I find it odd that this author makes no reference to a major causal factor in the gaying of the priesthood -- namely, the expectation that priests be unmarried.
81% of the cases of sexual abuse of minors involve boys, not girls. But that does NOT mean that homosexuality is the problem. It's a question of simple logic. Supposing that the priesthood was 100% heterosexual, but still celibate. Then all the scandals involving minors would involve female minors. Would that mean that heterosexuality was the problem?
You mean that heterosexual and homosexual men are EQUALLY inclined to abuse minors, in the same proportion, when they willingly submit themselves to the celibate life?
What is your documentary evidence for that?
At least you must prove that aprox. 81% of all priests in America are homosexuals...
"I find it odd that this author makes no reference to a major causal factor in the gaying of the priesthood -- namely, the expectation that priests be unmarried."
My sushi-lovin' friend, Joe, I am saddened to find you, too, chasing this tired old fallacy being pushed by the self-congratulatory trendy-lefty partisans of women's ordination. It just doesn't hold water. There is nothing in the history of the Church supporting a causal relation between celibacy and homosexuality. The exponential rise in homosexuality in the priesthood reflects the exponential rise in the general culture. Can you imagine anyone in the fifties pushing "same-sex marriage"? On other other hand, consider your logic. You say:
"It's a question of simple logic. Supposing that the priesthood was 100% heterosexual, but still celibate. Then all the scandals involving minors would involve female minors. Would that mean that heterosexuality was the problem?"
Joe, if the priesthood was 100% celibate, there would be no sexual scandals. The problem is with those who aren't celibate! Where it is a problem, it's because of an individual or a subculture that has lost sight of (or never possessed) an understanding of the meaning of priestly vocation.
Perhaps you're implying that if priests were married and could regularly "relieve" themselves sexually, there would be less sexual abuse of others by priests. Besides the fact that this would completely misunderstand the nature of married sexuality, all the evidence points in the other direction, Joe, as you should know. The sexual appetite grows with use, just as it diminishes with disuse. Further, the percentage of sexual abuse in mainline Protestant denominations, where marriage is permitted among clergy, is even higher than it is in the Catholic Church. But the media are about as eager to toot that horn as they are the fact that homosexuality is the problem underlying the Catholic sex abuse scandal, or the fact that the exponential rise in cancer among women is directly proportional to the rise in abortions and use of the estrogen based birth control pill.
Hey, Philip -- did I say all that?
I only made one point -- that to blame pedophile scandals on the gayness of the clergy is illogical; it the clergy were 100% straight, which I suppose they never have been, then one would have to blame pedophile scandals on the heterosexuality of the clergy.
I did make another suggestion, yes: that under current conditions an all-celibate organization will attract a disproportionate percentage of gays.
If all celibates were sexually continent, of course they would not commit sexual offenses with minors. That's a red herring in the context of the points I was addressing.
Joe, I would agree with your suggestion that under current conditions an all-celibate organization will attract a disproportionate percentage of gays, provided that organization fails to screen it's recruits properly. This has been a major problem for the last fourty or more years, as you know.
As to your other point -- that to blame pedophile scandals on the gayness of the clergy is illogical -- I find your reasoning utterly absurd. What could be more reasonable than to conclude from the fact that the vast majority of sexual abuses involve priests sodomizing teenage boys that the problem is homosexuality in the priesthood? What could be more obvious?
Isn't the issue, rather, that you, like the media in general, don't want to touch that datum with a ten foot pole, because you've been conditioned to think of practicing homosexuals in terms of a victimized minority group akin to American blacks during the civil rights movement of the 60s? No liberal wants to know that homosexuality was declassified as a mental disorder in 1973 by the American Psychiatric Association for political reasons and as a direct result of lobbying by the National Gay Task Force, not as a result of any scientific or medical knowledge.
"What could be more reasonable than to conclude from the fact that the vast majority of sexual abuses involve priests sodomizing teenage boys that the problem is homosexuality in the priesthood? What could be more obvious?"
My point is that if the priesthood became 100% heterosexual overnight, there is not guarantee that sexual abuses would not continue. But now they would be heterosexual abuses, and you would have to blame heterosexuality in the priesthood -- and weed that out as well.
Of course there are two unknowns here: how much more prone are gay men than straight men to indulge in sex with minors? what percentage of the clergy are gay (and how would that correlate with the percentage of sexual offenses that are with boys)?
Another unknown is this: are the kind of gay men drawn to the priesthood a particular kind of gay men who are also drawn to ephebes (a la Socrates) or to children? Eugen Drewermann caused offense by arguing in his book Kleriker (French translation: Fonctionnaires de Dieu) that in fact the priesthood drew an enormous number of people who were narcissistically fixated on their own angelic youth as altar-boys and were accordingly prone to have pedophile tendencies. Note that in this case the problem is not homosexuality in the priesthood but pedophile leanings in the priesthood -- so that it is not all gays but one particular kind who should be weeded out.
"My point is that if the priesthood became 100% heterosexual overnight, there is not guarantee that sexual abuses would not continue. But now they would be heterosexual abuses, and you would have to blame heterosexuality in the priesthood -- and weed that out as well...."
You assume "hetero" and "homo" are two species of the same genus, whereas they are not: one is an unnatural abberation of the other (link). While it's true that the common factor among "hetero" and "homo" abusers of sex is a mis-directed appetite, there is nothing disordered (or therefore blameworthy) in the hetero-erotic inclination as such; only in its mis-directedness toward immoral liaisons.
You mention two "unknowns"--(1) how much more prone are gay men than straight men to indulge in sex with minors and (2) whether the kind of gay men drawn to the priesthood a particular kind of gay men who are also drawn to ephebes (a la Socrates) or to children? I beg to differ with you and would argue that these things are all-too-well known. Homosexual men tend, as a rule, to be much more predatory than homosexual women. We know that. The data is incontestable. With many "gays," the promiscuity reaches proportions of an uncontrollable addiction to "fresh meat." If you haven't yet, read Michael Rose's Goodbye Good Men, for starters.
"there is nothing disordered (or therefore blameworthy) in the hetero-erotic inclination as such; only in its mis-directedness toward immoral liaisons." Augustine would say that all our sexuality is infected by concupiscence as a result of Original Sin and thus blameworthy; but this may be a red herring. My point is that the poster tried to say homosexuality was the problem at the root abuse of minors by clergy. By the same reasoning he could say that heterosexuality was the problem at the root of abuse of minors by, say, heterosexual married men. You say that whether his logic is incorrect or not does not matter, because in your view homosexuality is bad anyway. If you have good arguments for this, why use a bad one, whose illogical structure I have pointed out?
"You mention two "unknowns"--(1) how much more prone are gay men than straight men to indulge in sex with minors and (2) whether the kind of gay men drawn to the priesthood a particular kind of gay men who are also drawn to ephebes (a la Socrates) or to children? -- I beg to differ with you and would argue that these things are all-too-well known. [You say that it is well known that gay men are more prone than straight men to be attracted to minors and to be involved in illegal sex with them? I do not see the proof of this assertion. Nor is it well known that the priesthood attracts ephebophiles and pedophiles or the percentages of both that are likely to be found in the current clerical corps; I accept the plausiblity of this but I would like to see it profiled and defined more clearly].
"Homosexual men tend, as a rule, to be much more predatory than homosexual women. We know that. The data is incontestable." Is "homosexual women" here a slip for "heterosexual men"? I said nothing about women homosexual or otherwise. Again, I would like to see the proof that gay men are more predatory on minors than straight men are. Even if this is shown, ceteris paribus an all-heterosexual priesthood would still have abuses of minors even if fewer in degree, so the logic of correlating the abuses with the sexual orientation of the perpetrators still does not stand up.
I agree that gay men are more promiscuous on average that straights, but it should be noted that this promiscuity is to some extent (again, to what extent is an unknown) socially conditioned rather than intrinsic to the psychology or genetic make-up of gay people. In the newly emergent culture of gay couples we may see a sharp diminution of promiscuity. That is one of the reasons why we see the emergence of an accommodating attitude among the hierarchy and in Vatican courses on Canon Law to the recognition of domestic partnerships -- not marriage -- among such couples.
This business of weeding out all gays is really dotty. If Kinsey's claim that HALF of men have experiences same-sex attraction at some time in their life (with a THIRD actually reaching orgasm with another male), or even if he is half-right, rooting out homosexuality becomes a Gargantuan task. Also, would one retrospectively try to erase from the record the many gay clergy of the past, such Paul VI, or the venerable patron of this site, or even ... well, umm, that's enough about that.
Here is an article that effectively scotches all the nonsense about weeding out gays. http://www.taconline.org/2003/20...06-07/
page9.htm
"Augustine would say that all our sexuality is infected by concupiscence as a result of Original Sin and thus blameworthy."
You're right: this is a red herring. It's the infecting concupiscence that is the problem, not the infected natural appetite, obviously.
"If you have good arguments for this, why use a bad one, whose illogical structure I have pointed out?"
Because nothing is illogical about the argument, whereas your analogy with heterosexuality doesn't hold. If 81% of alcohol abuse among priests involved medically diagnosable alchoholism, it makes perfect sense to blame it on alcoholism. If one could certify that no priests were alcoholics and yet they still abused alcohol, how would it make sense to blame their abuse of alcohol on the fact that they were not alcoholics?
As to the rest, Joe, (1) no, there was no unintentional "slip" in any remark; (2) the data you get will vary, obviously, depending on the sources you read--and one of us is definitely not reading all the sources; and (3) as to your prognostications of a "sharp diminution of promiscuity" among gay partnerships and a growing acceptance of such by the Church, I think one of us must be living on another planet.
Joe, first of all, why is it that liberals so often rely on arguments from authority rather than sound research and argument? "The argument from (human) authority is the weakest of all arguments," was a medieval maxim. I find that instructive. As instructive as the fact that medieval thinkers were rational to a fault, while most modern philosophies since the Enlightenment have attacked reason and exaulted authority--the authority of ideology, politics, passions, power, pragmatism, positivism, Deconstructionism, Marxism, Freudianism, Romanticism, or Existentialism. It's a fantasy of moderns that the medievals thought the earth flat, as can be seen from the opening pages of Aquinas' Summa Theologae where he says "the earth is round."
Secondly, why are the authorities to which liberals appeal so often irrational and uncreditable? You appeal to Kinsey, whose research would be a joke if it didn't also involve such a travesty of pederasty. I am ceaselessly amazed at the uncritical liberal lionizing of men like Kinsey (Resources on Kinsey).
As to the Tim Unsworth piece, far from finding that it "effectively scotches all the nonsense about weeding out gays," I find it incestuously insular in its frame of reference and ill-informed. And look where it was published--in America magazine, of recent notoriety for having its editor fired after the election of Pope Benedict and long-standing criticisms from the Vatican.
Of course this will mean little to you; but then neither do your silly insinuations about Pope Paul VI and the Venerable John Henry Newman being examples of "gay clergy"!
What is silly about the claims the JHN and Paul VI were gay? It would be much sillier to say that they were straight!
"If 81% of alcohol abuse among priests involved medically diagnosable alchoholism, it makes perfect sense to blame it on alcoholism." Examine the logic of this: sex abuse of children -- alcoholic abuse; homosexuality -- alcoholicism. Wrong -- not homosexuality as such but pedophile or epebophile leanings is the cause. Eliminating people of such leanings would remove the cause; eliminating homosexuals would not, as it leaves over the 20% who practice heterosexual pedophile offenses!
" If one could certify that no priests were alcoholics and yet they still abused alcohol, how would it make sense to blame their abuse of alcohol on the fact that they were not alcoholics?" You apparently presuppose this parallel: "If one could certify that no priests were homosexuals and yet they still abused children, how would it make sense to blame their abuse of children on the fact that they were not homosexuals" -- Well, the point would be that the minors they abused would be female minors, so according to the false logic I am impugning you would have to blame this on the fact that they were heterosexuals.
"It's the infecting concupiscence that is the problem, not the infected natural appetite, obviously." I doubt if it would be obvious to Augustine. In the case of homosexuality, it is not obvious to Ratzinger, who refuses to see homosexual "appetite" (what a word) as natural.
"(1) no, there was no unintentional "slip" in any remark" -- well, I do not see what the relevance of saying that gay men are more promiscuous than lesbians is? Men generally are more promiscuous than women. An all female priesthood might be the ideal. A church run by nuns would surely by purer.
I did not appeal to Kinsey -- though I have yet to see a non-partisan disproof of his findings. I said that if he is even half right, that is, if even 25 percent of males have experiences same-sex attraction, the absurdity of the weed-out-gays policy becomes clear. And again I insist that you cannot have it both ways -- if gay priests are intolerably today, the St Alphonsus Liguouri, Venerable John Henry Newman and Paul VI are intolerable. On Newman, the current propaganda is that he was a "manly man" -- his place at Littlemore has been given the once over since the German nuns called Das Werk have made is a Shrine. Anglicans are no longer allowed to celebrate liturgies there and the portrait of Richard Hurrell Froude (shown to me by the housekeeper back in 1972 with the comment "such a beautiful man" has disappeared from view!). Paul VI had a very dear friend, an actor -- the papal limousine would pick him up from the theater door and ferry him to the Vatican -- though only 65 when the pope died at 80, the actor died a few weeks later. JHN loved Ambrose St John so much that he wanted to be buried with him, a request ignored by the Oratorians. Since I consider homosexuality as perfectly normal (not a case of nature having gone awry) I see no reason to blush and bluster about this. I would not say that homosexuality and heterosexuality are two species of the same genus; perhaps one could rather say that heterosexuality is the primary form of sexuality and that homosexuality is a common secondary variant; but perhaps it is more complex; some might argue that homosexuality, in some larger evolutionary picture, is the primary sexual matrix and that heterosexuality develops from it. The issue is still full of unknowns. That is why the Churches should be opening a dialogue and learning more about it, rather than going into tantrums about ill-thought-out doctrines.
The Church has not thought out the issues of homosexuality at all. Neither for that matter has the Bible -- look up Walter Wink and Robin Scroggs on this -- there are articles online.
Considering the declines in the numbers of priests and the increased involvement of the laity in every aspect of the parish, Protecting God's Children is actually aimed at preventing the *next* probable abuse crisis in the Catholic Church: the abuse of children by youth ministers, teachers, choir directors, pastoral associates, etc. I view this program as part of our eternal vigilance to protect our freedom.
The Irish Bishops' relaxed attitude to government recognition of cohabitation including gay cohabitation is somewhat reminiscent of the following: "Levada proposed allowing employees to designate anyone they wanted as a recipient of benefits on their health plans -- an aunt, a parent, a good friend, etc. In that sense, the church was making benefits more widely available, without endorsing same-sex relationships. One Catholic theologian at the time called the decision "Solomonic," though some critics still felt it fudged over the church's opposition to homosexuality" -- perhaps we see a new policy emerging here?
Chicago Tribune: a black columnist throws out hints of a Holocaust of gays based ont he irrational gay-bashing rhetoric that has become rife and respectable in the USA. Rene Girard acclaims Ratzinger's crusade against relativism.
Re. gay clergy, surely Gerard Manley Hopkins would have to be rooted out as well?
You may expel nature with a pitchfork, but she'll always make a comeback.
The Friend by Alan Bray (Chicago University Press, 2003)
In the Spring of 1841, the future cardinal John Henry Newman met Ambrose St John. The two had come to the consecration of Ampfield Church where their mutual friend, John Keble, was the parish priest. Newman wrote in his diary: From the first he loved me with an intensity of love, which was unaccountable.
He later added, As far as this world was concerned I was his first and last.
That they were last to each other was tangibly enacted in Newman's final request. Fifty years later they were laid to rest together, in a shared grave, in the cemetery of the Oratory Newman had founded. (??? I thought the Oratory overruled the request???)
Alan Bray's posthumously published book can be read, on one level, as a detective story. It attempts to uncover the full significance of Newman and St John's burial, which otherwise might just be taken as a touching gesture. His investigation begins nearly a millennium before, uncovers a form of friendship which has been almost lost to the modern world, and has to negotiate en route subjects as diverse as Syrian-Orthodox liturgy and contemporary queer politics.
... It is this tradition of friendship which Newman and St John recall, but which is so problematic today. It is partly a question of sex. For example, some Catholics believe that the possibility that Newman and St John were homosexual has stalled moves for Newman's beatification. Bray himself got into hot water when he delivered a lecture at Newman House in the Catholic University of Ireland in July 2001 on the matter of Newman and St John's grave: interviewed on breakfast television the day before he was asked whether he thought it true that half the priests in Ireland were gay. Putting aside the question of what counts as sexual or not, Bray, for one, is clear that whilst Newman and St John were not afraid to touch, they did not do anything that their church did, and still does regard as sinful.
In the context of this book, such speculation seems prurient. Which brings us to the reconciliation Bray hopes it may play a part in, 'a resolution of the conflict between homosexual people and the Christian church today?' His point is that whilst sworn brothers have been frozen out in the 'permafrost of modernity' the rigid structures of our society are bending, making way for friendships which might resonate with the past. ..
Reviewed by Dr Mark Vernon
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