Ex-Cardinal Allegedly Ran Sex Ring At Beach House

The Roman Catholic Church continues to demonize normal, well adjusted gays while still struggling to face the truth that the institution's priesthood was a hiding place for pedophiles and sexual predators - something I continue to blame on the Church's 12th century views on sex and sexuality that generated so many warped individuals.  Worse, yet, the problem reached to high levels within the Church and for decades - likely centuries - the Vatican turned a blind eye to what was right before it had anyone bothered to look and/or put the lives of children and youths ahead of protecting the Church's image.  The latest bombshell is a story reported by New York Daily News that reports on a new lawsuit filed in New Jersey. I remain amazed that anyone can remain Catholic given the Church leaderships stunning moral bankruptcy (my entire family has left it).  Here are story highlights:

Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick allegedly ran a depraved sex ring of underage boys at a beach house on the Jersey Shore, a disturbing new lawsuit claims.

The suit, filed by a man using the pseudonym Doe 14, claims that in 1982 and 1983, when he was as young as 14 years old, he and other victims were taken on weekend overnight trips to a Sea Girt beach house.

“McCarrick assigned sleeping arrangements, choosing his victims from the boys, seminarians and clerics present at the beach house,” according to the suit filed in state court under New Jersey’s Child Victims Act.

“On these occasions, minor boys were assigned to different rooms and paired with adult clerics.”

The victim claims that he fell into McCarrick’s clutches in 1982 through Brother Andrew Hewitt, who was then principal at Essex Catholic Boy’s High School. Hewitt allegedly abused Doe. He also introduced McCarrick to Doe as someone who could help pay the boy’s school tuition, the suit claims.

At the time, McCarrick was Bishop of the Archdiocese of Metuchen. He became a cardinal in February 2001. Hewitt died in 2002.

The suit names other members of the Catholic Church who also allegedly abused Doe. It alleges that McCarrick steadily climbed the hierarchy of the church despite being dogged by accusations of abuse for decades.

McCarrick, 90, in 2018 became the first cardinal in nearly a century to resign from his position following his suspension for a credible sexual abuse allegation involving an altar boy in New York. He’s denied wrongdoing.

The Daily News has previously reported on creepy postcards McCarrick sent to boys that experts say had the hallmarks of grooming.

The new suit is not the first to reference the beach house.

Don’t Blame the Catholic Church Sex Abuse Crisis on Gays

Photo by Chris Karidis on Unsplash.

Many on the far right of the Roman Catholic Church ranging from reactionary bishops and cardinals and, in my view, parasitic, self-enrichment organizations such as Church Militant and Bill Donohue's Catholic League (which is comprised of one well paid Donohue and one staffer) are working overtime to blame the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal on gays - specifically, gay priests - rather than the Church's clericalism, the Church's bizarre 12th century dogma on sexuality, or the Church hierarchy's active cover ups of abuse.  As always, scapegoating gays and shielding the reputation of the Church is the prime goal regardless of the lies and subterfuge required.   In response, a piece in America, the official outlet of the Jesuits - historically the best educated and most zealous defenders of Catholicism - argues that this scapegoating effort is wrong and not to be believed.  Indeed, gay Catholics, perhaps more than any others, have had to truly ponder the Gospel message and what - if one believes them to be more than myths of ignorant herders - the Old Testament seeks to tell.  Because of this, psycho-sexually mature gays have much to teach the Church. Here are excerpts:

This is not a fun moment to be Catholic, I know, and we are all grasping for sense and answers. But here’s the thing: Using an abuse and accountability scandal to scapegoat Catholic queerness is not O.K.

Take, for example, this letter from Bishop Robert Morlino. I trust the bishop has the best intentions, but some of his most scorching indignation aims not at the abuses of power and accountability he is supposed to be talking about but at homosexuality, in general, which he reminds us the church regards as “intrinsically disordered” and that “cries out to heaven for vengeance” and possibly—the referent is not fully clear—is to be “hated with a perfect hatred.”

There are other concurrent truths, too. . . . . Each time I read something like this, I think of how, over and over, the people who have saved my faith when it was on the brink happened to be queer folks. I suspect this is not an accident. I cannot be sure, but I expect it was their experience of marginalization and their humanness against it that helped me see where God is.

Some of these people have been of the left, some of the right. Some have been on TV, some will never be so seen. Sometimes things have even gotten inappropriate. But that was not because they were queer. Straight folks in the church cross boundaries, too, just as much.

I came into this church right in the heat of the Boston Globe revelations. I was baptized in 2003. Many times I have been grateful to have been called to this church as an adult (barely, I was 18). But I was old enough to know the difference between the nonsense and the glory.

I would not have begun to know God were it not for a person, harbored in holy orders, whose life could only be described as queer, and who drew me in, safely and respectfully, when the straight dudes wanted to drive me out.

I never noticed queerness in one of the people I looked to early in my Christian life as a guide and model. But years later I ran into him with his partner at a famously welcoming evening Mass, on the other end of town from where he lived.

And it was from some corners of this church, believe it or not, that queer experiences seemed to make the most sense. From one corner, a nun had to keep her ministry to the trans community secret. From another, the sweetest friendship I have ever seen was between a famous, withering Jesuit and a woman whose husband, while dying from AIDS, the two of them had tended to decades earlier.

In a sense, there is some truth that the problem of abuse has to do with a problem of queer sexuality. It is the problem of a repressed, denialist, immature queerness that discovered itself a little after Vatican II but was not able to go beyond that.

There is a revelation at hand here. It is not a liberal revelation or a conservative one. It is something else, something ancient. Blindness to it has caused so, so much pain. It has caused good people and good leaders to be their worst selves.

As I traveled my coming out journey, I read a great deal on religion, the Bible and Catholicism and worked with a licensed therapist who was an ordained minister. In the process, I suspect I gave more thought and analysis to my faith than the average Catholic and many members of the Church hierarchy who seem most focused on power, status, control of others and living like "princes."

Pope Francis Could Save the Church. Will He?

I gave up on Catholicism back around 2000, even before I ultimately came out of the closet.  I was sickened by the homophobia of the institutional Catholic Church and its desperate clinging to 12th century knowledge.  So I became an Episcopalian.  Ultimately, through a fluke, I ended up switching to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ("ELCA"), the liberal version of Lutheranism.   When the sex abuse scandal exploded in Boston in 2002, I felt my decision to leave Catholicism was the correct move given the moral bankruptcy of the Church leadership all the way up to John Paul II.  For a time, some family members remained in the Church, but now, most have left as well, some moving to the ELCA, many of the younger ones simply walking away from religion as has been the case with so many Millennials.   With the damning revelations of the Pennsylvania grand jury report - I suspect a similar investigation in other states would reveal similar findings - many Catholics are likely pondering whether it isn't finally time for them to walk away in a realization that reform of the Church from within is most unlikely.  Only one man could change that equation if he wanted to do so.  As a column in the New York Times ponders, will Pope Francis defy the fossilized and utterly corrupt curia and hierarchy and make radical changes to save the institution.  Here are column highlights:

The Roman Catholic Church’s clergy sex abuse crisis has come roaring back to life as if it were the worst days of 2002, when the scandal tsunami out of Boston seemed to inundate the entire church.

The shock waves this time came from substantiated allegations that a well-known cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, a retired archbishop of Washington, had molested boys; he was forced to resign last month from the College of Cardinals. Then came the grand jury report out of Pennsylvania detailing 70 years of horrific abuse by some 300 priests, too much of it facilitated by bishops.

It has all landed on the desk of the current pope, and the scandals have the potential to undermine the Francis pontificate.

It shouldn’t. Indeed, if Pope Francis lives up to his own words and actions, this could be a chance for him to advance his vision of church reform and turn a long-running crisis into an opportunity for long-term renewal.

This eruption was inevitable. At a historic meeting in Dallas in June 2002, American bishops agreed to a comprehensive set of policies designed to protect children and punish offending priests. . . . as the bishops effectively exempted themselves from genuine oversight or discipline for failing in their jobs, the sin that truly scandalized the faithful.

Only Rome could investigate bishops, they said, and only the pope could punish them. That wasn’t likely. The Vatican under John Paul II was not very keen on the United States hierarchy’s new policy against priests, and the pontiff certainly didn’t want to throw his own bishops under the bus.

Now the scandal has even some of John Paul’s staunchest fans questioning the wisdom of his canonization in 2014, and it bedeviled Pope Benedict up to his stunning 2013 resignation.

[I]n March 2013, Pope Francis — then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires — gave a brief, powerful address in which he said the church needed to open up or risk becoming “self-referential” and “sick” with “theological narcissism” that leads to the worst evil, the “spiritual worldliness” of an institution that is “living in itself, of itself, for itself.”

As pope, he has saved his harshest rhetoric for his fellow clerics, especially the cardinals and bishops, criticizing them as “careerists” and “airport bishops” who spend more time flying around the world than tending their flock.

“Clericalism is a perversion of the church,” Pope Francis told 70,000 young Italian Catholics at a rally this month. “The church without testimony is only smoke.”

Pope Francis’ vision of the church is clearly more radical than the defensive posture of John Paul or the nostalgic traditionalism of Benedict. But is he willing and able to implement it?

The pope has had spotty record on disciplining bishops and on the sex abuse issues as a whole, but a promising trajectory. For example, in 2015 he investigated and dismissed two American prelates, Bishop Robert Finn and Archbishop John Nienstedt, who had been accused of covering up for abusive priests. (Both men were favorites of conservative Catholics and found sanctuary elsewhere.) In 2014, Francis removed a conservative Paraguayan bishop who had sheltered an Argentine priest who had left the diocese of Scranton — yes, a diocese cited in last week’s grand jury report — under suspicion of sexual abuse.

Yet earlier this year, Pope Francis faced what had been the greatest crisis of his papacy when he firmly defended a Chilean bishop accused of covering for a notorious and influential priest who led a scandalous double life. Then in April, faced with evidence that the bishop, Juan Barros, and many other in that country’s hierarchy had in fact been complicit in the scandal, the pope suddenly reversed course, . . .

When Archbishop McCarrick was found to have molested minors as well as young men, the pope not only ordered the retired 88-year-old churchman confined to virtual house arrest but also accepted his resignation as a cardinal.

These are encouraging steps, but much more is needed: not only the kind of spiritual renewal that Pope Francis demands but also the kind of systematic change that can safeguard children and vulnerable adults, restore some credibility to the institutional church and begin to dismantle the culture of clericalism — the spiritual elitism of holier-than-thou cliques who cover for one another as they try to run the church.

Pope Francis has frequently been excoriated by church conservatives . . . . But on the issue of abuse, the Catholic right is often proving to be the pope’s unlikely ally, with many calling for a top-to-bottom overhaul.

It’s not like the church has to rewrite the creed. Instead, Catholicism can start by creating a human resources department to ensure that any person who is sexually harassed or assaulted — especially by a bishop or cardinal — can report it in confidentiality and safety.

It’s a simple first step, but even that would have been unthinkable under the ecclesiology of previous pontificates. Now such changes are both unavoidable and integral to the kind of humble, open church that Pope Francis desires. They also work. . . . and they will work for addressing the church’s two outstanding problems: protecting adults as well as minors, and holding accountable bishops who cover up for abuse as well as those who commit abuse.

“Test everything; retain what is good,” Saint Paul wrote to the Thessalonians nearly 2,000 years ago. It was good advice for the church back then, and it is even more relevant today.

I am not optimistic and continue to believe than only plunging membership figures and plunging revenues - America remains one of the largest financiers of the Vatican - will ultimately force change.   If you want the Church to change, the first step is to walk away.

  

Prayers Will Not Stop Sex Abuse in the Catholic Church

Some readers will likely roll their eyes and think "there he goes again" as I again look at the continuing sex abuse scandal that envelops the Catholic Church literally on a global basis.  The findings of the grand jury report released this past week in Pennsylvania mirrors what has been the norm across the globe from Australia, Guam, South America, Europe, parts of Africa and, of course, across America.  There is a systemic problem within the Catholic Church, much of it deriving, in my view and in the view of a number of mental health professionals, from the Church's more or less Medieval doctrines on sexuality and anti-women mindset. If one reads about the development of these bizarre views on sexuality - -the book The Origins and role of Same Sex Relations in Human Societies does an excellent job - the conclusion is that many of the so-called Church fathers had very serious mental issues.  Why must this be addressed and ended?  One reason, of course, is so that such rampant sex abuse of children and youths ceases to be a norm with far too many of the Catholic clergy.  The second is to end the emotional and psychological damage being done even as I write this post as more Catholic youth is brainwashed with the Church's bizarre and unhealthy sexual mores that push many toward constant self-hate and, in some instances, suicide. A third reason is to end the Church's and right wing Catholics' efforts to scapegoat gays rather than admit that the Church's warped teachings and forced celibacy are at the root of the problem.  Several pieces represent the reverberations from Tuesday's release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report.  One comes from Canada's Globe and Mail:  

The church has reacted of course, but always slowly, usually reluctantly and often incorrectly. It still treats offenders leniently, still covers up when it thinks it can and still refuses to address the major causes of abuse. One horribly regrettable response, for example, has been to try to link sexual abuse with homosexuality. It’s probably more difficult for a celibate gay man to enter a seminary under the allegedly progressive Pope Francis than it was under his more conservative predecessors. It’s not only an odious fallacy, but also a painful digression.

In fact, there are three genuine issues. First is enforced celibacy. Men denied sex do not become abusers, but abusers do look for places where they can disguise their crimes. There are a large number of gay priests – estimates are between 25 per cent and 50 per cent – and these men, some in relationships and some not, have to live a lie. Abusers exploit this culture of obfuscation to hide their crimes. A solution would be to ordain married men and to allow gay clergy to be open and honest.

Second is the extraordinary patriarchy that exists within the church. Women are not ordained, have very little influence and are excluded from decisions. While the presence of women doesn’t make abuse impossible, it certainly reduces the likelihood. The vast majority of abusers in any situation are men; women are more often survivors and have greater empathy and sensitivity to the issue, and they inject a gender balance that makes an abusive context more difficult to maintain.

Third is the rigid sense of authority that permeates the church, even under more liberal-minded pontiffs. This is still a clerical church, and until it is democratized, closed circles of secrecy will be formed whenever leadership is challenged.

The reality, however, is that the church will almost certainly continue to regard loving same-sex relationships as sinful, will never ordain women, and as Roman Catholicism is based on absolute central authority, will not genuinely empower the laity.

[U]nless we admit that child sexual abuse within Roman Catholicism is due to systemic problems rather than human failing, the obscenity will not stop. Prayers simply aren’t enough.

A second piece comes from Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic - I left the Church in 2000 - in New York Magazine.  Here are excerpts:

After a while, I couldn’t continue reading the Pennsylvania grand jury report on sexual abuse in six dioceses in the Catholic Church. Apart from the rising nausea, I realized the horror of each incident had begun to numb my conscience, and the sheer number of cases had numbed it still further. One case is a tragedy; thousands of cases can too easily become a statistic. Like dealing with Trump’s lies, you can get dizzy following the specific horrors committed against children, and the excuses and prevarications and silence of so many in the hierarchy. Which is why specifics matter. They reveal the core nature of the evil involved. 

And then the kicker: the diocese was aware of Zirwas’s abuses as early as 1987. Zirwas continued in the priesthood until 1994, when he was placed on leave, citing “personal reasons.” Bishop, soon-to-be Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua did nothing to punish or report this man for molesting countless children. Then he was actually re-appointed as a priest by Bishop Donald Wuerl, who is now a cardinal in my own archdiocese of Washington. When another complaint of abuse found its way to Wuerl, he removed Zirwas, who then moved to Florida, fled to Cuba, and was found strangled to death in Havana in 2001. Nonetheless Wuerl presided at Zirwas’s funeral and made some remarks: “According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wuerl described how Zirwas was a kind man, and had preached a message of salvation through faith in Jesus. ‘A priest is a priest,’ Wuerl said that day. ‘Once he is ordained, he’s a priest forever.’”
 This case is, in many ways, a microcosm of the entire wicked business: the abuse, the cover-up, the continued abuse, the conspiracy of silence. But more deeply for this Catholic: the cynicism. The giggling priests — by their very actions — could not possibly believe in the Gospels. They were merely using the Gospels to commit unspeakable crimes. The upper ranks, by their indifference and cover-up, are also deeply suspect. There is simply no way to square a belief in the Gospels and enabling, promoting, and covering up the rape of children. All of these men come off as cynics, incapable of summoning the overwhelming sense of outrage any nonbeliever, or any decent human being, would feel in the face of this kind of accusation; all protecting their own ranks, all far more committed to good public relations than saving children. There is simply something deeply wrong with these people.

All I can say is that I cannot understand why any human being — let alone a bishop — wouldn’t immediately suspend the priest and call the cops after a credible allegation. It doesn’t matter if it’s the 1980s, 1990s, or 1890s. You save the children first. And instead of PR, what about shame, penitence, taking responsibility and begging for forgiveness? Are those only for the laity?

How much of a role did homosexuality play in all this? There is of course a vital distinction to be made here between sexual orientation and sexual abuse, and between being gay and being a pedophile, hebephile, or ephebophile. Many gay priests are fine and honorable servants. It horrifies me they are tarred by association, by some of the more reactionary voices in the church. It’s also true that one reason young men and boys were targeted was that they were far more readily available to priests than girls.

And the way in which homosexuality has been treated by Catholicism — the only option for all gays is a life of celibacy and emotional repression — is not likely to lead to healthy homosexual lives, let alone priests.

Homophobia may also have increased the proportion of priests over the centuries who have been gay, because the priesthood has always been a reliable cover for not dating women. And these closeted, fucked-up gays are the ones who may well have internalized many of the slurs against gays in the past, hated themselves, never come to terms with themselves, and seen no real difference between sexual abuse and sex. . . .  When no form of sex is allowed, all forms of sex can seem equally immoral. And if your celibacy has ever slipped, you sure don’t want to snitch on someone else, do you?

It’s a vicious, destructive, evil circle. Which is why, it seems to me, that the clerical closet has to end. Secrecy and shame abet sexual dysfunction. Openness and self-respect are the cure.

Allowing married people and women to be priests is also a no-brainer. We have long discovered that secretive, hierarchical cabals of single men are usually trouble in any context and I have a feeling that a female priest would not react to the news of an abused child with concern for the abuser. The church’s moral credibility is now close to zero. All the more reason to throw open the doors and let the light in.
 We may still believe in Jesus. But precisely because of that, we can no longer believe in the church. No one is untouched. Even Pope John Paul II personally advanced and championed one of the worst abusers in the church, the Legionaries of Christ’s Marcial Maciel Degollado, because of the money he brought in, and the rigid ideology he upheld. And they made John Paul a saint! This is no time to shore up the institution. It’s time to open it up and cleanse it. We could start with Cardinal Wuerl.

Lastly, a letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune gets to what may be the only way to force the Church to change: everyday parishioners need to end their financial support of the Church and, better yet, cease attending mass and find a different denomination if they feel compelled to attend church:  

It’s hard to be a Catholic. In response to the recently released Pennsylvania grand jury report on some 300 priests accused of abuse, let it be known — let it be shouted from the rooftops — that those warped, vile, disgusting clerics who have violated children over the past several decades have made victims not only of the children but of all Catholics everywhere. Their victims number tens of millions.

As a church-going Catholic, I have found nothing more maddening over the last couple of decades than recurring revelations of priestly abuse and the church’s attempts to hide it. I think of the donations, which the faithful give at Mass every week, going now not to maintain churches, pay staff or upgrade schools, but to compensate plaintiffs in sexual abuse cases and enrich the lawyers who represent them. Why should I give?

I think of the harm to the church’s moral credibility on matters such as the roles of women inside and outside the church, gay marriage, gender dysphoria, in vitro fertilization and embryonic stem-cell research. How can an institution that has harbored so much sexual abuse over so many years purport to instruct others on anything involving sex?

I must suspect that the requirement that its clergy be celibate — a requirement that among religious organizations seems all but unique to the Catholic Church — not only disqualifies many otherwise capable men from the priesthood but, more ominously, tends to select in favor of men who lack healthy libidinal drives.

Clericalism and a Derelict Hierarchy Fuel Catholic Church Sex Abuse

Accused sexual predator Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

Even as far right Catholic sites such as Church Militant - ironically edited by a self-loathing closet gay man - continue to blame the Church's seemingly never ending sex abuse scandal that is finally creeping up into the ranks of the Church hierarchy on "gay priests," Commonweal, yet another legitimate site is pointing the finger at the Church hierarchy and the Church's insane doctrine on human sexuality.  A derelict, if not actively involved, Church hierarchy abetted and/or covered up sexual abuse. Adding to the problem was the Church's desperate recruitment of psychologically unfit individuals as it struggled to fill ballooning shortages of candidates for the priesthood.  None of this was unknown to the highest levels at the Vatican as the scandal surrounding Cardinal Theodore McCarrick continues to unfold.  Here are excerpts from Commonweal:

Emerging details about the scope and duration of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexually abusive behavior once more underscore the fact that an institutional sickness afflicts the Catholic Church. A predator priest can ascend to princely rank only if the clerical culture around him enables those who are complicit by their silence and failure to act.

The behavior of “Uncle Ted,” as the cardinal insisted he be called by his preferred victims, was something of an open secret at elite levels of the church. As the New YorkTimes noted, multiple reports about McCarrick’s sexual encounters with seminary students were made between 1994 and 2008—to American bishops, to the pope’s representative in Washington, and even to Pope Benedict XVI.  . . . . He even played a prominent role as a spokesperson for the church’s “zero-tolerance” policy on sexual abuse.

The causes of clerical abuse are complex and multilayered. Some Catholic conservatives and others on the right seem not to take this sufficiently into account. [*] First Thingssenior editor Matthew Schmitz recently tweeted: “It will be impossible to address sexual abuse in the Church if bishops and priests do not clearly affirm the Church’s teaching on sex, including same-sex activity. 

A 300-page report, prepared by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the request of the U.S. bishops seven years ago, found no statistical evidence that gay priests were more likely to abuse minors. What’s more, researchers found that the uptick in the number of gay priests from the late 1970s corresponded with “a decreased incidence of abuse-not an increased incidence of abuse.” The disproportionate number of adolescent male victims, according to the report, was linked to opportunity, not to preference or pathology.

A witch-hunt mentality demonizes the vast majority of celibate gay men who are faithful to their vows, serve the church, and are as horrified as anyone at the abuses committed. 

If the church removed all gay priests from ministry today, it would suffer for that loss. Nor would it bring an end to the abuse crisis. The problem is with those bishops, and others with influence in the church, who at best are asleep at the wheel and at worst willing to excuse predatory behavior. Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley this week acknowledged a “major gap” in procedures for how the church deals with a bishop or cardinal accused of abuse, and called for specific new steps. “

There were plenty of red flags about McCarrick, more than enough to stop his ascent into the College of Cardinals. That it was nevertheless allowed to proceed is an institutional failure on a massive scale. No scapegoating will make this mess go away.

And no single step—ending celibacy requirements or allowing priest to marry—will serve as a panacea. The significant spike in abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s, the John Jay researchers found, had much to do with psychologically unhealthy priests who were not properly screened, and who became clergy at a time when seminary education lacked a focus on psychological-emotional development. Improved seminary training and education in the 1980s, according to the report, contributed to a “sharp and sustained decline” in abuse cases since then.

More important is changing a clerical culture that prizes secrecy and loyalty over truth and transparency. That will be tedious, challenging and essential work. In the ongoing wake of the McCarrick scandal, it’s time to take up that task with greater urgency than ever.

Catholic Church Perpetuates Sex Abuse Crisis Through Its Own Policies

I have followed the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal closely since it first exploded in Boston in 2002. Indeed, I have a Google Search agent that sends me daily up to a dozen stories from across the globe on the still roiling scandal that has begun to claim high Church clerics who participated in the abuse or aided and abetted it. The Church hierarchy and right wing Catholic extremists (e.g., the site Church Militant) have made a concerted effort to blame the abuse epidemic on gay priests and homosexuality rather than the western rite celibacy requirement and the Church's utterly bizarre stances on sex and sexuality - the true cause in the minds of a number of mental health experts and the Australian Royal Commission investigating the scandal in Australia.  Now, a piece by a long time journalist for La Croix International, an online Catholic paper republished in the Washington Post belatedly throws responsibility back on the Vatican and its perverse and bizarre policies.  While the author addresses some of the root problems in Church, he overstates the role of homosexuality.  Most experts classify the predator priests and pedophiles and/or psycho-sexually maladjusted, not gays in the common sense.  Nonetheless, it is refreshing to see someone correctly pointing the finger at the Vatican and its unsound polices and dogma.  Here are excerpts:

The Catholic Church is being rocked — again — by high-level sexual abuse scandals, with allegations in recent weeks surfacing in Chile, Honduras and the District [of Columbia], home to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a once-super-popular cleric who is facing accusations by five males of harassment or abuse.

And again, people say they are shocked and outraged, which shows how Catholics still refuse to see that there is an underlying issue to these cases. It is the fact that almost all of them concern males — whether they are adolescents, post-pubescent teens or young men.

And while no adult who is of sound psychosexual health habitually preys on those who are vulnerable, there is no denying that homosexuality is a key component to the clergy sex abuse (and now sexual harassment) crisis.

But let me be very clear: psychologically healthy gay men do not rape boys or force themselves on other men over whom they wield some measure of power or authority.

However, we are not talking about men who are psychosexually mature. And yet the bishops and officials at the Vatican refuse to acknowledge this. Rather, they are perpetuating the problem, and even making it worse, with policies that actually punish seminarians and priests who seek to deal openly, honestly and healthily with their sexual orientation.

Our problem in the Church is of the abuse of power, an abuse that happens as a result of homophobia that keeps gay men in the closet, bars them from growing up and results in distorted sexuality for many gay priests. We need to address this elephant in the rectory parlor. They are products of a clerical caste and a priestly formation system that discourages and, in some places, even forbids them from being honest about their homosexual orientation.

Sadly, many of these men are or have become self-loathing and homophobic. Some of them emerge as public moralizers and denouncers of homosexuality, especially of the evil perpetrated on society by the so-called gay lobby.

As recently as 2005, just a few months after the election of Benedict XVI, the Vatican issued a document that reinforced the “stay in the closet” policy by saying men who identified as gay should not be admitted to seminaries.

In fact, one of the prime authors of that document — Monsignor Tony Anatrella, a priest-psychotherapist from Paris — was recently stripped of his priestly faculties after being credibly accused of abusing seminarians and other young men in his care.

[A]ll gay people, indeed the entire Church — would benefit greatly if these healthy gay priests could openly share their stories. But their bishops or religious superiors have forbidden them from writing or speaking publicly about this part of their lives.

This, too, only encourages more dishonesty and perpetuates a deeply flawed system that will continue to produce unhealthy priests. 

 Having been raised Catholic, I am all too aware of how badly Catholicism's approach to human sexuality can screw one up.  I was in therapy for a couple of years to undo the damage.  Trapped in seminary high schools and colleges, then seminary, where sex - and women - were viewed as sinful in almost every respect, it is little wonder so many priest were psycho-sexually damaged.  

Epidemic of Denial About Sexual Abuse in Evangelical Churches

Even as the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has agreed to pay a $210 million in settlement of to victims of clergy sex abuse, one of the largest payments in a never ending saga, there is another sex abuse epidemic that continues to go under reported: sex abuse in the evangelical churches (the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts out a monthly report of clerical crimes that takes up two newspaper sized pages).  Part of the explanation is the lack of a tight hierarchical structure in such denominations unlike in the Catholic Church, which makes tracking crimes more difficult.  The other phenomenon, is the tendency of parishioners to blame the victims and rally to the support of the abusers.  The victim, rather than the abuser often is the one who becomes the outcast - or at least until the abuse becomes too widespread. The result is that victims all too often blame themselves and/or remain silent.  The ultimate irony, of course, is that it seems to be denominations most obsessed with and repressive towards sex are the very ones that have the most wide spread abuse problems.  A long piece in the Washington Post looks at the denial that still remains the norm in the evangelical church.  The takeaway, to me, is that until evangelicals clean up their own churches, they have no moral authority to lecture others on issues of sexuality.  Here are excerpts:

Moxon was furious that her church community hadn’t listened. But she never told anyone what had happened to Rachael. “We had already tried once and weren’t believed,” Moxon says. “What was the point?”

Today, Denhollander can see how her church, which has since shut down, failed to protect her. But as a child, all she knew from her parents was that her abuse had made their church mad and that she wasn’t able to play with some of her friends. She blamed herself — and resolved that, if anyone else ever abused her, she wouldn’t mention it.

And so when Larry Nassar used his prestige as a doctor for the USA Gymnastics program to sexually assault Denhollander, she held to her vow. She wouldn’t put her family through something like that again. Her church had made it clear: No one believes victims. 

Across the United States, evangelical churches are failing to protect victims of sexual abuse among their members. As the #MeToo movement has swept into communities of faith, several high-profile leaders have fallen: Paige Patterson, the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, was forced into early retirement this month after reports that he’d told a rape victim to forgive her assailant rather than call the police. Illinois megachurch pastor Bill Hybels similarly retired early after several women said he’d dispensed lewd comments, unwanted kisses and invitations to hotel rooms. 

[I]n any community of faith, there is also sin — often silenced, ignored and denied — and it is much more common than many want to believe. It has often led to failures by evangelicals to report sexual abuse, respond appropriately to victims and change the institutional cultures that enabled the abuse in the first place. 

Without a centralized theological body, evangelical policies and cultures vary radically, and while some church leaders have worked to prevent abuse and harassment, many have not. The causes are manifold: authoritarian leadership, twisted theology, institutional protection, obliviousness about the problem and, perhaps most shocking, a diminishment of the trauma sexual abuse creates — especially surprising in a church culture that believes strongly in the sanctity of sex. “Sexual abuse is the most underreported thing — both in and outside the church — that exists,” says Boz Tchividjian, a grandson of Billy Graham and a former Florida assistant state attorney.

As a prosecutor, Tchividjian saw dozens of sexual abuse victims harmed by a church’s response to them. (In one case, a pastor did not report a sexual offender in his church because the man had repented. The offender was arrested only after he had abused five more children.)  

[T]he three largest insurers of churches and Christian nonprofits said they received about 260 claims of sexual abuse against a minor each year. Those figures, though, exclude groups covered by other insurers, victims older than 18, people whose cases weren’t disclosed to insurance companies and the many who, like Denhollander, never came forward. In other words, the research doesn’t include what is certainly the vast majority of sexual abuse. The sex advice columnist and LGBT rights advocate Dan Savage, tired of what he called the hypocrisy of conservatives who believe that gays molest children, compiled his own list that documents more than 100 instances of youth pastors around the country who, between 2008 and 2016, were accused of, arrested for or convicted of sexually abusing minors in a religious setting. 

The problem in collecting data stems, in part, from the loose or nonexistent hierarchy in evangelicalism. Catholic Church abusers benefited from an institutional cover-up, but that same bureaucracy enabled reporters to document a systemic scandal. In contrast, most evangelical groups prize the autonomy of local congregations, with major institutions like the Southern Baptist Convention having no authority to enforce a standard operating procedure among member churches.

This means researchers attempting to study this issue have to comb through publicly available documents. That’s what Wade Mullen, the director of the M.Div. program at Capital Seminary & Graduate School, did as a part of his PhD dissertation. . . . . Over 2016 and 2017, Mullen found 192 instances of a leader from an influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and child pornography. (This data did not include sexual crimes against an adult or crimes committed by someone other than a leader.) 

Of the 166 people who said they had been victims of sexual abuse before or during their time at BJU [Bob Jones University], half said school officials had actively discouraged them from going to the police. . . . BJU officials declined to comment for this article. 

Sovereign Grace Churches (SGC), an influential chain of congregations, many located on the East Coast, allegedly failed to report sexual abuse claims during the ’80s and ’90s to the authorities and caused secondary trauma to victims through pastoral counseling, according to an extensive investigation by Washingtonian magazine. In one instance, an SGC pastor allegedly told a wife whose husband sexually abused their daughter to remain with him. When she asked how she could possibly stay married to a man attracted to children, she was told that her husband “was not attracted to his 11-year-old daughter but rather to the ‘woman’ she ‘was becoming.’ ” Two years into the husband’s prison sentence, SGC pastor Gary Ricucci wrote in support of his parole using church letterhead, and the church welcomed him back to the community after his release. . . . The wife no longer attends.  

The evangelical defense of God-fearing offenders extends to the political realm. Franklin Graham, CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said President Trump’s “grab them by the p—y” comments and other crude language didn’t matter because “all of us are sinners.”  Roger Canaff, a former New York state prosecutor who specialized in child sexual abuse, tells me that many worshipers he encountered felt persecuted by the secular culture around them — and disinclined to reach out to their persecutors for help in solving problems. This is the same dynamic that drove a cover-up culture among ultra-Orthodox communities in New York, where rabbis insisted on dealing with child abusers internally, according to several analysts. 

But among evangelicals, there is an added eschatological component: According to a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Americans believe that the end times will occur before 2050. In some evangelical teachings, a severe moral decay among unbelievers precedes the rapture of the faithful. 

This attitude could explain the 2017 case of an assistant pastor at Agape Bible Church in Thornton, Colo., who was convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison for repeatedly sexually assaulting an adolescent girl. The police investigation revealed that church leaders and the girl’s father agreed not to contact the police because the “biblical counseling” received within the church was sufficient to handle the case. According to an officer who interviewed the father, “His interest was in protecting the church and its reputation more than protecting his daughter.” 

Partly, church leaders tend to circle the wagons out of arrogance. “I’ve worked with churches across the theological spectrum, from fundamentalist to progressive,” Tchividjian says. “They say: ‘I’m the man God’s placed in charge. I have the Bible. I know how to handle this.’ ” But another, less visible problem is the overall attitude toward sex. Sexual sin is talked about constantly, and extramarital sex is considered a heinous moral lapse. (A student at Patterson’s seminary who told him she’d been date-raped was disciplined for being in the man’s room) It stands to reason that churches don’t want to air an epidemic of wickedness among their flocks. 

At an untold number of Christian churches and institutions, the silence on sexual abuse is deafening. Statistically, evangelical pastors rarely mention the issue from the pulpit. According to research from the evangelical publishing company LifeWay, 64 percent of pastors said they talk about sexual violence once a year, or even less than that. Pastors drastically underestimate the number of victims in their congregations; a majority of them guessed in the survey that 10 percent or less might be victims. But in 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 1 in 4 women (women make up approximately 55 percent of evangelicals) and 1 in 9 men have been sexually abused. There is no evidence suggesting those numbers are lower inside the church.

Immanuel Baptist Church faced a choice, the same one before many American churches today: Face the sin in their midst and make the church a place that follows the biblical command to care for the powerless and victimized — or avoid the disruption and churn out another generation of silenced victims who learn, like Denhollander did, that the church isn’t safe.

68 Major Companies Join in Amicus Brief Against HB2

NC homophobe-in-chief, Pat McCrory with Paul Ryan

I continue to believe that the hate and batshitery embodied in North Carolina's HB2 and the corporate backlash to the bill ought to be an object lesson to Virginia's knuckle dragging Republicans and their spittle flecked Christofascist puppeteers.  Not only is North Carolina continuing to hemorrhage business losses  - Charlotte's convention business is being hammered - but the media coverage is unrelentingly negative.  Now, 68 major corporations have joined in an amicus brief arguing that HB2 must be struck down.  The list of companies is a who's who of household names and some are major players in North Carolina's business community that are livid over the North Carolina GOP's self-prostitution to the ugliest elements of the Christofascists in that state (and national hate groups funding some of them).  The Raleigh News & Observer looks at the companies joining in the brief. Here are excerpts:

American Airlines, Microsoft and Marriott are among 68 companies that signed an amicus brief in the lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s House Bill 2.

Former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson authored the brief on behalf of Human Rights Campaign, the LGBT advocacy group that is leading opposition to the law. The brief will be filed in the lawsuit currently pending between state leaders and the U.S. Department of Justice, which is trying to strike down the law as discriminatory.

“That so many in the business community are willing to stand up in opposition to HB2 underscores the immeasurable and irreparable harm the law is doing to the transgender community and to North Carolina’s economy,” Olson said in a news release.

In the brief, the companies argue that the law is “an affront to their nondiscrimination policies” and “undermines their ability to do business within and outside of North Carolina,” according to the news release.

Other companies that signed the brief include: Apple, Bloomberg, Capital One, General Electric, IBM, Nike, Morgan Stanley, PayPal, Dow Chemical and Red Hat.

Late Friday, Gov. Pat McCrory’s office issued a statement criticizing the companies’ involvement with the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, McCrory's Democrat opponent continues to hammer him on the harm he and anti-LGBT extremists are doing to the state.  As for McCrory's claim that HB2 "protects women and girls,"  there are ZERO cases of transgender individuals stalking in restrooms. ZERO cases.  In contrast, if one looks at Freethought Today, EVERY issue has multiple pages filled with reports crimes by clergy, many involving sexual misconduct.  Banning clergy from restrooms would do far more to protect the public than HB2.

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.