The Corruption of the Vatican’s Elite Has Been Exposed

A previous post looked at a new book, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, that looked at some of the moral rot and rank hypocrisy that is the Vatican.  The picture wasn't pretty, but Andrew Sullivan's new review gives a much more detailed picture that is utterly shocking and makes me wonder how decent, moral Catholics will remain in the Church.  Yes, there are some who will always blindly follow the Church hierarchy since the seemingly need someone to tell them what to think and what to do so they can avoid making moral decisions on their own (we see the same in the Southern Baptist Convention where many will ignore the sex abuse bombshell that went off two weekends ago), but many Catholics have drifted far from the blind obedience that was more the norm in my childhood and teens. Given the immense damage the Church and its 12th century dogma on sexuality and the subordination of women has done over the centuries and today's 24/7 access to information, hopefully will find itself faced with fury over the widespread hypocrisy that seemingly is the norm and an inability to hide its very, very dirty laundry.  Some, such as a piece in National Review have  sought to dismiss the book:

The book is trash. The supposed justice meted to McCarrick amounts to a cover-up. The pope’s summit is trash and a coverup. These men do not fear the justice of God or men. All their training in theology, and their great insight about man’s depravity, is the schoolyard taunt “Whoever smelt it, dealt it.” To hell with them all. 

Yet, the book appears to be consistent with stories of a blogger friend who was once a priest stationed at the Vatican.  Power with no accountability of any kind in most instances is corrupting and here, the corruption is off the charts. When I think of the 37 years of self-hate and trying to "pray away the gay" because of what these hypocrites preached, it enrages me.  Even more maddening is knowing that young lives continue to be harmed by these foul individuals all across the globe through the toxic dogma of the Church. Here are excerpts from Sullivan's lengthy piece in New York Magazine:

It’s a bewildering and vast piece of reporting — Martel interviewed no fewer than “41 cardinals, 52 bishops and monsignori, 45 apostolic nuncios, secretaries of nunciatures or foreign ambassadors, 11 Swiss Guards and over 200 Catholic priests and seminarians.” He conducted more than 1,500 interviews over four years, is quite clear about his sources, and helps the reader weigh their credibility. He keeps the identity of many of the most egregiously hypocritical cardinals confidential, but is unsparing about the dead.

The picture Martel draws is jaw-dropping. Many of the Vatican gays — especially the most homophobic — treat their vows of celibacy with an insouciant contempt. Martel argues that many of these cardinals and officials have lively sex lives, operate within a “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture, constantly hit on young men, hire prostitutes, throw chem-sex parties, and even pay for sex with church money. How do we know this? Because, astonishingly, they tell us.

So much of the information in the book comes from sources deep within the Holy See. Named and unnamed, they expose their fellow cardinals and bishops and nuncios as hypocrites, without perhaps realizing that their very targets are doing the same to them.

Among the named sources: Francesco Lepore, a brilliant young gay Latin translator and priest. He soared through the ranks, directly serving Popes Benedict XVI and Francis, until, as a gay man, he found a way to quit his post because he couldn’t abide the double life he was forced to lead, or the rancid hypocrisy of the whole system.

I’m no naïf when it comes to the gayness of the church. I’ve lived in it as a gay man for all my adult life, and my eyes are open. And so the book did not surprise me, as such, but it still stunned, shocked, and disgusted me. You simply cannot unread it, or banish what is quite obviously true from your mind.

[A]s Martel probes deeper and deeper, one theme emerges very powerfully: “Homosexuality spreads the closer one gets to the holy of holies; there are more and more homosexuals as one rises through the Catholic hierarchy. The more vehemently opposed a cleric is to gays, the stronger his homophobic obsession, the more likely it is that he is insincere, and that his vehemence conceals something.” It’s a lesson I learned reporting my own recent essay on gay priests.

And so it’s not that huge a surprise to see how influenced Paul VI was by gay Catholic writers of the time. And it’s highly predictable that John Paul II’s pontificate, which launched a new war on homosexuals, turns out to be the gayest of them all — and the one most resistant to any inquiry into stories of sex abuse. His right-hand man and successor, Joseph Ratzinger, (the future Pope Benedict XVI) personally received notification of every claim of sex abuse in the church under John Paul II, ignoring most, and made the stigmatization and persecution of sane, adjusted non-abusive gay people across the globe his mission instead.

As for America, Martel notes what is already in the public record:

“Cardinal Wakefield Baum of Washington, recently deceased, lived for many years with his personal assistant … Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington, … was well known for his ‘sleeping arrangements’ with seminarians and young priests whom he called his ‘nephews’ … Archbishop Rembert Weakland was ‘outed’ by a former boyfriend … One American cardinal has been banned from the Vatican and sent back to the United States for his improper conduct with a Swiss Guard. Another American cardinal, the bishop of a large city in the United States, ‘has lived for years with his boyfriend, a former priest’, while an archbishop of another city, a devotee of the Latin mass and a man much given to cruising, ‘lives surrounded by a flock of young seminarians’, a fact confirmed to me by Robert Carl Mickens, an American Vaticanologist familiar with the gay lifestyle of the senior Catholic hierarchy in the United States.”

Some of the most conservative clerics concede the truth of the book on the record. Or take Martel’s interaction with the Swiss Guards, one of whom vents: “The harassment is so insistent that I said to myself that I was going straight home. Many of us are exasperated by the usually rather indiscreet advances of the cardinals and bishops.” Or the prostitutes who keep elaborate records of their clients, and have already caused huge scandals in Italy.
 But critics of the book — and the defensive dismissals of it as mere salacious gossip are already out there — have to argue that Martel is a liar, a fabulist, a con artist, who faked these remarkable interviews. I don’t buy it.
 I’ve offered just a glimpse of the revelations in the book. I urge every Catholic to read it, however difficult that may be. It will also be fascinating to see how the various factions within Catholicism will respond to it. . . . . But if the Catholic right wants to weaponize the book, they’ll have to take on their own icons, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and a whole range of their closest allies in the church. And the core thesis of the book — which is that it is the hypocrisy of the closet that is the real problem — is not one the right will be able easily to absorb.
 There can be no meaningful reform until this closet is ended, and the whole sick, twisted syndrome is unwound.

How do you do that? The crisis is so profound, the corruption so deep, the duplicity so brazen that only a radical change will help. Ending mandatory celibacy is no longer an option. It’s a necessity. Women need to be brought in to the full sacramental life of the church. Gay men need to be embraced not as some manifestation of “intrinsic moral evil” but as human beings made in the image of God and capable of mutual love, care, and support.

As for me, someone who has wrestled with the question of homosexuality and Catholicism for much of my adult life, this book has, to be honest, been gutting. All the painful, wounding Vatican documents on my “objective disorder” that I have tried to parse and sincerely engage … I find out they were written, in part, by tormented gay men, partly to deflect from their own nature. Everything I was taught growing up — to respect the priests and hierarchs, to trust them, to accept their moral authority — is in tatters.
 [I]n my view, the last drops of moral authority the Vatican might hope to have evaporate with this book. It is difficult to express the heartbroken rage so many of us in the pews now feel.

Unlike Sullivan who has remained Catholic - a form of masochism in my view - I left the Church when I came out and even had my name stricken from the membership rolls for the Diocese of Richmond. The remainder of my siblings and nieces and nephews have left the church.  Any who remain Catholic in my extended family will likely find it difficult to remain in the Church with the revelations of this book. 

Catholicism: The Sins of Celibacy

I often write about religion and Christianity because since the 12th century conservative Christianity has been the nemesis of LGBT individuals, with homophobia spread by Christian missionaries like a plague across the globe. Countless LGBT lives harmed or even snuffed out during periods that gays were executed, often by burning, give rise to the pejorative "faggot."  Women too have suffered from the blame placed on Eve, a mythical figure, for induce her mate, Adam, to eat of the forbidden fruit.  All of this persecution and subordination of women based on 12th century knowledge and lack of understanding of normal human sexuality.  Sparking and leading this misogyny for centuries is the Roman Catholic Church, an institution wracked with dishonesty and hypocrisy and the cover up of crimes against children and youths.   A piece in the New York Review of Books looks at a new book entitled "Sins of Celibacy" that traces the current crisis in the Catholic Church and the global sex abuse scandal to celibacy and the Church's refusal to reject 12th century ignorance and adjust to modern knowledge and, indeed, modernity itself.  The premise is consistent with what I have long argued and which is set out at length in "The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relationships in Human Societies" which I have referenced in past posts.  Here are lengthy excerpts from the review:

On August 25 Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published an eleven-page letter in which he accused Pope Francis of ignoring and covering up evidence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and called for his resignation. It was a declaration of civil war by the church’s conservative wing. . . . He was the central figure in the 2012 scandal that involved documents leaked by Pope Benedict XVI’s personal butler, including letters Viganò wrote about corruption in Vatican finances, and that contributed to Benedict’s startling decision to abdicate the following year. Angry at not having been made a cardinal and alarmed by Francis’s supposedly liberal tendencies, Viganò seems determined to take out the pope.

As a result of Viganò’s latest accusations and the release eleven days earlier of a Pennsylvania grand jury report that outlines in excruciating detail decades of sexual abuse of children by priests, as well as further revelations of sexual misconduct by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., Francis’s papacy is now in a deep, possibly fatal crisis. After two weeks of silence, Francis announced in mid-September that he would convene a large-scale gathering of the church’s bishops in February to discuss the protection of minors against sexual abuse by priests.

The case of Cardinal McCarrick, which figures heavily in Viganò’s letter, is emblematic of the church’s failure to act on the problem of sexual abuse . . . . . Despite explicit allegations that were relayed to Rome, in 2000 Pope John Paul II appointed him archbishop of Washington, D.C., and made him a cardinal. Viganò speculates that the pope was too ill to know about the allegations, but does not mention that the appointment came five years before John Paul’s death. He also praises Benedict XVI for finally taking action against McCarrick by sentencing him to a life of retirement and penance, and then accuses Francis of revoking the punishment and relying on McCarrick for advice on important church appointments. If Benedict did in fact punish McCarrick, it was a very well kept secret, because he continued to appear at major church events and celebrate mass; he was even photographed with Viganò at a church celebration.

Viganò’s partial account of the way the church handled the allegations about McCarrick is meant to absolve Pope Francis’s predecessors, whose conservative ideology he shares. Viganò lays the principal blame for failing to punish McCarrick on Francis, who does appear to have mishandled the situation—one he largely inherited.

The greatest responsibility for the problem of sexual abuse in the church clearly lies with Pope John Paul II, who turned a blind eye to it for more than twenty years. From the mid-1980s to 2004, the church spent $2.6 billion settling lawsuits in the US, mostly paying victims to remain silent. Cases in Ireland, Australia, England, Canada, and Mexico followed the same depressing pattern: victims were ignored or bullied, even as offending priests were quietly transferred to new parishes, where they often abused again. “John Paul knew the score: he protected the guilty priests and he protected the bishops who covered for them, he protected the institution from scandal,” . . . .

Benedict was somewhat more energetic in dealing with the problem, but his papacy began after a cascade of reporting had appeared on priestly abuse, beginning with an investigation published by the Boston Globe in 2002 (the basis for Spotlight, the Oscar-winning film of 2015). The church was faced with mass defections and the collapse of donations from angry parishioners, which forced Benedict to confront the issue directly.

“I feel badly for Francis because he doesn’t know whom to trust,” Father Doyle said. Almost everyone in a senior position in the Catholic Church bears some guilt for covering up abuse, looking the other way, or resisting transparency. . . . . Francis may have hoped that the problem would go away and feared that a true housecleaning would leave him with no allies in the Curia.

Much of the press coverage of the scandal has been of the Watergate variety: what the pope knows, when he found out, and so forth. This ignores a much bigger issue that no one in the church wants to talk about: the sexuality of priests and the failure of priestly celibacy.

In his letter Viganò repeats the finding in the John Jay Report that 81 percent of the sexual abuse cases involve men abusing boys. But he ignores its finding that those who actually identify as homosexual are unlikely to engage in abuse and are more likely to seek out adult partners. Priests who abuse boys are often confused about their sexuality; they frequently have a negative view of homosexuality, yet are troubled by their own homoerotic urges.

Viganò approvingly cites Sipe’s work four times. But he ignores Sipe’s larger argument, made on his website in 2005, that “the practice of celibacy is the basic problem for bishops and priests.” Sipe also wrote, “The Vatican focus on homosexual orientation is a smoke screen to cover the pervasive and greater danger of exposing the sexual behavior of clerics generally. Gay priests and bishops practice celibacy (or fail at it) in the same proportions as straight priests and bishops do.”

Viganò believes that the church’s moral crisis derives uniquely from its abandonment of clear, unequivocal, strict teaching on moral matters, and from overly permissive attitudes toward homosexuality in particular. He does not want to consider the ways in which its traditional teaching on sexuality—emphasized incessantly by recent popes—has contributed to the present crisis. The modern church has boxed itself into a terrible predicament. Until about half a century ago, it was able to maintain an attitude of wise hypocrisy, accepting that priests were often sexually active but pretending that they weren’t. The randy priests and monks (and nuns) in Chaucer and Boccaccio were not simply literary tropes; they reflected a simple reality: priests often found it impossible to live the celibate life. Many priests had a female “housekeeper” who relieved their loneliness and doubled as life companions. Priests frequently had affairs with their female parishioners and fathered illegitimate children. The power and prestige of the church helped to keep this sort of thing a matter of local gossip rather than international scandal.

Opposing priestly marriage and contraception placed the church on the conservative side of the sexual revolution and made adherence to strict sexual norms a litmus test for being a good Catholic, at a time when customs were moving rapidly in the other direction. Only sex between a man and a woman meant for procreation and within the institution of holy matrimony was allowed. That a man and a woman might have sex merely for pleasure was seen as selfish and sinful. . . . Priestly vocations plummeted.

Conversely, the proportion of gay priests increased, since it was far easier to hide one’s sex life in an all-male community with a strong culture of secrecy and aversion to scandal. Many devout young Catholic men also entered the priesthood in order to try to escape their unconfessable urges, hoping that a vow of celibacy would help them suppress their homosexual leanings. But they often found themselves in seminaries full of sexual activity. Father Doyle estimates that approximately 10 percent of Catholic seminarians were abused (that is, drawn into nonconsensual sexual relationships) by priests, administrators, or other seminarians.  This problem is nothing new.

Priestly celibacy was not firmly established until the twelfth century, after which many priests had secret wives or lived in what the church termed “concubinage.”

The obsession with enforcing unenforceable standards of sexual continence that run contrary to human nature (according to one study, 95 percent of priests report that they masturbate) has led to an extremely unhealthy atmosphere within the modern church that contributed greatly to the sexual abuse crisis. A 1971 Loyola Study, which was also commissioned by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, concluded that a large majority of American priests were psychologically immature, underdeveloped, or maldeveloped. It also found that a solid majority of priests—including those ordained in the 1940s, well before the sexual revolution—described themselves as very or somewhat sexually active.

Sipe, during his decades of work treating priests as a psychotherapist, also concluded that the lack of education about sexuality and the nature of celibate life tended to make priests immature, often more comfortable around teenagers than around other adults. All this, along with a homosocial environment and the church’s culture of secrecy, has made seminaries a breeding ground for sexual abuse.

There are possible ways out of this dilemma for Francis. He could allow priests to marry, declare homosexuality to be not sinful, or even move to reform the patriarchal nature of the church—and to address the collapse in the number of nuns, which has decreased by 30 percent since the 1960s even though the number of the world’s Catholics has nearly doubled in that time—by allowing the ordination of women. But any of those actions would spark a revolt by conservatives in the church who already regard Francis with deep suspicion, if not downright aversion.

Since the French Revolution and the spread of liberal democracy in the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church has been torn between the urge to adapt to a changing world and the impulse to resist it at all cost. Pope Pius IX, at whose urging the First Vatican Council in 1870 adopted the doctrine of papal infallibility, published in 1864 his “Syllabus of Errors,” which roundly condemned modernity, freedom of the press, and the separation of church and state.

John XXIII, who became pope in 1958, saw a profound need for what he called aggiornamento—updating—precisely the kind of reconciling of the church to a changing world that Pius IX considered anathema. John XXIII was one of the high-ranking church leaders who regarded the Nazi genocide of the Jews as a moral crossroads in history. An important part of his reforms at Vatican II was to remove all references to the Jews as a “deicide” people and to adopt an ecumenical spirit that deems other faiths worthy of respect. After Vatican II, the church made optional much of the traditional window-dressing of Catholicism—the Latin Mass, the elaborate habits of nuns, the traditional prohibition against meat on Friday—but John died before the council took up more controversial issues of doctrine.

Both radical change and the failure to change are fraught with danger, making Francis’s path an almost impossible one. He is under great pressure from victims who are demanding that the church conduct an exhaustive investigation into the responsibility of monsignors, bishops, and cardinals who knew of abusing priests but did nothing—something he is likely to resist. Such an accounting might force many of the church’s leaders into retirement and paralyze it for years to come—but his failure to act could paralyze it as well. As for the larger challenges facing the church, Francis’s best option might be to make changes within the narrow limits constraining him, such as expanding the participation of the laity in church deliberations and allowing women to become deacons. But that may be too little, too late.

The longer the Vatican refuses to clean house and reject ignorance based dogma, the larger the defection of educated western Catholics and the further the concentration of Catholicism in the ignorant, least educated parts of the world.  

"It’s a Gay Problem," and Other Myths From the Catholic Church’s Sexual Abuse Crisis

One of the continuing myths put out by right wing elements in the Roman Catholic Church - and which is happily further disseminated by Protestant Christofascists and the right wing media - is that gays in the Catholic priesthood is the reason for the Church's continued sex abuse crisis.  Pushing this myth is far preferable than facing up to the real causes: (i) the Church's bizarre 12th century views on human sexuality and a belief that all sex is essentially dirty and sinful, (ii) the stunted psycho-sexual development of priests brought up in the Church's all male seminary high schools and seminaries, and (iii) the Church hierarchy's preference to protect priests and avoid any exposure of clerical wrongdoing no matter who has to be sacrificed in the process.  A piece in Religious Dispatches at Rewire looks at the these true causes of the once again exploding sex abuse crisis.  Here are highlights that address certain myths put out by right wing elements:

Americans love intrigue. So when Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano recently issued a public letter alleging a wide-scale cover-up of child sexual abuse—one which reaches all the way to Pope Francis himself—the media and public were sucked right into the conspiracy.

Vigano’s letter opened the doors to the inner workings of the Vatican political and culture war—one culminating with accusations of liberal vs. conservative, gay vs. straight priests, and the power struggles between Popes Francis, Pope Emeritus Benedict, and the Roman Curia.

The problem? None of this has to do with the causes of the sexual abuse of children. By muddying the waters and shifting focus from the crimes and onto politics and the Vatican culture war, Vigano’s letter feeds into old stereotypes that silence victims, minimize abuse, and encourage the continued cover-up.

If we want to address the scope and scale of the problem and put an end to the crisis and those who enable it, we must first work to dispel the myths and stereotypes that aim to silence victims and normalize criminal sexual behavior.

A problem of “homosexual priests”

This is a complicated issue, though it’s not a murky one. It’s important to begin by noting that, according to experts, there is absolutely zero evidence that sexual orientation has anything to do with sexual abuse. Period. In fact, when it comes to adult men who sexually abuse boys, researchers have found that it doesn’t even make sense to label these men as “homosexual,” since they neither possess an adult sexual orientation nor do they tend to show a preference for gender.

When apologists cite “the gay problem” for the ongoing crisis—what Bishop Robert Molino recently called the “homosexual subculture”—their intention is to paint a picture of secretive and “deviant” groups of clergy and a wider Church culture that tolerates them. In reality, the allegedly disproportionately large number of gay priests may be related to the problem, but it isn’t the cause of it.

As Robert Mickens wrote in July, and as others have noted for years, the pathologizing of queer sexualities has driven many men to the priesthood, as the vow of celibacy offers what appears to be a safe haven from negotiating a forbidden path. As a result, although he’s careful to point out that there is nothing about gay men in healthy situations that makes them more apt to sexually abuse others, Mickens argues that some of the abuse is due to the “homophobia that keeps gay men in the closet, bars them from growing up and results in distorted sexuality for many gay priests.”

In other words, the “homosexual subculture” isn’t the problem, though the demonization of queer sexualities could certainly contribute to the failure to develop a healthy adult sexuality.

Ask any victim of clergy sexual abuse—male or female—and they will tell you: child sexual abuse has no place in healthy adult sexuality, gay or straight. When apologists call the crisis a “gay problem,” they succeed in both silencing women victims and forcing a sexual identity onto male victims against their will.

Want the easiest way to silence and shame a male (straight or gay) victim of child rape and sanitize the crime? Call the crime “gay sex.” Make him question whether the abuse was an actual crime at all.

Child sex abuse is a crime of violence where those in positions of power prey upon the weak and vulnerable, using sex as a weapon. Apologists for the Catholic Church will do anything to make sure that this isn’t the focus.

“It happens everywhere”

Yes, child sexual abuse is a global problem, inside and outside of the Catholic Church. It happens in homes, schools, camps, sports programs, and any organization that caters to children or helps the vulnerable.

Apologists for the Catholic Church want you to believe that it is “just like any other institution.” It’s not.

Nowhere else in modern society have we seen the continued collusion to cover up decades of sex crimes on the macro or micro level as we see in the Catholic Church. They’ve spent billions of dollars lobbying against victim-friendly legislation; settling with victims; paying defense lawyers to shield abusers and their enablers; hiding and obfuscating evidence of child sexual abuse; shaming and silencing victims; and otherwise deceiving Catholics and the public about the crimes.

Add to that the fact that the church is supposed to have moral authority, and this is a crisis of monstrous proportions.

“It’s a problem of celibacy”

Celibacy is the vow requiring that priests abstain from marriage and adult sexual relations.

Is this suppression of adult sexuality healthy? That’s up for debate. In fact, former priest, psychotherapist and expert on priestly celibacy A.W. Richard Sipe concluded after years of research that no more than 50 percent of priests are celibate at any given time.

“It’s not really pedophilia”

Labeling victims because of their physical development minimizes and normalizes sexual assault.

Victims of “pedophilia” (children victimized pre-puberty), church defenders say, are different from victims of “ephebophilia,” those abused after puberty but before adulthood. Older victims are considered “less catastrophically damaged” by the church, implying that what happened to them was less abhorrent and caused less pain.

But let’s get down to the truth: Whether a 15-year-old or an 8-year-old is sexually abused, they are both victims of a horrific crime.

Sanitizing the crime and minimizing victims by saying their abuse “wasn’t as bad” because one particular victim is more physically developed than another—even though two victims may be the exact same age and emotional maturity—is reprehensible.

“The church and Pope Francis are too liberal”

A victim of child sexual abuse has no political leanings. Nor does a predator. Predators seek “easy targets”: at risk children who may lack family structure, self-esteem, or have other disadvantages that a predator can exploit.

Child sexual abuse and cover-up flourished in the Catholic Church during conservative papacies, just as it is continuing now. I’ve worked with victims pre-and post-Vatican II and their stories are similar.

The cover-up has nothing to do with politics. It’s about saving face, protecting priestly friends, and saving the Church from scandal. The political leanings of the pope or the predator have nothing to do with it. As John Gehring recently noted on Religion and Politics, “a top official from the Vatican’s secretary of state office acknowledged receiving allegations about [former Archbishop] McCarrick’s behavior with seminarians as far back as 2000, during the papacy of John Paul II.”

The only way we will be able to expose predators and those who covered for them is to maintain razor-sharp focus on the victims and to stop the crimes, not propagate myths that enable more abuse. It is the victims who empowered the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report. And those same victims are the ones who have refused to give up the fight for justice, in spite of insurmountable odds.

In just the past week the attorneys general from at least a half dozen states have vowed to investigate the Church, and, according to the New York Times, “Pope Francis has summoned bishops from around the world to Rome for an unprecedented meeting focused on protecting minors.” 

It’s a good start. In addition, despite the cries of apologists, we must continue to demand robust laws that expose predators and hold the Church accountable for the cover-up and encourage law enforcement to do everything possible to ensure that this cycle of abuse is completely eradicated and wrongdoers punished.

The Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal Continues in New York and Pennsylvania

As much of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy continues to work to stifle moves by Pope Francis to modernize the Church, two new sex abuse bombshells await to explode.  One is in Pennsylvania where the Pennsylvania bishops are fighting tooth and claw to block the release of what will no doubt be a scathing grand jury investigation report. The other is in New York State where revelations are coming out about the magnitude of priestly sex abuse in the Diocese of Buffalo.   The irony, of course is that in many instances, the bishops and cardinals seeking keep the Church locked in the 12th Century are the same ones who allowed the rampant rape of children and youths on their watch.  These vain, bitter old men in dresses will go to any lengths to block modern knowledge on sexual orientation and the reality of divorced and remarried Catholics. The Allentown Morning Call looks at the grand jury report that is being suppressed and depriving the public of much needed information on the depravity of the Church hierarchy in Pennsylvania.  Here are excerpts:

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead." — Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack  This is a column about secrets.

Secrets that the Catholic Church has kept from its parishioners and everyone else about the way some of its priests have preyed on children and the way church leaders covered it up. Secrets their victims have kept, festering in some cases for decades because they were too frightened, embarrassed or confused to speak up. Secrets parents try to keep from their children about sexual orientation and other uncomfortable subjects. Secrets some schools try to keep from their parents.

Certainly there are times when secrecy makes sense. Loose lips sink ships and all that. But far more often, it's healthy, even liberating, to expose these secrets to the light of day so they can be addressed in the open.

I suppose if I were accused of being a child molester or of covering for one, I would prefer not to have the details published in a Pennsylvania grand jury report. So it's understandable that some priests want to block the release of the impending report on child sex abuse in six dioceses, including Allentown.

What's less understandable, to me, is why the state Supreme Court is letting them do it, unless it intends to upend the grand jury system that already has produced illuminating reports about abuse in the Philadelphia Archdiocese and in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese.

Can you imagine the mixture of anticipation and fear many of these victims felt as the date approached for letting the world know what happened to them? Or the devastation of seeing the Supreme Court choose secrecy, at least for a little longer?

I can, because I've talked to so many victims of child sex abuse, by clergy . . . I've heard them talk about the guilt, the embarrassment, the betrayal, the anger that has driven so many victims to silence, to depression, to suicide.

When men who in a very real sense symbolize God betray you by sexually abusing you or by helping pedophiles find new victims instead of stopping them, religious faith becomes another casualty.  These secrets have been hidden far too long already. So I support all the efforts being made to force the Supreme Court to release this grand jury report and end this monstrous conspiracy of silence.

In Harrisburg, in East Penn, in six Catholic dioceses and everywhere else, the truth will set us free.  Or at least begin the healing.

Meanwhile, north of the border in New York State, the Diocese of Buffalo is reeling as it is revealed that 74 past and present priests are involved in claims of sexual abuse.   WKBW-TV looks at the revelations.  What is telling is that much of the abuse cited occurred relatively recently, not in the 1950's and 1960's as the Church hierarchy often likes to claim as it dismisses the allegations of victims.  Here are excerpts:

To date, 74 current or former Buffalo priests have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct. 

The Diocese of Buffalo in March 2018 released a list of 42 "diocesan priests who were removed from ministry, were retired, or left ministry after allegations of sexual abuse with a minor." It included deceased priests "with more than one allegation made against them."

That list did not include the names of dozens of additional priests who were members of religious orders, were publicly accused of sexual misconduct with adult women or men, left the diocese and moved to other parts of the country, or were identified in reporting by 7 Eyewitness News and other media outlets since March. . . .

Sadly, it is the same familiar pattern seen across the globe where priests were shuffled from parish to parish with no warning given to unsuspecting parents and youths.  The root cause in my view: the Church's bizarre obsession with all things sexual and its refusal to accept modern knowledge on sexuality and sexual orientation. Add to this (i) the western rite celibacy requirement, and (ii) the strange and isolated existence of many males who enter seminary directly from seminary high schools and/or colleges who have never been allowed to have normal psycho-sexual development. It is a recipe for disaster that will continue to lead to sexual abuse until such time as the Church leaves the 12th century and accepts modernity.

Australian Abuse Report: Catholic Church Must End Celibacy Rule

Ever since the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal first exploded in Boston over 15 years ago, the Church hierarchy and Church apologists like blow hard William Donahue of the Catholic League (a largely two person operation) and the cite Church Militant have worked hard to blame gays for the wide spread abuse of children and youths by Catholic priests.   Great efforts have been made to ignore the roles of (i) Church's bizarre 12th century view of sexuality and (ii) the unnatural rule of mandatory celibacy for Western rite priests (no such requirement applies to Eastern rite priests) have played in creating the atmosphere for widespread abuse.  Now, after a years long study, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has released a report that lays blame squarely on the celibacy rule, a rule first implemented by the Church hierarchy to preserve Church funds and assets from the costs of maintaining priest' families (money has always been the Church leadership's real god).    A piece in DeutscheWelle looks at the report's findings which will not be happily received by the bitter old men in dresses at the Vatican.  Here are some article highlights:

Among the 189 recommendations put forward by the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse are two for the Catholic Church to lift its demand for mandatory celibacy and enforce mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, even if it is heard during confession.

A five-year study from Melbourne's RMIT University on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church found that mandatory celibacy is the major precipitating risk factor for child sexual abuse.

DW spoke to Professor Des Cahill, who co-authored the report with Dr Peter Wilkinson.
DW: How did you come to the conclusion that mandatory celibacy is a risk factor for child sexual abuse?

Professor Des Cahill: In the [psychological and psychiatric] studies of priest offenders, the key facts were that the offending priest perpetrators were either psychologically immature or psychologically mal-developed and suffering from loneliness, lack of intimacy and sexual deprivation, and they became terrorized with their own sexual desires and sexual thinking. In their sexual deprivation their thinking mutated towards children, and so they began grooming young children and eventually abusing them sexually and emotionally. . . . . I and the Commission in the report make very clear that homosexuality is not the cause of clerical sex abuse.

Does that mean sexual deprivation and lack of physical relationships is the major reason that someone might become a child sex offender?

It's the clericalist incubating culture, and celibacy is part of that. One of the elements is the lack of contact with women. Take the example of the Christian Brothers who are the major teaching order for boys in Australia. Young men who were educated in all-male Catholic schools, went to all-male minor seminaries and then went on to all-male novitiates, perhaps went to university and became teachers, but didn't have much contact with the feminine. Then they lived in all-male communities, teaching in all-male schools.

Eugen Drewermann would argue that is a psycho-spiritual recipe for disaster and that's what happened among the Christian Brothers in Australia. 22 percent offended sexually against the boys they were in charge of, especially in orphanages and farming schools in country areas.

[T]he profile – and the Royal Commission is strong on this – of Catholic clerical offenders is different from the profile of child sex offenders generally. They offend much later in life, they are better educated, and in other aspects of their personality profile they are reasonably normal although, as the Royal Commission points out and as we point out in our report, there is a high degree of narcissism amongst Catholic priests and that also is a factor in the offending. They are totally focused on self and their own sexual identity, their own sexual thoughts etcetera.

Would lifting the ban on mandatory celibacy result in a decrease in child sex abuse in the Catholic Church?

When we looked at Eastern Rite Catholic Churches we found there was virtually no clerical sex abuse because in those eastern churches the priests have a choice between marrying or not marrying. In the Latin Rite Catholic Church, [priests] took on celibacy as part of the priesthood package. This is why the Royal Commission has recommended – and it was based partly on our report – the Australian Catholic Bishops make a request to the Vatican that married persons should be admitted to the Catholic priesthood.

What effect does the seal of confession have on cases of child sexual abuse being reported?

Until now in Australia priests have not been required to report any cases of child sex abuse. The Royal Commission has recommended this should be applied to Catholic priests even when they are hearing confessions. Already there is opposition to that from the two leading archbishops in Australia.

There is a tension between the seal of confession and obligation towards the welfare of vulnerable children. Unfortunately Pope Pius the 10th in 1910 lowered the age of confession from 13-14 to seven, which meant offending priests had access to younger children and were able to begin the process of grooming those children, and that, I think, is one reason why the problem became worse in the 20th century.

It should be noted that celibacy is not the only causation factor.  The Southern Baptist Convention which clings to similar 12th century views of sexuality likewise has a huge sexual abuse problem.  Ridiculous obsessions with all things sexual, rejection of modern knowledge, and the embrace of ignorance all seem to also play a role in setting the stage for sexual abuse.

Report: Catholic Sexual Abuse Caused by Secrecy and Mandatory Celibacy

I have followed the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal since it first exploded in Boston in 2002.  The expose broken by the Boston Globe coincidentally coincided with my coming out and my efforts to shake off the religious brainwashing of my upbringing as a Roman Catholic were all things sexual were viewed as evil and sinful except in the context of conceiving children - something that helped to increase the rolls of the Catholic Church. It goes without saying that the participants were not supposed to enjoy the conception process. Having been raised Catholic and exposed to the Church's obsession with all things sexual as well as the mandatory celibacy requirement (which historically arose because the Church leadership did not like losing revenues to the families of married priests), I always believed that much of the sexual abuse scandal traced back to the celibacy and the Church's bizarre view of sexuality not to mention the obsession with secrecy among high clergy.  Now, a new Royal Commission report out of Australia (where the scandal has been exploding for more than two years) seems to confirm that celibacy has played a significant role in the widespread sexual abuse  by priests.  The report also notes the dis-ingenuousness of Church efforts to blame the sexual abuse on gay clergy.   The Guardian looks at the report findings:

Mandatory celibacy and a culture of secrecy created by popes and bishops are major factors in why such high rates of child abuse have occurred in the Catholic church, a comprehensive study has found.

The report, which looked at the findings of 26 royal commissions and other inquiries from Australia, Ireland, the UK, Canada and the Netherlands since 1985, found that while the endangerment of children in institutions has been considerably lowered in Australia, children remained at risk in Catholic parishes and schools and Catholic residential institutions in other countries across the world, especially in the developing world where there are more than 9,000 Catholic-run orphanages, including 2,600 in India.

The patriarchal nature of Catholic institutions meant that abuse went unchallenged and, while a small number of nuns were abusers, the report found the risk of offending was much higher in institutions where priests and religious brothers had minimal contact with women. The report estimated about 7% of clergy had abused children between about 1950 and 2000.

“Their contact with women in teacher training institutions would have been carefully proscribed and then they were appointed to male-only schools where they were in charge of young boys and adolescents,” the report said.

“And they were living in all-male religious communities. They had to make do with a sacralised image of a sexless Virgin Mary. It was a recipe for a psycho-spiritual disaster.”

A Catholic priest who assisted the child sexual abuse royal commission, Prof Des Cahill, says discovering he had lived and worked with paedophile priests was part of the reason he has devoted the past five years to analysing why child abuse has plagued the church.

On Wednesday the findings from Cahill and his theologian co-author, Dr Peter Wilkinson, were released in a report, Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: An Interpretive Review of the Literature and Public Inquiry Reports, published by the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University.

The findings explore why the Catholic church and its priests and religious brothers, more than any other religious denomination, have become synonymous with the historical sexual abuse of children.
 I began wondering: ‘Why did this happen?’,” Cahill told Guardian Australia. “I knew some of the priest perpetrators and I studied with them and I lived with one of them. And yet I was never aware while I was in the church. You have to understand, a priest offender is very secretive and doesn’t want to be found out.”

His and Wilkinson’s findings were made after examining reports from royal commissions, academic studies, police reports and church reports from around the world since 1985. Among the findings was that mandatory celibacy was and remains “the major precipitating risk factor for child sexual abuse” and that popes and bishops created a culture of secrecy, leading to a series of gross failures in transparency, accountability, openness and trust.

The issue of confession was also examined. Last month, Australia’s child sex abuse royal commission called for clergy who refused to report child sexual abuse to police because the information was received during a religious confession to face criminal charges.
 The recommendation prompted an angry response from the archbishop of the archdiocese of Melbourne, Denis Hart, who said he would risk going to jail rather than report allegations of child sexual abuse raised during confession, and that the sacredness of communication with God during confession should be above the law.
 The report states that “young and vulnerable Catholic children, especially boys, were in danger and at risk in the presence of psychosexually immature, psychosexually maldeveloped and sexually deprived and deeply frustrated male priests and male religious, particularly those who had not satisfactorily resolved their own sexual identity”.

“This was especially so if these priests and religious were confused or in denial about their homosexual orientation while training and operating in a profoundly homophobic Church environment,” the report found.

Courtin said that the evidence was “absolutely clear” that sexual crimes involving children and paedophilia “have nothing to do with homosexuality at all”.

And homosexuality is one of the reasons or excuses that the church has used for a long time and it’s wrong, inappropriate and inaccurate of them,” she said. “Paedophilia does not equate with homosexuality.” 

After several years of therapy, I finally resolved the psychological damage from my Catholic upbringing. I also left the Catholic Church and after a brief interlude as an Episcopalian, I remain technically a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ("ELCA") which liturgically is like the Catholic Church liturgy prior to the break between Martin Luther and the Catholic Church and which does not have the self-perpetuating Church hierarchy of the Catholic Church ( ELCA bishops must be reviewed and reappointed and local pastors are not imposed by remote and out of touch bishops).

Meanwhile, The Atlantic is reporting on the child pornography charges against a member of the Vatican diplomatic corps in Washington, D.C. (note that the Vatican refused to waive diplomatic immunity which would have allowed prosecution):

The Holy See announced on Friday that a priest who is part of its diplomatic corps has been recalled to Rome following allegations that he violated child-pornography laws. The official had been accredited to serve in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Department of State notified Catholic Church leaders about the alleged crime through diplomatic channels. The Vatican has opened an investigation and is keeping the name of the accused priest confidential. The AP reported that the U.S. government requested that the official’s diplomatic immunity be lifted. The request was denied.

The moral bankruptcy at the Vatican continues despite Pope Francis' improved PR efforts.

Why Are the Deeply Religious So Obsessed with Sex?

One thing that binds right wing evangelical Protestants and right wing Roman Catholics is their obsession with all things sexual - especially sex that involves pleasure.  A piece in Salon has excerpts

from the book "The Illusion of God's Presence" that looks at looks at religion's obsession with sex.

One of the book's conclusions is that  the deeply religious suffer from what might be called stunted emotional development - infantile emotions, if you will.  This explains not only their obsession with sex which on the one hand they view as vile and dirty even as they desperately want to indulge in it, but also their fear of thinking for themselves and a desire to be able to "check off the boxes" to prove their future in Heaven.  The end result is a schizophrenic approach to sex where while condemning sex and matters sexual, both the Catholic clergy and conservative Protestant clergy engage in much higher than average levels of sexual abuse and infidelity.  Here are highlights:

Why does the creator of this infinitely vast universe care so much about what we do with our sexual organs as adults? Why is lust considered sinful? Why was Jesus born of a virgin, and, according to Catholics, his mother also? Why did the early Shakers not only practice celibacy, but also dance naked? Why do religious fundamentalists oppose not only abortion, but also the most effective means of pre­venting it, contraception? Why do televangelists rant about the evils of adultery, pornography, masturbation, fornication, and homosexuality, only to be caught with their pants down doing exactly those things? Why is religion so obsessed with sex?

As the core of a believer’s religious love of God, the innate model colors religious experience with infantile emotions. The more intensely pious the believer becomes, however, the greater the risk that these emotions will spill over into other parts of the evolutionary hack. The sparks really fly when the infantile emotions of religious fervor breach the levee and pour into sexual territory.

Perhaps this is to be expected, considering that novitiates are told that their celibate life to come is the price paid for the privilege of being wedded to Christ. But celibate nuns are not the only ones whose image of God is painted in sexual hues. . . .

The big problem here is that, despite this intrusion of the sexual, religious emotion remains primarily infantile, with God normally in the role of a greatly exalted parent. Sexual feelings for this parental figure therefore activate the incest-avoidance system, an innate mechanism that generates feelings of disgust and revulsion at the prospect of sex with close kin. . . .  The predictable result of this conflict is an obsession with controlling or prohib­iting sexual behavior, coupled with an almost irresistible drive to violate those prohibitions. How these people deal with this conflict—as individuals and as religious institutions—determines the variously entertaining or tragic manifestations of sexual obsession in religion.

If these ideas are right, then we should expect sexual misbehavior among the clergy to be significantly greater than in comparable secular professions, and several studies bear this out. Two surveys of predominantly male American Protestant ministers found that more than 12 percent of respondents admitted to having sexual intercourse with a member of their congregation other than their spouse. This is roughly double the incidence of sexual intercourse with clients committed by male clinical psychologists and physicians. The studies also hint at a more general problem of sexual conflict, guilt, and obsession. One of them found that 37 percent of Protestant ministers admit to the vague sin of “sexual behavior inappropriate for a minister.” Responses to other questions in the study suggest that at least some of these transgressions involve sexual fantasy, viewing pornography, and masturbating in private—acts of negligible consequence or moral weight in the broader society.

The pastors, however, see it differently. Their religiously warped view of human sexuality is especially evident in “The War Within,” an account of one Protestant pastor’s tormented struggle with lust, published anonymously in a journal for Protestant clergy. Although he was married and regularly had sex with his wife, the author tells a sad tale of his obsession with various aspects of sexuality off-limits to good Christians. . . . He mentions only in passing a “repressed childhood” that may have contributed to his obsession with lust, but beyond that glimmer of insight he appears utterly blinded by his religious worldview to the essence of his problem: lust is healthy and normal, but a religious obsession with it is not. “

The most obvious culprit here is the Catholic obsession with the sinfulness of sex for pleasure, especially homosexual sex, along with a peculiar sexual proscrip­tion for clergy: celibacy. Intentionally or not, the celibate priesthood specifically attracts applicants who are at best confused or conflicted about their sexuality, and at worst deliberately seek positions conducive to sexual exploitation of the vulnerable. . . . . Aside from being an ineffec­tive sham, the doctrine of celibacy for the priesthood apparently attracts young Catholic homosexual men, either as a means of suppressing a sexual orientation they perceive as evil, or—in certain Catholic subcultures—as a safe venue for hooking up with other gays.

That struggle takes a darker turn among Catholic clergy, who are disproportionately likely to sexually abuse vulnerable children and adolescents. Catholic apol­ogists deny this, often citing a study that found that only 4 percent of Catholic priests sexually abuse minors. They argue that this is the same as in the general male population, implicitly suggesting that there is no special relationship between Catholicism and the sexual abuse of children. There are, however, several problems with this rationalization. One is that other studies find higher rates of child sexual abuse in the Catholic clergy, over 5 percent, and even that is likely to be an underes­timate given the reluctance of victims to come forward and the intense effort by the Catholic hierarchy to protect offending priests and cover up the scandal. Another problem is the specious comparison to the general male population. The Catholic Church claims to be a high moral authority—God’s representative on Earth—and its clergy are supposedly transformed by God into a special state of sanctity. If this were true, we should expect exemplary behavior from Catholic priests, especially with respect to the sexual abuse of innocent children, one of the most odious crimes imaginable.

If the Catholic Church really were what it claims to be, the incidence of child sexual abuse by priests should be zero.

These insights suggest some obvious fixes for the problem of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy:

·        drop the requirement of celibacy;

·        allow women into the priesthood;

·        eliminate the ritual of confession for children and adolescents;

·        accept homosexuality as a natural dimension of human sexuality.

Thus, the ultimate irony is that those who are the most screwed up emotionally and in terms of normal sexual/psychological want to be the ones to advise and control others in all things sexual.  It's like putting the patients in control of the insane asylum.