill. The medical literature appears to be mixed on whether the pill is responsible for long-term medical problems for the woman in the way of breast cancer, uterine cancer, cardio-vascular problems and the like. Giving the pill the benefit of the doubt on this score, would you board a jetliner if there is a 50/50 chance of a bomb in the luggage compartment? A 20/80 chance? A 5/95 chance? Not if you recognize suicide as immoral for perfectly healthy people or otherwise.
Likewise the IUD disrupts implantation by disrupting the womb and it also poses major health risks of an immediate nature to the woman.
Needless to say, the "morning-after pill" is simply a powerful abortifacient taken AFTER conception. The RU-486 pill, dubbed as the "human pesticide" is simply and well-understood by all concerned to be an abortion in pill form.
This leaves "Natural Family Planning" which is allowed only for "grave reasons", which is the loophole that AmChurch liberals have been perverting and driving tractor trailer loads of defiant immorality ever since the more excommunicatable of them rejected Humanae Vitae and its rejection of birth control.
Grave reasons would include physical maladies threatening the life or essential health of the woman (husband has communicable HIV or AIDS, substantial diabetic condition of wife makes pregnancy a major risk, a serious heart condition, uterine cancers, etc.) Grave reasons do not include a desire to buy a bigger projection TV, a desire to vacation in or build a castle in Spain, a need for "fulfillment" by returning to the workplace for the satisfactions (?) of career, a need to be involved in the garden club. Grave reasons also do not include hubby's frustration with infants crying for 3 AM feedings; his desire for a snazzier car; the rising cost of country club dues; the fact that anyone fathering more than two kids is teased by the more Planned Barrenhood oriented of his friends and colleagues for using his wife as (they so delicately put it) a breed sow. I could go on but you get the picture.
It may well be that some priest has told Salvation what she posted. Fortunately, we do not regard our priests as infallible much less our laity (such as your not so humble servant). Just as we have far too many pederasts, pedophiles, ephebophiles and just plain queers within the priesthood, we also have embezzlers, drunks, drug abusers and priests of extremely questionable judgment who, above all, wish to be liked and are willing to please by telling parishioners what Father Feelgood thinks they want to hear. If the priestly advice in question suggested the moral acceptability WITHIN Catholicism of ANY form of birth control other that Natural Family Planning OR the acceptability of NFP under any but "grave" circumstances, he is wrong and his advice is a marriage wrecker. Such advice is all too common and is one very important reason for the scandalous percentage of divorce among "Catholics".
Fortunately, Father Feelgood, Father Pederast, Father Barleycorn, Father Embezzlement and Father Heresy are not the only sorts of priests or anywhere near a majority. If your priest is telling you that birth control is OK, bear in mind the connection between the natural sterility of homosexual sex (all of it) and the artificial sterility of birth-controlled sex. There are plenty of heroic priests (particularly among the younger ones) who will adhere to the moral truth of the Magisterium and help you to do likewise. Find one quickly for this and many other reasons. Shun the rest.
Also, bear in mind, that acceptance of the notion that a couple have a moral right to "plan" the number of their pregnancies, never mind what God may want, is, as understood by the infamous Margaret Sanger would inevitably lead to acceptance of abortion as a fall back measure. Birth control, without grave reason, is defying God by effectively saying: "My will, not Thine be done." But that is what Sanger was really up to all along, ably assisted by Antonio Gramsci, Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, Himmler, Hitler, the Arkansas Antichrist, Ms. Antichrist, most of the legislators that most of us despise for whatever reasons, and so many, many more, but the victory over them is not just possible. It is guaranteed on the Highest Authority. We still must do our part.
In Connecticut, I enjoyed the friendship of some very conservatively oriented Greek Orthodox families and their priest, and spent time with the families daily at their business and the home of one of the families. Perhaps, there was something unspoken of historical problems with some Catholics in centuries previous to any we had lived in, but, if so, it never came up in conversation and they knew me well enough to know that any sincere belief of theirs would not harm our friendship but would occasion my respectful attention.
I apologize for the "small annoyance" crack. If unity between your Church and mine is not to be, we will, both of us, survive. Yours is a truly wonderful Church with entirely valid spirituality and sacraments and Mass. I will absolutely not disrespect the Orthodox Church. When I was outraged in the immediate post-Vatican II era over the suppression of the Tridentine Mass and considered options, the option most likely if I were to have ceased being Catholic would have been Eastern Orthodoxy. For me, it finally came down to the old Roman maxim that where Peter is, there is the Church. I know we disagree on that, which is why I am Catholic and probably a reason why you are Orthodox. We need not disagree disrespectfully.
Finally, one of our local pastors observed that anyone who thinks that actual Catholics are having their Faith shaken by the current scandal does not know us very well. The congregation (a novus ordo one) responded with a standing ovation. We are, of course, a tad sensitive at the moment and like the Celtic warrior Cuchulain, girded for battle. We and you need not fight one another at this time.
That is one very cute goat on your profile page as well. God bless you and yours.
Where on earth did you get this?
Here's what the Catholic Catechism has to say about NFP:
2370 Periodic continence, that is, the methods of birth regulation based on self-observation and the use of infertile periods, is in conformity with the objective criteria of morality.
Moreover, the Catechism says regulations of births may be done for just reasons, which is a far cry from "grave."
The determination of the size of a family is the duty of the married couple and no one else.
I guess you could read my statement to mean that the Church would approve of birth control. However, what I meant, was that on an individual basis, in sitting down with a priest and explaining the details, the priest can give you guidance from the point of view of the Church.
The individual, thus informed, can then judge his or her or situation.....alchoholism in the family.......Rh factor danger of losing the mother........etc., etc. Each individual cas is then decided by the individual, NOT the priest or the Church.
Is this a better explanation?
God bless. You covered what I wanted to say much better than I.
Absolutely.
I won't belabor the point here. The idea of my posting was to help you guys see why we don't have that gratitude you speak of toward your pope. Just very different perspectives of him. They don't seem to be reconcilable.
May God have mercy on you!! May your prayers be answered and may you find eternal bliss in the Kingdom of our Lord!! May God protect and defend you from all evil!
Please pray for me, a sinner.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.