Category Archives: Sexual abstinence

03/9/13

Unfit for purpose and in denial: a church that has lost all authority

As a matter of urgency, the new pope must extend the gift of marriage to all priesthood candidates. Failure to do that will mean, in less than a generation, a priesthood comprised solely of social misfits and emotionally damaged refugees from reality.

By Kevin McKenna

Of all the theories advanced explaining why the Catholic priesthood attracts so many young gay men, this is the most valid: it is a direct consequence of the church’s official attitude to homosexuality and the way that this has insinuated itself into the fabric of what we might call a traditional Catholic family with its roots in Ireland.

recruitmentIn such an upbringing homosexuality is still treated as the sum of all sins. Catholic families long ago found a way of dealing with abortion, extramarital sex and divorce, the other three horsemen of the Catholic apocalypse, whenever they occurred close to home, but not homosexuality.

The others could all be processed and interpreted as very human failings stemming from the powerful instinct of physical desire and our need for affection and love. The Christian virtues of understanding, compassion and forgiveness are built to outlast initial shock and hurt in these “acceptable” moral failings. Not so homosexuality.

For how many Catholic parents have secretly prayed that their son “does not turn out gay” or obsess about their response if the eldest boy shows no interest in football and insists on taking a shower every day and buying all his own clothes? The church’s pastoral care and guidance for its own gay community is nonexistent. Catholic gays are non-people in my church; they are “los desaparecidos” and one day many of us will be called to account for how we have treated them.

The church has nothing to say to a child reared in these circumstances and who is beginning to encounter issues with his sexual identity. And so, by a perverse irony, the Catholic priesthood becomes a viable option for him. For what better way to submerge your “problem sexuality” than by committing yourself to a life of celibacy and a lifetime of reflection on the burden that God has deemed you must bear for your redemption and his glory?

Neither of these, though, explains why a church which has become a haven for homosexual men has become so obsessive about warning the rest of us about the dangers of gay sex.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Britain’s most senior Catholic cleric, has been accused of “inappropriate behaviour” towards four priests, stretching back 30-odd years. Thus far he has refused to “deny” the claims, merely to “contest” them. The press office for the Catholic church in Scotland, by way of explanation, lamely insists that the cardinal does not know the identity of his accusers, nor the details of which he is being accused.

Has such behaviour occurred so many times that the cardinal simply has trouble recalling specific instances? Or might he genuinely think that what the priests describe as “inappropriate behaviour” was merely a misunderstanding arising from an encounter with an over-affectionate and tactile boss?

The sullen “no comments” and “I can’t help you” are curious, too. This is an organisation that has become the church’s de facto witchfinder-generals, ever vigilant for examples of anti-Catholicism and never missing an opportunity to portray this country as bigoted and backward.

Like the entire hierarchy of the global Catholic church, they are in complete denial about a culture of sexual dysfunction that has been operating at its core for several decades. Hardly a year passes without an example of grotesque sexual behaviour, both homosexual and heterosexual, by a priest or bishop in the church.

The damage to the church is incalculable. In response to last week’s Observer story, the historian Tom Devine, a Catholic, described it as the church’s biggest crisis since the Reformation. It means that the Scottish Catholic church has lost all authority to speak on matters of human relationships until it at least recognises the root of the problem. Quite simply, the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland is no longer fit for purpose. It hasn’t been for a long time now: its default position is denial and concealment before accusing its critics of being motivated by bigotry.

The Vatican says it will investigate the complaints of the cardinal’s accusers. I have very little faith that an inquiry conducted in another country and of indeterminate legal structure and under the authority of another old man in Rome – identity, as yet, unknown – will deliver anything resembling a just outcome.

Nothing less than a full-scale investigation into the structure and leadership of the Scottish Catholic church will suffice to begin the task of recovering its lost authority. The commission to oversee this must be headed by an overseas cardinal of impeccable character and must comprise clergy and lay people in equal measure.

As a matter of urgency, the new pope must extend the gift of marriage to all priesthood candidates. Failure to do that will mean, in less than a generation, a priesthood comprised solely of social misfits and emotionally damaged refugees from reality. Ordinary Catholics have been incessantly grossly betrayed by the Catholic hierarchy. It is time we ignored the weekly collection plate until we receive some answers.

Complete Article HERE!

08/15/12

Tom Rastrelli: Priests who lie; the dilemma of sexual orientation and the priesthood

People don’t expect their priests and bishops to lie, but as Michelangelo Signorile’s recent post illustrated, clerics do lie. Some even make a virtue of it. I know this from experience, for I was ordained a Catholic priest on a lie.

In spring 2002 I walked with my spiritual director along the blacktop road encircling the seminary. He’d been my confessor and guide for two years, helping me discern God’s presence in all aspects of my life, intimate and mundane. Over our heads, a canopy of newborn leaves rustled in a sunny breeze, a welcome relief from the bitter fog that had engulfed the church and my vocational surety.

For the previous two months an unprecedented number of bishops and priests, starting with Cardinal Law of Boston, had fallen from grace for participation in the sexual abuse of children and the ensuing cover-up. Their duplicity was palpable in my knotted back and abdomen. In a few months I’d be ordained a priest. I didn’t want to do so on a lie.

“I’m coming out of the closet,” I said.

My spiritual director loosened his clerical collar and lit a cigarette. “Where’s this coming from?” he asked. A couple of chattering wrens whooshed past.

I backtracked through six years of seminary formation. At events I had hobnobbed with supposedly holy men, some of whom had been harboring pedophiles. A few had done the deed themselves. By shaking their hands, mine were dirty. I knew the ecclesiology, how the bishops’ authority stemmed from a direct line to Jesus, but they were still criminals. Who were they to declare homosexuals “intrinsically depraved”?

When I’d applied for seminary, the director of seminarians — the priest who’d recruited me — explained that orientation didn’t matter, only celibacy. But on my intake interviews he’d told me to answer “yes” when the archdiocesan psychologist asked if I was attracted to women, and “no” when he asked if I was attracted to men. It was for the greater good, he said. Frightened of being cast out and ashamed of my true nature, I had lied as instructed.

In light of the sexual abuse scandal, lying about my orientation was no longer acceptable. I thought of what a gay friend who’d left seminary had said. His words became my own: “I don’t know if I can separate my private and public selves. Isn’t integration the goal of spiritual direction?”

“Of course it is,” my spiritual director said, more gravelly than usual. He stopped and turned to me. A tree cast a web of shadows over his face. His strawberry nose grew flushed, as he gestured with his hands. “Here’s the thing, Rastrelli. You have to ask yourself: Am I going to be a gay priest, or a priest” — he rolled his fingers and cigarette through the air like a barrel — “who happens to be gay?”

“What’s the difference?” I turned my head to inhale, trying to avoid his secondhand smoke. “Either way I’m gay. It’s a part of me.”

“But are you gay first, and then a priest? Or a priest first, and then gay?” He smiled, satisfied with the distinction.

“Both/and.” I’d hit him with what he’d taught me in class. “Both/and” was the paradoxical answer for every ultimate question in Catholic theology: Scripture or tradition? Faith or works? Is Jesus divine or human? Are we sinful or good? is faith a solo or communal experience?

“Touché,” he said. We walked. He sucked his cigarette. “You’re a smart guy, Rastrelli. Give it some thought.”

I kicked a pebble onto the grass. “I have. I don’t want to lie about my sexuality.”

“It’s not lying if those asking don’t have a right to the information.”

He hadn’t even flinched. I wanted to shake the nicotine from his bones, to scream, “It was that kind of thinking that landed the bishops in the papers!” Still, part of me wanted him to be right. Silence was simpler, easier, and maybe my need to come out was just pride at work. My promise of obedience demanded that I surrender my ego. My vocation was about God, not my orientation. But couldn’t we priests be honest with one another? I had to try.

“Gay Catholics don’t have positive role models,” I said. “I don’t know of a single gay priest that’s healthy. Do you?” I stopped. He kept walking. This was as close as I’d ever come to asking him if he was gay. I suspected he was. He’d lived with another priest for decades. They vacationed and picked out carpeting together. They spoke about their cat as if she were their child. Even if he and his housemate weren’t having sex, they were a couple. I stepped in stride with him. “How am I supposed to be an integrated gay priest when I have no one to look up to? How does celibacy actually work?” I stopped again. “I’m asking you.”

He turned to me. His face became whiter than a funeral pall. “I’m sorry, Rastrelli, but that’s not a conversation I’m comfortable having with a student.”

He resumed his pace. I followed silently.

The breeze picked up. The undulating trees sounded like the ocean breaking on the shore. I choked back the urge to ask, “Are you gay?” I felt like a sinking ship in a fleet that had wandered into a minefield. After laying the mines himself, the fleet commander had ordered radio silence.

I didn’t want to drown alone. I didn’t want to hear him lie. I wanted the truth, but the truth was dangerous. Were I to come out amid sexual-abuse headlines, homophobic Catholics wrongly blaming gay priests for the scandal would demand my dismissal.

My spiritual director was right. Who were they to judge, to put my orientation before my vocation? They had no right to that knowledge. It was safer to be a priest who happened to be gay. Perhaps it was God’s will. The fear accompanying us back to the seminary told me so.

That day, I learned the unspoken rule passed down through generations of priests: the doctrine of justification for lying by clergy. I went on to be ordained a priest. I preached that “the truth will set you free” while living in silence and shame. After a long journey and much pain, I came out. I left the priesthood, finally refusing to live the lies that I’d been taught to venerate.

Complete Article HERE!

08/1/12

Slovenian archbishop fathered two children, reports say

The Slovenian mystery has been solved. Archbishop Uran has been punished by the Vatican not for his involvement in a financial flop but for his infraction of the celibacy rule

The Slovenian mystery has been solved. Archbishop Uran has been punished by the Vatican not for his involvement in a financial flop but for his infraction of the celibacy rule.

Now the prelate-father will move to the northern Italian city of Trieste. The Vatican has ordered Mgr. Alojz Uran, Archbishop of Ljubljana, from 2004 to 2009 to leave Slovenia because of all the rumours going round about him breaking his celibacy vows and fathering two children, now adults, neither of whom he recognises as his. “This is a temporary measure to calm public opinion until the question is resolved,” stated Andrej Saje, spokesman for Slovenia’s bishops, on Ljubljana’s public television.

“The problem is his alleged paternity, which the former archbishop has always denied, but I think there have been some misunderstandings between him and the Holy See. Once these are cleared up, Uran will be able to return to his country,” Saje added, denying the theory that the sanctions decided by the Congregation for Bishops are linked to the financial scandal which brought the Diocese of Maribor to the brink of bankruptcy two years ago. Uran retired unexpectedly in 2009 (he is not 67) for health reasons after a heart operation, but soon rumours began to spread about him allegedly fathering two children, a fact he apparently kept secret from his Vatican superiors.

Maribor daily newspaper Vecer wrote that “despite the former archbishop categorically denying these accusations, Rome continues to suspect he did not tell the truth, also because he was said to have refused a DNA test.” Saje confirmed that three years ago the Nuncio to Ljubljana launched a procedure to “ascertain whether the rumours were true.” Now Uran is being asked to withdraw from Slovenian public life and “move to Trieste.” Saje added that Uran accepted the decision and once the issue is cleared up “he will probably be able to return home.”

“This is a preventive measure and it is not true that he was forbidden to celebrate solemn masses,” the spokesman added. No one escapes Holy See justice it appears. While the former Archbishop of Ljubljana Alojz Uran and the Archbishop of Maribor Franc Kramberger got red cards when the Vatican issued its second warning, Mgr. Uran has received an exile decree as well. He will have to leave Slovenia. And the reason? His alleged fatherhood. He will only be able to return to the country when the scandal surrounding his person has calmed down.

The former archbishop will be welcomed in one of Trieste’s ecclesiastical institutions. The Slovenian press reported that the Vatican has ordered the prelate to leave his country as soon as possible, at the latest by the end of the year, but it is unclear which part of the Canon Code exactly he has broken. Newspapers are speculating that he is involved in a financial scandal but they do not exclude a child kept secret or an internal clash between Slovenian prelates as the reason. The news has sparked the interest of the media partly because the Holy See rarely decides to take such drastic punitive measures against its bishops, but especially because the underlying reasons for the decision remain unclear. The retired prelate was apparently informed of the decision by the Congregation for Bishops.

The news was revealed by the parish priest of Šentjakob ob Savi, Vlado Bizant, a relative of Uran’s who headed the Archdiocese of Ljubljana from 2004 to 2009. Bizant said that last May the Vatican apparently forbid the former archbishop from celebrating solemn masses, ordering him to leave Slovenia. He added that Uran sees the decision as “unfair” but intends to respect it. The Apostolic Nunciature in Ljubljana and Archbishop Anton Stres neither confirmed nor denied the news, saying they had not seen the content of the correspondence between Uran and the Vatican.According to the newspapers, the prelate’s punishment is imminent and he will be moving to Trieste or to Pula in Istria in the next few months.

However, the reasons behind the Holy See’s decision to punish the archbishop are unknown. Two newspapers, Delo and Dnevnik say it is highly likely that Uran is held co-responsible for Diocese of Maribor’s financial flop. Two years ago, the Italian press revealed that the Diocese of Maribor had made a series of high risk investments in some funds, even going as far as to mortgage a number of churches and using money collected from faithful. After the collapse of the stock exchanges resulting from the economic crisis and the bankruptcy of funds linked to the Catholic Church in Maribor, hundreds of millions of Euros apparently went up in smoke, along with “part of the Slovenian Church’s reputation.”

Others claim that the Vatican did not like the fact that Uran kept quiet about having a child, though this has never actually been proven. Delo newspaper has speculated that the reason for this drastic punishment is the “tense personal relations among the Slovenian clergy.” The newspaper wrote it is unlikely that Uran’s destiny was decided without the current archbishop, Anton Stres and Uran’s predecessor, Cardinal Franc Rode – an illustrious member of the Vatican Curia and a member of the Congregation for Bishops – knowing about it.

Complete Article HERE!

03/25/12

Catholic Church Historical Reversal: Backed Civil Unions In New Hampshire

For the first time ever, the Roman Catholic church is endorsing civil unions, announcing its second historic reversal in only two weeks.

The Roman Catholic church of New Hampshire suddenly endorsed civil unions on March 19, just 48 hours before a state legislature vote that has been pending for two years. In an equally surprising move, on March 4, the Roman Catholic church of Maine ceased all external opposition to this year’s full marriage equality ballot campaign in Maine.

Historically, Roman Catholic officials have opposed virtually every regulation, policy, and law proposed to protect LGBT people nationwide, including all proposals for civil unions. However, faced with the choice of either retaining New Hampshire’s full marriage law which was signed on 3 June 2009, or else repealing it and replacing it with civil unions instead, church officials decided – for the first time ever – to endorse civil unions for LGBT people.

In a statement issued on March 19, church officials claimed that they are endorsing civil unions only in an attempt to repeal full marriage for same-gender couples. They called the replacement of full marriage with the inferior civil unions an “incremental improvement.”

In lockstep, the National Organization for Marriage, a Roman Catholic church affiliate, also issued a companion surprise announcement the same day, also endorsing civil unions in New Hampshire for similar reasons. NOM was founded by Catholics, is staffed by Catholics, and appears to be mostly funded by Catholic laity and church officials. NOM’s membership rolls and finances are secret, some of its government filings are incomplete or contradictory, and it violates campaign finance disclosure regulations in every state where it opposes marriage equality.

Monday’s reversal in New Hampshire is just as profound as the decision by church officials two weeks ago to withdraw from this year’s public marriage battle in Maine. Neither decision was made independently, and both had to be coordinated with higher church officials. The Manchester Diocese, which is what the Roman Catholic church in New Hampshire calls itself, is a corporation sole and is subordinate to the Ecclesiastical Province of Boston, Massachusetts, which oversees Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

Among New Hampshire’s 1,315,809 residents, only 24% (309,987) are Catholic. Consequently, this sudden, last-minute switch by religious leaders only hours before the deadline may not have much impact upon the legislative votes being taken tomorrow. Four recent polls indicate that about 63% of all New Hampshire voters favor retaining the current full marriage law.

In addition to local impacts in Maine and New Hampshire, both of the Catholic church’s recent historic reversals may also help this year’s marriage equality efforts in 18 other states, especially New Jersey, North Carolina, and Minnesota. In New Jersey, advocates need just 15 more votes from the 120-member legislature to override the governor’s recent veto of a law which could upgrade civil unions to full marriage. In Minnesota and North Carolina, the church has been lobbying to ban marriage for all same-gender couples by amending those states’ constitutions so that marriage equality laws can’t even be considered. New Hampshire Bishop Peter Libasci gave no indication of when, whether, or how his church’s endorsement of civil unions in New Hampshire will affect church campaigns in other states.

Within its own religious ranks, Roman Catholic officials are continuing to reinforce Pope Benedict XVI’s formal view of bisexual, lesbian, and gay sexuality as “an intrinsic moral evil,” “intrinsically disordered,” and “inherently evil.” Moreover, the church still promotes the widely discredited “ex-gay” reparative therapy, which they claim cures patients of the sexual orientation that they are born with using a mixture of firm hope, additional prayer, new apparel, and/or life-long celibacy. Such reparative therapies have been discredited and denounced by every major mental/medical health professional organization as ineffective, painful, and dangerous to patients because of higher death rates from suicide.

Complete Article HERE!

03/23/12

Theology of priesthood behind sex abuse crisis

CLERICAL SEXUAL abuse is inevitable given the meaning system that is taught by the Catholic Church and to which many priests adhere.

Contradictions in that system lead to failure, increase shame and a way of living that encourages deviant behaviour.

This is the thesis of a revealing book on sexual abuse within the church by an Irish academic and therapist who interviewed, at length, nine priests and brothers convicted of child abuse, who counselled several other clerical abusers and who undertook extensive research on the issue for her book Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power and Organisational Culture. The author is Marie Keenan of the school of applied social science at UCD.

It is evident that the apostolic visitors – Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop Emeritus of Westminster, Cardinal Seán O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston, Thomas Christopher Collins, Archbishop of Toronto and Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York – didn’t read the book or speak to Keenan while in Ireland.

Their report, published in summary form yesterday, might have been very different had they done so.

The culture inculcated in Catholic clergy is that they are separate from other human beings because of their special “calling” from God, because of their sole capacity to administer the sacraments, to turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, because of their power to forgive sin and administer the last rites.

From the moment of their ordination they are apart, apart in the minds of other convinced Catholics and apart in their own minds. And they are also celibate, because of that “calling”. Abjuring intimate sexual relations, sublimating their sexual urges and widely admired in the communities they inhabit on account of that sublimation.

Keenan says this theology of sacrifice eclipses all human considerations. She says her argument is not that clerical celibacy is the problem but a Catholic externally-imposed sexual ethic and a theology of priesthood that “problematises” the body and erotic sexual desire and emphasises chastity and purity, over a relational ethic (how as human beings we should treat each other).

She says this theology of sexuality contributes to self-hatred, shame and a sense of personal failure on the part of some priests.

This tension is often exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness on the part of many priests within a hierarchical, authoritarian church, subject to the authority of bishops or heads of religious orders, often allowing them with little sense of being in control of their own lives. And this is further added to by loneliness.

Some priests cope with this by easing off on the celibacy bit. Some ease off the celibacy bit with guilt, some with a sense of doing their best with their human frailties.

According to Keenan it is often the priests who aspire to priestly perfection and are hugely conflicted with the demands of such perfection that resort to child sexual abuse, usually, she says, not opportunistically, but consciously and deliberately over time. And this seems to be confirmed by other research.

Moreover, in many ways, the release of the confessional – the opportunity to dispel guilt in a secret ritual – compounds the problem. The “external” imposition (by the church) of the priestly ethic, rather than the cultivation of an internal ethic, also contributes to the propensity to abuse; for the construction of an internal ethic involves reflection on the impact of one’s conduct on the lives of others and that seems to have been missing in the make-up of many of the clerical abusers.

There is nothing at all of this in the report of the bachelor apostolic visitors, instead a recommendation that the culture of the seminary be intensified in the lives of aspirants for the priesthood. No acknowledgment is made of the tension inherent in the celibacy thing and the hypocrisies and traumas to which it gives rise.

In general there seems to be little interest in why this clerical abuse has occurred and what it is within the Catholic culture that has engendered it. The dismissive explanation that it is all due to the “flawed” personalities of the abusers ignores the cultural and formative factors that at least contributed to the phenomenon.

There is a further point which is also not addressed at all by the Catholic Church and it has to do with society’s treatment of the clerical perpetrators after they have served their sentences. They are rendered effectively homeless by a public rage directed at them, engendered largely by the media.

Our system of justice ordains that people who commit even the most heinous of crimes are brought before the courts, convicted, publicly shamed and then imprisoned, after which, that’s it. And yet, often in denial of their human rights, they remain hounded for the remainder of their days. Moreover, very often those who do the most vigorous hounding are those who speak most loudly that bit from what is known as “the Lord’s Prayer”: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Complete Article HERE!

03/6/12

Mother Church and the Rape of Her Children

I recommend that you read the entire article, but here are Richard Sipe’s conclusions.

Conclusion: The title of this volume—Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: A Decade of Crisis:—is actually a question. What has the Catholic Church learned? No one in June 2002 could possibly imagine the worldwide scope or dimensions that questions about abuse by Roman Catholic clergy would assume by 2012. The head of the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, Wilton Gregory, proclaimed triumphantly in 2004, “the problem is history.”

My reflections focused on five fundamental issues that impinge on the Catholic Church and underlie its processes of learning about and preventing clergy sex abuse: secrecy, scandal, crisis, mandated celibacy, and clerical culture.

Secrecy was and remains foundational to the operation of the Catholic clerical world. Reviewing several thousand legal procedures over the past ten years demonstrates to me how assiduously—and violently—American cardinals and bishops fight to keep incriminating and embarrassing documents secret.

Within a decade, the fulminating scandal fed by revelation upon revelation of Catholic bishops and priests abusing boys and girls and superiors covering up their crime spread like a string of Chinese fire crackers from Boston’s Back Bay to the Vatican and Pope, from Dallas to Dublin and Bishops Conferences around the world. Sex abuse by priests is no longer a secret, but a scandal properly so defined: a widely publicized allegation or set of allegations that damages the reputation of an institution, individual or creed. Clergy abuse of the vulnerable is the biggest scandal the Catholic Church in America has ever faced and most probably equals the Twelfth and Sixteenth Century scandals in Europe. For example: tapes recorded during an April 2010 meeting between a victim, his bishop abuser, and a cardinal (Danneels of Belgium) reveal the prelate urging the victim not to tell anyone that the bishop sexually abused him. The European press claimed the tapes provided some of the most damaging documents to emerge in the scandal rocking the Roman Catholic Church.

Again in 2010 another cardinal, Dario Castrillon Hoyos of Columbia, used the familial argument to defend keeping priest abuse secret saying, “it [reporting priest abusers to the police] would have been like testifying against a family member at trial.” He also claimed in a radio interview reported by the Associated Press “that Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was involved in a 2001 decision to praise a French bishop for shielding a priest who was convicted of raping minors.”

Not long after February 27, 2004 when the Report on the Crisis in the Catholic Church in the United States was published and made public along with the John Jay Report Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne M. Burke who served as interim Chair of the National Review Board said that the bishops did not want change, but only “business as usual.” She spoke in 2010 about the problem of “untruth” she sees in the church and the bishops.

The scandal of sex abuse by Catholic clergy has been a public relations nightmare—gargantuan and impossible. No spin makes gruesome facts go away. Many priests and bishops have violated in criminal ways their responsibilities as representatives of Mother Church. Scandal, of course, is not the real problem no matter how distressing; the crisis of betrayal of Mother Church’s children is the crux of the scandal. However, the question remains: has the church learned anything about truth and transparency in the past decade?

There is wide based agreement that the Catholic Church is in a crisis mode. The crisis has to do with human sexuality—specifically bishops and priests who present themselves as celibate and chaste while they violate minors and the vulnerable under the cloak of their religion. The denial, rationalization, lies, and cover up of clerical crime by Church authority is in evidence and provides an ongoing scandal and crisis.

There are repeated calls for the abrogation of the requirement of celibacy for ordination to the priesthood. Whatever the merits of the arguments, they will not solve all the problems of clerical sexual malfeasance. Bishops and priests exist in, maintain, and assiduously preserve a clerical culture within which secret sexual activity by clergy is tolerated.

Celibacy and chastity are taught in an educational mode and structure established for diocesan clergy at the Council of Trent. That tradition is dependent on a monastic-like schedule (horarium) and a system of sacramental confession and spiritual directors. It is no longer effective. Despite rules and screening procedures a significant number of clerical candidates are sexually active with one another or with priests—sometimes faculty. Celibate observance of religious order clerics has not proved better. But sexual activity in the clerical culture is not introduced from the bottom-up—from candidates for ordination—but from men established in the culture—priests, spiritual directors, rectors, superiors, even bishops. Homosexuality is a predominant operational orientation in clerical culture form Rome to Los Angeles.[23]

Culture always trumps reason. Is it possible to revise clerical culture? History, theology and human nature all conspire in favor of reforming dysfunctional systems eventually. Theologically, clerical culture is mutable, no matter how firmly grounded in custom and tradition. Jesuit Bernard Lonergan (1967) wrestling with the possibility of “transition of organization and structural forms in the Church” said among other things: “there is in the historicity, which results from human nature, an exigence for changing form, structures, methods; and it is on this level and through this medium of changing meaning that divine revelation has entered the world and that the Church’s witness is given to it.”[24]

Literary critic, Lionel Trilling (1965) talks about the power of forces that change culture. Somewhere in the mind “there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason, that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge culture and resist and revise it.”[25] There is hope.

Prevention of sexual abuse by priests and bishops presents a daunting agenda. A revision of clerical culture is required to deal effectively with clergy sexual violations of every stripe. The burden transcends the capacities and limits of law and psychiatry and rests squarely on the very core of religion and spiritual transformation—in theologian Bernard Haering’s words on “absolute sincerity and transparency.” Prevention will not occur without discussion of the realities of sexuality, celibacy, and the development of explicit and honest norms for sexual responsibility and accountability for human behavior on every level of the church. The darkness of secrecy breeds betrayal, abuse and violent assault. Revelations over the last decade have proved that. A Mother Church, that sustains, nourishes and, protects her children demands light, accountability, openness and truth. That is the task unveiled over the past ten years. It is vital that the Church respond. Any church that cannot tell the truth about itself runs the risk of having nothing significant to be heard.

Complete Article HERE!

02/3/12

Diocese Of Portland To Offer Support Group For Same-Sex Attraction

The Catholic Pray the gay away program…except they don’t call it gay. They’re so clever!

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland is setting up a ministry to support people with same-sex attraction.

The spiritual support group Courage refers to itself as a “pro-chastity” ministry on its website, www.courageRC.org. It has more than 100 worldwide chapters and more than 1,500 participants, said Sue Bernard, communications director for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland.

“Courage offers hope and encouragement to men and woman who desire to live in accordance with the church’s teaching on homosexuality — specifically that the dignity and identity of every person is not determined by their sexual attractions, but by their relationship with the Lord and their striving to live the virtues of faith, hope and charity,” she said.

The Catholic Church emphasizes sex within the context of marriage and the importance of chaste living, Bernard said.

“If you’re married, chaste living is being faithful to your spouse,” she said.

An informal support group had been meeting before the first referendum about same-sex marriage in 2009. Bernard did not have an estimate of the number of people who participated.

After representatives spoke to Bishop Richard Malone and wanted the church’s assistance, the group received formal recognition. It has a chaplain, Fr. Kevin Martin. Martin serves as parochial vicar in the Augusta area, Bernard said.

The Courage website has a section called “The 12 Steps of Courage,” based on the 12 steps from Alcoholics Anonymous. Step one says, “We admitted that we were powerless over homosexuality and our lives had become unmanageable.”
The support group has a policy of anonymity and confidentiality, Bernard said. Locations will be disclosed to people who plan to participate in it.

Complete Article HERE!

01/8/12

New church group to assist gays draws criticism

A new program by the Archdiocese of Hartford to provide a spiritual support system to assist men and women with same-sex attractions to live chaste lives has drawn criticism from the gay community who say it can do more harm than good.

The new program called Courage, which has chapters around the world, does not condone physical sex between same-sex partners. But it creates a “spiritual support system which would assist men and women with same-sex attractions in living chaste lives in fellowship, truth and love,” according to the Courage website.

“We really needed to do something because a lot of people are hurting, because families are torn apart by this, and we really need to be responsive,” said Deacon Robert Pallotti, who operates the Courage program in Connecticut.
“We do have a pastoral responsibility to do all we can to make people feel welcome in the church.”

Catholic pro-gay groups generally had a negative reaction to Courage.
“Courage does not want to convert you to become heterosexual, so in some ways, it’s a little more enlightened that the other programs that the Catholic Church has had for gays,” said Phil Attey, executive director of the national group, Catholics for Equality. “But at its core it’s still rooted in dangerous, harmful and barbaric thinking. The idea that you can suppress someone’s sexuality and still have that person develop into a happy, well-adjusted person, well, there’s very little evidence that that’s possible.”

Attey, however, said the church’s stance on gays isn’t pushing him out of his faith.

“Most non-Catholics don’t understand the Catholic experience, which is very much rooted in family and community,” Attey said. “It’s not unlike someone who is a Jew. He might not attend his synagogue, but that doesn’t make him any less Jewish. We will always be Catholic, regardless of what comes out of our hierarchy.”

Attey said that most rank-and-file Catholics, in fact, support the gay community, and because of this, gays feel comfortable in the church.
“American Catholics are the most supportive faith group in the country on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) issues. That may come as some as a surprise to a lot of people, given the harsh statements from the hierarchy, but if you look at the people and the `body church,’ it’s the most pro-gay church in the country.”

Marianne Duddy-Burke of the Dignity USA agrees. Dignity USA is the nation’s largest advocacy group for LGBT Catholics.

“You really have to differentiate between Catholics and the church hierarchy,” she said. “Even the Catholics who go to church every single week are more supportive toward gays than the population as a whole.”

She said that this might spring from the Church’s demands for the humane treatment of a host of other groups that have often go neglected and even hated — prisoners, the sick, the poor, men on death row, and so forth.

“Catholics are more supportive of gays than any other denomination according to the Public Region Research Group, and that surprises a lot of people,” she said.
As for the future, Attey said he doesn’t expect the Vatican to change its posture on gays anytime soon.

“We don’t expect any dogmatic change on LGBT issues anytime soon, but what we do expect is that more and more Catholics will be speaking out on their own on LGBT rights,” Attey said.

“This is a place where the leaders have to catch up with the truth that Catholics are living out every single day in their families and in the workplace,” said Duddy-Burke.

Pallotti said not all of the hierarchy in the archdiocese was on board with Courage from the outset.

“Many of them were fine with this, but we wanted to educate those deacons who had a reluctance to get involved or had some resistance, and many were dealing with their own personal feelings on this,” Pallotti said.
He said that Courage is sanctioned by the Vatican as the “only approved approach.”

The Rev. Paul Check of St. Mary’s Church in Norwalk, who runs the Courage meetings, explained that Courage “addresses homosexuality as a lived reality in the lives of individual people.”

Check said that “there’s no doubt” of the difficulty of the church’s teaching on homosexuality.

“But we have a way for people to live this teaching, and that’s where Courage comes in,” Check said. “Really, as a matter of natural justice and pastoral charity, we have to have a way for people to live that teaching. It’s difficult and challenging, but it helps people with this particular struggle.”

The roots of the Connecticut Courage chapter grew in the gay marriage debate in the state, Pallotti said.

“I was very fearful of the emotional backlash that was I was witnessing in Connecticut during the gay marriage debate,” Pallotti said. “So I went to the archbishop and I said, `OK, yeah, this is our position (to oppose gay marriage), but I’m concerned about people who are whipping up hate against gays as if they have the Plague or something — and some Christian churches were doing that. We had to confront this head-on.”

The Connecticut Courage chapter will meet twice a month “somewhere in Greater Hartford,” he said, and the exact location will be disclosed only to those who plan to participate. If there’s sufficient interest, other chapters might be set up in the state.

Complete Article HERE!

01/4/12

US Catholic bishop with secret family, Gabino Zavala, quits

A Catholic bishop who fathered two children has stepped down.

Pope Benedict has accepted the resignation of Gabino Zavala, an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, the Vatican said.

The Archbishop of Los Angeles, Jose Gomez, wrote in a letter to worshippers that Bishop Zavala told him in December that he was the father of two teenage children.

The children, who are minors, live with their mother in another state.

Archbishop Gomez said that the archdiocese was offering the family “spiritual care,” as well as funding to help the children with college costs.

In his letter he described the news as “sad and difficult” and said Bishop Zavala had been living privately and not participating in ministry since resigning.

Bishop Zavala is 60 and was born in Mexico. He has campaigned against the death penalty and for immigrants’ rights.

The Vatican did not spell out the reason for Bishop Zavala’s resignation in its statement, but made reference to canon law which allows bishops to step down before normal retirement age if they are ill or unfit for office for some other reason.

The Pope has shown no sign of relaxing the Roman Catholic Church’s rule on priestly celibacy, which has been in place since the 11th Century.

In March 2010 he described celibacy as “the sign of full devotion, the entire commitment to the Lord and to the ‘Lord’s business’, an expression of giving oneself to God and to others”.

Priests are not allowed to marry but married Anglican priests who convert to Catholicism are exempted from the celibacy rule.

Two days ago Pope Benedict appointed an American married priest to head the first US structure for Anglicans converting to Roman Catholicism.

Complete Article HERE!

11/30/11

A Harrowing Story of Survival

Why I Slept with My Therapist, How One Gay Man Tried to Go Straight

Just how far will a gay man go to be straight? For Brian Anthony Kraemer, that journey included thirteen years of celibacy, daily prayer, extensive reading, participation in an ex-gay ministry, and two exorcisms. He still hadn’t reached his goal when he met a man he believed to be the therapist of his dreams—a married, Christian therapist with an innovative method of healing.

Through what he called “spiritual adoption,” the therapist began a reparenting experiment in which Brian’s therapy included spending time with his therapist in his home and meeting his wife and biological children, as well as other “spiritually adopted” clients. Brian and his therapist shared a bed, showered together, and spent extensive amounts of time holding, cuddling, and caressing.

In his memoir, Why I Slept with My Therapist, How One Gay Man Tried to Go Straight, Brian Anthony Kraemer shares the details of his developing relationship with a Christian male therapist in his attempt to change from homosexual to heterosexual. Though the goal was to go straight, this relationship ultimately led to Brian’s acceptance of himself as a gay man—and the therapist’s loss of his license.

Just before Christmas of 1997, I flew from Southern California, where I worked in a Christian mission agency, to visit my parents five hundred miles north. I originally planned to stay for two weeks, from December 20 through January 3, but after a few days, I knew I could not stay that long. I felt anxious, nervous, and afraid. I had to get back to my own home, my gym, and my routine. I was addicted to my daily trips to swim at a local university pool, where I spent long periods of time in the men’s locker room showering, hoping to see as many naked men as possible.

I watched men come and go in this group shower setting and tried to avoid being too obvious in my sexual interests. My penis, however, often revealed my thoughts, and I had to direct my erection toward the shower wall and pretend nothing unusual was happening. Most men ignored it. Some engaged in friendly conversation without mentioning it. Others revealed interest with eye contact or by moving closer, to a shower head near mine. Still others gave a scowl of disapproval and left. With my eyes, I soaked in these masculine bodies in an eff ort to satiate my longing for any kind of connection with them. … I had not had sex with a man since my conversion to Christianity thirteen years before, in May 1984, at age twenty. I wasn’t about to break my record of celibacy.

Brian Anthony Kraemer holds bachelor’s degrees in psychology, health science, and social science; he is currently working on a master’s degree in psychology. He has taught in elementary schools and served as the president of Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) in Pasadena and Chico, California. He currently lives in Chico, California, where he performs as a musician and engages in public speaking opportunities, mostly on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues.

This book can be ordered through amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and many other book retail outlets.