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 Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal Continues in New York and Pennsylvania

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Fired Priest: Catholic Church is "Frequently Violently Homophobic”

Just as we see the most homophobic statements and behavior coming from closeted Republican politicians - many of whom deservedly get "out" - we see the same behavior among the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church.  In my view the homophobia stems from a mix of (i) brainwashing during ones youth, (ii) terror over facing the prospect that what one was taught was a lie, and (iii) lashing out in jealousy, if not near hatred, at those who have had the courage to embrace who they are and reach out to find happiness.  By many reports the Vatican is full of gay clergy who rather than have fulfilling relationships with those to whom they are attracted have opted instead for power and control of others on whom they wish to visit their own misery and psycho-sexual hangups.  The Advocate looks at the accusations made by former Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa.  Here are excerpts:

The Roman Catholic Church is “frequently violently homophobic” and makes LGBT Catholics’ lives “a hell,” says a priest who was fired by the Vatican after coming out as gay.

Krzysztof Charamsa, who held a post at the Vatican until early October, expressed these sentiments in a letter to Pope Francis, written the same day as his coming-out announcement, the BBC reports. Charamsa provided the network with a copy.

In the letter, he takes the church to task for “persecuting” and bringing “immeasurable suffering” to LGBT Catholics and their loved ones. After a “long and tormented period of discernment and prayer,” he wrote, he decided to “publicly reject the violence of the Church towards homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and intersexual people.”

He denounced the “homophobic hate of the Church, the exclusion, the marginalisation and the stigmatisation of people like me,” and said that while there are many gay people in the church, including clergy, the institution is  “frequently violently homophobic.” He urged “all gay cardinals, gay bishops and gay priests [to] have the courage to abandon this insensitive, unfair and brutal Church.”

Charamsa thanked Pope Francis for some of his conciliatory remarks about LGBT people but said they will be meaningful only if the church reverses some of its attitudes. The priest condemned a statement by Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, that homosexuality is “a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil,” and he said the church should nullify its policy barring men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” from the priesthood.

As the recently concluded "Synod on the Family" demonstrated,  despite Francis' less hateful rhetoric, nothing of substance has changed in the Church's condemnation of gays despite the hopes of many (hopes that I always believed would be disappointed).  The Guardian has details.  Here are highlights:

After a three-week marathon of Vatican talks on family issues, Roman Catholic bishops voted on a summary document which decided against overhauling the church’s teaching on gay Catholics but paved the way for greater openness towards divorcees.

A push for more welcoming language was evident, but the final text was by no means a triumph for progressives. Although bishops agreed that people should be treated with respect “independently of their own sexual tendency”, the reference to gay Catholics was viewed in terms of “accompanying the families in which people with homosexual tendencies live”, rather than accepting same-sex relationships.

The bishops also criticised international bodies they said were pushing poor countries to introduce same-sex marriage laws with the promise of aid.

There was, however, a greater openness towards Catholics who divorce and remarry outside the church, who under Vatican teachings are excluded from receiving communion. Bishops agreed divorcees must be “more integrated in Christian communities”.

The bishops also paved the way for clergy to decide whether to allow divorcees to participate fully in church life: “It is to be hoped that in the dioceses paths of discernment and involvement of these people will be promoted.”

My advice to gay Catholics is to walk away and to stop being masochists.  Moreover, as gay Catholics exit the Church, they need to convince their friends and families to do the same.  Dwindling membership - and more importantly, dwindling money flow - are the only things that have ever forced the Church to change.  Until such change happens, the Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church offer gay accepting alternatives with all the ritual of a Catholic mass, but without all the hate and hypocrisy.

Former Vatican Insider: More than 50% of Priests are Gay

This past weekend, Roman Catholic bishops gathered at the Vatican to kick off a second installment of their synod on so-called family issues.  During the lead up to the synod, two gay Catholic priests have been fired from their positions because of their relationships.  Further underscoring the Church's animus towards gays, Pope Francis opened the synod by basically repeating his view that God entrusted the earth to the alliance between man and woman: Its failure deprives the earth of warmth and darkens the sky of hope.”  Meanwhile, a former Vatican insider has stated in an interview with German magazine Stern that he believes 50% of priests, including those at the Vatican, are gay.  Gay Star News looks at these statements:

David Berger, an openly gay academic who formerly worked for the Vatican, said the number of gay men working in the Catholic Church was well above average – even more so in the papal state.

‘In the Vatican, I experienced the number of gay men to be even higher,’ he said in an interview with German magazine Stern.  ‘I guess around half [of the men working there].’

‘On one hand it’s down to homosexuality being demonized in the Church. It’s a very severe sin,’ he said.

On the other hand, the image of a celibate priest, who is never questioned about not having a wife, was very attractive for gay men, Berger continued, as they wouldn’t have to explain themselves and wouldn’t be bothered into marriage.

‘So you have the advantage of having many gay men with a guilty conscience.
Berger also said the biggest rule in the Vatican was while people could have gay sex, in public they should always remain true to the Church’s principles and not talk about it.

‘I think that may be down to being gay being an important apparatus of power,’ Berger told the Stern.

‘After a coming out, those in power don’t have anything left with which to hold you down. That’s a disaster beyond all expectations.’

David Berger worked as an academic at the Pontifical Academy of St Thomas Aquinas in Vatican City; when he came out as gay, he was forced to leave.

It goes without saying that the hypocrisy of these bitter old men is off the proverbial chart.   But there is much more involved in the misogyny of the Church and it centers on psychologically damaged, self-loathing closeted men.  Michael Bayly, a gay rights activist Catholic and blogger friend, lays out the true level of hypocrisy and dysfunction that is the Catholic Church hierarchy and much of the priesthood.  Here are excerpts:

The Roman Catholic priesthood has long been a haven for a certain type of gay man – one who, for whatever reason, does not experience, or care to seek to experience in the wider world, validation for who they are sexually.

Before the rise in the West of the gay liberation movement of the late 60s-early 70s, the priesthood was one of a very few environments where homosexual men could gather and live together without arousing undue suspicion. More importantly, it was perhaps the only environment where they could gain power and experience respect and deference.

Consequently, I think it's fair to say that the priesthood has historically attracted a disproportionate number of homosexual men. For many of these men, the price paid for a life of power and prestige involves the maintaining of a secretive sexual life. . . . . Another price that we know has been paid by many men – both gay and straight – is that of a stunted psycho-sexual development. One sad consequence of this can be seen in the clergy sex abuse scandal. I would argue that it's a minority of abuse cases that involve actual pedophiles, i.e., adults sexually attracted to prepubescent children. Instead, many, if not most of the caes, involve grown men attempting to act-out or come to terms with their sexuality with non-consenting teenagers and/or young adults with whom they share a similar level of psycho-sexual development.

Just as with heterosexuals, the vast majority of homosexuals can and do choose to live lives marked by ongoing psycho-sexual growth, loving relationships, and sexual integrity and health. We see the benefits of this choice all around us in the lives and relationships of the gay individuals, couples, and families we know and love.

Where we're not seeing it is in the Roman Catholic priesthood.

This is because the clerical culture of the church, unlike wider society, continues to denigrate and malign homosexuality and its expression. And yet we know that this same culture is heavily populated by homosexual men – not the type "on the outside" that accept and celebrate the gift of their sexuality, but rather the type that is self-loathing, secretive, and often psycho-sexually stunted. 

A celibate life can be fostered and maintained, but only if sexuality – in all its beauty and complexity – is acknowledged and respected, something that's not happening in the priesthood. Gay men in the priesthood are forced to live secret, isolated, and often sexually furtive lives.

No good can come from such a state of affairs, as we're painfully witnessing almost on a daily basis.  

What's stopping the many gay priests and bishops from stepping out of their closets of secrecy? Is it the lure of the rich trappings of power and prestige also housed in these closets? Is it fear of losing this power and prestige? Is it more practical – the fear of simply losing their position and thus their source of income? Do some really believe what the clerical leadership teaches about homosexuality?

One thing I do know for sure is that our gay brothers within the feudal world of the Vatican are giving gay men everywhere a bad name. I must admit that as a gay Catholic man I resent this. So many of us have made the difficult journey to a place of self-realization and integration, and discerned that it's the truly enlightened and authentically spiritual path to tread. And yet our so-called spiritual leaders refuse to recognize it, let alone embark on the journey themselves. I don't want our church to be led by such hypocrites and cowards.

[T]he whole leadership system must be reformed. We can no longer depend upon a "good" pope, i.e., one who thinks like us, to come in and make everything better. A benevolent autocrat is still an autocrat. It's time we acknowledged that the church took a terribly wrong turn when, around 1600 years ago, it assumed the trappings of empire during the time of Constantine. No more overlords, autocrats, emperor-like popes.  

These men want to dictate morality to others and love to condemn other gays, yet they are totally screwed up emotionally and psychologically themselves.    Worse yet, they are for the most part totally clueless on matters of family life and intimate relationships, but want to define how others should live.