A Hook Up Site for Gay Priests?

William Donohue of the Catholic League and the Opus Dei crowd - which seeming includes Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli and might explain his bizarre fixation on gays - must be having convulsions and shrieking at this story about a supposed hookup site for gay Catholic priests.  Yes, you read that correctly, a gay chat and hook up site for "HomoSensible Roman Catholic Priests."  Combined with Pope Francis' recent statements about the "gay lobby" at the Vatican the pious folk must be on the verge of hysteria and will no doubt be demanding a witch hunt for gays within the priesthood.  Here are highlights from a "Catholic" blog out of Dallas:

It’s St. Sebastian’s Angels all over again.  But much worse. In Rome!  A gay hookup site specifically tailored for priests and seminarians in ROME!  Good Heavens what is to become of us?:

It is not easy to talk about some things, but  Pope Francis’ statement of a gay lobby in the Catholic Church draws waves. As the Catholic writer, Vittorio Messori made ​​known, there is a page on the Internet called Venerabilis which is run by  a fraternity of Homo-Sensitive Roman Catholic Priests.

The homo Sensitive  priestly society claims to be a loose association of gay and homophile Catholic priests. The website serves as a gay dating site, so that aberrosexual priests can find contact among themselves, or homosexual laity can meet like-minded priests and vice versa. This page offers chat rooms in five languages, including in German, a Twitter service to the Catholic Church and some news from a “homo sensitive” view. The ads are unique. Anyone who registers on the Venerabilis and gives a personal ad or responds to one, seeks homosexual sexual contact………

…….Since the 1st of May  the [homosexual]-brotherhood, which calls itself Fraternitas Sacerdotalis.[Is this a catty shot at the masculinity of FSSP priests?] is a “meeting place” in order to meet “personally” and at “no risk”. And in fact, Rome Feltrinelli bookstore in Largo Argentina  has a “6- 8pm” at the cafeteria or in the department “Philosophy and Religion”. “For the seminarians of the Jesuit university Gregorian University and the Dominican Angelicum from 11 to 12 clock in the same place. ” [So now the great colleges of Rome, erected at great expense by religious orders that shook the world, are now reduced to being hookup sites for sexual deviants. Nice. I wonder how much is taught at these former bastions of orthodoxy and erudition that would challenge these lost souls in their depravity? Anything?]

So, I went tot he site, and while I didn’t find anything pornographic, at least not that I could understand, it’s obvious what the site is about.  It’s about finding sex partners. The homo-mafia in the Church obviously feels sufficiently strong and emboldened to operate almost in the open.  This site is smart in that everyone operates under automatically generated IDs, but people are dumb and have left their personal e-mails all over the place. I bet a decent multi-lingual private investigator could identify dozens of people from the site in an afternoon’s work.

 

It’s a certitude there are more sites like this out there. They just have to be found. And then the hard part. Will competent ecclesiastical authority take any steps to remove those priests found to be partaking in this homosexual hookup site?

Folks, don’t fool yourselves into believing this mafia is made up only of a few scattered bishops and maybe a cardinal or too. It is at least as widespead in the episcopate as it is in the regular clergy, and possibly even more so. Think about for a while.  Lord, have mercy on Your Church!  Please extirpate this foul evil from the midst of Your Body!

As I said, they probably had to call 911 when William Donohue heard this news.  One can only imagine the verbal diarrhea he will be spewing.   As for Ken Cuccinelli, if the gay rumors I keep hearing whispered are true, now he's got a new discrete hook up site he can use.  It certainly beats MegaPhone which former GOP Congressman Ed Schrock used before he got caught or Larry Craig's "wide stance.".

Was the Pope’s Resignation Connected to Network of Gay Bishops?

OK.  In a prior post I referenced the rumor that Benedict XVI resigned because of blackmail and a cabal of gay cardinals and bishops within the Vatican and thought I'd say no more.  But the topic is just too much fun to pass up.  Especially, with the new allegations against Britain's highest ranking prelate.  Combine all of this with the world wide conspiracy to protect predatory priests, allegations that  Cardinal Dolan of New York hid money while in the Milwaukee archdioceses to protect it from pay out to sexual abuse victims and the Vatican bank's suspicious transactions and the Mafia begins to look pretty straight forward and upstanding.  John Allen, a long time Vatican reporter at the National Catholic Reporter looks at the increasingly bizarre picture of the goings on at the Vatican.  Here are article excerpts:

I've received numerous requests to comment on the sensational story in an Italian newspaper Thursday suggesting the existence of a shadowy "gay lobby" in the Vatican, linking it to the prospect of blackmail and suggesting that such dark forces may have factored into Benedict XVI's decision to resign.  For what it's worth, I'll lay out my initial reaction here.

First of all, the paper that carried the story, La Repubblica, is not a scandal sheet. It's the largest circulation daily in the country, with a center-left editorial stance. It's sometimes critical of the church, but it's not the National Enquirer.

In terms of the story's specifics, I don't know whether it's accurate that a commission of three cardinals created by Benedict XVI to investigate the Vatican leaks affair, composed of Cardinals Julian Herranz Casado, Jozef Tomko and Salvatore De Giorgi, actually considered possible networks inside the Vatican based on sexual preference, but frankly, it would be a little surprising if they hadn't.

Here's why. In 2007, Msgr. Thomas Stenico in the Congregation for Clergy was suspended after being caught on hidden camera making contact with a young man posing as a potential "date" in gay-oriented chat rooms, then taking him back to his Vatican apartment. In 2010, a "Gentlemen of the Pope" named Angelo Balducci was caught in a wiretap trying to arrange sexual hookups through a Nigerian member of a Vatican choir. Both episodes were highly public and caused massive embarrassment.

In that context, it would seem odd if the cardinals didn't at least consider the possibility that somebody with a big secret to hide might be vulnerable to pressure to leak documents or spill the beans in other ways.

It also doesn't stretch credulity to believe there are still people in the system leading a double life, not just in terms of their sexual preference and activities, but possibly in other ways as well -- in terms of their financial interests, for example. Whether they form self-conscious cabals is open to question, but they may well naturally identify with each other, and it's not out of the realm of possibility that trying to chart such networks was part of what the three cardinals tried to do.

Among many cardinals, it's become a fixed point of faith that the Vatican is long overdue for a serious housecleaning, and certainly the furor unleashed by the La Repubblica piece is likely to strengthen that conviction.

However, it's probably a stretch to draw a straight line between all of this and Benedict's resignation. For the most part, one has to take the pope at his word: He's stepping aside because he's old and tired, not because of any particular crisis.

That said, I don't believe you can completely discount the cumulative impact of the various meltdowns over the last eight years on Benedict's state of mind. Read Benedict's anguished letter to the bishops of the world back in 2009, at the peak of the frenzy over the lifting of the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop, and it's crystal clear he was both pained by the criticism it generated and frustrated the Vatican hadn't handled the whole thing more effectively.

If you want to understand why Benedict is tired, in other words, part of it is because he knows that putting things right inside the Vatican will take a tremendous investment of administrative energy, which he doesn't feel he can supply, and which probably isn't in his skill set in any event.

No, Benedict didn't quit under the pressure of a "gay lobby." But the perceived disarray in the Vatican, which may well be one part perception and one part reality, probably made resignation look even better.

McCain Takes Money From Manhunt Site Owner

UPDATED: 365gay.com also has a story on this matter which can be found here. Personally, I am waiting for the fundies to demand that McCain return the money.
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LOL. The wingnuts will be going nuts on this one if they get wind of it. Imagine, John McCain - a newly minted supporter of family values - taking money generated from a web site facilitating gay sexual hook ups and meetings for potential gay relationships. Daddy Dobson will be soiling his pants or worse. Me, I love it and hope McCain will make more gaffes like this one. Meanwhile, I hope some of the paying subscribers will cancel their accounts on Manhunt. As for the owners of Manhunt, I don't know how any rational, self-respecting gay can support McCain, particularly now that McCain is trying to pander to the Christianists. Here are some highlights from Towleroad:

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It appears John McCain has accepted the maximum individual campaign donation from the owner of America's largest gay sex hook-up website.

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As for the potential fall out for Crutchley and his gay sex site, The Edge has the following comments:

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Glenn is an American expatriate living in South America who has just subscribed for three months to Manhunt in his present country. But he now may renege. "I hate the fact that my $30 will be going towards supporting McCain’t... I am going to cancel my membership, join Gayday," he wrote in an email. What has Glenn--and a lot of other Manhunt customers--hopping mad is the support for Republicans, and presidential nominee John McCain in particular, by one of the two founders of the site. Jonathan Crutchley has given the maximum for an individual to McCain’s campaign. And he has been publicly unapologetic about it.

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It remains to be seen how many of the men vowing to quit the site actually do so. EDGE made calls to Manhunt’s spokesperson, who explained that Crutchley was unavailable at press time.