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A Lavender Mafia?
Some weeks after Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation, the Italian press went wild, reporting that his decision had been prompted by his receipt of a report issued by a commission of three Cardinals whom he had asked to investigate the so-called Vatileaks affair. That report, we were told, revealed the existence within the Curia of a network of sexually active homosexual prelates who were being blackmailed by outsiders.
That such a commission was appointed and that it issued a report is true. The members were Julián Herranz of Spain, Salvatore De Giorgi of Italy, and Jozef Tomko, from Slovakia. Initially, the Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi refused to comment on the contents of the report. Later, however, he denied that the press account was correct.
Soon thereafter, The Observer in Britain reported that three serving priests and a former priest had lodged a formal complaint with the Papal Nuncio in Britain, charging Keith O’Brien, Cardinal-Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh and Primate of the Catholic Church in Scotland, with having tried, in some cases successfully, to take advantage of them sexually some 30 years ago when he was spiritual director in a seminary and after he became a bishop. It was later revealed that last year another priest had made similar allegations about O’Brien’s conduct 11 years before. Soon after these revelations, O’Brien was forced to resign from his post. At first, he denied the truth of the charges. Later, he confessed his guilt.
If Cardinal O’Brien’s misconduct were an isolated case, I would be inclined to believe Father Lombardi’s dismissal of the reports in the Italian press. A close friend who knows the Vatican very well indeed suspects that the focus of the report issued by the three Cardinals is graft. “In Italy,” as he put it, “theft is a way of life.”
It would not, however, be surprising were there blackmail involved as well. It is not as if there have not, in recent years, been examples of homoerotically inclined prelates in the United States being blackmailed by former sexual partners, and it is a reasonable guess that there has been a lot more of this sort of thing going on than we know even now. The world of the Catholic clergy is a secretive world governed by a code of silence. Cardinal O’Brien’s misconduct escaped public notice for more than thirty years.
Some time in the 1980s, I became aware that some of the Catholic seminaries in this country were little better than brothels. I read no public reports, but I heard stories. The diocesan seminary at Catholic University in Washington, DC was notorious. In the late 1990s, I had a conversation with a leading Catholic layman that brought home to me how deep the rot went. He knew a priest who, upon being named to head a diocesan seminary, discovered that chastity was not there the norm. He made an appointment to see the Bishop of the diocese for the purpose of informing him of the problem, and he asked permission to weed out those who were sexually active. “If we do not do this now,” he reportedly said, “there will be terrible trouble when these young men are unleashed on the diocese.” The Bishop replied that he wanted nothing done. “I want numbers,” he said, and numbers he got. Not long after I had this conversation, this particular Bishop became an Archbishop, and soon thereafter he was named a Cardinal. The diocese he left behind has been a cesspool ever since.
It is against this background that the scandals of recent years become explicable. Much has been written about pedophile priests. But the truth is that, in the priesthood, genuine pedophiles were and are exceedingly rare. As the report commissioned by the American hierarchy some years back revealed, the vast majority of the victims were not pre-pubescent children. They were adolescent boys. Pedophilia was not a plague; pederasty of the sort common in classical Greece was. The seminaries were churning out a generation of sexually active, homoerotically inclined priests. Like many a heterosexual, some of these men found young people in the bloom of youth highly attractive. And the bishops – many of whom had strayed in their younger days – did not regard with great horror what these priests were doing.
I have long thought that the sexual revolution of the late 1960s had engendered a crisis within the Roman Catholic clergy. There had always been priests who were homoerotically inclined. In times past, the priesthood offered men who were not at all attracted to women a place of respect and responsibility within the community. As long as chastity was the norm, I reasoned, it was relatively easy for them to observe the vow of celibacy. Once, however, chastity ceased to be the norm in the larger society, their situation became more difficult.
I still suspect that there is a lot to this analysis. But I recently became aware that the problem was serious long before the late 1960s. In Jemez Springs, New Mexico, there once existed a Monastery of the Servants of the Paraclete named Via Coeli. From 1947 to 1968, Father Gerald Fitzgerald, who had founded the order, was the order’s Father General. In those days, the Catholic hierarchy sent wayward priests to this monastery for treatment. Most of these men had drinking problems, but, even then, there were priests who abused children and adolescents, and, over time, Father Fitzgerald came to believe that these men were incurable and that they should never be allowed to get near children again.
There is online a dossier including some of the letters that Father Fitzgerald wrote in the 1950s and 1960s. If you want to come to grips with what has happened in recent years, you should read them – all of them. On 12 September 1952, for example, Father Fitzgerald writes to the Bishop of Reno, Nevada about one such priest:
His record here was one of conformity to the rule and cooperation yet with no marked indication of fervor or penitential zeal. We find it quite common, almost universal with the handful of men we have seen in the last five years who have been under similar charges – we find it universal that they seem to be lacking in appreciation of the serious situation. As a class they expect to bound back like tennis balls on to the court of priestly activity. I myself would be inclined to favor laicization for any priest, upon objective evidence, for tampering with the virtue of the young. My argument being, from this point onward the charity to the Mystical Body should take precedence over charity to the individual and when a man has so far fallen away from the purpose of the priesthood the very best that should be offered is his Mass in the seclusion of a monastery. Moreover, in practice, real conversions will be found to be extremely rare. Many bishops believe men are never free from the approximate danger once they have begun. Hence leaving them on duty or wandering from diocese to diocese is contributing to scandal or at least to the approximate danger of scandal.
Five years later, he wrote to an Archbishop in a similar vein, describing those “who have seduced or attempted to seduce little boys or girls” as “devils” and “a class of rattlesnake,” and he suggested that they be confined to an isolated island. One letter, written on 10 September 1964, shows that Father Fitzgerald had expressed these concerns directly to Pope Paul VI in an audience.
In that same letter, Father Fitzgerald alludes to another difficulty he has encountered that bears on the reports in the Italian press:
When I was ordained forty-three years ago, homosexuality was a practically unknown rarity. Today, it is – in the wake of World War II – rampant among men. And whereas seventeen years ago, eight out of ten problems here would represent the alcoholic, now in the last year or so our admission ratio would be approximately 5-2-3: five being alcoholics; two
would be what we call “heart cases” (natural affection towards women); and three representing aberrations involving homosexuality. More alarming still is that among these of the 3 out of 10 class 2 out of 3 have been young priests.I mention this because it would seem in America at least this type of problem is more devastating to the good standing of the priesthood than anything else. It is very infectious and the prognosis for recovery extremely unfavorable. The majority of psychiatrists, physicians, and experienced priests are not sanguine of permanent recovery. Therefore, it would seem that more careful screening – especially the study of family background and personal motivation – is definitely in order.
Bishop, do not quote me because this is given you in strictest confidence, but we know of several seminaries that have been deeply infected and this of course leads to a wide infection. Therefore there should be a very strict discipline of dismissal and a very clear and printed teaching in the moral theology course that mutual masturbation is a mortal sin. Priests develop a blind spot on this matter which in my opinion involves very likely the fixation of impenitence. Seldom will you find these men evidencing consciousness of the gravity of what they have done. And this apparently is represented in the strange attitude of Bishops who place these men after reactivation in assignments where they are most exposed to a recurrence of a vicious habit which the majority of experts would consider practically incurable.
Decades before I became aware of what was happening in some of the seminaries, the problem had already appeared. It did not emerge as a response to the sexual revolution. It was already there, and the advice offered by Father Fitzgerald, who was removed from his post in 1968, was not taken.
The scandals that have rocked the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and elsewhere have deep roots. Things no doubt got worse in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. But they have been bad for more than half a century. Scotland’s Cardinal O’Brien may not be typical, but his is by no means an isolated case. I would not be surprised were we to discover that the reports in the Italian press are more accurate than the Vatican spokesman has led us to believe. The next Pope will have a great deal of housecleaning to do.
Published in General
It isn’t that marriage cures anyone of bad inclinations. I don’t for a minute think you’d cure even one man of a propensity to one of these sins by allowing him to both be a priest and to marry. But you might well make that same man much less inclined to become a priest. I think that would be a very desirable result. ·
How so? Specifically, in what way would the incentives be different than for gay priests? Of the Anglican priests I studied with and that I worship under when attending services with my wife, roughly half of them are gay, despite (heterosexual) marriage being available to them. If you had a system where being married was essentially required for ordination, as the Orthodox church kind of does (it’s not a theoretical requirement, but it works that way), then that would have an impact, but that strikes me as quite a big leap to make.
And not enormously necessary; the numbers of cases have been declining massively over recent decades, and this seems likely to continue.
It strikes you as contradictory that a cleric could be close to God without enormous secular power?
No, what strikes me as contradictory is that someone could spend nearly a quarter century as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith but remain unaware of — or unwilling to take effective action to end — horrendous, repeated sexual abuse committed under color of the Church’s authority. There’s plenty of evidence that the CDF had plenty of evidence.
Edit: Continued from comment #94: I should clarify that this the rate of anglican priests is higher because I’m mostly in contact with the anglo-catholic wing of the Anglican church, but the Catholic church has a pretty catholic aesthetic, too, if often a little less so than Pusey House.
On Judgement Day, everyone is accountable for their performance.
He claims universal moral authority. But according to you he has little or no actual authority over (and hence little or no accountability for) what happens inside the organization he actually heads, as opposed to the universe in which he merely resides.
It strikes you as contradictory that a cleric could be close to God without enormous secular power?
If moral authority derives from, and is measured by, secular power, then Barack Obama must be the foremost moral authority on the planet.
It strikes you as contradictory that a cleric could be close to God without enormous secular power?
No, what strikes me as contradictory is that someone could spend nearly a quarter century as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith but remain unaware of — or unwilling to take effective action to end — horrendous, repeated sexual abuse committed under color of the Church’s authority. There’s plenty of evidence that the CDF had plenty of evidence. ·
It’s true that they had a lot of evidence. It’s also true that they took a lot of action; as I noted, the incidence of abuse appears to have been falling dramatically for decades. You might say that the action was not enough; this is where empirical questions about the level of power involved and such come in. Again, the US and state governments have considerably more evidence, and considerably more power, and yet their plague continues. That should tell you that this is not an easy struggle.
On Judgement Day, everyone is accountable for their performance.
Ergo, they are not accountable before Judgement Day? How convenient that would be! You may have just broken the code for me. Certain behaviors become quite clear in light of this doctrine.
I’m quite familiar with Cardinal Ratzinger’s record as head of the CDF and his role in being by far the most effective and tenacious prelate in pursuing the action that legitimately fell within his sphere of influence. You, however, are not. Please provide your evidence of the charge you make. Other than your own peculiar misunderstanding of the 1917 and 1983 codes of canon law, ecclesiastical due process (to avoid vindictive prosecution of clerics) and the workings of disciplinary authority within the Church, this strikes me as the uninformed and unfounded allegations of someone who spends most of their time on the subject reading the overheated speculations of the clueless press corps.
I’d love to hear you discuss Cardinal Ratzinger’s role in the prosecution of Father Marcial Maciel. Please do enlighten us as to your extensive knowledge of that case.
Take a look at the Catechism, sections 888-896, and note that it groups the roles of bishops under 3 headings: teaching office, sanctifying office, and governing office.
I don’t think that this is the only logic by which celibacy can be held up as a possible cause of this scandal. It may be that the requirement of celibacy made Catholic priesthood attractive to men who had no interest in marriage or women and wanted to be perceived as normal in a society that condemned homosexuality. This then created an atmosphere of homosexuality that attracted more of the same men, even at a time when it became less socially undesirable to be homosexual.
Since celibacy is not truly a doctrinal requirement but only a discipline of the Catholic church (and not observed in some Eastern Rite Catholic churches), I don’t think it’s wrong for those of us from churches with married clergy to note that there are some advantages to our practices. ·22 hours ago
I know some married clergy who are right awful buggers themselves. Married clergy is not the answer.
On Judgement Day, everyone is accountable for their performance.
Ergo, they are not accountable before Judgement Day?53 minutes ago
To someone unable to follow a basic course in Aristotelian logic, that would be considered sound reasoning.
This wikipedia piece is also a good summary of what was going on in the 50s and later in terms of dealing with the pederasts. (Sorry if someone has already pointed to it.) After reading it, I became more convinced that the evil had been part of the church ‘forever’, but the dropoff in ordinations in the 60s made it a big problem percentage wise.
I went to Jesuit high school and college. Thinking back it would have been not imaginable that such stuff was going on among the priests, scholastics and/or my classmates. Now, I am forced to wonder.
I’m quite familiar with Cardinal Ratzinger’s record as head of the CDF and his role in being by far the most effective and tenacious prelate in pursuing the action that legitimately fell within his sphere of influence.
Please do enlighten us as to your extensive knowledge of that case.
You go ahead . . . no, actually, you’ve done enough . . . your talking points are perfect . . . you’ve outdone the Vatican’s lawyers with “the most effective and tenacious prelate in pursuing the action that legitimately fell within his sphere of influence.” Sounds authoritative and compelling . . . says nothing. You also managed to convey the how-dare-you-mere-peons-question-authority tone, which over the centuries has served Rome so well. Pitch perfect. I’m awed.
….
Since celibacy is not truly a doctrinal requirement but only a discipline of the Catholic church (and not observed in some Eastern Rite Catholic churches), I don’t think it’s wrong for those of us from churches with married clergy to note that there are some advantages to our practices. ·
Fwiw, Orthodox priests are generally married, but bishops and monks are not; somehow Orthodox monasteries and seminaries seem to have been spared the same fate as Catholicism, even where celibacy is enforced. I agree that there are advantages to having married priests, but feel that the case is frequently described in exceedingly credulous terms. I’d also note that Orthodox priests cannot marry after ordination, which strikes me as an important corollary; it’s worth protecting parisioners from predation even after they’ve reached majority.
Genesis 50:20 may be the most beautiful verse in the book, with Joseph reassuring his brothers:
There have been problems at various times and places. I was reading a biography of a Russian monk who visited the famous monastery at Mount Athos a century ago and was shocked by the fornication that was going on openly between monks. That anecdote should give us pause, since the scandalized Russian monk I’m referring to was Grigori Rasputin. ·1 hour ago
Sure. I spoke imprecisely; I didn’t get the impression when I moved in the relevant social circles that there were the same levels of, well, lavender mafias. [. . .] ·March 6, 2013 at 11:52pm
I freely admit my anecdote is merely that, and I don’t have wider knowledge. Mainly, I was glad for an excuse to pass along this story, which still blows my mind whenever I think of it.
The Marxists and homesuxual collective have been infiltrating the Catholic Church since before WWII. The Jesuits and similar orders are about completely taken over. It’s a tribute to the sttrength of the Faith that there is still a Church.
Would we could have the same confidence that America will prevail against her enemies within and without.
Forgive me … but do you have any facts to support that assertion? On what, other than surmise, do you base that?
Forgive me … but do you have any facts to support that assertion? On what, other than surmise, do you base that? ·5 minutes ago
Just to clarify, are you arguing against the first claim, which seems manifestly true? There have only been Catholic Marxists for as long as we’ve had Marxism, but I’d be surprised if any church had not been “infiltrated” by sexual liberals from their earliest days, although what constitutes a sexual liberal may have been a little different in Calvin’s Switzerland. (Perhaps twice a month), and there have certainly been same sex attracted Christians from the earliest days (statistically, probably but not certainly at Pentecost).
The second claim is more contentious, and I would agree with your call for citations there.
A vanishingly small minority prey on the vulnerable. If your concern is that this suggests that there is an extremely small, but nonetheless present, chance that your confessions will be publicized, then, well, yes, that’s true, but surely you’d have known that even if the clergy were all castrated at ordination?
That’s a difference in experience, then. I’ve spent my life in the Episcopal Church, predominantly in the low church but also in the portions of the high church that were hewing strictly to orthodoxy (those that were among the first to get kicked out of the Episcopal church). I’m now in an Anglican church under the authority of Rwanda. I have not yet encountered a gay priest in any parish I attended–although I believe I must have met one or two when I lived in New York City. Oh, I take that back. I remember one priest I thought was probably gay but closeted.
I have met a couple of priests who misbehaved with women in their congregations–one with bipolar disorder (major mental illness). It’s bad enough, but nowhere near as bad as the Catholic church’s issues.
re #114. I suppose the Catholic church is stuck with centuries of tradiation around a celibate priesthood. I think that’s how you get those gay high Anglican priests; they fancy themselves in the mold of Catholics and therefore think they can get away with being unmarried and thus at a minimum not advertise their homosexuality. But I have a friend whose grandfather was a Catholic (Eastern Rite) priest, and I’ve always wondered why Catholics are so resistant to spreading that custom a bit more broadly among their clergy. The celibacy requirement does seem to attract to the priesthood men with various kinds of sexual issues.
Well, I spent some time at Good Shepherd, Rosemont, when Father Andrew Mead was there, before he left for Boston where I gather that his firm line on homosexuality created a certain amount of controversy. Now he’s holding that same line at the most prominent church in Manhattan, St. Thomas Fifth Avenue. And I spent some time in Milwaukee, at a couple of churches with high church, married rectors, include Father Jim Adams who went on to become bishop of Western Kansas. Out there, we had some dealings with Nashotah House in the Robert Munday days, which were a reaction to some previous tolerance toward homosexuality at the seminary.
So I guess you could say that I am aware that the pro-homosexuality “celibate priesthood” groups exist, I just have always been around at times and in places where they were being marginalized and supressed. And, yes, I do believe that having married clergy attracts a more normal group of men to the priesthood.
To be a Catholic is to be dismayed but not surprised at the painful reminder that the Church is not immune to human sin and, at the same time, to go on believing that the gates of Hell will not prevail against her. A cynical friend of mine, who dismisses religion in general as a scam, with special scorn for the Church, says that only an Italian pope could clean up the mess, apparently unaware that if it is all a scam, there is no incentive for such…As is often said, we (religious) conservatives are short-range pessimists and long-range optimists. If liberals were more consistent or logical, they would see themselves as the opposite. They seem to suggest that getting rid of religion and sexual “repression” will lead to utopia, but it seems apparent that on the whole they pretty much loathe and despise humanity.
That’s a difference in experience, then. I’ve spent my life in the Episcopal Church, …..
in the portions of the high church that were hewing strictly to orthodoxy (those that were among the first to get kicked out of the Episcopal church). I’m now in an Anglican church under the authority of Rwanda. …..
I have met a couple of priests who misbehaved …. It’s bad enough, but nowhere near as bad as the Catholic church’s issues. ·
Given that clarity on homosexuality is one of the central attractions of the PEARUSA, it would make sense if it were unattractive to gay clergy.
The rest of the Anglican community is, as I suggested, less gay than the Anglo-Catholics, but probably more so than Catholicism, at least in seminaries I’m familiar with. I’m not sure which parts of the orthodox high church you were part of, but the fight against women priests is, while mostly female, very heavily gay amongst its male American, Canadian, and English members, particularly FiF.
Regarding pedophilia, Anglican priests often have a less broad relationship with their flock; there are fewer and weaker non-church Anglican institutions.
The amazing thing to me is that we are expected to confess our sins to these weirdos. If they can’t be trusted to keep their vows and prey on the vulnerable, what this to keep them from violating the privacy of the confessional?
Dr Rahe:Excellent. Would very much be interested to see this point developed. I suspect perception into what happened to our culture as a result of things that occurred in WW II would be far deeper than hailing a “greatest generation”. This was the generation that were the parents of the boomers and the authority that caved en masse in the sixties.
Mike VisserWhen I was ordained forty-three years ago, homosexuality was a practically unknown rarity. Today, it is – in the wake of World War II – rampant among men.This from one of the letters cited above. Is he using World War II as a place-holder the way many of us do when discussing the Twentieth Century, or did the war itself precipitate a shift in sexual behavior? · 4 hours agoPaul Rahe: He seems to be saying that there was a seismic shift. For what it is worth, there were other changes. In the 1950s, the divorce rate began to soar. The sixties did not come out of nowhere.——-Dr. Rahe:Excellent. I would like to see this point developed. I believe that perception into what happened to our culture by what went on in WWII would reveal far deeper points than mere adulation of a “greatest generation.” These people were the parents of the boomers and the authority that caved “en masse” in the 60’s.