Vatican attacked (by gay groups) over cardinal's claim of homosexuality and paedophilia link

Guardian ^ | April 14, 2010

[NYer]

Gay rights groups have condemned the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, for claiming that the Catholic church's sexual abuse crisis was linked to homosexuality and paedophilia and not celibacy among priests.

Bertone, who is considered Pope Benedict's number two, sparked the controversy on a visit to Chile when he suggested gay sexuality was to blame for the church's child abuse scandals.

Homosexual associations in Italy reacted with anger and indignation. The biggest group, Arcigay, called the cardinal's words "shocking and irresponsible". The president of the gay media service, Gaynet, said if senior church officials "feel constrained to dump the blame on homosexuals, it says a lot about the current state of desperation in the Vatican".

Gay rights advocates in Chile also waded in. "Neither Bertone nor the Vatican has the moral authority to give lessons on sexuality," Rolando Jiménez, president of the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation in Chile, told AP.

No reputable study exists to support the cardinal's claims, said Jiménez added. "This is a perverse strategy by the Vatican to shirk its own ethical and legal responsibility by making a spurious and disgusting connection."

The cardinal, who is known for his blunt and sometimes tactless manner, made the remarks at a televised press conference in Chile's capital Santiago.

He said: "Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and paedophilia but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia. This pathology is one that touches all categories of people, and priests to a lesser degree in percentage terms. The behaviour of the priests in this case, the negative behaviour, is very serious, is scandalous."

[little jeremiah]

A Must pingout tomorrow!

[HamiltonJay]

The Catholic Church is being attacked by haters of it more than anything else, the rate of these incidents in the Church are actually lower than those in the general population. Of course that fact is never brought up because the Church is evil because it doesn’t buy into the moral relavatism of the liberal media.

Has the Catholic Church handled every incident or situation effectively nope, but the portrayal that this stuff is rampant in the church compared to the rest of society is a flat out lie.

The Catholic Church unfortunately made a deal with the devil in the 60s when it foolishly allowed admitted gay, but not “practicing” into the ranks of its Priesthood. That attempt at misguided compassion has harmed the church in a LOT of ways.

However, the facts of the pedophile issue is that the Church actually has a statistically lower incident of these cases than the general population, but because its the church, it gets more attention.

Pedophiles are attracted to positions where they know they can abuse their power and be alone or unsupervised with children, any position that allows this... Coaches, teachers, mentors, etc etc. Given the realities of the ability to abuse if you are in such positions, the fact the Church has an overall lower rate than the average is actually speaks very well of the Church.

Doesn’t excuse the behavior or the incidents of bad behavior around some of the incidents either, but the portrayal that priests are all pedophiles is grossly untrue, but it sells papers, so facts don’t matter.

[Natural Law]

"We've read several time in the past month posts citing officials of the Catholic church arguing that the Catholic Priests aren't any more likely to abuse kids than Protestants,"

Actually, the Catholic Church officials were being kind. The actual statistics are that abuse of children by Protestant Clergy abuse children is more than three times more prevalent and inappropriate sexual contact with parishioners of all types is over ten times more prevalent. This would imply that those who feel free to engage in sexual activity should NEVER be allowed to become clergy.

[CharlesWayneCT]

Your statistics are wrong, but typical of what has been being repeated here in “defense” of Priests abusing children.

Just because someone in power says something, doesn’t make it true. And even if you believe the citing of unnamed studies, the actual citations weren’t what you are repeating, they were misunderstood and misreported multiple times here.

I’m not in any way saying these numbers are correct, but here are the numbers as reported from the “sources in power”. 10% - Total sexual “impropriety” reported by some study amongst ALL clergy that identified as “protestant”. Sexual impropriety was not defined in the reports (probably was in the study that nobody has cited), but could include looking at naked pictures on the web, hardly the kind of “sexual abuse” we are talking about here.

When it came to actual sexual abuse of children, the Church sources spreading these numbers seem to say that Catholic abuse was 1.5-1.8%, and Protestant was between 2.0 and 2.5%.

Again, no citation of a source for this “protestant” information. And comparing “protestant”, which is a general category of hundreds of denominations and uncounted churches, to a single specific denomination, is absurd.

But even if you accept the unverified numbers, the protestant abuse is less than 20% more, or at most less then twice, the number for Priests.

When talking about Protestant self-identified “sexual impropriety”, remember that President Jimmy Carter confessed to sexual impropriety, admitting he had lusted after women in his heart. It’s hardly the same thing as having sex with boys.