UPDATE: The Catholic League is finally calling a spade a spade.
One of the AP stories on priestly sexual abuse admits that “The overwhelming majority of the victims were adolescents. That means very few guilty priests were pedophiles, a term mental health professionals reserve for those who target pre-pubescent children.” Fine. But then it says something which is positively remarkable: “Even though about 80 percent of victims were boys, the John Jay researchers and other experts on sex offenders say it does not mean the perpetrators were gay.” So what would they be? Heterosexual?
Read the rest.
First, I should say that I have not been inside a Catholic church in years with the exception of my son’s wedding last summer. The Church, as in the international organization based in Rome (or Heaven, if you prefer), has had a decade long scandal regarding the actions of priests who committed sexual activities with minors, some of them small children. There are several facets to this scandal. First, a minority of these cases involve clear child molestation. There were several outrageous examples. One of these defrocked priests was murdered in prison as child molesters do not do well with the men in prison.
There is a second group that involves homosexual activity between priests and adolescent boys. Some of those boys may have been experimenting with homosexuality but, once the scandal hit the press, they denied all of this undercurrent to get in on the huge financial settlements. We will never know the truth about many of these cases. The gay community has made frantic efforts to distance itself from the scandal by asserting that gay men, real gay men, are not interested in teenaged boys. They have been a large part of the conflating of the two separate scandals into one “child molestation” case. The men who were involved as 15 and 16 year olds have assisted in the interest of getting a piece of the pie and, perhaps, because their flirtation with homosexuality did not last.
There is an interesting book that has gotten little traction because of the successful effort to conceal the homosexual side of the scandal. It is titled, Goodbye Good Men and describes how, in the 1960s, a “pink mafia” took over the seminaries. Homosexual activity was combined with a leftist ideological slant. Radical nuns interviewed applicants and men who did not favor the ordination of women, were rejected as applicants for the priesthood. The author interviewed many rejected applicants and a number who had left the seminary. Many men leave the seminary because they find that they do not have the vocation and many fear they cannot live a celibate life. Read some of the reviews, many by former seminarians.
We see little about the fact that other denominations, especially those with a leftist slant in ideology, have had similar problems with sexual scandal, even though many allow marriage. The Eastern Orthodox Church, which shares the doctrines of the Roman Church, allows marriage and has had little scandal. Now the scandal seems to be reaching the Pope although it is a lie driven by politics. Maureen Dowd, for example, was raised Catholic. It is true that a number of bishops failed in their obligation to the parishioners by shifting around priests who had had problems instead of reporting them to police. One, some of these cases may have involved consensual acts but with underage boys (or girls in a few cases). Those may have seemed less serious but they are still illegal. Two, many of these bishops may have come from the same pink mafia seminaries and may be too sympathetic to the 60s philosophy that permeated these institutions.
Whatever the case, the Church had a serious problem and it may not be over. I think the only way it will be solved is by making celibacy optional. The politics of some of these seminaries need to be changed, as well. This is all part of the leftist revolution that has reached even to the White House.
