Tag Archives: #CatholicPriesthood

Posted on by

The Catholic Church and the Right to Privacy

We have twice reported on Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who resigned as General Secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, after a conservative Catholic site used cell phone data to show him using Grindr, a homosexual dating app, and frequenting homosexual bars, and noted the New York Times story “Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests Using Grindr“. Naturally, the Church can’t say that it’s acceptable for priests to be using homosexual pick up apps, but the Church is very concerned about the privacy rights of priests, at least when it comes to their COVID vaccination status.

The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington

Which brings me to the Most Reverend John Stowe, O.F.M.Conv., the Bishop of Lexington. We have reported, many times, on the Bishop’s policies, with a rather jaundiced eye.

While I have heard no statements from Bishop Stowe concerning Pillar’s exposure of Msgr Burrill’s activities, it would seem that the Bishop is pretty much unconcerned with the privacy of priests in his diocese.

    Bishop Stowe: Catholics deserve to know if their priest is unvaccinated

    Michael J. O’Loughlin | September 16, 2021

    Bishop John Stowe, O.F.M.Conv., last month asked that diocesan employees working at the Catholic Center in the Diocese of Lexington, Ky., vaccinate themselves against Covid-19, extending a mandate that had already been announced for faculty and staff at Catholic schools. The bishop said the diocese let go of “a handful” of employees who refused. When it came to priests in the diocese, the bishop said he turned to “moral persuasion,” urging them to vaccinate themselves as a way to protect parishioners. That seemed to work. About 92 percent of the diocese’s 50 priests have been vaccinated, a rate that puts them as a group well ahead of the 61 percent of adults in Kentucky who are fully vaccinated.

The math is pretty simple: 92% of 50 priests is 46 priests, meaning four diocesan priests are unvaccinated. The Bishop publicly exposed two of them, Father John Moriarty, the Rector of the Cathedral of Christ the King parish, and Father David Wheeler, a parochial vicar at the Cathedral parish, as not having been vaccinated. The Cathedral parish is where the diocesan Bishop has his seat, so His Excellency the Bishop was unable to persuade two other priests that he sees, almost every day, at his resident parish, to get vaccinated.

The other two unvaccinated priests of his diocese have not been named.

I note that the report states that the Bishop “let go”, a euphemism for fired, “a handful” of employees who refused to be vaccinated, meaning that he took “a handful,” whatever that number happens to be, and threw them into poverty. While The Lord hears the cry of the poor, he might not expect one of his Bishops to add to the number of the poor.

    But for the few priests who chose not to be vaccinated, the bishop believes they owe it to their parishioners to be upfront about their status.

    “When I found out that four of them still were not vaccinated, I said they had to disclose that to their people because people were expecting they would be vaccinated,” Bishop Stowe told America. He said he also told the unvaccinated priests that “they couldn’t go into the homes of the sick or the homebound or be in close proximity” to worshippers.

Odd thing, though, that the Bishop would fire let go the “handful” of diocesan employees who declined to be vaccinated, but did not fire let go the four diocesan priests who refused. Could that be because lay employees are far easier to find in this economy, but priests are in short supply? With more parishes, 59, than priests, several priests, including my own parish pastor, who will turn 88 years old in a couple of weeks, have to serve more than one parish.

We have previously noted that Bishop Stowe has been very supportive of homosexual rights and recognition of ‘transgender’ individuals as the sex they claim to be, rather than the sex they are, but I cannot accurately report his position on Pillar’s exposure of the homosexual activity of Msgr Burrill and the privacy rights of Catholic priests when it comes to their vows of celibacy. But we certainly know his views on the privacy rights of both his parish priests and lay employees when it comes to their vaccination status.

Posted on by

A bad move by Bishop John Stowe

Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck) visits dying gangster Whitey Brennan (Mark Margolis) in “Dedication.”

At the end of episode 15, Dedication, in the first season of Blue Bloods, Police Commissioner Frank Reagan visits Whitey Brennan, an Irish mobster whose son tried to assassinate the Commissioner. The elder Mr Brennan is in a nursing home, essentially waiting for death. Mr Reagan asks Mr Brennan if there’s anything he’d like to confess at the end, at which point the dying mobster laughs at him. The Commissioner then tells him, ‘Not to me,’ then opens the room door to admit a priest, so that Mr Brennan has an opportunity to make his last Confession. That’s a very powerful scene, at least for Catholics, but, with Bishop John Stowe’s new order, oops! so sorry, if you live in one of the widely spaced parishes in eastern Kentucky and your parish priest isn’t vaccinated, he can’t come to you to hear your last Confession.

It isn’t often that the Diocese of Lexington is mentioned by the Catholic News Agency, this being a very Protestant area, but it happened Tuesday morning:

    Unvaccinated clergy in Lexington, Kentucky barred from ministering to the sick and homebound elderly

    By Shannon Mullen, Joe Bukuras | Tuesday, September 14, 2021 |8:10 AM EDT

    The Most Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington

    Priests of the Diocese of Lexington, Kentucky who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19 may not minister to the sick, elderly, and homebound, Bishop John Stowe has directed.

    The policy was announced during a Saturday vigil Mass Sept. 11 that Bishop Stowe celebrated at the Cathedral of Christ the King in Lexington.

    At the end of the liturgy, Deacon Tim Weinmann read a statement from the cathedral’s rector, Father John Moriarty, that both Fr. Moriarty and Father David Wheeler, the parochial vicar, have not been vaccinated.

    “The bishop has asked that Fr. David and I, Fr. John – I’m speaking for Fr. John – make an announcement that we are not vaccinated, so people can decide if they wanted to attend Mass where they were celebrating,” the deacon read, according to a video of the Mass posted by the Cathedral of Christ the King.

    “And if also the priests – and this has been done throughout the diocese – those priests that are not vaccinated are to follow the COVID protocol in the liturgy, and they are not allowed to visit the sick or elderly that are homebound,” the announcement continued. “Fr. John and Fr. David, again, have not been vaccinated.” Bishop Stowe stood beside Deacon Weinmann while the announcement was read but did not comment afterward.

You can see the announcement at the end of this video of the Mass, beginning at the 1:07:10 mark.

We have previously reported on the Bishop’s mandate that all employees at the Catholic Center must be vaccinated as a condition of employment, which has to mean that any who refuse will be fired. We have previously noted Bishop Stowe’s support for homosexuals, and that the diocese hosts St Paul’s Catholic Church, which is very openly “LGBTQ+” accepting, only a couple of miles from the cathedral parish, Cathedral of Christ the King, where the Bishop resides and has his seat. Bishop Stowe is fully aware of St Paul’s ‘mission.’ One wonders if our Bishop is more concerned with COVID-19 than he is the spiritual health of his parishioners.

Then again, I have often wondered if Bishop Stowe is more of a Democrat than he is a Catholic, the way Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and so many of our (purportedly) Catholic politicians are. Our Bishop is very much a supporter of liberal, Democratic political policies, and has been far more vocal about such than he has when it comes to abortion. While he noted, in yet another OpEd, that neither major party supports all of Catholic social teaching, he gave very short attention to Joe Biden’s support for abortion, two whole sentences, with neither mentioning that Me Biden also wants to have the taxpayers, which would include Catholics, pay for abortions, he devoted several long paragraphs condemning conservative policies on welfare and illegal immigration. The Bishop called President Trump “so much anti-life,” something that, sadly, our local parish priest reiterated in his homily. As noted above, he supports the diocese’s homosexual activist parish, and he has broken with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the Equality Act. The USCCB opposes the legislation due to the fact that it does not contain sufficient protection for matters of religion and conscience, and might require Catholic diocese and other organizations to hire or retain open homosexuals or transsexuals living in a state of open scandal.

I have heard His Excellency the Bishop at Mass, twice, in our very small parish, and I can tell you that he is an excellent preacher who really tries to connect with his parishioners. If you are capable of being inspired by a priest’s homily, Bishop Stowe will inspire you. I have no reason at all to doubt his faith.

But, sadly enough, I do see reason to doubt whether his Catholic faith is stronger than his Democratic allegiance. He basically gave Catholic parishioners a choice of opting out of Mass if either Fr. John Moriarty or Fr. David Wheeler is the celebrant . . . and those are the only two priests other than the Bishop noted in the Cathedral staff directory. I guess that the Bishop will, personally, visit all of the shut-ins in his parish.

Of course, the Cathedral parish is a large one, with three priests, but, the diocese being a very much Protestant one, we have, overall, small parishes covering large geographic areas. My own pastor, who is in his eighties, has to cover two parishes, and it isn’t physically easy on him. I’m certain that he is vaccinated, since he adds, every Sunday, a plea for everyone to get vaccinated. Still, if two priests, in the Cathedral parish, with the Bishop hanging over their heads every day, have chosen not to get vaccinated, the obvious question is: how many other priests, in smaller, rural parishes scattered throughout eastern Kentucky, have also chosen against vaccination? The Bishop has just said that such priests cannot visit the sick and the homebound, which, in effect, denies the sacraments to some ill or elderly parishioners who might want and need them.

I understand the Bishop’s concerns about the virus, and, like him, I believe that everybody should get vaccinated, though I oppose vaccine mandates. But the Bishop’s latest actions hurt his parishioners.

Posted on by

Theodore McCarrick illustrates the problem, but he is not the only problem

I have said it before: the Catholic priesthood must be changed, and restricted to married, heterosexual men.

Mandatory celibacy for priests was not established until the Second Lateran Council in 1139, and reaffirmed by the Council of Trent in 1563. That means that, for 1,100 years, the majority of Church history, priests could be, and were mostly expected to be, married men.

With humans being naturally inclined to mate, the Church is expecting the priest to live an unnatural lifestyle. Human beings need to mate, they need to be married, and the celibacy discipline denies to Catholic priests that most basic normalcy in human life. Even St Paul, who stated that he was celibate, noted that marriage was the natural condition of life,[1]I Corinthians 7:1-11. And St Paul also set down the conditions that a man must meet to be a deacon, priest or bishop:

The saying is sure: whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach, married only once, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way— for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church?[2]1 Timothy 3:1-5

St Peter, regarded as the first Pope, at least had been married at one point: Matthew 8:14-15 refers to his mother-in-law, though there is no reference to St Peter’s wife in the Bible.[3]1 Corinthians 9:5 has also been interpreted as confirming that not only was St Peter married, but that his wife accompanied him as he traveled with Jesus. Cephas, in the cited passage, refers to … Continue reading

The conditions for priests and deacon are similar. But clearly, St Paul expected those in Holy Orders to mostly be married.

Ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick pleads not guilty to child sex assault; some in crowd outside yell, ‘Shame on you!’

By Kurt Shillinger  and Michelle Boorstein | September 3, 2021 | 9:55 a.m. EDT

DEDHAM, Mass. — Disgraced ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, 91, in street clothes, stooped and using a walker, was arraigned Friday in a suburban Boston courtroom on three counts of criminal child sex abuse.

It was the first time the former Catholic archbishop of Washington had appeared in public since 2018, when his fall began amid a wave of sex abuse allegations. Some in the crowd outside, including survivors of other assaults, screamed at the former global power-broker: “Shame on you! Prince of the church!”

Inside, McCarrick was charged with sexually assaulting a teen in the 1970s, the first time a U.S. cardinal has faced a criminal charge of abuse. He pleaded not guilty during the hearing that lasted less than 10 minutes. Judge Michael J. Pomarole ordered McCarrick to give up his passport and to stay away from people under the age of 18, as well as the victim.

There’s much more at the original, but the story of the former Cardinal is well-known: after scads of evidence, Pope Francis took away his title as Cardinal, and eventually he was laicized. Let’s be honest about it: Mr McCarrick was a predatory homosexual, using his power and position to abuse not just teenagers, but seminarians and subordinate priests.

We need to tell the truth here: while it is wholly politically incorrect to say, the sexual abuse of minors in the Church has been a problem of homosexuality: the vast majority of sexual abuse by Catholic priests has been against boys rather than girls. Several different Google searches have failed to turn up any notation concerning the number of victims in the recent Pennsylvania grand jury report divided by sex, something of obvious interest, because such would reinforce the rather obvious fact that most victims of an all-male clergy have been boys. The John Jay report noted that sexual abuse cases studied between 1950 and 2002 indicated that, rather than prepubescent children, abusers targeted older children:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.[4]The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950-2002, page 12.

A celibate priesthood is a sexually immature priesthood. Sorry to tell the truth here, but if you have never, or only rarely, had sexual relations, you have simply not had time to mature in those relations.

There is no way that the Catholic Church could find a way to accommodate the sexual desires of its homosexual priests, when the Church holds that homosexuals cannot be married, that sexual activity outside of marriage is sinful,[5]Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2353 that homosexual activity is “gravely depraved”,[6]Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2357 and that homosexuality itself is “objectively disordered.”[7]Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2358 This can mean only one thing: that Catholic priests must be heterosexual, and that they must be married.

This is a celibacy problem, in that priests are forced to live unnatural lives, but while it might be politically incorrect, it is also intellectually dishonest to deny that this is a homosexuality problem as well. We have a priesthood of sexually immature men who are far more heavily than the population homosexual in orientation. The statistics we do have indicate that they were preying on boys just entering puberty, not prepubescent children, and that is an indication that sexual orientation as opposed to pedophilia is the primary motivation.

We need a priesthood who understand and participate in normal, adult sexual relationships, and, given that the Church does not, and cannot, recognize homosexual marriages as legitimate, that can mean only one thing: a priesthood in normal, heterosexual marriages.

That will not eliminate all sexual abuse; Jerry Sandusky, were he available for comment — and cared to tell the truth — could tell us all about men in stable, heterosexual marriages who still had a preference for underaged boys. Nor will it prevent the inevitable, some priests being divorced by their wives, and some children or married priests turning out badly.

But it has to be better than what we have now, a priesthood with an out-of-proportion homosexual cohort, and all being denied the most natural of human impulses, that of mating.

This is what we must have, this is what the Catholic Church needs in order to survive to serve the faithful into the future. Denying it, because it is politically incorrect, is denying the truth.

Back to The Washington Post:

While shocking, due to the popularity and power of the sprightly, charismatic McCarrick, his case came two decades after the Catholic sex abuse scandal exploded in Boston and spread everywhere from high-level sports to the Boy Scouts. Forty-six U.S. bishops have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct with minors, according to BishopAccountability. Many thousands of complaints have been filed and multiple dioceses have filed for bankruptcy to cover costs of attorneys and settlements.

But McCarrick is one of only two U.S. bishops who have been criminally charged. The charges against former Springfield bishop Thomas Dupre were dropped the same day, in 2004, with prosecutors citing the statute of limitations.

Forty-six bishops, forty-six bishops! They might not all be guilty, and must be proven innocent until proven otherwise, at least legally.

Pope Francis has recognized the problem:

Pope Francis warned Italian bishops this week to vet carefully applicants to the priesthood and reject anyone they suspected might be homosexual, local media reported on Thursday.

‘Keep an eye on the admissions to seminaries, keep your eyes open,’ the pope was quoted as saying by newspaper La Stampa’s Vatican Insider service. ‘If in doubt, better not let them enter.’

The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the remarks, which Vatican Insider and Il Messaggero said were made at a closed-door gathering on Monday.”

Had the Pope’s admonition been put in place by Pope Pius XII, who was the Bishop of Rome when Mr McCarrick entered the seminary, perhaps he would never have become a priest, perhaps all of the disastrous behavior he exhibited while under Holy Orders would have been avoided. Had we a married priesthood, perhaps we would not have the shortage of priests we have now, and perhaps, just perhaps, we would not have had the scandals which have rocked the Church.

Mr McCarrick is an infirm, old man, who might not spend a minute in jail, who might not even survive until the end of his trial. Quite frankly, I don’t really care what happens to him at this point; his punishment is the disgrace he has suffered, and that will probably have to be enough.

But Mr McCarrick is the symbol of what has gone wrong in the Catholic Church, and tells us, if we are willing to look honestly at the problem, what the solution is: while not all homosexuals are predators going after minors, while some truly can remain celibate, their continued presence in the Church has been a persistent problem, and one which will not go away by simply ignoring it. Those who have done nothing wrong should not be somehow kicked out of the priesthood, but we must open the seminaries to married men, as we already have with permanent deacons, and restrict them to mature, married men.

References

References
↑1 I Corinthians 7:1-11.
↑2 1 Timothy 3:1-5
↑3 1 Corinthians 9:5 has also been interpreted as confirming that not only was St Peter married, but that his wife accompanied him as he traveled with Jesus. Cephas, in the cited passage, refers to Peter.
↑4 The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950-2002, page 12.
↑5 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2353
↑6 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2357
↑7 Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2358
Posted on by

I point at the moon; they stare at my finger When the left don't like the information, they attack the gathering of the facts

We noted, a month ago, the story of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who resigned as General Secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, after a conservative Catholic site used cell phone data to show him using Grindr, a homosexual dating app, and frequenting homosexual bars. But, as is so often the case with the left, the liberals got all upset about the wrong thing, and The New York Times spent 1,599 works to completely miss the point!

Catholic Officials on Edge After Reports of Priests Using Grindr

A conservative Catholic media organization, The Pillar, has published several reports claiming the use of dating apps at several churches and the Vatican.

by Liam Stack | August 20, 2021

The reports hit the Roman Catholic Church in rapid succession: Analyses of cellphone data obtained by a conservative Catholic blog seemed to show priests at multiple levels of the Catholic hierarchy in both the United States and the Vatican using the gay hookup app Grindr.

The first report, published late last month, led to the resignation of Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, the former general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference. The second, posted online days later, made claims about the use of Grindr by unnamed people in unspecified rectories in the Archdiocese of Newark. The third, published days after that, claimed that in 2018 at least 32 mobile devices emitted dating app data signals from within areas of Vatican City that are off-limits to tourists.

The reports by the blog, The Pillar, have unnerved the leadership of the American Catholic Church and have introduced a potentially powerful new weapon into the culture war between supporters of Pope Francis and his conservative critics: cellphone data, which many users assume to be unavailable to the general public.

“When there is reporting out there that claims to expose activity like this in parishes around the country and also on Vatican grounds, that is a five-alarm fire for church officials, there is no doubt about it,” said John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a progressive advocacy group.

Note that Faith in Public Life is very much a homosexual rights activist group.

The reports have put church officials in an awkward position: Priests take a vow of celibacy that is in no way flexible, and the downloading or use of dating apps by clergy members is inconsistent with that vow. But officials are also deeply uncomfortable with the use of cellphone data to publicly police priests’ behavior. Vatican officials said they met with representatives from the blog in June but would not publicly respond to its reports.

“If someone who has made promise of celibacy or a vow of chastity has a dating app on his or her phone, that is asking for trouble,” said Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark at a Zoom panel organized by Georgetown University. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Of course, His Eminence the Cardinal is far, far, far more concerned with the fact that some priests have been ‘outed’ as active homosexuals than he is about them being active homosexuals!

“I would also say that I think there are very questionable ethics around the collection of this data of people who allegedly may have broken their promises,” he said.

In American jurisprudence, information about a criminal suspect has to be gathered legally, and Americans tend to look at evidence gathered about people concerning things other than criminal law in the same manner.  But the investigation exposed by The Pillar, however it was gathered, has exposed, yet again, the problem of priests not keeping their vows. The Cardinal somehow doesn’t see that as that big a deal. “(T)hat is asking for trouble”? “(P)eople who allegedly may have broken their promises”? I’m sorry, but that is mealy-mouthing the issue.

The only app explicitly named in the reports has been Grindr, which is used almost exclusively by gay and bisexual men, although The Pillar has made vague references to other apps it says are used by heterosexuals. Only one of the reports directly links an app to a specific person, Monsignor Burrill.

The reports have been criticized by Catholic liberals for tying the general use of Grindr to studies that show minors sometimes use the app as well. That conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia is part of a longstanding effort by Catholic conservatives to blame the church sex abuse crisis on the presence of gay men in the priesthood.

Of course, there it is. I wrote, three years ago, about the problems in the Catholic priesthood, including the fact that a significantly large percentage of priests are homosexual,

the actual number unknown, but most surveys (which, due to the sensitivity of the subject, admittedly suffer from limited samples and other design issues) find between 15 percent and 50 percent of U.S. priests are gay, which is much greater than the 3.8 percent of people who identify as LGBTQ in the general population.[1]The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either … Continue reading

The Church does not want to admit that homosexuality is related to the sexual abuse of minors by priests, but the vast majority of sexual abuse by Catholic priests has been against boys rather than girls. Several different Google searches have failed to turn up any notation concerning the number of victims in the recent Pennsylvania grand jury report divided by sex, something of obvious interest, because such would reinforce the rather obvious fact that most victims of an all-male clergy have been boys. The John Jay report noted that sexual abuse cases studied between 1950 and 2002 indicated that, rather than prepubescent children, abusers targeted older children:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

Only willful, deliberate ignorance could contend that such numbers don’t indicate a problem with homosexuality among priests.

The editors of The Pillar, J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon, said their work was motivated by a desire to expose a secretive culture of wrongdoing within the church.

“Immoral and illicit sexual behavior on the part of clerics who are bound to celibacy, but also on the part of other church leaders, could lead to a broad sense of tolerance for any number or kinds of sexual sins,” Mr. Flynn said on the podcast.

They said Newark was the only American diocese they wrote about because it was once led by the former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked in 2019 and charged last month with sexually assaulting a child in Massachusetts in 1974.

But their decision to investigate the use of a gay dating app in suburban New Jersey, instead of a city with a large gay population, has raised suspicion that their real goal may have been to undermine Cardinal Tobin, an ally of Pope Francis.

So, now The Pillar is being accused of targeting Cardinal Tobin and his archdiocese, as that somehow exculpates the entire behavioral issue.

A great deal of the Times article concerns how The Pillar obtained their information, and it includes a lot of speculation that is hardly consistent with good journalism.

Father Bob Bonnot, the executive director of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests, said the use of cellphone data to track the movement of Monsignor Burrill had deepened a sense of vulnerability many priests feel.

“It can be terribly threatening,” he said. “It can make all priests uncomfortable and worried.”

It makes them worried about what, that such cell phone tracking might expose their own homosexual hook ups?

I don’t know why so many homosexuals are attracted to the priesthood. My guess is that they know that homosexual relationships are immoral and sinful, and they hope that, by the grace of God and the promise to be celibate, they can live life celibately.

But this really is a celibacy problem, in that priests are forced to live unnatural lives, and while it might be politically incorrect, it is also intellectually dishonest to deny that this is a homosexuality problem as well. We have a priesthood of sexually immature men — what else could they be, having been denied mature sexual relationships by the nature of their careers? — who are far more heavily than the population homosexual in orientation. The statistics we do have indicate that they were preying on boys just entering puberty, not prepubescent children, and that is an indication that sexual orientation as opposed to pedophilia is the primary motivation.

We need a priesthood who understand and participate in normal, adult sexual relationships, and, given that the Church does not, and cannot, recognize homosexual marriages as legitimate, that can mean only one thing: a priesthood in normal, heterosexual marriages.

That will not eliminate all sexual abuse; Jerry Sandusky, were he available for comment — and cared to tell the truth — could tell us all about men in stable, heterosexual marriages who still had a preference for underaged boys. Nor will it prevent the inevitable, some priests being divorced by their wives, and some children or married priests turning out badly.

But it has to be better than what we have now, a priesthood with an out-of-proportion homosexual cohort, and all being denied the most natural of human impulses, that of mating.

This is what we must have, this is what the Catholic Church needs in order to survive to serve the faithful into the future. Denying it, because it is politically incorrect, is denying the truth.

References

References
↑1 The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1.1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. This does not support the article’s contention that 3.8% of the population are homosexual.
Posted on by

Nothing is private anymore.

I will admit to some surprise that The Washington Post referred to homosexuals as “queer,” so much so that I made a screen capture of it before it got changed! You can click on the image to enlarge it.

The story is two-fold. It details how Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill resigned as General Secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops “impending media reports alleging possible improper behavior.” But it also details how nothing remains private anymore.

    Top U.S. Catholic Church official resigns after cellphone data used to track him on Grindr and to gay bars

    By Michelle Boorstein, Marisa Iati and Annys Shin | July 20, 2021 | 5:11 PM EDT

    The top administrator of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops resigned after a Catholic media site told the conference it had access to cellphone data that appeared to show he was a regular user of Grindr, the queer dating app, and frequented gay bars.

    Some privacy experts said that they couldn’t recall other instances of phone data being de-anonymized and reported publicly, but that it’s not illegal and will likely happen more as people come to understand what data is available about others.

    Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill has since last fall been the general secretary of the USCCB, a position that coordinates all administrative work and planning for the conference, which is the country’s network for Catholic bishops. As a priest, he takes a vow of celibacy. Catholic teaching opposes sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage.

I am not in the least upset that an actively homosexual priest has lost his job. However, this story makes two very important points:

  1. What was done to ‘out’ Monsignor Burrill was not illegal; and
  2. If you are dumb enough to engage in activity you would not want revealed, don’t be stupid enough to use your Smart Phone to do it.

Duhhh!

    The National Catholic Reporter was the first to report Tuesday morning that Burrill had resigned, citing a memo from Archbishop José Gomez, the USCCB president, to other bishops. The Tuesday memo said it was “with sadness” that Gomez announced Burrill’s resignation, saying the day before, the USCCB staff learned of “impending media reports alleging possible improper behavior.”

    Burrill is a priest from the La Crosse, Wis., diocese and was a parish priest and a professor before joining the administrative staff of the USCCB in 2016. Some USCCB staff and former staff said they were reeling and shocked.

Reeling and shocked? Yeah, I’m guessing: not so much. We have previously noted that a whole lot of priests are homosexual:

    Of course, many factors influence a person’s decision to join the clergy; it’s not like sexuality alone determines vocations. But it’s dishonest to dismiss sexuality’s influence given that we know there is a disproportionate number of gay priests, despite the church’s hostility toward LGBTQ identity. As a gay priest told Frontline in a February 2014 episode, “I cannot understand this schizophrenic attitude of the hierarchy against gays when a lot of priests are gay.”

    So how many gay priests actually exist? While there’s a glut of homoerotic writings from priests going back to the Middle Ages, obtaining an accurate count is tough. But most surveys (which, due to the sensitivity of the subject, admittedly suffer from limited samples and other design issues) find between 15 percent and 50 percent of U.S. priests are gay, which is much greater than the 3.8 percent of people who identify as LGBTQ in the general population.[1]The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1,1% … Continue reading

    In the last half century there’s also been an increased “gaying of the priesthood” in the West. Throughout the 1970s, several hundred men left the priesthood each year, many of them for marriage. As straight priests left the church for domestic bliss, the proportion of remaining priests who were gay grew. In a survey of several thousand priests in the U.S., the Los Angeles Times found that 28 percent of priests between the ages of 46 and 55 reported that they were gay. This statistic was higher than the percentages found in other age brackets and reflected the outflow of straight priests throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

    The high number of gay priests also became evident in the 1980s, when the priesthood was hit hard by the AIDS crisis that was afflicting the gay community. The Kansas City Star estimated that at least 300 U.S. priests suffered AIDS-related deaths between the mid-1980s and 1999. The Star concluded that priests were about twice as likely as other adult men to die from AIDS.

So, no, when I am told that the Catholic bishops and their staff are “reeling and shocked” that one of their own is homosexual, and actively seeking sex, I look at that statement with a jaundiced eye.

Father Burrill was a Monsignor, a now honorary title granted by the Pope to a diocesan priest, normally upon the recommendation of his local bishop. Pope Francis suspended the practice of granting the title, except to members of the Vatican’s diplomatic corps, because he thought it led to clerical careerism. Father Burrill would have to have been a well-known priest of some standing for his local ordinary to submit his name to Rome for the honorific. But a priest frequenting homosexual bars would be found out.

    It wasn’t clear who had collected the information about Burrill. USCCB spokespeople declined to answer questions Tuesday about what it knew about the information-gathering and what its leadership feels about it, except to say the USCCB wasn’t involved. They also declined to comment on whether they knew if Burrill’s alleged actions were tracked on a private or church-owned phone.

No, the last thing the bishops want is someone looking into the sexual activity of a purportedly celibate priesthood!

    The resignation stemmed from reporting in the Pillar, an online newsletter that reports on the Catholic Church. Tuesday afternoon, after Burrill’s resignation became public, the Pillar reported that it had obtained information based on the data Grindr collects from its users, and hired an independent firm to authenticate it.

    “A mobile device correlated to Burrill emitted app data signals from the location-based hookup app Grindr on a near-daily basis during parts of 2018, 2019, and 2020 — at both his USCCB office and his USCCB-owned residence, as well as during USCCB meetings and events in other cities,” the Pillar reported.

There’s a lot more at the original, primarily concerning how Msgr Burrill’s activities were discovered and documented. One thing is obvious: someone was targeting the USCCB, at least in general, if not Msgr Burrill specifically.

The Post concluded:

    The report comes the same week as The Post and other organizations reported that military-grade spyware normally leased to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and others, revealing new concerns and issues around technology and privacy and democracy.

This time, the data mining caught a misbehaving Catholic priest, but it’s as obvious as can be: if you are using technology to do something you shouldn’t be doing, you are vulnerable to getting caught; all that it takes is for someone who knows what he’s doing to look.

References

References
↑1 The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1,1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. This does not support the article’s contention that 3.8% of the population are homosexual.
Posted on by

The problem with the Catholic priesthood

Yesterday I wrote about the problems with the leadership in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, but the problems are not limited to the hierarchy and their terrible decisions. Much of the problem is in the nature of the priesthood itself.

It ought to be obvious: human beings need to have mates. Our media are full of advertisements for the things people need to do to attract, or keep, their mates, ads for weight loss help, personal grooming products and the like, but also for help finding a mate when you don’t have one and are frustrated with doing that search by yourself. There are specialized companies like Our Time, which claims to be “the largest dating network for singles over 50,” and even one called Farmers Only, which specializes in finding dates for people in rural areas, as well as more generalized services such as Match.com.1 While some seem to think that this is just the biological urge to copulate, it really is clear: human beings need other human beings, and marriage is a common thread throughout every human culture, in every place and at every time in which we have any social knowledge at all.

But the Roman Catholic Church has required perpetual celibacy, and prohibited marriage, for its priests since the Second Lateran Council in 1139; this was reaffirmed at the Council of Trent in 1563.

While that part is common knowledge, less well known is that there are married Catholic priests. In 1980, Pole John Paul II opened a path by which married Episcopal/Anglican priests who converted to Catholicism could serve in the Catholic priesthood. Estimates are that there are about 120 such priests in the United States.

And there are more: the Eastern-Rite Catholic Churches have allowed married priests for several centuries, and in 2014, Pope Francis ended the restriction that married Eastern Catholic could serve only in their home countries.2

There were, of course, many married priests in the Roman Catholic Church prior to the Second Lateran Council, including many popes. St Peter, regarded as the first Pope, at least had been married at one point: Matthew 8:14-15 refers to his mother-in-law.3

How can there be married Catholic priests, either in the Eastern Rite churches, or in the Latin Rite, converts from Anglicanism and its off-shoot churches? It’s simple: priestly celibacy is a discipline, not a dogma, and disciplines can be changed. The advantages of a celibate priesthood are clear:

  • Celibate priests can give more of their time an attention to their parishes and parishioners, while married men have to devote more of their time and attention to their wives and children.
  • Celibate priests can be more easily transferred to different parishes. Priests are reassigned every five to seven years, on average.4 Wives frequently have jobs, even careers, while children have friends and school, and transferring a married priest could be much more difficult and disruptive to his family.
  • Celibate priests are easier to house and support. Priests normally live in the rectory, a house for priests normally on church grounds. These buildings are not normally set up to house wives and children.5 Accommodating married priests would mean a larger home for his family. Considering that Catholic dogma opposes artificial contraception, a married priest could have a very large family to support and house.
  • A celibate priest will normally live on parish grounds, while a married priest might have to live in a house away from the church. This means that the married priest might not be a security guard for his parish.

But, if there are clear advantages to having a celibate priesthood, there is one huge disadvantage: with humans being naturally inclined to mate, the Church is expecting the priest to live an unnatural lifestyle. Human beings need to mate, they need to be married, and the celibacy discipline denies to Catholic priests that most basic normalcy in human life. Even St Paul, who stated that he was celibate, noted that marriage was the natural condition of life,6 And St Paul also set down the conditions that a man must meet to be a deacon, priest or bishop:

The saying is sure: whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach, married only once, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way— for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church?7

The conditions for priests and deacon are similar. But clearly, St Paul expected those in Holy Orders to mostly be married.

The Church offers for us The Theological Basis for Priestly Celibacy, saying in part:

Observing celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of heaven does not mean being any the less a man; by renouncing a natural form of existence, the priest discovers life in all its fullness.

Alas! We are at this point, in the sexual abuse scandal rocking the Church, because, in too many cases, the renunciation of this “natural form of existence” has not led a too-large number of priests to “discover life in all its fullness.”

Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk and priest, wrote:

Roman Catholic clerical culture favors doctrinal rigidity, conformity, obedience, submission and psychosexual immaturity, mistaken for innocence, in its candidates. These are the personality elements that lead to advancement and power in the clerical system. Single men are more easily controlled if their sexuality is secret. Double lives on all levels of clerical life are tolerated if they do not cause scandal or raise legal problems. Sexual activity between bishops and priests and adult partners is well known within clerical circles. The secret system forms a comfortable refuge for unresolved gay conflicts. There is a new emerging awareness of the systemic nature of sexual/celibate behavior within the Roman Catholic ministry that is increasingly destabilizing to the church.

Dire consequences will follow the exposure of this sexual system embedded in a secret celibate culture. Authorities who are or have been sexually active, although not with minors, are hard put to publicly correct clerics who are abusing minors. The need for secrecy, the cover-up, extends beyond defending criminal activity of a sex abuser. The power and control that holds the Roman Catholic church together depends on preservation of the celibate myth. The Vatican and Pope John Paul II declared its inviolability.

The truth about secret sex in the celibate system portends grave danger. The reality of celibate violations extends beyond priests who abuse minors and the bishops who hide them.

And this points up another problem: if “sexual activity between bishops and priests and adult partners is well known within clerical circles,” that means that it is largely homosexual activity, something else expressly forbidden. How many priests are homosexual?

Of course, many factors influence a person’s decision to join the clergy; it’s not like sexuality alone determines vocations. But it’s dishonest to dismiss sexuality’s influence given that we know there is a disproportionate number of gay priests, despite the church’s hostility toward LGBTQ identity. As a gay priest told Frontline in a February 2014 episode, “I cannot understand this schizophrenic attitude of the hierarchy against gays when a lot of priests are gay.”

So how many gay priests actually exist? While there’s a glut of homoerotic writings from priests going back to the Middle Ages, obtaining an accurate count is tough. But most surveys (which, due to the sensitivity of the subject, admittedly suffer from limited samples and other design issues) find between 15 percent and 50 percent of U.S. priests are gay, which is much greater than the 3.8 percent of people who identify as LGBTQ in the general population.8

In the last half century there’s also been an increased “gaying of the priesthood” in the West. Throughout the 1970s, several hundred men left the priesthood each year, many of them for marriage. As straight priests left the church for domestic bliss, the proportion of remaining priests who were gay grew. In a survey of several thousand priests in the U.S., the Los Angeles Times found that 28 percent of priests between the ages of 46 and 55 reported that they were gay. This statistic was higher than the percentages found in other age brackets and reflected the outflow of straight priests throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

The high number of gay priests also became evident in the 1980s, when the priesthood was hit hard by the AIDS crisis that was afflicting the gay community. The Kansas City Star estimated that at least 300 U.S. priests suffered AIDS-related deaths between the mid-1980s and 1999. The Star concluded that priests were about twice as likely as other adult men to die from AIDS.

What we have, under the requirement of priestly celibacy, is a large group of men forced by their profession to live an abnormal lifestyle. Heterosexual men, anticipating an eventually married lifestyle, face a very difficult choice if they are considering the priesthood, a choice of a lifetime of denial of their sexual urges versus a (hopefully) happy and productive marriage. Homosexual men who might be considering the priesthood might now be able to marry legally, but if they are Christians, in general, and Catholic specifically, they are faced with the concomitant belief that two men cannot marry or have sex with each other; the priesthood just might offer the grace of God, to enable them to resist their sexual urges.

But, for whatever reasons they have, it has been clear that homosexual men make up a significant percentage of the Catholic priesthood, a far greater percentage than their percentage of the population. From The Washington Post:

The Catholic Church is enabling the sex abuse crisis by forcing gay priests to stay in the closet

By Robert Mickens9 | July 23, 2018

The Catholic Church is being rocked — again — by high-level sexual abuse scandals, with allegations in recent weeks surfacing in Chile, Honduras and the District, home to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a once-super-popular cleric who is facing accusations by five males of harassment or abuse.

And again, people say they are shocked and outraged, which shows how Catholics still refuse to see that there is an underlying issue to these cases. It is the fact that almost all of them concern males — whether they are adolescents, post-pubescent teens or young men.

And while no adult who is of sound psychosexual health habitually preys on those who are vulnerable, there is no denying that homosexuality is a key component to the clergy sex abuse (and now sexual harassment) crisis. With such a high percentage of priests with a homosexual orientation, this should not be surprising.

But let me be very clear: psychologically healthy gay men do not rape boys or force themselves on other men over whom they wield some measure of power or authority.

However, we are not talking about men who are psychosexually mature. And yet the bishops and officials at the Vatican refuse to acknowledge this. Rather, they are perpetuating the problem, and even making it worse, with policies that actually punish seminarians and priests who seek to deal openly, honestly and healthily with their sexual orientation.

McCarrick’s case made me think of that of the late Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who in 2013 was removed from ministry after the surfacing of reports that he’d harassed and been involved with seminarians. That year, cardinals picked a pope, and O’Brien stepped back – or was pulled back by higher-ups.

Something I wrote then comes to mind amid the McCarrick scandal: O’Brien should not have recused himself from voting in the pope-picking “conclave,” as “only a naif could believe that he is the only man among the electors who has broken his solemn promise to remain celibate,” I wrote in the March 9, 2013, edition of the Tablet. “There are likely others. And even those who’ve done worse,” I warned.

There’s much more at the original, but Mr Mickens’ theme is that the Church should simply be more open and honest about the number of homosexual men within the clergy:

Their more conflicted gay confreres — and all gay people, indeed the entire Church — would benefit greatly if these healthy gay priests could openly share their stories. But their bishops or religious superiors have forbidden them from writing or speaking publicly about this part of their lives.

Even if you believe that homosexual relationships are acceptable — the Editor does not — Mr Mickens’ proposal is that the Catholic Church should find some way to accommodate the sexual desires of its homosexual priests, when the Church holds that homosexuals cannot be married, that sexual activity outside of marriage is sinful,10 and that homosexual activity is “gravely depraved”,11 and that homosexuality itself is “objectively disordered.”12

There is, instead, another, far simpler, far more logical path for the Church: the Church should only ordain heterosexual men,13 and only ordain those who are already married or state that they intend to marry. This will not only give us a priesthood which is not denied the basic human need of mating and which understands married parishioners, but greatly expand the pool of potential priests.

But more, it will address the sexual abuse of minors in a way that is wholly politically incorrect to say: the vast majority of sexual abuse by Catholic priests has been against boys rather than girls. Several different Google searches have failed to turn up any notation concerning the number of victims in the recent Pennsylvania grand jury report divided by sex, something of obvious interest, because such would reinforce the rather obvious fact that most victims of an all-male clergy have been boys. The John Jay report noted that sexual abuse cases studied between 1950 and 2002 indicated that, rather than prepubescent children, abusers targeted older children:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.14

Yes, this is a celibacy problem, in that priests are forced to live unnatural lives, but while it might be politically incorrect, it is also intellectually dishonest to deny that this is a homosexuality problem as well. We have a priesthood of sexually immature men — what else could they be, having been denied mature sexual relationships by the nature of their careers — who are far more heavily than the population homosexual in orientation. The statistics we do have indicate that they were preying on boys just entering puberty, not prepubescent children, and that is an indication that sexual orientation as opposed to pedophilia is the primary motivation.

We need a priesthood who understand and participate in normal, adult sexual relationships, and, given that the Church does not, and cannot, recognize homosexual marriages as legitimate, that can mean only one thing: a priesthood in normal, heterosexual marriages.

That will not eliminate all sexual abuse; Jerry Sandusky, were he available for comment — and cared to tell the truth — could tell us all about men in stable, heterosexual marriages who still had a preference for underaged boys. Nor will it prevent the inevitable, some priests being divorced by their wives, and some children or married priests turning out badly.

But it has to be better than what we have now, a priesthood with an out-of-proportion homosexual cohort, and all being denied the most natural of human impulses, that of mating.

This is what we must have, this is what the Catholic Church needs in order to survive to serve the faithful into the future. Denying it, because it is politically incorrect, is denying the truth.
________________________________________
1 – Links to these dating services are simply for documentation; none are paid advertisements on this site.
2 – In the Eastern Rites, married men can be ordained; this has been the custom from the first, but unmarried men who are ordained may not subsequently marry. A married Eastern Rite priest is not allowed to remarry if he is widowed. Bishops in the Eastern Rite are all celibates.
3 – 1 Corinthians 9:5 has also been interpreted as confirming that not only was St Peter married, but that his wife accompanied him as he traveled with Jesus. Cephas, in the cited passage, refers to Peter.
4 – I would note here that the priest of my parish, when I lived in Pennsylvania, was at the same parish for the entire fifteen years I lived there, and was still there nine months after I moved away.
5 – I am personally aware of one instance in which the parish sold the rectory building, and the priest lived in a small room in the church basement.
6 – 1 Corinthians 7:1-11.
7 – 1 Timothy 3:1-5
8 – The Centers for Disease Control conducted the National Health Institute Survey in 2013, and found that only 1.6% of the population are homosexual, with another 0.7% bisexual, and another 1,1% either stating that they were ‘something else’ or declining to respond. This does not support the article’s contention that 3.8% of the population are homosexual.
9 – Robert Mickens lives in Rome and has covered the Catholic Church for decades. He is English-language editor of La Croix International, an online Catholic paper that originally ran a version of this piece.
10 – Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2353
11 – Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2357
12 – Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2358
13 – “Pope Francis warned Italian bishops this week to vet carefully applicants to the priesthood and reject anyone they suspected might be homosexual, local media reported on Thursday.
‘Keep an eye on the admissions to seminaries, keep your eyes open,’ the pope was quoted as saying by newspaper La Stampa’s Vatican Insider service. ‘If in doubt, better not let them enter.’
The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the remarks, which Vatican Insider and Il Messaggero said were made at a closed-door gathering on Monday.”
14 – The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950-2002, page 12.