Reality Check: Young People Are Not the Problem

If one listens to right wing Catholics - e.g., delusional sites like "Church Militant which wants to return to the days of the Spanish Inquisition - the woes of the Church in today's world lies with the younger generations who are accused of moral and intellectual failings.  Any and every excuse and scapegoat is preferable to acknowledging that most of the Catholic Church hierarchy is a moral cesspool.  (A similar denial of reality afflicts the leadership of the Republican Party.)  If right wing Catholics and members of the hierarchy want to understand why younger generations are fleeing Catholicism like passengers fleeing a sinking ship, they need to look in the mirror.  Ditto for the Republican Party.   A piece in the National Catholic Reporter responds to the self-delusion of the Catholic right.  Here are excerpts:

If the recent conference at the University of Notre Dame — where speakers postulated reasons for young people's disassociation from the Catholic Church — represents the approach going into the upcoming Synod of Bishops on young people, we would beg church officials to postpone the gathering.

What we heard was a familiar litany, placing blame for missing young people on:

·        Technology — specifically youths' obsession with smartphones — which supposedly robs them of the contemplative mind and makes them "suckers for irrelevancy."
·        An aversion to "orthodoxy," a term the user brandished with the certainty that his strain of orthodoxy is the immutable version of the truth.
·        The "dumbing down of our faith."
·        The pervasiveness of pornography and relativism, of course.
·        And a new danger — the "bland toleration" of diversity, a curious addition.

According to this analysis, it is the young people, not the church, who are in crisis.

It isn't that healthy young people might be repulsed by the way that church leaders mishandled the sex abuse crisis for decades. Nor is it the money scandals or callousness toward gay and lesbian Catholics or the bishop-driven one-issue politics that has reduced religion and faith to a bumper sticker in the culture wars.

No, they say, the problem lies with young people who have acquired culturally influenced defects.

The cultural critique has value, of course, and the disaffection of young people from all manner of institutional involvement — from the local symphony orchestra to the Rotary Club — needs continued examination to figure out how institutions can be relevant to young people.

Before becoming too convinced that the reason for the disaffection lies with everything and everyone else, church leaders need to seriously examine how their own shortcomings and failures have contributed to young people leaving the church.

It is reasonable to understand that teens and young adults, living in a civil culture that increasingly accepts their LGBT friends and family members, find unacceptable the intolerance and outright discrimination of some Catholic officials and organizations.

It is understandable that a young person would rather not be part of an institution that preaches God's mercy but shows little mercy toward divorced and remarried parents.

Young people, especially young women, who know how their mothers and grandmothers struggled to gain equality in the wider culture, don't care to become involved in an institution where women are marginalized.

Isn't it also reasonable, speaking of vocations to the priesthood, that parents might hesitate to encourage their sons to join a clerical culture that has been depleted not only in numbers, but also in credibility and moral standing?

Unless church leaders at the highest levels thoroughly examine how our community became so distorted — corrupt like a white sepulcher — a synod about attracting younger members will ultimately prove a waste of time and effort.

Perhaps the breathless pursuit of young people in its embarrassing obviousness should be set aside to give church leaders time for deep reflection on what it means to be authentically humble. Replace fanciful answers to questions few are asking with a simple sign, containing one line, in each bishop's office: "You may be the problem."

A similar analysis needs to be undertaken by Republicans: there is a reason a super majority of Millennials vote Democrat.

Vatican Adviser on Anti-Gay Policies Accused in Gay Sex Scandal

It truly is very difficult to find hypocrisy more off the charts than among the anti-gay zealots at the Vatican and their circle of advisers (only the Southern Baptist Convention comes close).  While they rail against gays and demonize us, it keeps turning out that either they abetted sexual predators - or are predators themselves - much like Republican politicians.  As Religion News Service is reporting, Vatican adviser, Monsignor Tony Anatrella (pictured above) , a prominent French priest and therapist who has written disparagingly of gays, has now been accused of sexually molesting young students and seminarians sent to him to over come their "homosexual tendencies."  Sadly, the safest approach to the anti-gay bleating of the Catholic hierarchy is to assume that those screaming the loudest are likely themselves to be engaging in abusive gay sex.  Here are article highlights on this latest portrait in Church hypocrisy:

For years, seminaries and monasteries around France sent students and novices to Monsignor Tony Anatrella, a prominent French priest and therapist who has written disparagingly of gays, if their superiors decided the young men were struggling with homosexuality.

Now Anatrella, who argues that gay men cannot be ordained as priests, is facing mounting allegations that he himself had sex with male clients under his care, a scandal that could have repercussions all the way to the Vatican, where the priest is still regularly consulted on matters of sexuality.

The reports about Anatrella that have emerged in recent weeks also landed just as the Catholic Church in France has been embroiled in a crisis over charges that senior churchmen shielded priests even after they received reports that the clerics had molested children.

Anatrella stoked that furor earlier this year when it was revealed that he told new bishops at a Vatican-sponsored course that they are not obligated to report a suspected abuser to authorities even in countries where the law requires such reporting. Yet the allegations that Anatrella himself has engaged in sexual misconduct – accusations that were first broached a decade ago – pose a much greater threat to the priest. So far, European media have relayed accusations from as many as four men – only one of whom agreed to be identified by his real name – who say that Anatrella engaged in various sex acts with them during counseling sessions in his Paris office, with the activity allegedly occurring up until a few years ago.

“You’re not gay, you just think that you are,” Anatrella reportedly told Daniel Lamarca, who was a 23-year-old seminarian when he first went to Anatrella in 1987.

According to Dutch Catholic journalist Hendro Munsterman, who first reported Lamarca’s story in Nederlands Dagblad, Anatrella told Lamarca he could rid him of his “pseudo-homosexuality” and sought to do so by performing sex acts on Lamarca.

Lamarca said that in 2001 he reported these episodes to the archbishop of Paris at the time, the late Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. But Lamarca said nothing was done.

Then, in 2006, he told a liberal lay-run Catholic periodical, Golias, about Anatrella’s behavior; Lamarca’s was one of three accusations to surface that year, but because they involved adults and wound up being their word against Anatrella’s, civil authorities did not pursue the allegations.

The church also apparently took no action. Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois had succeeded Lustiger by that point, and he reportedly sent an email to all his priests expressing his support for Anatrella. Accusations from other ex-patients did not change the cardinal’s opinion and he spoke of a “gay lobby” working against Anatrella.

While Anatrella has been a familiar figure for decades in France, his controversial views gained wider attention in 2005 when he reportedly helped the Vatican, then headed by Pope Benedict XVI, a theological conservative, craft guidelines aimed at keeping gay men out of the priesthood.

Anatrella at the time also wrote a lengthy article in the Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano, stating that homosexuality was “like an incompleteness and a profound immaturity of human sexuality.”

According to a report from Catholic News Service, Anatrella wrote that gays are “narcissists” and said homosexuality is “a problem in the psychic organization” of a person’s sexuality. He said that for theological reasons the Catholic Church can only ordain “men mature in their masculine identity.”

Anatrella remains a consultant to the pontifical councils for the family and for health care ministry; in February, he was the main organizer of a major conference on priestly celibacy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

The true narcissists are the members of the Catholic Church hierarchy - a group that is for the most part morally bankrupt.  As noted recently, the last of my family members who had held onto Catholicism has finally walked away.  Good and decent people simply cannot support such an evil and corrupt institution at an level.