Moral Dilemma
Rainbow Sash Movement Takes On Bishop William Lori’s Homophobia
That the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is on the warpath over LGBT rights, and are even going so far as to claim that any rights given to LGBT people limit the rights of
Catholics is not even sitting well now with the Catholic laity. The Rainbow Sash Movement is opposed to the way that the Catholic hierarchy portrays the LGBT Community and they are now speaking out agaisnt the ad hoc committees that the US Council of Catholic Bishops is putting into place. Here is their press release:
All Saints” aka Halloween, is a Holy Day of Obligation in the Roman Catholic Church. The Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, (also known by its opening words Homosexualitatis problema or, disparagingly, as “the Halloween Letter”) is a letter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Roman Catholic Church written in 1985 and delivered in Rome on 1 October 1986 by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger ( Pope Benedict XVI) and Archbishop Alberto Bovone. The letter gave instructions on how the Clergy should deal with and respond to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. Pope John Paul II approved the letter and ordered its publication.
What does this letter have in common with the recent testimony of Bishop William Lori, head of the newly created ad hoc committee on religious liberty at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), who recently testified before Congress? According to Bishop Lori the Catholic vision of Religious Freedom should be paramount and associated with the Vatican’s perceived threats to religious liberty. Further that action in support of any legislation that promotes equality for Lesbian/Gay People would be an attack a Catholics right to practice his/hers religion. The Rainbow Sash Movement response to such a view is that it is totally unreasonable, un-democratic and homophobic.
Like the 1986 Halloween Letter Bishop Lori promotes the idea that propagation of religious belief as a justification for discrimination against Gay people should be lawful. Both continue to promote the Catholic Church’s condemnation of homosexuality under the guise “Religious Freedom”. This will only result in the corresponding denial of “Religious Freedom” to Gay people as is exampled by the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The Halloween letter did not remove violence against gay people if they try to legalize our rights.
The US Council of Catholic Bishops imperial religious behavior in respect to Gay Marriage has only sought to deny equality and fairness by promoting individual attacks on the rights of gay people generally, on Gay Catholics and their allies specifically. The Bishops seek to promote through the prism of “Religious Freedom” an atmosphere where promoting individual rights of conscience and equal rights for Gay People are somehow at odds with “Religious Freedom” which is a total fabrication of reasonable thought.
Both the Halloween Letter anniversary and Bishop Lori testimony only show how out of touch the bishops are when it comes to the lives of real people. Clearly the Bishops can no longer speak for the Catholic voter on these issues as poll after poll has shown.
Complete Article HERE!
Is there a link between homosexuality and clergy sex abuse?
Editor’s Note: Dr. James Cantor is a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and has been conducting research on the causes of pedophilia for the past 10 years. He is the Head of the Law & Mental Health Research Section of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH; Toronto) and the Editor-in-Chief of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment.
(CNN) — The on-going reports about child molestation in the Catholic church have led the public and the media to ask what causes someone to be sexually attracted to children. Scientists use the word pedophilia to refer to the sexual preference for children before puberty (usually, before age 11), and the word hebephilia, to refer to the sexual preference for children at puberty (usually, ages 11 to 14).
Although there have been claims that child molestation is a result of homosexuality (or of celibacy), there is absolutely no basis in science for either conclusion. The scientific evidence instead suggests that pedophilia and hebephilia are caused by atypical brain development occurring near or before birth.
MRI research has found very large differences in brain structure between men who have a sexual preference for children and those who have a sexual preference for adults. These differences were detected as regions of low density in brain tissue called white matter. White matter is what connects the various parts of the brain, enabling it to function as a whole. The white matter that is affected in pedophilia and hebephilia is the white matter that connects the parts of the brain that respond to sexual images. (Specifically, these regions were the superior occipitofrontal fasciculus and the arcuate fasciculus.)
There does not exist any evidence that gay men share this feature of decreased white matter. In fact, there is some evidence that gay men have areas of more white matter than straight men, in at least some parts of the brain (called the corpus callosum).
Also demonstrating that gay men have no more of a sexual interest in children than do straight men are studies that have measured sexual responses directly: There exists a test, called a phallometric test, in which a man is shown images of adults and children, both male and female, while he wears a device on his penis to detect even very small changes in blood volume. The procedure is routinely used with sexual offenders, and research has repeatedly shown phallometric testing to be one of the most — if not the single most — accurate predictor of who is the most likely to commit future sexual offenses. When regular gay men and regular straight men (not offenders) are tested, gay men respond to images of children in exactly the same way that straight men do: very little.
Out of typical men, approximately two to three percent have a sexual preference for men rather than women, and out of pedophilic/hebephilic men, approximately 20 to 30 percent have a sexual preference for boys rather than girls. It is an error, however, to conclude from this that the two to three percent who prefer men are more likely than the others to break out of their preferences to contact a child sexually. That is, the offenses against boys are being committed by the 20 to 30 percent of pedophiles who prefer boys, not by the two to three percent of otherwise typical men who prefer men.
The misconception that gay men pose a disproportionate risk to children comes from a misunderstanding of men’s sexual preferences: Pedophilia is the genuine sexual preference for children. The evidence suggests that these are innate and immutable characteristics. Pedophilia/hebephilia is not a temporary state from which those who prefer boys can become typical gay men, nor from which those who prefer girls can become typical straight men. Nor is there any known route by which someone with a genuine sexual preference for adults can develop a genuine sexual preference for children, either girls or boys.
Although it is reasonable to question why the Catholic priesthood appears to include so many pedophilic or hebephilic men, there is no scientific evidence that homosexuality is the answer, nor that fostering discrimination against gay men could be a solution.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Dr. James Cantor. Click here more information and updates on his research.
Complete Article HERE!
Scandal and the Vatican: Let’s Not Talk About Kansas City
COMMENTARY
The news that an American bishop had been charged with failing to report child abuse should have been collosal news in the Vatican.
But the response has been as if the case is far away and far removed from the Holy See — and the Papacy that is so quick to come down on questions of celibacy, women priests and the rights of gay Catholics appears to regard the American scandal, involving a priest and what seems to be child pornography, as a matter for local jurisprudence.
On last Friday, prosecutors in Kansas City, Missouri, secured an indictment from a grand jury that alleges Bishop Robert Finn neglected to inform the police for months after discovering “hundreds of disturbing images of children” on a priest’s laptop in December 2010, including photographs focused on the crotch, upskirt pictures and at least one image of a child’s naked vagina.
The offending priest — Shawn Ratigan — was relieved of his position as a church pastor and transferred to a convent, but neither the police, his parishioners, nor the parents of a nearby Catholic school were informed of the pictures until May 2011.
In the interim, Ratigan continued to attend events involving children, including birthday parties and a first communion, and allegedly attempted to take lewd pictures of a 12-year-old girl. Finn and Ratigan have both pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.
The case against Finn marks the first time a bishop in the United States has been indicted for failing to report abuse by a priest under his supervision. It comes nearly 10 years after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted policy mandating that dioceses report allegations of sexual abuse to the public authorities and seven months after the Vatican urged all bishops across the world to institute similar measures.
It also comes three years after a $10 million settlement in Kansas City with 47 plaintiffs alleging abuse at the hands of priests, in which Bishop Finn agreed to immediately inform the police of any suspicion of sexual abuse by members of his diocese. However, when the Vatican was contacted for comment, regarding the allegations, it demurred, citing the pending charges.
“There is a legal procedure under way,” the Vatican’s spokesperson Father Federico Lombardi told a reporter for the AFP. “Any intervention could be interpreted as interference.”
The Vatican’s tepid response highlights a chasm between the public perception of the way the church is organized and the structure by which it usually operates. While most outsiders imagine the Catholic Church as a monolithic hierarchy, with a direct line of command from the Pope down to most junior priest, for many inside its ranks the better analogy is a community, in which the Vatican plays a coordinating role for a host of almost completely independent dioceses.
“The church doesn’t work at all like a centralized machine, in that a command that comes from above is automatically communicated to the parts of the machine below,” says Sandro Magister, editor of the Rome-based website Chiesa (Italian for “church”). “The autonomy of single bishops is very strong.”
Thus, while an outside observer might draw a line of accountability directly to Rome, from the Vatican’s point of view responsibility for a sex abuse scandal would more traditionally lie at the local level. Indeed, in other cases, lawyers for the church have explicitly argued that bishops don’t work directly or the Vatican.
But, under Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican has nonetheless begun to ratchet up the pressure, according to Phil Lawler, editor of CatholicCulture.org, and a long-time critic of the Church’s slow response to the 25-year-old sex abuse scandal.
“The Vatican is gradually getting a grip on it, if not in this country, in others,” he says.
In Ireland, for instance, the church forced the resignation of three bishops who failed to report abuse by priests.
“I think you’re starting to see steadily more active supervision,” says Lawler, adding that the Vatican would nonetheless likely continue to have a largely hands off approach. “The autonomy of bishops isn’t going to away,” he says. “That’s fundamental to the structure of the church.”
Yet for the victims of the abusive priests, it’s not an argument that has much resonance. After all, when a priest advocates ending the tradition of celibacy or in favor of the ordination of women, the Vatican is quick to clamp down.
“Rome does have a direct influence on diocese around the country and around the world,” says Michael Hunter, the Kansas City director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) who has filed a new lawsuit against Finn for breach of contract, alleging that the bishop failed to live up to the terms of the earlier settlement.
“The Vatican really could and should come down on the moral side of this and really chastise this diocese,” he adds.
“And the heck with the legal issues.”
Complete Article HERE!
Keep calm and lock the doors
COMMENTARY
Flipping through my normal news sources, I came across an ‘in other news’ story about the Occupy London (dubbed by the BBC as ‘anti-capitalist protest’). Seems that said protests are large enough that they have accidentally done what the Nazis needed the Blitz to do, they have shuttered St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Citing health and safety concerns, the Right Reverend Graeme Knowles, dean of the cathedral, announced that they will be closing St. Paul’s until further notice. As can be seen by the image above, the protest camp is sandwiched between the historic cathedral and the Exchange, filling Paternoster Square.
What struck me about this story most is that I see it as a sad tale of missed opportunity. Here is a large group of people who are following their conscience and speaking out against economic/social injustice and the Church, rather than providing assistance and showing that they are sensitive to the needs of their neighbour, decide to turn out the lights and lock the doors.
Is that the message that they wish to send?
Is that the message we wish to be sent?
Is that the message that Christ has charged them to preach?
Where is God in this?
Complete Article HERE!