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.

HypocritesAfter 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.”

Complete Article HERE!

It’ll be a miracle if a new pope ushers in real change in a decaying Church

By Colette Browne

THE resignation of Pope Benedict has prompted much debate about his legacy but another question also arises — why do so many people in this country continue to care about an anachronistic institution that doesn’t want them as members?
It’s ironic really. Senior Church figures whine about the increasing marginalisation of religion in society without ever conceding that it is their own intransigent dogma that is to blame for its increasing irrelevance. lightening strikes St Peter's

While the behaviour of the Catholic Church is hard to comprehend, so too is that of à la carte Catholics determined to remain part of an organisation with core teachings many find offensive or, frankly, ridiculous. Personally, I have some degree of sympathy for the view of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who last year implored lapsed Catholics to have the courage of their non-convictions and stop cloaking themselves in the comfort blanket of a faith they no longer possess.

There should be no confusion. It’s not as if the Church’s strident views on a host of controversial social issues — like homosexuality and contraception — are shrouded in any mystery. In his infamous letter on the pastoral care of homosexual people, written in 1986, the then Cardinal Ratzinger was unequivocal. “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

“Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not,” he wrote.

Anyone who doesn’t believe that homosexuality is “a disordered sexual inclination” is engaging in “deceitful propaganda” which is “profoundly opposed to the teaching of the Church”.

But wait. All is not entirely lost. Renouncing homosexual acts and living a chaste existence will allow gay people to “dedicate their lives to understanding the nature of God’s personal call to them”.

In short, you can spend your life as a self-hating homosexual, tormented with the knowledge that God instilled in you such disgusting urges as a sort of bizarre penance, or you can simply ignore all of that guff and get on with your life.

The stark choice between abstinence and damnation is something of a recurring theme when it comes to much Church teaching. In his 1968 encyclical, Humane Vitae, Pope Paul VI laid out the unambiguous Catholic position on contraception — it’s against God’s divine plan.

“It is not licit, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil so that good may follow … even when the intention is to safeguard or promote individual, family or social wellbeing.”

Couples wishing to plan their families were told to roll the dice and rely on the rhythm method. Bizarre as it seems now, this view persisted in Ireland up until the early 1980s, even after a young mother was forced to go to the Supreme Court, in 1973, to fight for the right to import contraceptives after her doctor told her another pregnancy could kill her.

While there may still be some devout Catholics who adhere to this teaching, the suspicion must be that most happily ignore it yet the Church’s position hasn’t changed a jot in the intervening 40 years.

“One cannot accept the hypothesis that a slight moral disorder, on the lines of venial sin, is at stake … for the Magisterium contraception is such a morally disordered form of behaviour that it constitutes gravely sinful matter,” explained professor of moral theology, Fr Lino Ciccone.

The only softening was an admission by Pope Benedict, two years ago, that the use of contraceptives was acceptable “in certain cases”, for example by gay prostitutes to reduce the risk of HIV.

However, the Vatican later stressed that the Pope was not redefining Catholic teaching and the pope had merely “considered an exceptional situation in which the exercise of sexuality represents a real risk to the lives of others”.

So, if you’re married and using contraceptives you are still engaging in “gravely sinful” behaviour. Meanwhile, it goes without saying that those unmarried people living in sin — with contraceptives or without — are hopeless cases whose eternal reward will likely be a fiery affair.

While the Church is happy to see women barefoot and pregnant, it definitely doesn’t want to see them ordained and anywhere near an altar. To understand why a penis is the most important qualification when becoming a priest, the faithful are asked to delve back into the mists of time and remember that Jesus chose 12 male apostles.

Writing in 1994, Pope John Paul II repeated this mantra, saying the Church therefore had no authority to ordain women, while Pope Benedict urged Catholics, seeking a more nuanced explanation, to submit to the “radicalism of obedience”. Basically, just accept it. In case there was any lingering confusion, the Vatican, in 2010, said that anyone involved in the ordination of women was engaged in a grave crime against the church, on a par with child abuse, and would be instantly excommunicated. Strangely, the fact that there were no female apostles is reason enough to debar women from ever being ordained, but the fact that the same apostles were married is not seen as convincing evidence that priests should also be allowed to marry. None of this makes any sense, but that doesn’t stop otherwise erudite members of the hierarchy trotting this out as a supposedly credible excuse when asked about the lack of women in positions of authority in the Church.

MEANWHILE, a recent discovery by a Harvard professor, who has found a scrap of 4th-century papyrus that indicates early Christians believed that Jesus was married and his wife was an apostle, could prove most inconvenient for the Church.

While the scrap of papyrus is still undergoing tests to prove its authenticity, a number of preliminary examinations by experts have found no evidence of any forgery — a minor detail that has not stopped the Vatican from claiming that it is a dud in order to avoid any awkward questions.

Instead of encouraging dialogue and debate about contested teachings, the hierarchy advises conflicted Catholics to either shut up or sling their hook — and then professes bafflement when church attendance is down and their archaic views don’t gain any traction in public debates.

Religious faith is a matter for each individual’s conscience, but the line of demarcation between faith and habit seems to have grown increasingly blurred for many still maintaining a tangential relationship with an organisation that displays so little comprehension of the reality of their lives.

The election of a new pope is certainly a historic occasion, but there has been no indication that a modernising or revitalising force is waiting in the wings to breath life into a decaying institution.

Once the pomp and spectacle is over, it is likely that nothing substantive will have changed and the inexorable decline of the church in the West will continue unabated.

Complete Article HERE!

Lower house of French parliament approves bill that would legalize gay marriage, adoption

France’s lower house of parliament has approved a sweeping bill to legalize gay marriage and allow same-sex couples to adopt children.

President Francois Hollande’s Socialists have pushed the measure through the National Assembly and put France on track to join about a dozen, mostly European nations that grant marriage and adoption rights to homosexuals.

husband & husband

The measure, approved in a 329-to-229 vote Tuesday, comes despite an array of demonstrations in recent weeks by opponents of the “marriage for all” bill. Polls show most French support legalizing gay marriage, though that backing softens when children come into play.

The Assembly has been debating the bill and voting on its individual articles in recent weeks. The overall bill now goes to the Senate, which is also controlled by the Socialists and their allies.

Pope favorite has defended African ‘Kill the Gays’ laws

After Pope Benedict XVI’s shock resignation due to his ill health, one of the top contenders for the post is Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson

BY JOE MORGAN

The top three candidates for Pope are all vehemently anti-LGBT, with one defending African laws punishing gay people with death.

Cardinal_Peter_TurksonPope Benedict XVI resigned earlier today (11 February), with the 85-year-old citing ill health and his advancing age.

Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, has said many of the laws imposed on gay people in Africa are an ‘exaggeration.’

Last year, the National Catholic Register reported the Cardinal saying it is important people understand the ‘reasons’ why some African governments have created legislation against homosexuality.

Turkson argues the ‘intensity of the reaction is probably commensurate with tradition’, saying the African culture needs to be respected.

‘When you’re talking about what’s called “an alternative lifestyle”, are those human rights?’ he said.

‘There’s a subtle distinction between morality and human rights, and that’s what needs to be clarified.’

In over 30 African countries, homosexuality is illegal and punishments range from public whippings to jail time and capital punishment.

Other favorites for Pope include Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze and Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet.

In a 2003 speech at Georgetown University in the UK, Arinze likened homosexuality with pornography, infanticide and adultery.

He has also opposed religious people wearing rainbow sashes, who prove they are ‘showing their opposition to Church teaching on a major issue of natural law and so disqualify themselves from being given Holy Communion.’

Like Turkson and Arinze, Ouellet has regularly spoken out against homosexuality.

As the same-sex marriage legislation was being debated in Canada, he warned anti-gay speakers could be brought to the ‘court because I am teaching against homosexuality as part of the doctrine of the Catholic Church.’

He has also referred to homosexuality as an ‘abomination’, and the path to equal rights for gay people as a ‘black cloud over America.’

However he has also apologized for Catholic attitudes prior to 1960 that promoted ‘anti-Semitism, racism, indifference to First Nations and discrimination against women and homosexuals.’

Pope Benedict XVI will leave his post on 28 February, where there will be a vacant seat. As there will be no need for a time of traditional mourning, the Vatican will decide on the next pope by the end of March.

Complete Article HERE!