The Catholic Hierarchy: “Suffer The Little Children.”

Dec29 by D Gregory Smith

Illinois Catholic bishops are taking their ball and going home in the face of federal non-discrimination requirements for foster care and adoption. The New York Times:

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Roman Catholic bishops in Illinois have shuttered most of the Catholic Charities affiliates in the state rather than comply with a new requirement that says they must consider same-sex couples as potential foster-care and adoptive parents if they want to receive state money. The charities have served for more than 40 years as a major link in the state’s social service network for poor and neglected children.

The bishops have followed colleagues in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts who had jettisoned their adoption services rather than comply with nondiscrimination laws.

The vilification of LGBT persons by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church is quickly becoming hysterical paranoia. What I find interesting is that it flies in the face of most of the opinions of people in the pews as well as the experience of many of the clergy and bishops themselves. They know gay people, they minister to gay people, and- I know this from personal experience- many of them are gay people.

Yet, this real-life, personal experience has no credibility in the face of freakishly ideological edicts from Rome. It’s absolutely backward. The experience of the people is supposed to form the church, form the hierarchy.

Not to mention the disregard for social and biological science. This is a church that would rather let the little children suffer. It saddens me.

Where’s the love, people?

Read the full story here

Catholic Bishops’ Lie About Threats to Religious Freedom (bilerico.com)
In Adoption Controversy, Put the Children First (newwaysministryblog.wordpress.com)
NYT: Bishops say rules on gay parents limit religious freedom (msnbc.msn.com)
Catholic bishop doesn’t know when to shut up: compares gays to Ku Klux Klan (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)

Limitations of Clergy Sexual Abuse Report

May25 by D Gregory Smith

I haven’t gotten through the report itself yet, but there has been some welcome clarification on one point:

The researchers conclude that there is no causative relationship between either celibacy or homosexuality and the sexual victimization of children in the Church. Therefore, being celibate or being gay did not increase the risk of violating children. So, blaming the clergy abuse crisis in the Catholic Church on gay men or celibacy is unfounded.

Psychologists (and LGBT persons) have realized that this was the case, and despite their protestations, certain bishops and Cardinals have placed the responsibility for the sex abuse scandal squarely in the laps of gay priests. Not so. Completely refuted and repudiated.

Hopefully, for the last time.

Yeah, you’re right. Religious homophobes are unlikely to let this go….

The NCR has an excellent synopsis- and gives a critical eye:

Release of the John Jay College study on the causes of sexual abuse by Catholic priests signals the end of the U.S. bishops’ five-year, $1.8 million inquiry into the institution they govern and the priests in their charge. But the new study hardly quiets the fundamental questions that have dogged the church and its leaders since the crisis was first publicized in the mid-1980s.

The conclusions of the study were immediately challenged by victims of abuse, their advocates, and those who maintain an enormous archive of documentation related to the scandal. Among the reasons they say the report should be approached with caution or skepticism:

Questions persist about the reliability of the basic data that underpins both the most recent study, as well as one on the nature and scope of the scandal that was released in 2004, because the researchers relied principally on reporting by bishops. The reliability of such reporting is called into question on a number of fronts and was most recently challenged by a grand jury report that claimed that officials of the Philadelphia archdiocese had not reported dozens of credibly accused priests. Doubts about the reliability of the numbers were even given credibility by one of the John Jay researchers in a recent interview.

The conclusion that priests’ behavior was influenced by and reflected turmoil in American culture during the 1960s and 1970s is called into question, or at least qualified, say experts, given revelations of similar widespread scandals in the United Kingdom and several European countries. The dimensions of the scandal in those countries surfaced in recent months, at a point when the John Jay researchers were concluding research on the U.S. church.

The lack of any in-depth look at institutional dynamics, particularly clerical/hierarchical culture, an element some think is integral to understanding why and how abuse of children was covered up and tolerated for so many years.

Beyond the limited dimensions of the study — it covered the years 1950 through 2010 and concentrated on the behavior of priests — questions persist about the bishops’ role in protecting perpetrators and shuffling abusive priests.

Read the full story here. And when you hear that this crisis was precipitated by gay priests- you can comfortably tell anyone spreading this lie that they’re full of shit.

“Among The Flutterers”-Explains A Lot

Aug14 by D Gregory Smith

In the London Review Of Books, Colm Tóibín reviews The Pope Is Not Gay by Angelo Quattrocchi, and comes up with a mind-numbingly simple analysis of clerical culture, social norms, gay priests and ecclesiastical/institutional fear.

A sample:

This is almost an aspect of the Catholic religion itself, this business of knowing and not knowing something all at the same time, keeping an illusion separate from the truth. We knew that the bread and wine, for example, were literally and actually changed into the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the priest at Mass, and, at the same time, we must have known that this was not the case, that, really, they remained just bread and wine.

The shame an adolescent felt about being gay in those years should not be underestimated; the feeling that you were less than worthy, that if people found out the truth about you they would despise you, went deep into your soul. This was another reason to become a priest. You could change your own powerlessness into power. As a priest, you would be admired and looked up to, you would spend your life – as so many Catholic priests have indeed spent their lives – doing good and being good. And being seen to be good, being needed by the sick and the dying, being wanted to officiate at weddings and baptisms and funerals, saying the sacred words which would mean so much to the congregation, all this would offer you a fulfilled and fulfilling life. Becoming a priest solved not only the outward problem of forbidden and unmentionable sexual urges, but, perhaps more important, offered a solution to the problem of having a shameful identity that lurked in the deepest recesses of the self.

This idea of knowing two things at the same time has been essential to gay people in other ways. Gay people have known that our sexuality was actually, despite what we read or were told, quite normal, quite natural; it was only the world that thought otherwise. While the world’s view often ate into the self, there was another part of the self which remained intact, confident, sure. Introspection, the study of the self, for gay people became necessary, fruitful. The struggle between our knowledge and their prejudice often meant that a spiritual element in our being – something private, wounded, solitary and self-aware – had reason to come to the fore and seek nourishment in a close relationship to God. This is another reason so many gay men have become priests.

This was so true for me- and judging by our conversations, for many of my seminarian/priest friends- then and now.

But it doesn’t stop there. Tóibín looks at Ireland, Europe, secularization, the sex abuse crisis, celibacy, Maureen Dowd, clerical wardrobe changes and the Pope’s handsome secretary, explaining all with such common sense you want to invite him to lunch. Or for the weekend….

If you want to understand more deeply my struggle with the church, or maybe your own read the full text here.

It explains a lot.

UPDATE: Sully’s response from the Daily Dish here.