The Vatican’s Self-Created Crisis for Catholicism.

Having been raised Roman Catholic, been an altar boy for a decade from age 8 to 18, and risen to the 4th Degree in the Knights of Columbus, I am all too aware of the Medieval dogma of the Church and its desperate clinging to a 12th century understanding of human sexuality.  And yes, during those years I was desperately trying to "pray away the gay". something that is both ludicrous and futile with the benefit of hindsight.  Nowhere is this embrace of 12th century ignorance more true than in the context of the Church's war against homosexuality which at times has included torturing gays and burning them at the stake, a mindset and practice which Catholic missionaries spread like a cancer across the globe.  Meanwhile, the Church has found the ranks of its clergy - probably for centuries - increasingly filled with gays with stunted psycho-sexual development given the Church's bizarre system of all boys schools and high school seminary schools since there was nowhere better to hide one's "secret" than with in the ranks of the celibate priesthood. Something similar also plagues anti-gay Protestant denominations where we see closeted evangelicals flocking to the pulpit where they vent homophobic vitriol only to be caught in gay sex scandals down the road.  In an extremely long piece in New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan lays the current sex abuse scandal firmly at the feet of the Vatican.  In reading the piece (which I recommend reading the entire piece), do not forget that celibacy requirement in the Roman Catholic Church derived from the Church's lust for money as the costs of married priest with children mounted. Simply put, celibate priests did not dissipate Church assets in the support of wives and families.  Here are column highlights: 

We have no reliable figures on just how many priests in the Catholic Church are gay. The Vatican has conducted many studies on its own clergy but never on this subject. In the United States, however, where there are 37,000 priests, no independent study has found fewer than 15 percent to be gay, and some have found as many as 60 percent. The consensus in my own research over the past few months converged on around 30 to 40 percent among parish priests and considerably more than that — as many as 60 percent or higher — among religious orders like the Franciscans or the Jesuits.

This fact hangs in the air as a giant, unsustainable paradox. A church that, since 2005, bans priests with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” and officially teaches that gay men are “objectively disordered” and inherently disposed toward “intrinsic moral evil” is actually composed, in ways very few other institutions are, of gay men.

The massive cognitive dissonance this requires is becoming harder to sustain. The collapse of the closet in public and private life in the past three decades has made the disproportionate homosexuality of the Catholic priesthood much less easy to hide, ignore, or deny. This cultural and moral shift has not only changed the consciousness of most American Catholics (67 percent of whom support civil marriage for gay couples) and gay priests (many of whom are close to quitting) but also broken the silence that long shrouded the subject.

Five years ago, Pope Francis made his watershed “Who am I to judge?” remark after being asked about a flawed gay priest. “A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality,” Francis went on. “I replied with another question: ‘Tell me, when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person. . . . . These sentiments won 62 percent of the votes of the synod bishops — just shy of what was necessary to pass, but still evidence of a sharp shift in tone in official Catholic teaching.

They also triggered near panic on the Catholic right. Alarmed by the possibility that divorced and remarried people might be welcomed as well as gays, traditionalists launched a fierce rearguard campaign against the new papacy, with a focus on what some called a “Lavender Mafia” running the church, and broke new ground in connecting this directly to the horrifying revelations of sex abuse that came to light in 2002. In increasingly direct ways, they have argued that the root of the scandal was not abuse of power, or pedophilia, or clericalism, or the distortive psychological effects of celibacy and institutional homophobia, but gayness itself.

The unseemly fall this past summer of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, one of the most powerful American cardinals of his time, provided a cause célèbre for this faction. It emerged that McCarrick had abused at least two children and then sexually harassed generations of adult seminarians with impunity.

McCarrick gave the right an opening. New online media organizations — led by Breitbart-style websites such as LifeSite News and Church Militant — now routinely pounce on any incidents involving gay priests and have an influential audience in the Vatican. A wealthy group of conservative Catholics, the Better Church Governance, has even launched an investigation into the orthodoxy, conduct, and, it’s clear, sexual orientation of each of the 124 cardinals who will elect the next pope.

At the center of this struggle, of course, are gay priests, bishops, and cardinals themselves. They are caught in a whiplash of relative toleration embodied by Francis and hostility exemplified by his conservative predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. . . . . “They are equating all gay priests with sexual abuse. There’s a witch hunt.”

Sullivan then jumps and looks at good, decent gay priests and what the Vatican is doing to them and ultimately to the institution itself,  He also looks at an accurate history of gays in the Church:

Most of the gay priests I spoke with have never experienced abuse in the church. Many had already come to terms with their sexual orientation before they entered the priesthood, but some wrestled with it in the seminary, and others later in life. “There is no typical experience,” Father Joe, as I’ll call him, told me. “At first I wondered if I were a fraud, because I thought, Well, am I just trying to escape into a life in which I don’t have to deal with my sexuality? But I had people in charge of me who challenged me to ask myself if this were authentic, and I felt that this was the life and work that God was calling me to. It’s an ongoing discernment.” Then there was a moment of grace. “I was working in a hospital at the height of the AIDS crisis. A nun said to me, ‘What do you want to tell these people? They’re active homosexuals, drug users.’ I said, ‘I would talk about God’s mercy and be with them as they are.’ It helped me understand how God could use me even though the church didn’t accept me.”

Another, call him Father Andrew, described his choice of vocation as “convenient and existential”: “I was 18 and sexually aware but extremely depressed, and my father cornered me one day in the kitchen and made me come out. I went to a psychologist, who told me, ‘You’re not going to change. You need to accept yourself.’ ” Andrew’s father was not happy about this recommendation and ended the therapy. In college, Andrew sought out more treatment, and then, suddenly, his father died. It threw him. “I kept thinking about life and death. I had started praying again and attending Mass. I was driving in the desert from Phoenix to Tucson and saw these dust devils, and I suddenly heard in my head, ‘Oh, be a priest. You won’t need to deal with sex; you can be respected.’ And then my brother died — a car crash.” By his junior year, Andrew was in the seminary.

The scapegoating has wounded many of the priests I spoke with. It has become a double stigma: targeted by the hierarchy for being gay and by the general public for being pedophiles. Many of the people I spoke to, Catholics and non-Catholics, about the subject of gay priests rolled their eyes and asked about the abuse of children. The news environment is saturated with stories about sex abuse — and rightly so — yet there are hardly any public examples of the overwhelming number of gay priests who would never dream of preying upon the powerless.

These men are still sexual beings, flesh and blood. In these crises, they tend to do one of two things: either fall so deeply in love that they cannot sustain a life without physical intimacy and so leave the church or, more often, recalibrate, confess, and recommit to the celibate life.

How do you live a healthy sexuality in a context where your sexuality is stigmatized?” After the 2005 ban on gay priests, Father Mike became attracted to conversion therapy and underwent a year and a half of trying to be cured of being gay. It was only later that he came to see how “none of it was true; it was all a lie.”

The preponderance of gay men in the priesthood is, in fact, nothing new in the history of the church. For well over a millennium, it was commonplace, and though there were occasional denunciations of it, these were usually followed by papal inaction or indifference.

Even Saint Augustine had one particularly intense love affair with another young man. “For I felt that my soul and his were one soul in two bodies,” he wrote, “and therefore life was a horror to me, since I did not want to live as a half; and yet I was also afraid to die lest he, whom I had loved so much, would completely die.” This was not merely a spiritual friendship, Augustine confessed. . . . Some have speculated that Augustine’s starkly Manichaean divide between the spirit and the body is rooted in his disgust at his own homosexual tendencies. The historical record, however, reveals that for all Augustine’s influence, the practice of intense homoerotic friendship among the clergy was common over the following centuries, especially in monasteries.

The masterpiece on the subject of “spiritual friendship” was, in fact, written by a gay man, Saint Aelred, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx in England in the mid-1160s. He had had sexual relationships with men in his younger years, but, vowing chastity as a monk, he sublimated these desires into an idea of intense celibate love for another man. He took as a model the relationship between Jesus and the “disciple whom Jesus loved,” John, describing it at one point even as a “marriage.”

By the 12th century, priests and monks were writing love poems to one another in what Boswell describes as an “outburst of Christian gay literature still without parallel in the Western world.” But perhaps in response to this broad acceptance of gay spirituality, some began to campaign for a crackdown. Around 1051, Saint Peter Damian published a treatise, The Book of Gomorrah, whose rhetoric is strikingly similar to the online denunciations of our time: “absolutely no other vice can be reasonably compared with this one … [it] is in fact the death of the body, the destruction of the soul … it removes truth utterly from the mind.” He accused the church of being run by a gay cabal who covered for each other and gave one another absolution for their sins. The pope at the time, Leo IX, nonetheless refused to ban gay clergy and argued that the problem w as those who had sex “as a long-standing practice or with many men.”

In 1102, in a similar moment, the Council of London decided to promulgate a decree against the newly defined sin of “sodomy” — only to have the publication stopped by the archbishop of Canterbury, who remarked that “this sin has hitherto been so public that hardly anyone is embarrassed by it.”

The tide turned decisively in the 13th century with the theological genius Thomas Aquinas denouncing homosexual acts as “against nature.” All sex — heterosexual and homosexual — was to be reserved only for married couples open to procreation, and any other sexual activity was a grave sin. Homosexuals, in the new theology, were part of nature — many had noticed homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom, particularly among hares and hyenas — but they were also somehow contrary to nature. Aquinas never resolved this paradox. Neither has the church.

As the taboo deepened in the succeeding centuries, there is little reason to believe that gay priests disappeared, but most went more fully underground. Still, same-sex love remained a profound part of Catholic Christianity. The friendship that grew between Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier, for example, created the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, in the 16th century.

The greatest Catholic theologian of the 19th century, Cardinal John Henry Newman, devoted his personal life to another man, Ambrose St. John. This does not mean the two had a sexual relationship (although they might have), but it does suggest that deep same-sex love was still alive in the highest echelons of the Catholic priesthood, even at the apex of Victorian repression and even in someone about to be celebrated as a saint. When St. John died, Newman wrote, “I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband’s or a wife’s, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or anyone’s sorrow greater, than mine.”

But why is the priesthood so gay? It is worth noting that the connection between homosexuality and spirituality is by no means restricted to Catholicism. Some evolutionary psychologists have found an ancient link between gay men and tribal shamanism. Carl Jung identified the archetypal gifts of the homosexual: “a great capacity for friendship, which often creates ties of astonishing tenderness between men”; a talent for teaching, aesthetics, and tradition (“to be conservative in the best sense and cherish the values of the past”); “a wealth of religious feelings, which help to bring the ecclesia spiritualis into reality; and a spiritual receptivity which makes him responsive to revelation.”

Among gay priests themselves, I heard a variety of explanations. Some described to me how their sense of displacement as boys and teens made them more sensitive to the needs of other marginalized people: “You were an outsider, and you can help other outsiders and welcome them in.” Another simply said, “We understand suffering.”

Then there is the common experience of a gay boy or teen, brought up in the church, who turns to God in struggling with the question of his difference and displacement from the normal. He is forced to ponder deeper questions than most of his peers, acquires powerful skills of observation, and develops a precocious spirituality that never fully leaves him. This resonates for myself as a Catholic boy and teen. The first person I ever came out to was God, in a silent prayer on my way to Communion. I was an altar boy, knew well how to swing a brass thurible full of incense, could debate the nuances of transubstantiation by the age of 11, and considered the priesthood as a vocation (I concluded I wasn’t good enough a person).

But there are other reasons for gay men to seek the priesthood that are far from healthy. The first is celibacy. If you were a young gay Catholic in centuries past, one way to avoid social ostracism, or constant questions about why you lacked an interest in girls or women, was to become a priest. . . . . This pattern, though much less severe than in the past, endures. A profound lack of self-esteem, fueled in part by the church’s homophobia, also led to some seeking the priesthood as a means to repress or somehow cure themselves.

Other gay priests, more self-aware and cynical, find there is a career to be made in all of this falseness. From the 13th century onward, it’s easy to see how secretly gay men found in the church, and the church alone, a source of status and power. Marginalized outside, within they could become advisers to monarchs, forgive others’ sins, earn a stable living, enjoy huge privileges, and be treated instantly with respect. Everything was suppressed, no questions were asked in seminaries, and psychological counseling was absent (and even now is rare). Scarred, scared men became priests, and certain distinct patterns emerged.

One, as we have come to learn, was sexual acting out and abuse. To conflate sexual abuse with the gay priesthood, as many now reflexively do, is a grotesque libel on the vast majority who have never contemplated such crimes and are indeed appalled by them. It is classic scapegoating.

But some abuse of male teens and young adults, as well as abuse of other priests, is clearly related to homosexuality gone horribly astray — and around a quarter of the reported cases involve 15- to 17-year-old victims.

The scale of it in the late 20th century was extraordinary — but, in retrospect, predictable. If you do not deal honestly with your sexuality, it will deal with you. If you construct an institution staffed by repressed and self-hating men and build it on secrecy and complete obedience to superiors, you have practically created a machine for dysfunction and predation. And the hideous truth is we will never know the extent of the abuse in centuries past or what is still going on, especially throughout places in the world (like Africa and Latin America) where robust scrutiny of the church is still sometimes taboo.

Another pattern was externalized homophobia: What you hate in yourself but cannot face, you police and punish in others. It remains a fact that many of the most homophobic bishops and cardinals have been — and are — gay. Take the most powerful American cardinal of the 20th century, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, who died in 1967. He had an active gay sex life for years while being one of the most rigid upholders of orthodoxy.

Anti-gay archconservative Cardinal George Pell was recently found guilty of sexual abuse of boys in Australia. The founder of the once hugely influential hard-right, anti-gay cult the Legion of Christ, Marcial Maciel, was found to have sexually abused countless men, women, and children. The leader of Church Militant, which is obsessed with gay priests, is a self-described “ex-gay.” This is a good rule: Those in the hierarchy obsessed with the homosexual question often turn out to be gay; those who are calmer tend to be straight.

But this is because so many in the hierarchy still cannot see homosexuality as being about love and identity rather than acts and lust. As we uncover layer upon layer of dysfunction at the very top of the church, it may be time to point out how naked these bejeweled emperors can appear.

And this, of course, has added another layer of complexity to the story of gay priests: Generations matter. Those in their 70s and 80s grew up in a different universe, where the closet was automatic and the notion of even discussing gay priests was scandalous. One priest described that generation to me as “so closeted they might as well be in Narnia.” They may not even be aware they’re gay. But their reaction to the modern reexamination of homosexual love, and the consideration of sex as distinct from procreation, was panicked retrenchment.

This dynamic has made the clerical closet — not the fact of gay priests but the way that fact has been hidden — a core mechanism for tolerating and enabling abuse. On top of all this, the vow of obedience to superiors gives gay bishops and cardinals huge sway over their priestly flock. Some, of course, realized this power could be leveraged for sex and abused it.

The only obstacle standing in the way of this path is the homophobia formally embedded into church doctrine in 1986 by the future Benedict XVI. The church now explicitly teaches that gay people are “objectively disordered” because their very being leads them to an intrinsic moral evil. This “evil” is the orientation to have sex that cannot lead to procreation — the same reason the church opposes birth control for straight couples. The difference, of course, is that birth control is a choice, while gayness isn’t.

At some point you realize that this is, in the end, the bottom line. There is a deep and un-Christian cruelty at the heart of the church’s teaching, a bigotry profoundly at odds with the church’s own commitment to seeing every person as worthy of respect, deserving of protection, and made in the image of God. It’s based on a lie — a lie that the hierarchy knows is untrue, and a lie proven untrue by science and history and the church’s own experience. “The hierarchy is tying itself in knots in public over something it has already conceded in private,” Father Leo explained to me.

The task, it seems to me, is not to rid the church of homosexuality, which is an integral part of the human mystery, but of hypocrisy, dishonesty, and dysfunction.

The Much Need Message of "Recovering Catholics"

I make no secret that I am a former Catholic and believe that my Catholic upbringing inflicted much pain and self-hatred on me.  Indeed, it took several years of therapy to get over the damage done.  Thus, I found it of interest when on December 17, 2017, the Rev. Gregory Greiten, a Roman Catholic priest, shared a secret with parishioners at the St. Bernadette Catholic Parish: “I am gay.” Greiten was then greeted with a standing ovation, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  Greiten next wrote a column in the National Catholic Reporter that looked at both his own experiences but also on why the Church needs to change and reject its 12th century views on sexuality.  In the Root, another former Catholic reviewed Greitan's actions and made statements that ran all too true with me.  Here are excerpts:

As someone who now uses the descriptor “recovering Catholic” to answer questions about my religious identity, was once approached for the priesthood, struggled with reconciling my faith with my sexual orientation, and just finished writing about these experiences and more in a book called I Can’t Date Jesus, much of what Greiten wrote felt all too familiar.

Like Greiten, I was taught that homosexuality was something “disordered, unspeakable and something to be punished.” I thought I was going to go to hell for every thought I had, every touch I contemplated, each time I gave in to temptation. It’s a haunting, shameful feeling that eats you inside. You become so accustomed to guilt that even if you dare to be truthful about who you are in all settings, you may still find yourself having to learn to shake off old habits, like guilt. Religions in general tend to make their believers feel guilty about their misdeeds, but Catholics are particularly adept when it comes to guilt.

That’s why it matters so much that Greiten has stepped forward and gained national attention. There are many more like him. Just how many is unclear, but none of them should feel compelled to linger in the shadows. . . . The church continues to collectively hold archaic, bigoted views about transgender people. Moreover, the Vatican relentlessly clings to needless positions about women on issues like contraception that contribute to their subjugation around the world.

Everyone should be loved and embraced rather than merely tolerated.

As we launch into 2018, I hope that more Catholics - especially those who are LGBT - will reject the Church's toxic teachings and in the process find self-acceptance and the realization that there is nothing wrong with them.  Happy New Year! 

Book Reveals "Strong Gay Scene" in Irish Catholic Church

American Christofacists and professional Christians don't have a monopoly on hypocrisy when it comes to condemning gays while engaging in same sex fantasies and/or conduct.  A new book indicates that there is a "strong gay scene" within the Irish Roman Catholic Church.  As I and others have noted before, the Church's celibacy requirement offered a perfect hiding place for gays who sought a reason to avoid marrying or sexual relations with women.  It also offered a perfect hiding place for pedophiles and others damaged psychologically by the Church's obsession with all things sexual.   The Irish Independent has details on the book:

'Thirty-Three Good Men: Celibacy, Obedience and Identity' publishes new analysis of priests' views from a series of interviews conducted by Dr John Weafer, a former seminarian who is now married with children.

The book, which has just been published by Columba Books, reveals that one parish priest interviewed confidentially by Weafer is in a long term gay relationship.

Speaking to the Irish Independent, the author said 'Fr C' was "very happy with his life as a priest and a person".

Another priest interviewed, 'Fr L' was ordained in the 1990s. It was only when he was ordained that he finally ended up 'sleeping' with another priest.

"Although we both vowed it would never happen again, it did and I was really very confused," he said.  When he ended up in bed "fumbling around" with another priest, he decided to try the gay scene.

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Fr L then "discovered a strong clerical gay scene in Ireland", although it was not easy to access because of the clerics' need for secrecy.

He believes that there are "quite a lot of gay guys in the priesthood" and on one occasion when he went into a gay bar in Dublin, he recognized at least nine priests in the bar.

Dr Weafer said he did not think that the Irish hierarchy would be shocked by the revelations in the book as the interviews showed that the "hierarchy are aware" of what is going on.

"As long as priests don't go public and don't flaunt those actions that don't correspond with being a celibate priest" they turn a blind eye, he claimed.

This will shock many as the official church's attitude on homosexuality deems it as intrinsically disordered.  According to Dr Weafer: "If a priest was to say in the morning 'I am gay', he would be fired. Priests have learned to keep their heads down".

The new research shows that the majority of Irish priests are unhappy with mandatory celibacy.

The Vatican's Secret Gay Life

Photograph © David Lees/Corbis; digital colorization by Lorna Clark.

Over the years, this blog has looked at the filth and hypocrisy that permeates the Vatican. especially within the context of the world wide sex abuse scandal and the conspiracy orchestrated from the Vatican - largely at the direction of John Paul II and Benedict XVI - to cover up horrific abuse.  But the other huge scandal is the Church's anti-gay jihad even as the Vatican is full of gays, some at high levels of the Church hierarchy.  Vanity Fair has a lengthy piece on this secret world and the psychological depravity that exist in a world where the quest for power leads priest, bishops and cardinals to lead double lives or, at best a lie.  Read the full piece.  Here are some excerpts:

Naked but for the towel around his waist, a man of a certain age sat by himself, bent slightly forward as if praying, in a corner of the sauna at a gym in central Rome. I had not met this man before, but as I entered the sauna, I thought I recognized him from photographs. He looked like a priest with whom I’d corresponded after mutual friends put us in touch, a man I had wanted to consult about gay clerics in the Vatican Curia. My friends told me that this priest was gay, politically savvy, and well connected to the gay Church hierarchy in Rome.

But this couldn’t be that priest. He had told me that he’d be away and couldn’t meet. Yet as I looked at the man more closely, I saw that it was definitely him. When we were alone, I spoke his name, telling him mine. “I thought you were out of the country,” I said. “How lucky for me: you’re here!” Startled, the priest talked fast. Yes, his plans had changed, he said, but he was leaving again the next day and would return only after I was gone.

During the previous few days, I had heard a lot about this man. I had heard that he is a gossip, a social operator whose calendar is a blur of drinks and dinners with cardinals and archbishops, principessas and personal trainers. Supposedly, he loves to dish male colleagues with campy female nicknames. But I would never have the experience firsthand. The priest was embarrassed: to have been chanced upon at this place; to have had his small evasions revealed. The encounter was awkward. No, he did not wish to discuss the subject I was interested in. No, he did not think the subject worthwhile. These things he made clear.

I could understand his discomfort. But in Rome these days the topic of gay priests in the upper reaches of the Holy See is hard to avoid. In February of this year, not long before the College of Cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel for the conclave to choose the 266th Pope, the largest Italian daily newspaper, La Repubblica, reported that a “gay lobby”—a more or less unified cabal of homosexual power brokers—might be operating inside the Vatican.  

“Gay lobby” is really shorthand for something else. At the Vatican, a significant number of gay prelates and other gay clerics are in positions of great authority. They may not act as a collective but are aware of one another’s existence. And they inhabit a secretive netherworld, because homosexuality is officially condemned. Though the number of gay priests in general, and specifically among the Curia in Rome, is unknown, the proportion is much higher than in the general population. Between 20 and 60 percent of all Catholic priests are gay, according to one estimate cited by Donald B. Cozzens in his well-regarded The Changing Face of the Priesthood. For gay clerics at the Vatican, one fundamental condition of their power, and of their priesthood, is silence, at least in public, about who they really are.

Clerics inhabit this silence in a variety of ways. A few keep their sexuality entirely private and adhere to the vow of celibacy. Many others quietly let themselves be known as gay to a limited degree, to some colleagues, or to some laypeople, or both; sometimes they remain celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way, perhaps the least common but certainly the most visible, involves living a double life. Occasionally such clerics are unmasked, usually by stories in the Italian press.  

There are at least a few gay cardinals, including one whose long-term partner is a well-known minister in a Protestant denomination. There is the notorious monsignor nicknamed “Jessica,” who likes to visit a pontifical university and pass out his business card to 25-year-old novices. (Among the monsignor’s pickup lines: “Do you want to see the bed of John XXIII?”) There’s the supposedly straight man who has a secret life as a gay prostitute in Rome and posts photographs online of the innermost corridors of the Vatican. 

To be gay in the Vatican is no guarantee of success, mark of belonging, or shortcut to erotic intrigue. Most basically it is a sentence of isolation. Gays in the Vatican are creatures of a cutthroat bureaucracy whose dogmatic worldview denies or denigrates their own existence. They live in a closet that has no door. Among recent Popes, Benedict made the most concerted effort to sharpen Church doctrine on homosexuality, which he once called “a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.”

Tales of gays in the Vatican have been told for more than a thousand years. Pope John XII, who reigned from 955 to 964, was accused of having sex with men and boys and turning the papal palace “into a whorehouse.” While trying to persuade a cobbler’s apprentice to have sex with him, Pope Boniface VIII, who reigned from 1294 to 1303, was said to have assured the boy that two men having sex was “no more a sin than rubbing your hands together.” After Paul II, who reigned from 1464 to 1471, died of a heart attack—while in flagrante delicto with a page, according to one rumor—he was succeeded by Sixtus IV, who kept a nephew as his lover (and made the nephew a cardinal at age 17). Some such stories are better substantiated than others. Even while their reliability is questionable, they demonstrate that playing the gay card (even if you yourself are gay) is an ancient Curial tactic. 

The Catholic priesthood’s contemporary gay cultural memory begins in the middle of the last century. When Paul VI assumed the throne, in 1963, by one account he took his papal name not from any predecessor but from a former lover, a film actor. That at least was the contention of the provocative gay French writer Roger Peyrefitte . . 

Self-centeredness can breed a sense of entitlement. “A certain part of the clergy feels that no one will care what they do if they are discreet,” says Marco Politi, a prominent Italian journalist and longtime Vatican correspondent, and the author of several books about the papacy and the Church. In 2000, Politi published a book-length interview with an anonymous gay priest, entitled La Confessione, republished in 2006 as Io, Prete Gay (I, Gay Priest). “Rumors are O.K., but not scandal,” Politi observes. There has been plenty of scandal, though. In 2007, Monsignor Tommaso Stenico met a young man in an online chat room and invited him to his Vatican office, where their conversation—in which Stenico denied that gay sex was a sin, touched the man’s leg, and said, “You’re so hot”—was secretly videotaped and then broadcast on Italian television. 

Even Benedict has been dogged by rumors that he is gay. Though no solid evidence has ever emerged, it is treated as common knowledge by many in Rome, who cite stereotypes galore, including his fussy fashion sense (his ruby-red slippers, his “Valentino red” capes); his crusade to nail down why “homosexual actions” are “intrinsically disordered” (many closeted gay men, from Roy Cohn to Cardinal O’Brien, have made the most extraordinary efforts to condemn homosexuality); and his bromance with Archbishop Georg Gänswein, his longtime personal secretary. (Nicknamed Bel Giorgio, or “Gorgeous George,” the rugged Gänswein skis, plays tennis, and pilots airplanes. 

The culture of deception operates according to signals and conventions by which gay clerics navigate their lives. Camp is perhaps the most powerful and pervasive of these codes, though it can be difficult to define. Ironic, effeminate self-mockery—allowing priests to exercise some limited rebellion against their own isolation and invisibility—is one form of clerical camp. For fear of laughing out loud, priests sometimes try to avoid making eye contact with one another in church when hymns with titles like “Hail, Holy Queen” are sung. 

1. There's much more.  In sum, it recounts a cesspool of hypocrisy.  The Catholic Church continues to oppose any equal civil rights for gays even as snake-like queens in the hierarchy live the opulent life of princes.  I remain baffled why anyone looks to these foul individuals for moral guidance.   Unless and until those who participated in the sexual abuse cover up are rooted out of the hierarchy and the anti-gay jihad ceases, the Church deserves no moral authority.  Its leadership - unless Pope Frances acts boldly - is morally bankrupt.

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.".

A Former Insider's View of Vatican Machinations and the Papal Race

Tony Adams, a/k/a Father Tony, is a columnist, editor, playwright and ex-priest that I first met at the LGBT Blogger Summit in Washington, D.C., in December, 2008.  Among other things, he is Senior Features Correspondent with South Florida Gay News and a contributor at PRIDE magazine and The Mirror. And, while he was a Catholic priest, he was stationed at the Vatican where he had a fist hand view of many in the Church hierarchy - the good, the bad and the ugly.  In the wake of Nazi Pope Benedict XVI's announced abdication, Tony has an insightful and interesting piece in the South Florida Gay News.  Here are excerpts:

Pope Benedict XVI has announced that he will retire the papacy on February 28. In hindsight, there were recent signs hinting at this. He made his beloved secretary Georg Gänswein an archbishop, assuring the handsome fellow a post-papal future in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. He promoted the servile head of his household, American James Harvey, to cardinal. These are the kind of loose ends tied up by an aged pope who had years ago stated his willingness to voluntarily vacate the papacy should he no longer be able to fulfill the duties of that office. No one ever expected him to exercise that option, given the obvious delight he took in the ermine, velvet and watered silk that perpetually swathed him as he seemed to float through the serene routine of his seven-year papacy.
From the immaculate soles of his Pradas to the jeweled tip of his gold-threaded mitre, Pope Benedict XVI has been a paragon of gilded denial whose brow furrowed briefly when confronted with news of pedophile priests, church cover-ups, condom use in Africa, unruly nuns, plummeting Sunday church attendance and a general lack of new and renewed subscription to a church that has kept its flock in line with the threat that disobedience to the infallible moral teaching of its pope would lead to eternal fire in hell.

What can we expect of the 117 voting-age cardinals who will lock themselves into the Sistine Chapel next month and smoke the place up with the burned ballots that will elect Benedict’s successor? Will they choose a man who will stop the anti-gay crusades of recent years? Will they elect a man who will hold women in such high regard that he will relinquish obsessive control over their lady parts and grant them access to that exclusively male club of the Catholic priesthood? Will they elevate a man who will understand how wallowing in ostentatious wealth irritates not only the poor but workers struggling to provide for the basic survival of their families? Will they tap a man who loves children in an honorable way and will cherish their innocence by getting rid of abusive priests with speed and transparency?

[C]ardinals are creatures who care little for popularity until such time as unpopularity means loss of revenue, the closing down of churches and schools, and the payment of millions of dollars in settlements for the victims of priestly abuse.  As they enter the Sistine Chapel, those fiscal realities will be writ with red ink on the ballots they burn to produce white smoke.

Among the American cardinals who will take part in the conclave are men I knew in Rome in the ‘70s, including Tim Dolan, Don Wuerl, Ray Burke, Jim Harvey, Justin Rigali and Dan DiNardo.
Most of them are celibate gay men who will never admit to being gay because they have that uncanny ability to feel same-sex attraction while eschewing the gay nametag.  DiNardo and Harvey may have some skeletons in their closets. Burke is a good henchman but not a charismatic leader. Rigali is an elegant diplomat but is not considered an antidote to the priest abuse scandal.  Wuerl persecuted bad priests when other bishops were wringing their hands but he may be slightly too refined for his own good.  That leaves Dolan  .  .  .  . Cardinal Dolan has always been a rule-follower and one of his appetites is his desire to please his boss as perfectly as possible. If he finds himself answering to no higher earthly authority, we will finally see what is in his heart as he tries to discern what god really wants of him.

Although the LGBT community has decried his strenuous efforts to thwart marriage equality, I know him as someone who took the time to write me a “let’s do lunch” letter after I sent him an email welcoming him to New York. He did not have to do that. He knew my situation, and also, he counts many gay priests among his close friends. I do not know if Tim Dolan is gay or straight. He was never the kind of guy who talked sex. I do know that I would rather have a straight pope who was our ally than another closeted gay pope who is our foe.

[T]he sad fact is that most of the LGBT community has shed anti-gay Catholicism, and is critical of those of us who wish for its reform. “Why bother with it?” they ask me.  Maybe the five years I spent marrying people, baptizing their babies, holding their hands on their deathbeds and absolving their tearful guilt in the secrecy of the confessional made me a better person.  Maybe I just want to see those good Catholics get the good pope they deserve . . .

Yes, I shed Catholicism.  Remaining a Catholic would have been like staying in an abusive marriage where one was regularly beaten and subjected to psychological abuse.   That said, I would be over joyed to see Catholicism reformed and brought into the 21st century.  Will it happen?  I am not going to be holding my breath.

The Vatican's Subculture of Gay Priests

Newsweek - that magazine one finds in countless doctors' office waiting rooms and other places - has jumped on the band wagon and is covering what is apparently an open secret in Rome, Italy - gay Catholic priests are literally everywhere and many date other gay priests in public view. The Vatican's latest reaction is to remain untethered from objective reality and demand that all such priests come out of the closet and leave the priesthood. Does this apply to Benedict XVI too who has long been rumored to have a "special friend"? And has anyone stopped to factor in that such a demand could lead to the Church's inability to function, much like what would happen to the U.S. Navy if all of the gays left? Of course not. Hypocrisy is the principal hallmark of institutional Catholicism today. Andrew Sullivan described the situation as such:
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It is an institution so embedded with homosexuality it makes Broadway look straight. The stories I've heard! The network of gay priests is vast in Rome, and is, in my mind, as unhealthy for those who get away with it - the hypocrisy must hollow out the soul in the end - as for those who impose it. Instead of grappling with this fact, owning it, and seeking to diversify the priesthood by ending the celibacy requirement and men-only anachronism, the Vatican clings on to denial and repression.
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Increasingly, on these issues of modernity, the Vatican of the new millennium seems like the Soviet Politburo of the 1980s. They pretend to believe what they preach while we pretend to obey them. One day, this surreality will pop like a bubble.
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The Politburo comparison is especially appropriate since "do as we say not as we do" is so pronounced that the only way those trying to cling to the Church can remain is to become increasingly so-called cafeteria Catholics who ignore more and more of Rome's disingenuousness and also attend mass less and less frequently. What to y mind is so sad and downright criminal is that the Church hierarchy continues to ruin and warp young gay lives with its anti-gay jihad even as in cities such as Rome its priests enjoy an almost circuit party like atmosphere. Here are highlights from Newsweek:
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In the basement dining room of Le Mani In Pasta, a trattoria in central Rome, a young, glossy-eyed couple stare at each other across a table for two. They smile and blush over a private joke. There is no handholding or kissing, but they are clearly more than friends, even though they are both wearing dark shirts and the telltale white clerical collar.
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For residents of Rome, the sight of courting priests is hardly an anomaly. The phenomenon is a well-known secret here, and one that was largely ignored until last weekend, when the Italian weekly magazine Panorama published a shocking exposé called “Le Notti Brave Dei Preti Gay,” or “Good Nights Out for Gay Priests.”
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The exposé has touched a nerve within the Catholic community in Rome, but Abbate doesn’t believe that it will have any effect, especially given the Vatican’s other sex scandal. Yet unlike the pedophile-priest crisis, which has so far reached scores of dioceses in the United States and Europe, the gay-priest problem is—so far—an issue just for the Rome diocese on the Vatican’s home turf. Most priests in Rome have some affiliation with the Vatican, and Abbate says one of the priests caught on tape also gave mass in St. Peter’s Basilica.
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Victims’ rights advocates, however, have noticed that the Vatican seems more focused on sexual orientation than sexual deviance, and they are furious. While clergymen spent years covering up rumors of child-sex abuse and protecting each other, they’re calling instantly for the ouster of gay priests. “Priests who are committing sex crimes against children and bishops who enable and conceal the crimes are the ones leading double lives,” says Barbara Blaine, head of Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests. “They are the ones who should resign.”
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But requirements like those are impossible to enforce, and they are plainly ignored. In Rome’s medieval quarter of Trastevere not far from Le Mani In Pasta, the International Ecclesiastic Seminary attracts men from all over the world who want to study for the priesthood in the heart of Rome. A professor there, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect his job, says the vast majority of the young men who come to study are sexually active gay men who quickly become part of the lively gay culture in Rome.
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Abbate also discovered through his covert research that male escorts and transsexual prostitutes in Rome rely on priests as regular customers. Last March, a member of the Vatican choir admitted to police that he arranged male escorts for papal assistants, including Angelo Balducci, a high-ranking member of Gentlemen of his Holiness, a fraternal order whose members assist the pope.
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Bryan Cones, who writes for the popular U.S. Catholic blog. “On this matter, the church’s real problem is the closet,” he says. “I must agree with the Vicar of Rome that it would be helpful if gay priests would come out—so we could thank them for their faithful service, especially as they have been unjustly tarred with ‘causing’ sex abuse. Unfortunately, our church leadership at this time is not creating the kind of open and safe space that would allow for such honesty.”

the Proportion of Gay Priests in the Italian Capital at '98%'

The Vatican's PR nightmare continues to run out of control - and deservedly so. The moral rot and bankruptcy throughout the Catholic Church hierarchy in respect to the sexual abuse scandal seems to encompass the majority of high clerics as opposed to being the exception to the rule. With this week's expose on the sexual partying and cavorting of priests in Rome, the Vatican is having vapors - or at least pretending to do so - and claiming such reports are untrue. The Guardian has more on the continuing fallout. My favorite is the statement that 98% of the priests in Rome are gay. Here are story highlights:
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The Catholic church, already reeling from a string of clerical sex abuse scandals, is facing new embarrassment after an Italian magazine published an investigation into what it termed the double life of gay priests in Rome.
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The diocese of Rome lashed out at the prime minister's magazine, saying its aim was "to create scandal [and] defame all priests". But it also urged gay clerics to leave both the closet and the priesthood.

It said, "Consistency would require that they come into the open", but that they "ought not to have become priests". The semi-official papal daily, L'Osservatore Romano, made no reference to the affair. Vatican Radio reported it briefly.
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A member of the clergy quoted by the magazine put the proportion of gay priests in the Italian capital at "98%". The Rome diocese insisted the vast majority of priests in the city were "models of morality for all", while adding that the number of gay clergyman was "small, but not to be written off as isolated cases". A review eight years ago of research on the American church concluded that between a quarter and a half of seminarians and priests there were homosexual.
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A former Italian MP and gay activist, Franco Grillini, said: "If all the gays in the Catholic church were to leave it at once – something we would very much like – they would cause it serious operational problems."
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In March, the pope's own household was rocked by scandal when court documents revealed a Vatican chorister had procured male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting.

Gay Italian Priests Sex Scandal Caught on Video

Yet another bomb shell to rock the Roman Catholic Church as an Italian investigative report tracks three priests in Rome who were caught by hidden cameras in sex romps and visits to gay clubs. Frankly, I am not surprised in the least. The more relevant question is how many [thousands] more are there and who many are within the ranks of the high clerics in the hierarchy? Papa Ratzi will naturally say the Church's sexual misconduct issues are all the fault of the gays - conveniently ignoring the Church system that helped make the priesthood a safe hiding place for both gays and pedophiles. Do I feel sorry for the priests caught in the probe? Not really - if they had any self-respect they would leave the Church. The good news, of course, is that at least these priests were not busy raping children and minors. Both The Advocate and the Daily Mail have coverage. Here are highlights from the Daily Mail:
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A gay priest sex scandal has rocked the Catholic Church in Italy today after a weekly news magazine released details of a shock investigation it had carried out. Using hidden cameras, a journalist from Panorama magazine - owned by Italian Prime Minister and media baron Silvio Berlusconi - filmed three priests as they attended gay nightspots and had casual sex.
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Today there was no immediate comment from the Italian Bishops Conference and the Vatican - which has been rocked by a series of sex scandals involving paedophile priests since the start of the year.
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Panorama described its investigation as 'deeply disturbing' as it detailed how three priests - two Italians and a Frenchman - happily took part in gay events and had casual sex.

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In one part of the investigation Panorama said that one priest, named as Carlo, willingly put on his cassock to have sex with the reporter's gay accomplice, adding 'all of which was filmed by the hidden camera'. The magazine also described how they had attended a Mass which was celebrated by Carlo.

Suspended Vatican Priest Denies He's Gay

This guy's new denial sounds about as convincing as Larry Craig's "wide stance" BS line. They caught his ass and it's either try to deny it or be fired and lose a cushy lifestyle. Next, I suppose he'll claim that Jesus spoke to him and told him to make advances on the guy. Between this excuse and those put out by some of the GOP officials and Baptist pastors, they must all think the public is incredibly stupid. Here are some highlights of 365gay.com's coverage of this new fairy tale (http://www.365gay.com/Newscon07/10/101407movat.htm):

(Vatican City) A Vatican official suspended after being caught on hidden camera making advances to a young man said in an interview published Sunday that he is not gay and was only pretending to be gay as part of his work. In an interview with La Repubblica newspaper, Monsignor Tommaso Stenico said he frequented online gay chat rooms and met with gay men as part of his work as a psychoanalyst. He said that he pretended to be gay in order to gather information about "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity."

The Vatican after acted Vatican officials recognized Stenico's office in the background of a television program on gay priests that was broadcast on Oct. 1 on La7, a private Italian TV network. Stenico was secretly filmed making advances to a young man and asserting that gay sex was not sinful. In the Repubblica interview, Stenico said he had met with the young man and pretended to talk about homosexuality "to better understand this mysterious and faraway world which, by the fault of a few people - among them some priests - is doing so much harm to the Church." He said he had never been gay and was heterosexual, but remained faithful to his vow of celibacy.

If you believe that line, call me and I will sell you some oceanfront property in Nevada. CNN also has a report here: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/10/13/gay.monsignor.ap/index.html

High Ranking Vatican Official Suspended After Coming Out On TV

We all knew that there were closet cases at the Vatican. However, this news story via 365gay.com (http://www.365gay.com/Newscon07/10/101407vatican.htm) proves it conclusively! Why do I suspect that this monsignor is but the tip of the closeted gay ice berg? I can only speculate on how many other closeted priests within the Vatican this monsignor could perhaps identify as gay. I hope the guy doesn't disappear or die suddenly. I am sure Richard and Lindsay Roberts will be happy to have some other religious profiteers who likewise live in lavish surroundings share the limelight with them. Here are some story highlights:

(Vatican City) An Italian monsignor was suspended from a senior position at the Holy See, the Vatican said on Saturday, identifying him as a priest who was anonymously interviewed about his gay sex life on a television program. In the program on a private Italian television network, the monsignor said he "didn't feel he was sinning" by having sex with gay men, Rome daily La Repubblica reported Saturday. Vatican officials recognized the Vatican office in the interview took place, La Repubblica reported.

Vatican officials "had to intervene decisively and with the severity required by conduct not compatible with priestly service and with the mission of the Holy See," said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman.Lombardi did not identify the cleric, but said the monsignor was suspended from his job as a top official in the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy, an office which aims to ensure proper conduct by priests.

Episcopal Bishops in Key Meeting on Gays

I have been following the fight within the Anglican Communion for some time now and I hope that the US Episcopal Church will decide that it is better to stand alone and be right than remain in communion with others who distort Christ's message and turn it into a message of exclusion. Here are highlights(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/19/AR2007091901330.html?hpid=sec-religion) on a meeting that could have significant impact on gay Episcopalians and other gay Christians:

The Rev. Frank Wade, a veteran of the brawling theological debates in the Episcopal Church, said the denomination was once filled with people like him: "old white men." It was the church of the establishment, the spiritual home of more U.S. presidents than any other denomination. Now, the head of the church is a woman who says the Bible supports gay relationships. Many Episcopal priests believe that accepting Jesus isn't the only path to salvation. And V. Gene Robinson, who lives openly with his longtime male partner, is the bishop of New Hampshire.

Episcopalians are hardly alone among mainline Protestants in their liberal turn, but they have been tested like no others for their views. The Episcopal Church is the Anglican body in the U.S., and many Anglican leaders overseas are infuriated by Episcopal left-leaning beliefs.

Starting on Thursday in New Orleans, Episcopal bishops will take up the most direct demand yet that they reverse course: Anglican leaders want an unequivocal pledge that Episcopalians won't consecrate another gay bishop or approve official prayers for same-gender couples. If the church fails to do so by Sept. 30, their full membership in the Anglican Communion could be lost.

"I think the bishops are going to stand up and say, `Going backward is not one of our options,'" said Wade of the Washington diocese, who has led church legislative committees on liturgy and Anglican relations. "I don't think there's going to be a backing down."

The 2.2 million-member Episcopal Church comprises only a tiny part of the world's 77 million Anglicans. But the wealthy U.S. denomination covers about one-third of the communion's budget. Within the Episcopal Church, most parishioners either accept gay relationships or don't want to split up over homosexuality. However, a small minority of Episcopal traditionalists are fed up with church leaders.

I believe that history will judge harshly those parishes and diocese that leave the Church. Their intolerance will look akin to allegedly Christian denominations that supported slavery and later segregation.