Posted on 05/06/2002 7:06:08 AM PDT by anniegetyourgun
PHILADELPHIA- Mary Louise Cervone has been a practicing Roman Catholic all her life and, as a lesbian, has long hoped for acceptance from the church.
But finding a welcoming place has never been easy and now with the clergy sex abuse scandals raging in dioceses across the country, Cervone and other gay Catholics feel that homosexuals are being scapegoated by church leaders.
Most of the victims of priestly abuse are adolescent boys, leading some Catholics to conclude that there is a link between homosexuality and the abuse of minors.
Philadelphia Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua last week called homosexuality an "aberration, a moral evil" and said the archdiocese tries to screen out gay priests, suggesting that they were more likely to commit child abuse.
And 100 gay advocates protested outside St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City on Sunday after Monsignor Eugene Clark reportedly made similar comments April 21. The New York Archdiocese has said Clark was speaking for himself and not the archdiocese.
Clinicians say no credible data exists on the number of abusive priests who are homosexual and there is no evidence that homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to molest children.
Cervone, the president of Dignity/USA, a national gay Catholic activist organization, thinks homosexuals are being unfairly targeted.
"It's wrong," she said. "There's no data to support it. There's not even any data collected by the Catholic church. It's the arrogance of the church leaders, this feeble attempt to blame the whole crisis of clergy on the gay community."
Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based gay Catholic advocacy group, said the organization has been getting calls from concerned gay priests and parishioners.
"It's a new phase of anger toward church leaders," DeBernardo said.
Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the recent statements do not reflect the usual church stance, which is that homosexual or heterosexual men can be priests if they are celibate.
She added that the church does not reject gay Catholics. What it teaches is that being homosexual isn't a sin, but being a sexually active gay is.
"I think the church tries to be open to all Catholics who are accepting of the church's teachings," Walsh said. "It's a difficult point for homosexual Catholics that the church condemns homosexual activity."
Both Dignity/USA, which has been banned from meeting in Philadelphia churches, and New Ways plan to speak on behalf of gay Catholic rights at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' general meeting in Dallas beginning June 13.
Over the years, such efforts have become more common as gays have fought for greater acceptance in the church.
"As gay people become more accepted in society, more Catholics are coming out," said Donal Godfrey, an Irish Jesuit priest who is working on a doctorate at the University of San Francisco.
"If you look at the life of Jesus, he was close to people who were marginalized. If we're meant to be following him, people who are marginalized should be comfortable in our churches."
The number of gay Catholics is hard to judge, but DeBernardo said he believes it is around 10 percent, roughly similar to some estimates of the general population.
Some wonder why homosexuals would stick with the church. Gay Catholics say their faith is a piece of their identity.
"It isn't an option for me," said Tom Streeper another member of Dignity in Philadelphia. "That's the way I was raised and it's part of who I am."
Now, if only we can get the bishops to agree ...
I couldn't, for the life of me, understand how our bishops fail to see that. I was 16 years old when I first learned of a homosexual relationship going on between a priest and a boy my age. This was in 1960, the early days of Vatican 2. I couldn't understand how a priest could do such acts at night and in the morning got up to the altar to celebrate Mass and RECEIVE COMMUNION. To my young mind, it was a sacrilege of the vilest kind!
As I said, I was 16 at that time. One should hope that our Bishops are much older and wiser today than I was at that age!
Nope. There have been worthless, vile bishops all along. St. John Chrysostom (born in 347 AD) remarked that the floor of Hell is paved with the skulls of bishops. That's a powerful statement, indicating that the bishops of his time were at least as corrupt as American bishops are today. And yet the Church survived. The Church will recover from this, and I'm staying in.
Really Sad!
It was the only case of sexual misconduct by a priest that I've ever known personally, so I can't tell you anything about anecdotal evidence outside the US. Also, that priest was American - a Maryknoll Missioner named Fr. John Lennon, who was the director of my high school for some five years. His teen-age partner was a 16-year-old Filipino boy, my classmate in high school, who impregnated my then best-friend (girl), and therefore HAD to marry her.
It was my friend who shared with me the details of her husband's homosexual relationship with this priest.
I felt so sorry for my friend, as she was very devastated about it even as she helplessly tried to be non-judgmental. After all, it was about the two men she was most fond of - her husband and her priest! Both she and I wondered if we had missed anything taught in school?
The current crisis in the Church bring back these unhappy memories, even though my then best-friend and I have since lost touch with each other. The last time she wrote me 15 years ago, there was not even a mention of her husband's name.
And the priest, what had happened to him? A search in the internet revealed that after his stint in the Philippines, Fr. Lennon left Maryknoll and became a US military chaplain in Vietnam. Then, as a diocesan priest, he was assigned to Cardinal Hayes High School in New York were he was from, originally.
I wonder if anybody ever knew about his homosexual activities in the Philippines and perhaps elsewhere, but I couldn't find anything else about Fr. Lennon, except in this link with the Bronx newspaper: http://www.bxtimes.com/News/2000/1130/School_News/51.html
Really sad, Chatham. But are many of them practicing? I've always thought they were grossly negligent, indifferent, cowardly, even indolent - or worse, not prayerful enough. Where did you get the information that many of them are homosexuals?
Read Howie Carr's column last week on Cardinal Spellman and his boyfriend from Broadway Theater who visited with him regularly.
Visit the Roman Catholic website (www.rcf.org) and read through their information presented.
Visit www.nomorepeds.org, a site from the palm beach area put up by a prominent Catholic who has done a lot of work for the church.
Read the following books:
"The Changing face of the Priesthood" by Rev. Donald B. Cozzens
"Sex, Priests and Power" by A.W. Richard Sipe.
"Goodbye Goodmen", by Michael S. Rose Also read some of the recent stories from Ireland.
Sorry.
Anybody else as sick as I am of reading this statement?
"no credible data exists"? B.S.---- then GET some data, it ought to take all of about 48 hours to compile it!
I'm constantly haunted by what Pope Paul VI said before he died, that the "smoke of Satan" has infiltrated the Church - and of Our Lady's warning about "bishop against bishops." This crisis is almost apocalyptic in scope.
At Confirmation we became Soldiers of Christ and the War is at Hand and the general of the Enemies forces is Satan himself.
It is time to pray to St. Michael for guidance and we will win the war.
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