Posted on 05/06/2002 9:07:38 AM PDT by marshmallow
NEW YORK — Msgr. Eugene Clark, rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, touched on the neuralgic issue in the Church today — the issue of homosexuals in the clergy — and created a firestorm of controversy when he blamed the current priest sex abuse scandals on homosexuality, a “sex-saturated society,” and liberals’ attacks on clerical celibacy.
In a 15-minute homily delivered from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s as Edward Cardinal Egan was flying to Rome, he called homosexuality a “disorder” and said it was a “grave mistake” that bishops ever ordained homosexuals.
“The tendency to homosexuality is a disorder, not a sin,” he told his congregation, but “the practice of homosexuality is truly sinful.”
“In some seminaries in the United States, known homosexual young men have been accepted as candidates against every rule of Church wisdom and Church requirements. One need say no more of this as a breeding ground for later homosexual practice after Ordination, and the manifest danger of man-boy relationships.”
“Homosexuality became in the American exchange of views a protected area,” said Clark, “and unfortunately . . . homosexual students were allowed to pass through seminaries. Grave mistake. Not because homosexuals in any way tend to criminality, but because it is a disorder.”
While at least one person walked out of the cathedral during his homily, and others were visibly squirming in the pews, Clark received an ovation from the congregation. But after the homily was reported by New York’s Daily News, he was attacked by gay activists, disavowed by the New York chancery, and persuaded to offer a “clarification” of his views.
Marianne Duddy, executive director of homosexual activist group Dignity/USA, branded Clark’s comments as “incredibly horrifying and irresponsible. . . . This is a poor attempt to deflect attention away from the church’s culpability for the sexual abuse of minors by priests and its attempt to cover it up for decades.”
Two days after he made his remarks, Msgr. Clark said his words were “misconstrued and misinterpreted.”
In a three-paragraph statement released by the Archdiocese of New York, Msgr. Clark explained: “In my homily, I did not associate homosexuals with the illness of pedophilia, although some priests had fallen, sadly, into man-boy sexual relationships. . . . Nothing in the homily implied that homosexuals were, categorically or individually, guilty of any crime. . . . To suggest that I said that there is one cause and one solution to the problem is to grossly oversimplify the situation.”
David Smith, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the coutyr’s major homosexual political advocacy group, said Clark’s views “don’t reflect reality and are certainly not consistent with science and medicine . . . and are inaccurate, unfair, mean-spirited, and quite unfortunate.”
But Patrick Scully, a spokesman for the New York-based Catholic League, praised Clark for raising the issue of the role of homosexuality in the scandal.
“The data show that the people who are offending are offending with teenage boys. You can spin it any way you want, but it’s homosexual behavior,” he said. “Now if we’re going to address the scandal we have to put this in the mix. To leave the homosexual aspect out of this is to be intellectually dishonest.”
The matter of ordaining homosexuals was addressed by the U.S. cardinals and the bishop officers of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at their extraordinary meeting in Rome, and the USCCB president, Bishop Wilton Gregory, did acknowledge that there was concern about the priesthood becoming disproportionately homosexual. “I think that priests, having been overprotected in the past, are concerned there may be a tendency to throw them overboard to save the ship,” she quoted longtime social activist Fr. Philip Murnion as saying.
Murnion, director of the Pastoral Life Center in New York and a cofounder of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin’s “common ground” initiative, added, “[Priests] want to assure that care be taken that the concerns and rights of all will be protected.”
The AP’s report continued: “Christopher Bellitto, a church historian and academic editor of the Paulist Press in New Jersey, said homosexual clergy have told him they are terrified they will be made scapegoats as the scandal drags on.
“ ‘There is a real fear among gay priests that they are going to be seen as the fall guys,’ Bellitto said.”
“At last week’s annual conference of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils in Montreal,” the AP revealed, “some of the 300 priests at the event were so worried that they proposed creating a national forum to air their concerns, said the Rev. Robert Silva, the federation president.
“ ‘It’s frightening to us,’ Silva said.”
New York Catholic Rod Dreher, an editor of National Review Online, addressed the issue in an April 22 editorial, “The Gay Question: Amid the Catholic Church’s Current Scandals, an Un-Ignorable Issue.”
He informed readers:
“Stephen Rubino, a New Jersey lawyer, says that of the over 300 alleged victims of priest sex abuse he has represented, roughly 85% are boys, and were teenagers when the abuse occurred. Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, an eminent Catholic psychiatrist who has treated scores of victims and priest-perpetrators, says 90% of his patients were either teen male victims of priests, or priests who abused teen boys....
The reluctance of bishops — and the general public — to address this issue, Dreher suggests, “arises, no doubt, partly out of a fear of antagonizing homosexual anti-defamation groups, who resent the stereotype of male homosexuals as pederasts. It’s much safer to focus inquiry on the question of mandatory celibacy, or the issue of ordaining women. Yet it defies common sense to imagine that an ordinary man, having made a vow not to marry, is therefore going to be sexually attracted to boys.
“Indeed, suppose the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s had admitted married men to the ranks of the Catholic priesthood: Would a single adolescent boy molested over the past 40 years have escaped his fate? Similarly, if women had been ordained, would that somehow have made sexually predatory gay priests disappear?
“No, this is chiefly a scandal about unchaste or criminal homosexuals in the Catholic priesthood, and about far too many in Church leadership disinclined to deal with the problem — or, worse, who may in some cases be actively involved in the misconduct. For Catholics, to start asking questions about homosexuality in the priesthood is to risk finding out more than many Church members prefer to know.
“For journalists, to confront the issue is to risk touching the electrified third rail of American popular culture: the dark side of homosexuality. Yet when we learn that the greatest crisis the Catholic Church in America has ever faced has been brought upon it almost wholly by male clerics seducing boys, attention must be paid to the man behind the curtain. . . .
“The raw numbers [of gay priests] are less important, though, if homosexual priests occupy positions of influence in the vast Catholic bureaucracy; and there seems little doubt that this is the case in the American Church.
“Lest this be dismissed as right-wing paranoia, it bears noting that psychotherapist [Richard] Sipe is no conservative — indeed, he is disliked by many on the Catholic right for his vigorous dissent from Church teaching on sexual morality — yet he is convinced that the sexual abuse of minors is facilitated by a secret, powerful network of gay priests. Sipe has a great deal of clinical and research experience in this field; he has reviewed thousands of case histories of sexually active priests and abuse victims. He is convinced of the existence of what the Rev. Andrew Greeley, the left-wing clerical gadfly, has called a ‘lavender Mafia.’
“ ‘This is a system. This is a whole community. You have many good people covering it up,’ Sipe says. ‘There is a network of power. A lot of seminary rectors and teachers are part of it, and they move to chancery-office positions, and on to bishoprics. It’s part of the ladder of success. It breaks your heart to see the people who suffer because of this’. . . .
“Longtime observers predict that in the coming weeks, bishops and priests will be forced to resign under fire after their closeted homosexual lives, including sexual abuse, become public. The disgraced pederast former bishop of Palm Beach, Fla., is probably not alone. If this happens, the Vatican will face mounting pressure from the Catholic rank-and-file to take action. . . .
“Today, those who defend allowing homosexuals into the priesthood point to the Church’s official teaching, which distinguishes between homosexual orientation (which the Church does not consider sinful) and homosexual acts (which the Catechism labels ‘grave depravity’). There is nothing wrong, the argument goes, with ordaining a homosexually oriented man committed to living chastely and to upholding the Church’s teaching on sexuality. Surely there are many such faithful priests in service.
“This argument, though, seems persuasive only under conditions far removed from those under which priests have to live today. We now have a culture in which there is little support for chastity, even from within the ranks of the Catholic priesthood. . . . Sipe believes gays shouldn’t be admitted into seminaries at the present time — for their own protection, against sexual predators among the faculty and administration, who will attempt to draw them into a priestly subculture in which gay sex is normative behavior. . . .
“Though the American scandal is nowhere near played out, it seems likely that the barrage of humiliating revelations and mounting financial losses will force the Vatican to get tough on gay ordinations. To have any hope of being effective, Rome will have to clean house at most American seminaries. This can be done only if local bishops can be trusted to be both loyal to Rome and resolute — and that will happen only if the Vatican forces them to be accountable.”
I don't get this. For priests who are truly living their vows of celibacy, it should be impossible to distinguish a "homosexual" from a nonhomosexual. It should be a non-issue.
The fact that they identify themselves as "homosexual" priests already indicates that the issue of sex is intruding on their spiritual lives, even if they are not engaging in the physical act of sodomy.
I agree---how would the Church know who was homosexual and who was heterosexual at this point unless either of these groups has been engaging in sexual conduct contrary to their vows?
And if they have, they don't need to be priests any longer.
The fact that some clergy 'out themselves' is a tip that being homosexual is more important to them than being a priest.
The Wanderer has been out-front in pointing out problems in the 'Am-Church' for many years. For this, the paper is just about on the extinct list in local parishes. The number of priest deaths from aids was the tip of the iceberg. The Church is in denial like the captain of the Titanic.
"... The homosexual movement has a history of trying to claw its way into places its agenda doesn’t belong, not for the betterment of mankind, but simply to legitimize and normalize perverse behavior. This is apparent in the all-too-common need of homosexuals to declare their sexuality rather than simply do the job they sign on to do.
This is extremely detrimental—first, it creates conflict with others as most believe homosexuality to be wrong, and it shows that the full efforts of the employed homosexual are not going towards performing the task at hand but largely to declaring their lifestyle. When it comes to serious concerns such as the Church, schools, and the Boy Scouts that involve our children, we can’t take the risk of giving them this power to destroy the values we as parents try to instill, nor can we put our country’s welfare at stake by turning these pivotal foundational institutions and our military into homosexual social experiments.
The homosexual movement is marked by two major tendencies: the tendency to continually infiltrate all good aspects of society; and once they have achieved that, the tendency to destroy this good. Public education, the Boy Scouts, the military, and now the Catholic Church have been targeted, and all have been hurt by the effects of homosexuality. The media and the Church must break its silence towards this enemy. If they do not, the people themselves must rise up and expose it..."
I can, men who practice perversion are more likely to be pedophiles and men who want to sodomize other men will disrupt the cohesiveness of a military unit.
Some people are discussing the utter chaos and damage that homosexuality has done...to marrige, to society, to the church. But homosexuals are too powerful. They are too well defended in the media.
When This...
is passed off as a legitmate "lifestyle," and not hedonism, unbridled lust, and debauchery, then we have lost.
"I could post pictures of "Girls Gone Wild!" you know!
True.
But girls who drank too much and flashed themselves don't have the "Girls Gone Wild Anti-Defamation Legal Defense Society."
There is not pending legislation for "Anti-Hate Crime" laws to protect girls who drink and expose themselves; or asking for special adoption laws, or employement guarantees, or asking society to approve of their behavior.
Homosexuals do.
Sorry wrong answer! Sexual immorality is not a disorder, it is a perversion by choice!!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.