Faith & Sex – Page 104 – Hear Our Voices

March 8, 2013

Former Catholics say rigid church forced them to leave

Opposition to female ordination and the prohibition on marriage for priests are among the factors causing an exodus from the Catholic Church.

By: Leslie Scrivener
Joanna Manning, former nun, award-winning religion teacher, advocate for the poor and activist-intellectual, was battle-weary.

For decades she had challenged the Catholic Church, arguing for women’s ordination, the right of priests to marry and accountability in repeated sexual abuse crises.

So Manning, once the public face of the reform movement in Catholic Canada and a persistent burr in the side of the church establishment, decamped a decade ago.

She is now a priest in the Anglican Church.

“I did go through a period of grieving for the loss of the vision I’d grown up with after Vatican II,” says Manning, now 69, referring to the 1962-1965 council to modernize the church. “But the church hierarchy had shut down and retreated . . .”

Critics say the Catholic Church hierarchy is disconnected from many if not most of its followers on issues of reform. Theologian Hans Kung writes that a recent poll in Germany shows 85 per cent of Catholics say priests should be allowed to marry, 79 per cent say divorced persons should have permission to remarry in the church and 75 per cent favour ordaining women.

“There’s a catastrophic shortage of priests, in Europe and in Latin America and Africa,” Kung wrote in the New York Times last week. “Huge numbers have left the church or gone into ‘internal emigration,’ especially in the industrialized countries.”

Around the world there are 49,000 parishes without a resident priest pastor.

The question, says Kung, author of the forthcoming book Can the Church Still Be Saved? , is whether cardinals, gathering to elect a new pope — likely in the next 10 days — will discuss progressive issues, or be “muzzled, as they were at the last conclave, in 2005, to keep them in line.”

In Canada many churches have closed and priests have been brought in from other countries to serve. The Catholic Register has reported that in the Archdiocese of Halifax, elderly priests have been brought out of retirement to serve in parishes.

In the sprawling diocese of London, 42 Catholic churches — including half those in Windsor — closed between 2006 and 2008. About one-third of the remaining parishes are “clustered” or share a priest. Declining attendance, the shortage of priests and the high costs of maintaining old buildings have all contributed to the shuttering, says Connie Paré, the diocese’s director of pastoral planning. “It was a very painful process.”

Speaking from her Bloor West home, Manning recalls of her break with Catholicism that she “had put too much energy into something in which I could see no future.” Her spiky white hair, jeans and purple jacket, worn with a clerical collar, contribute to her youthful appearance. “At my age I could no longer give my life over to resisting.”

She looked elsewhere for a place to practise her faith and found, about 10 years ago, San Lorenzo Anglican church on Dufferin St., which has a Spanish-speaking congregation.

“I’d been in exile and alien in my own church,” says Manning, who received horrific hate mail for her views. “Finally, I’d found a place where I was accepted for who I was without having to check anything at the door, including my brain.”

About five years after she joined the San Lorenzo community, Manning, who is single and has two adult sons and two grandchildren, was unprepared when her fellow parishioners suggested she consider the Anglican priesthood. “It was like I was surprised by the Spirit.”

Women have been ordained as Anglican priests in Canada since 1976.

Manning was ordained in 2011. More than half of those who attended the service were Catholic.

Among them was Ted Schmidt, retired teacher, author and former editor of the Catholic New Times. “This was a woman so far ahead of the institutional leadership she would be shot as the enemy,” says Ted Schmidt, a church progressive. “She’s a prophetic person.”

Manning now works as an assistant curate at two parishes, the inner city All Saints Sherbourne and All Saints Kingsway. She finds herself living with a “deep, abiding joy. A place where I can exercise all my gifts.”

She compares her present state to 10 years ago. “My energies were being drained by struggle. I felt a real outsider. I’d been rejected and was on the fringes of the church. Today my energy is so positive, I feel a flowering . . . at my age to have a second chance to do God’s work in the world.”

The Anglican Church has also attracted Catholic men who wanted to marry and raise families as much as they wanted to be priests. The Rev. Canon Joseph Asselin has been the rector of St. Cuthbert’s Anglican Church in Oakville for the past 13 years.

He was raised Catholic — and was a student of Ted Schmidt — and was so committed that as a young person never once missed Sunday mass over 20 years. His mother continues to attend mass up to four times a week.

Asselin was steeped in Catholic social teaching, he says, and was taught to challenge the culture of consumerism and materialism. His experiences in the church were positive. “I was so happy to have healthy role models and mentors.”
But he could never consider being a priest in the Catholic Church. “This could never happen because I always wanted to be a husband and father. Probably, what I find the greatest joy in is being a father.”

He and his wife, Maureen, an elementary school teacher, have a teenage daughter and son, whose photos adorn his church office.

“The Catholic Church is turning its back on a lot of people who have a genuine calling to be priests, and they are the poorer for it,” says Asselin, 49. “No surprise,” he adds, “women can have the same calling.”
He counts many Catholics in his congregation and has married divorced Catholics who do not want to go through painful, lengthy annulments.

“I am able to relate to families here, with all the joys and challenges of being in a family,” he says.
He adds that the Anglican Church has options for men who feel the calling to live celibate lives as monks.

“When you see priests not leading sexually health lives, it saddens me, because they have been asked to a live a life that is not really for them.”

A radical option for Catholic women who feel called to the priesthood is to be ordained in the Catholic Church.
The price is excommunication.

Monica Kilburn-Smith, a 52-year-old Calgary hospice chaplain and mother of two, is a member of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests group, and was ordained in 2008. “The first priests and bishops in our movement were ordained by male bishops in full communion with Rome, who did this out of their own conviction/conscience that it was wrong for women to be refused this sacrament,” she explains.

Pope John Paul II said that the church has no authority to ordain women, using the argument that the first apostles were all men.

Later, Pope Benedict XVI declared that anyone taking in a woman’s ordination was committing a grave sin.

Kilburn-Smith’s St. Brigid of Kildare Catholic Faith Community is growing, she says, with 200 on the mailing list and up to 60 coming to a monthly service held in a United church. By the fall she hopes to say mass twice monthly.

“When women come to mass for the first time and see a woman in vestments and all that represents, on the surface and at deeper levels, it hits them and makes them cry,” says Kilburn-Smith. “It’s not about me; it’s seeing a woman as a person as a representative of God.”

The movement is not just about getting women into the priesthood, but also about a renewed church for the 21st century.

Why not leave the church and join a denomination that ordains women? “To leave women’s voices out just seems wrong,” Kilburn-Smith says.

“If you see something isn’t right, and you feel called in your own faith, why would you go? The Anglican Church changed because women were ordained. It didn’t come from the hierarchy.”

Complete Article HERE!

March 7, 2013

Flocks and shepherds

As a conclave gathers to elect a pope, many in the Catholic church want change

WANTED: man of God; good at languages; preferably under 75; extensive pastoral experience; no record of covering up clerical sex abuse, deeply spiritual and, mentally, tough as old boots. It is a lot to ask, but that is the emerging profile of the man many of his fellow-cardinals would like to see replace Benedict XVI as the next pope.

On March 4th the princes of the church began a series of preliminary “general congregations”, the first step to electing a pontiff. They have much to discuss. After four sessions, they had still not—as expected—fixed a date for the Conclave, the electoral college, made up of cardinals below the age of 80, which will actually choose the next pope.

The papal spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said the members of the general congregation, who include older cardinals, are not “hurrying things”. By March 6th, when they adjourned, the assembly had heard 51 speeches. As Father Lombardi tactfully put it, they spoke “freely and with rather effective colour”. That is code for candour—even bluntness. Indeed, given the crises the church faces, delicacy might seem remiss.

The procedure is usually to identify the main threats facing the church and then find the cardinal best able to deal with them. Of the subjects cited by Father Lombardi, half concerned the Vatican itself. Deeper questions include the loss of religious faith in Europe; the challenge from evangelical Protestantism in Latin America; persecution of Christians in the Middle East and clerical sex abuse. But none is as pressing as the turmoil in the Roman Curia, the church’s central administration.

Benedict, intellectually fearless yet personally timid, was unable to keep order. Many in Rome believe that was the true reason for his departure. The Curia has become a battleground. Prelates loyal to the secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who in many cases were appointed by him or come from his native region of Piedmont, are at furious odds with papal diplomats who resented the appointment of a secretary of state with no knowledge of their business. Other feuds abound too. The leaking of documents by the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, though apparently motivated by genuine dismay at decisions taken in the Vatican, was entwined with this venomous plotting and squabbling.

Following the will of God
The findings of an investigative panel of three cardinals will cast a long shadow over the conclave. Last month an Italian newspaper wrote of a ring of gay prelates, some being blackmailed by outsiders. In the first general congregation, three cardinals—reportedly all Europeans—demanded (in vain) access to the findings. If the report will indeed be kept secret until it is handed to the new pope, it is unclear who made that decision. Secrecy fosters suspicions that the contents are dreadful.

The episode may also strengthen the resolve of the mainly English- and German-speaking cardinals who want a vigorous pope to clean up the Curia. This was last reformed under Paul VI, who reigned from 1963 to 1978. Cardinal George Pell, the burly archbishop of Sydney, said he wanted “a strategist, a decision-maker, a planner, somebody who has got strong pastoral capacities already demonstrated so that he can take a grip of the situation.”

For I have sinned

Among those watching the decision making in Rome with apprehension, fear and optimism is the Catholic priesthood. In many countries, their declining and ageing ranks are beset by the revelation of past scandals—both at the parish and at the top. This week Scotland’s most senior cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, admitted that his sexual conduct at times “has fallen below the standards” expected of him. A radio interview by his former counterpart in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, marked by a nervous laugh and opaque language, compounded the ire.

Victims of sexual abuse believe the reckoning has barely begun. They want not just proper investigation, but apologies and punishments—and in some cases cash. For them, Benedict exemplified the secretive, cautious response that aggravated the misconduct. It will be hard for any new pope to meet their expectations.

Along with frustrations of church politics and shame about misconduct, attendance at mass is falling. In America it has declined by over a third since 1960. In Britain data from the 2011 census show a similar trend, with numbers of Christians down 12 percentage points since 2001. Average Sunday attendance has fallen for the past 20 years. In mostly Catholic Italy only 39% attend on a monthly basis.

But parish life goes on. Timothy Radcliffe, the former head of the Dominican order, says priests are mostly happy, albeit overstretched. After a peak of 110 vocations in England and Wales in 1996, the figure dropped to a mere 19 in 2006. But this year 38 ordinations are expected. In a reversal of the old days of Western missionaries, many were born overseas. Father Stephen Wang, of Allen Hall seminary in London, counts men from Africa, India and Australia in this year’s cohort of 54.

Movements such as “Youth 2000” and World Youth Day encourage vocations through what has been called “evangelical Catholicism”, says Father Wang, in which the faith is “more confident” about presenting itself. Traditionalist groups such as the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter or the Institute of Christ the King are attracting younger members. The provost of the Brompton Oratory, a traditionalist church in central London, is Father Julian Large, a 43-year-old former journalist who draws a youthful following.

The brighter shore

In some respects the woes of the church in the West seem far away from the parts of the world where it is thriving. In a leafy sanctuary from the heat and frenzy of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s biggest city, Father Aurel da Silva sits under a tree on the tidy front lawn of a monastery. On the wall behind him hangs an oversize portrait of Michel Nielly, who a half-century ago established it as a beachhead for the Dominican order. Today it houses some 30 seminarians from across the region and its small wooden chapel attracts Abidjan’s elites for Sunday mass.

Near the guardhouse, employees raise money for local charities by selling mushrooms that grow in the monastery’s garden. Ceramic water filters distributed to the poor are also displayed prominently. A pink leaflet posted on a bulletin board advertises job-training programmes for unemployed youth. When violence engulfed Côte d’Ivoire after its disputed 2010 presidential election, the towering St Paul’s cathedral in the heart of Abidjan sheltered nearly 2,000 people.

The rapidly growing African Catholic church, says Father da Silva, has great ambitions as a social force. But autonomy must be the watchword. The doctrinal debates and papal intrigue in Rome hardly concern him. “I haven’t spent time in Rome, but I don’t need to,” he says. “What I do here is more important.”

Some of his seminarians have softer attitudes to the Vatican, but they insist that the church’s social message is secondary: spirituality comes first. The African church is no hotbed of liberalism. Its leading contender for the papacy, the Ghanaian cardinal Peter Turkson, is widely regarded as a conservative in the mold of Benedict.

But one of Father da Silva’s older colleagues stakes out a more radical position. The church must evolve, he says. His priorities are: the end of clerical celibacy, women’s ordination, and, above all, greater tolerance for dissent: “You have to accept other people’s way of thinking.”

Those views chime across continents and oceans. In the beautiful, desolate west of Ireland is the village of Moygownagh, the home parish of Father Brendan Hoban. He is a co-founder of the Association of Catholic Priests, which aspires to represent the 2m Irish people who attend mass at least once a month. It is campaigning for an end to celibacy, “inclusive ministry” (code for women priests) and a rethinking of sexual teaching, especially on contraception.

Nearly a quarter of Ireland’s 4,500 priests (and probably a higher share of its able-bodied, energetic ones) has joined. It is in touch with similar bodies in Austria, where a grass-roots initiative among priests incurred a papal rebuke last year, as well as France, the Czech Republic, Australia and the United States.

The Irish association has special credibility. It speaks for a country where the hierarchy is reeling from horrific revelations about abuse in church-run institutions and clerical cover-ups, but where the population, despite the onrush of secularism, remains relatively pious by the standards of the rich world.

The village exemplifies both the crisis and strength of Irish Catholicism. Half of its residents attend weekly mass and most of the remainder look to the church for rites of passage, from first communion to anniversary masses for the dead. Despite the recession, generous donations are paying for church refurbishment.

Moygownagh belongs to a small diocese with 32 priests serving 22 parishes; that number sounds high, and it reflects a flood of vocations in the 1960s and 1970s. But only seven priests are under 55. Father Hoban is nearly 65. When he retires, he expects that the village will be left without a priest of its own for the first time in centuries. In his parents’ time, he recalls, a local farming family would be proud if a son joined the priesthood. Now, he says, even a “faithful Catholic family might panic” if a son announced a similar vocation. “They would feel he was embarking on a life of stress, isolation and low social prestige.”

Almost all the church’s recent woes can be ascribed, in Father Hoban’s view, to the top-down decision-making which has marked the past two papacies. Like many Catholic liberals, he feels that the trouble started when the church hierarchy hijacked the devolutionary reforms of the second Vatican council and blocked change or implemented it badly.

The result, viewed from an Irish village, is that “Rome doesn’t listen to the national bishops; the bishops don’t tell Rome the truth because Rome doesn’t want to hear it; the bishops don’t listen to the priests, the priests haven’t listened enough to the people.” With lay involvement, the child-abuse cover-ups would not have happened. He does not want the church to be “literally democratic”, but nor should it “preserve structures inherited from the Roman empire.”

What do priests of his school expect from the conclave? “In some ways we don’t hope for that much, because all the cardinals have been appointed under the present order. But we hope that some can see the dysfunctionality of the Vatican in its present form…the cardinals need to bite the bullet and appoint somebody who can challenge the Curia.”

Complete Article HERE!

March 6, 2013March 6, 2013

Shadow of shame: The conflict facing gay priests

I am delighted that my research and I are referenced in this fine article.

By Dani Garavelli

LOOKING back from a distance of more than 20 years, Fr Joe can see that his decision to join the priesthood was motivated in part by his homosexuality. Coming of age in the 1970s, when there was still a huge stigma attached to coming out as gay, it provided an alternative to getting married and having children.

“I was hugely idealistic and genuinely believed in the priesthood, but I think it was also the only respectable way to be Catholic and single,” he says. “I wouldn’t have recognised it at the time, but I think I was trying to escape having to tell my family about my sexuality or even having to face up to it properly myself.”

Once ordained, however, he realised being gay in a church which considers homosexuality to be intrinsically disordered brings problems of its own. Prey to the same temptations as everyone else, but unable to talk openly about them, many homosexual priests find themselves feeling undervalued and isolated. Trying to navigate their way in a highly sexualised society, with little or no pastoral support, it’s hardly surprising if they sometimes find it difficult to keep their vows.

“I think celibacy is always a struggle, it’s the same for all priests – in fact it’s the same for married people – you try to keep your integrity, to stay true to what you have been called to, ” says Fr Joe, who was a priest in Scotland but has now moved abroad. “I belong to a religious order that means you live with other guys; it means you have emotional support and your chances of being lonely are less. The ones I feel really sorry for are the diocesan priests who are alone in a parish. I think celibacy must be even more difficult for them. They have no-one to confide in when they are feeling low or horny or any other normal human way of feeling.”

As with any same-sex environment, such as a boarding school or prison, there can also be a kind of “super-heated effect” in the seminary or church where, regardless of sexual orientation, men have crushes on other men and that is more likely to spill over into sexual behaviour when the whole subject of sexuality is taboo. “I think that is something gay men in the Church are prone to,” Fr Joe says. “Because the subject is hidden, it creates this secret club kind of environment because priests who are gay are only likely to be open with other priests who are gay, you become part of a secret club, not because you want to, but because your peers are your support group.”

Fr Joe’s experiences are not rare. Studies have suggested the priesthood attracts a disproportionate number of gay men, with Dominican Friar-turned-journalist Mark Dowd suggesting earlier this week, the figure could be as high as 50 per cent. Such statistics have become headline news because even as the Church has become increasingly strident in its position on such issues as gay marriage it is being claimed that an increasing number of homosexual priests, Bishops and even Cardinals are breaking their vow of chastity.

There have, of course, been many scandals in the past involving heterosexual priests and Bishops, who have had affairs and fathered children. But now Italian newspapers are speculating Benedict XVI’s unprecedented resignation was inspired by a dossier revealing a powerful network of actively gay priests in the highest echelons of the Vatican. The dossier was compiled in the wake of the Vatileaks scandal, which saw papers taken from the Pope’s desk published in a blockbuster book, and after Italian journalist Carmelo Abbate took a hidden camera into Rome’s gay nightclubs to expose a group of priests who said mass by day and had sex with male escorts by night.

Back at home, there have been controversies too. In 2008, a man was jailed for blackmailing a priest he had encountered at a meeting point for gay men in Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow. And now, of course, there are the allegations that Cardinal Keith O’Brien engaged in “inappropriate behaviour” with several priests, allegations which, though contested, led him to step down.

From a secular viewpoint, the scandal lies less in the sexuality of the priests, but in the perceived hypocrisy of an institution which is seen as homophobic being an apparent cauldron of gay activity. But this contradiction also raises questions as to the degree to which the Catholic Church’s attitude towards homosexuality – and the climate of secrecy it engenders amongst gay priests – has contributed to its own travails.

The fact the priesthood is attractive to homosexuals is neither new nor surprising. Neither are the Church’s efforts to cover this up. Back in the 1980s, Richard Wagner, an openly gay priest from Illinois, who was completing a doctorate in human sexuality, interviewed 50 gay priests about their experiences in order to examine how they reconciled their own identity with the Church’s absolute ban on homosexual activity. As a result of the media firestorm surrounding the publication of his dissertation “Gay Catholic Priests: A Study Of Cognitive And Affective Dissonance”, he says he was hounded out of his religious order. “In one way, the Church is the perfect place for closeted homosexual to prosper,” he says. “But at some point, these people have to face their sexuality and either address it and become comfortable with it or have it contaminate the rest of their lives. When you live in the confines of the seminary there’s not the same kind of distraction you have when, after ordination, you are in ministry in a world awash with sexual imagery. Hopefully that washes over those who are healthy and integrated in terms of their sexuality, but those who are troubled are lost. I was merely pointing out there was a significant population of gay priests, good men who had committed their lives to the Church, who were struggling with their sexuality and there was no encouragement or help.”

The atmosphere such isolation fosters, the deep-seated shame it engenders, lends itself to exactly the kind of abuses of power or inappropriate behaviour O’Brien has been accused of. “A combination of the Church’s immature attitude to sex and the secrecy of the gay priest is a really powerful, really poisonous mix,” Fr Joe says.

The irony is that as society as a whole has become more accepting of homosexuality (and recent research suggests the Catholic laity is less concerned about issues like premarital and gay sex than other Christian denominations), the Church’s position has become more entrenched, with O’Brien, originally perceived as a liberal, at the vanguard of the campaign against same-sex marriage.

“They say their job is not to reflect society, but to challenge society, but I think the Church has lost its moral authority to speak about homosexuality because it has shown so little tolerance of and support for gay and lesbian people,” says Fr Joe, who went out of his way to ensure his Scottish parish was inclusive. “It says, ‘Oh it’s not the sinner we hate, it’s the sin,’ but to my mind, that’s rank hypocrisy.”

In the wake of the succession of sex abuse scandals which has shaken the Church over the past 10 years, the hierarchy tried to clamp down on the ordination of gay priests – a move which was hugely controversial, not only because of the hurt it caused existing gay priests, but also because it implied a connection between homosexuality and paedophilia.

Under the new policy, introduced in 2005, men with “transitory” homosexual leanings could be ordained following three years of chastity, but men with “deeply rooted” homosexual tendencies or those who were sexually active could not. The Church also introduced a tougher screening process. Many candidates for the priesthood in England and Wales, for example, are sent to St Luke’s Centre in Manchester, where they are subjected to a battery of psychological tests.

The sense they are not wanted has made existing gay priests feel even more demoralised. “There’s been a constant drip, drip, drip of negativity, taking away guys’ self-esteem, coming from this hypocritical section of the Church,” Fr Joe says.

Today Wagner runs a website and receives calls from troubled gay priests all over the world. Some of them, he says, want to lead the ascetic life they signed up for, others are looking for sexual fulfilment, but all are trying to reconcile two conflicting parts of their own personality – their vocation and their sexuality.

“They want to know how to navigate this maelstrom of sexual negativity and try to put that together with the Gospel message of authenticity and integrity and truthfulness, but it’s nearly impossible to do,” he says.

The fact that some highly placed gay clergymen endorse the Church’s line on homosexuality could be viewed as the height of cynicism, but others, who have seen the workings of the Church at close hand see it as a manifestation of their inner conflict. “There are a lot of self-hating priests, but there are others who are frightened – they feel they have to toe the line or they will be out of a living,” says Fr Joe.

Vatican adviser John Haldane has suggested one way out of the current crisis is to compel priests – gay or heterosexual – to renew their vow of celibacy or leave the Church. Yet it is hard to feel anything but sympathy for committed priests who took their vows before they really understood their own sexuality or how important the need for companionship might become in later life. “There are men who think they can take this vow and live up to it, especially if they are fairly young,” says Elena Curti, deputy editor of The Tablet. “They are full of enthusiasm and idealism and they can survive on that for the first decade or two, but in my experience, when they get older, into their 40s and 50s, they feel immensely isolated. They see their peers around them with children and a real, intense loneliness kicks in and it’s often at that stage they stage they leave.”

Since the Church can’t afford to lose any more clergy, it seems more sensible to relax the rules on marriage as O’Brien suggested days before he resigned. Celibacy is not a matter of doctrine and there are many liberals who would be happy to see it dropped. This feeling has been strengthened by the Church’s decision to welcome married Anglican priests into the fold. But relaxing the rule on celibacy would not help ease the plight of gay priests; if anything it would make it worse. They would have to continue to battle with their own sexuality while watching their peers enjoy loving relationships.

Fr Joe is realistic; he knows whoever becomes Pope, the Church’s attitude towards homosexuality is unlikely to be radically overhauled in the near future. So what changes would he like to see? “The first thing and the easiest thing in the world, is a change of tone. Notch the warmth up 10 degrees and stop talking about homosexuality in terms of sin and disorder,” he says. “Secondly if the Church wants authority to speak on that matter it needs to show a clear level of pastoral support for lesbian and gay people that is non-judgmental on a spiritual and practical level.

“Then you it look at how the doctrine of the Church is expressed – whether it accurately reflects a good understanding of anthropology or sociology or psychology, or whether the Church is operating from an outdated model.” Fr Joe says that’s a 100-year project. But one thing’s for sure, unless the Church starts to address the disparity between the homophobia it spouts and the conduct of its own priests soon, the new Pope is likely spend his time in the Vatican as his predecessor did – firefighting one sex scandal after another.

Complete Article HERE!

March 4, 2013

O’Brien priest worries that church wants to ‘crush’ him

Key figure behind allegations of inappropriate behaviour attacks Catholic church’s response to complaints

By Catherine Deveney

A key figure behind allegations of inappropriate behaviour by Cardinal Keith O’Brien has launched a powerful attack on the Catholic church’s response to the complaints, saying he fears the church hierarchy would “crush” him if they could.

Last Sunday the Observer revealed that the former priest, along with three serving priests, had reported O’Brien’s behaviour to the Vatican, prompting the UK’s most senior Catholic to resign the following day. Now the former priest, who says he was the subject of unwanted attention by O’Brien when he was a 20-year-old seminarian, has come forward to explain why he made his allegations public and to lambast the Scottish church leadership’s reaction to last week’s story.

He is “disappointed” by the “lack of integrity” shown by the Catholic church. “There have been two sensations for me this week. One is feeling the hot breath of the media on the back of my neck and the other is sensing the cold disapproval of the church hierarchy for daring to break ranks. I feel like if they could crush me, they would,” he told the Observer.

He added that he was shocked when Peter Kearney, director of communications for the church in Scotland, claimed O’Brien’s resignation was not linked to the Observer story and that the church did not know the details of the allegations.

Kearney said he was unable to comment on suggestions that a new complaint had been lodged as a result of last week’s story. When asked to outline the church’s programme of support for complainants, he said only that they would be directed to Antonio Mennini, the Papal Nuncio, the Vatican’s ambassador to Britain, to make a formal statement.

“The vacuum the church has created has allowed whimsy and speculation to distort the truth,” the priest said. “And the only support I have been offered is a cursory email with a couple of telephone numbers of counsellors hundreds of miles away from me. Anyway, I don’t need counselling about Keith O’Brien’s unwanted behaviour to me as a young man. But I may need counselling about the trauma of speaking truth to power.”

The former cleric says he feels that he, rather than the cardinal, has been the subject of scrutiny. “I have felt very alone and there is a tendency to become reclusive when people are trying to hunt you down.”

He said he felt particularly angered by demands that the identity of the four complainants be revealed: “To those who want to know my name I would say, what does that change? And what do you think I have done wrong?”

He said that when the four came forward to the church, they were asked to make sworn signed statements to Mennini. But they were also warned that if their complaints became public knowledge, they would cause “immense further damage to the church”. The church, he says, failed to act quickly and appropriately, adding that he fears the matter was in danger of being swept under the carpet.

“For me, this is about integrity. I thought it was best to let the men and women who put their hard-earned cash in the plate every Sunday know what has been happening. If you pay into something you have a right, but also a duty, to know what you are paying for.”

He said that the men’s complaints were not maliciously motivated. “I am as sinful as the next man – as my partner and pals frequently remind me. But this isn’t about trying to own the moral high ground. I feel compassion for O’Brien, more compassion than the church is showing me, but the truth has to be available – even when that truth is hard to swallow.”

He also dismissed suggestions that the accusations contain an element of homophobia. ” This is not about a gay culture or a straight culture. It’s about an open culture. I would be happy to see an openly gay bishop, cardinal, or pope. But the church acts as if sexual identity has to be kept secret.”

Complete Article HERE!

March 4, 2013

Cardinal O’Brien’s confession turns spotlight on Scottish Catholic church

Admission of sexual misconduct exposes former head cleric and church to claims of hypocrisy especially over gay rights

By Severin Carrell

The Scottish Roman Catholic church is facing a series of questions about the conduct of its former leader and its attacks on gay rights, after Cardinal Keith O’Brien admitted to a secret sexual life dating back decades.

O’Brien is expected to face a more detailed investigation by the Vatican after admitting to incidents of sexual misconduct throughout his career, which started in 1965.

After a week of denials over allegations of sexual conduct and approaches by four men, the cardinal said on Sunday he was guilty of conduct that had “fallen beneath the standards expected of me”.

In a statement that left questions unanswered about the nature of that misconduct, he added: “To those I have offended, I apologise and ask forgiveness. To the Catholic church and people of Scotland, I also apologise.”

Those admissions are likely to supersede the original Vatican investigation, first revealed by the Observer, into formal allegations levelled against O’Brien in early February by three serving priests in his former diocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, and a former priest.

The latter said he left the priesthood after he was sexually propositioned by O’Brien in the 1980s. Other incidents involving O’Brien, who became archbishop in 1985 and then cardinal in 2003, included a series of “drunken fumblings” and unwanted advances, church sources said.

His remarks are an admission that he breached ecclesiastical codes on celibacy and against homosexuality, and that his officials misled the Vatican, the Scottish church and the public in their denials following the Observer article.

While the Vatican inquiry is expected to remain confidential, and will be set up once 116 or so of the church’s cardinals gather in Rome elect Pope Benedict XVI’s successor within the coming days, it will ask O’Brien for further details about that misconduct.

It also exposes the cardinal and the Scottish church to claims of hypocrisy, and raises questions about whether other senior figures in the church knew about his private life and covered it up or failed to take action.

It also emerged last week that a fifth priest had reportedly made accusations to the Vatican against O’Brien late last year, concerning an incident in 2001. In 2003, O’Brien took office as a cardinal, signing an oath about upholding the church’s teachings: until then, he had been regarded as a liberal archbishop.

O’Brien has since become notorious among equal rights campaigners for his vigorous attacks on gay marriage and gay adoptions, calling homosexuality a “grotesque subversion” and “harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved”.

Colin MacFarlane, director of Stonewall Scotland, which named O’Brien “bigot of the year” last year, challenged the cleric and the Scottish church to explain why he had not apologised directly to the gay community.

“We note with sadness that the cardinal didn’t find it in him to apologise to gay people, their families and friends for the harm his vicious and cruel language caused,” he said.

Church officials confirmed on Monday that O’Brien had left Scotland for an undisclosed location to rest and escape the furore over his admission of misconduct. He had been due to attend this week’s conclave in the Vatican. Before being disgraced, he had been scheduled to visit a parish in Dunbar, East Lothian, after retiring on his 75th birthday later this month.

Professor John Haldane, an adviser to the Vatican and a leading commentator on Scottish Catholic affairs at St Andrews University, said the O’Brien affair raised a number of “broad lessons” for the church and a challenge to the Scottish church to reform itself.

Writing in the weekly Catholic newspaper the Tablet, Haldane said the church was guilty of double standards for denouncing homosexuality as an inherently disordered condition while knowing many of its priests and trainees at its seminaries were gay, or wrestling with their sexuality. Regardless of their sexuality, priests ought to be made to explicitly pledge to remain wholly celibate or leave the priesthood, Haldane said.

He added that the Scottish church should abolish at least half of its eight diocese – a throwback to the size and power of the pre-reformation church.

The Scottish church is struggling to fill five bishop vacancies. It has only three full-time, permanent bishops or archbishops in post. It needed a new body of at most six lay advisers to help in that transformation, Haldane said.

Catherine Deveney, the journalist who broke the original story in the Observer, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme none of the four accusers she had reported on was pursuing a personal vendetta against O’Brien.

“One of the individuals concerned said that to take the cardinal on as an individual himself would have been like running into a brick wall,” she said, adding: “These men are spiritual men – they want to see an open and transparent Catholic church as a result of this, they don’t want to see it destroyed.”

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