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A conference on child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church began today:

Gay Priests, Secret Rules and the Abuse of Nuns: Some of the Vatican Controversies as Bishops Meet

February 21, 2019

The gathering is intended to be a moment to realign and move forward, and before it began, in what many saw as a significant step, the Vatican expelled Theodore E. McCarrick, a former cardinal and archbishop of Washington, from the priesthood. It was the first time any cardinal has been defrocked for sexual abuse. …

The accusations that Mr. McCarrick, as an archbishop, had abused his seminary students and young priests — and not only children — caused some Catholic conservatives to call for the expulsion of gay men from the priesthood. …

Now, gay priests are increasingly speaking out, demanding recognition both of their role in the church and the fact that their sexual orientation has no connection to the abuse perpetrated by others.

Though fewer than about 10 priests in the United States have come out publicly, gay priests and researchers estimate that gay men probably make up at least 30 to 40 percent of the Catholic clergy in the United States. Like all Catholic priests, they take a vow of celibacy.

While Catholic priests make a commitment to a life of celibacy, the Vatican has an internal protocol for dealing with the children of those who violate that vow. The Times made it public this week.

The Vatican confirmed that its department overseeing Catholic priests globally has general guidelines for what to do when clerics father children.

Sometimes the children are born from relationships between priests and women in the community — or nuns. But other children are the consequence of rape. …

This month, Pope Francis acknowledged for the first time the abuse of nuns at the hands of priests and other church officials, something he said was an ongoing problem. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/world/europe/catholic-church-sex-abuse.html

A report last year claimed that 1/3 of Catholic priests were active homosexuals and another 1/3 were active heterosexuals (see ‘Pope adviser urges rethink on Catholic celibacy’ Two-thirds of Catholic priests reportedly are NOT celibate). And of course, according to the Vatican’s supposed rules, there are to be none in either category.

Pope Francis made the following statements at the conference:

21 February 2019

In light of the scourge of sexual abuse perpetrated by ecclesiastics to the great harm of minors, I wanted to consult you, Patriarchs, Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, and Religious Superiors and Leaders …

People of God looks to us, and expects from us not simple and predictable condemnations, but concrete and effective measures to be undertaken. We need to be concrete.

So we begin this process armed with faith and a spirit of great parrhesia, courage and concreteness. …

May the Virgin Mary enlighten us as we seek to heal the grave wounds that the scandal of pedophilia has caused, both in the little ones and in believers. Thank you. https://zenit.org/articles/we-need-to-be-concrete-pope-demands-as-he-inaugurates-summit-for-protection-of-minors/

The clerics need to turn to the Bible, not Jesus’ deceased mother, to be enlightened. Real repentance is needed.

It is horrific that religious leaders would be child abusers, but the Church of Rome has a long history of that.

As far as Pope Francis’ comments about them needing courage to deal with this, one would think that if the Vatican would have enforced its moral directives little courage would be needed.

But, it seems one reason that ‘courage’ is needed by the prelates is that the amount of clerics violating the rules is so high, that the Pope feels the cost of trying to do the right thing will harm his church.

A new book, which was scheduled for public release today, says homosexuality in the Vatican itself is more rampant than most would believe. It is the “Book of the Day” at the Guardian, and here are comments about it:

In the Closet of the Vatican by Frédéric Martel review – power, homosexuality and hypocrisy

21 February 2019

Some years ago a well-placed German Catholic priest sent me a long letter denouncing a network of gay clergy supposedly centred around Pope Benedict XVI’s private secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein. …

It was a glimpse of the poisonous world that Frédéric Martel, himself gay, has spent five years researching for this book. In this place of make-believe, guilt and constant innuendo the prelates live in a tension between the dreadful fear of being outed and the loneliness of not being recognised for who and what they are. So they out each other instead, compulsively. Martel’s rule of thumb is that the most publicly homophobic prelates are those most likely to be homosexually inclined themselves; the only ones who feel they can afford to be sympathetic to gay people are celibate straight people, who do exist in the Vatican. Martel quotes the estimate of the pope’s former chief Latinist that up to 80% of the Vatican staff could be gay even if obviously most of them are buttoned up. The real figure is unknowable but 80% is not entirely incredible.

One of the most impressive, and saddening, parts of Martel’s research is his exploration of the world of migrant sex workers in Rome. Elsewhere in Europe there are fewer gay sex workers on the streets, he says, but in Rome they still thrive, in part because of the concentration of priests, who seek out migrants for the anonymity their encounters offer. The sex workers tell him that their priestly clientele divide into two classes: the lordly ones, who treat them like dirt and pay very badly, and the younger ones, tortured by tenderness, who fall in love with them and are carefully cultivated for their money. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/21/in-the-closet-of-the-vatican-by-frederic-martel-review

Here are some quotes from the book put online by the National Catholic Reporter:

‘He’s of the parish,’ the priest whispers conspiratorially in my ear.

The first person who used that coded expression in front of me was an archbishop from the Roman Curia.

‘You know, he’s very practising. He’s of the parish,’ he stressed in a low voice, talking to me about the morals of a famous Vatican cardinal, a former ‘minister’ of John Paul II, who both of us knew well. …

About forty cardinals and hundreds of bishops, monsignori, priests and ‘nuncios’ (the pope’s ambassadors) agreed to meet me. Among them, alleged homosexuals, who were present in the Vatican every day, introduced me to their world of initiates. …

I installed myself in Rome, one week every month, regularly inside the Vatican, thanks to the hospitality of senior prelates who sometimes revealed that they too were ‘part of the parish’. And then I travelled across the world, through more than thirty countries, among the clergies of Latin America, Asia, the United States and the Middle East, to collect over a thousand statements. During that long investigation I spent more than a hundred and fifty nights a year reporting, away from home, away from Paris. …

The best-kept secret of the Vatican is no secret to Pope Francis. He knows his ‘parish’. Since arriving in Rome he has known that he is dealing with an organisation that is quite extraordinary in its way, and that isn’t restricted, as people believed for a long time, to a few lost sheep. It’s a system; and a huge herd. How many are there? … Let’s just say: they represent the great majority. …

The Vatican has one of the biggest gay communities in the world, and I doubt whether, even in San Francisco’s Castro, the emblematic gay quarter, though more mixed today, there are quite as many gays! …

‘How much filth there is in the Church,’ said Cardinal Ratzinger, who also discovered the extent of the ‘closet’ through a secret report by three cardinals, the content of which was described to me and that was one of the major reasons for his resignation. This report is said to reveal not so much the existence of a ‘gay lobby’, as was said, as the omnipresence of homosexuals in the Vatican, blackmail and harassment built into the system. There is, as Hamlet might have said, something rotten in the state of the Vatican.

The homosexual sociology of Catholicism also helps us to explain another reality: the end of vocations in Europe. For a long time, as we will see, young Italians who discovered that they were homosexual, or who had doubts about their inclinations, chose the priesthood. …

Here is the pope: threatened and attacked on all sides and generally criticized, Francis is said to be ‘among the wolves’.

It’s not quite true: he’s among the queens. https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/excerpt-closet-vatican

Sexual immorality is a big problem for the Church of Rome.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2019 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Religious News.

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