Cardinals Burke and Brandmueller on the Crisis

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Cardinals Burke and Brandmuller are correct. I’m getting tired of hearing the excuse being tied to clericalism.

And Cardinal Cupich doesn’t instill confidence in me at all. While acknowledging the fact that a high percentage of sex abuse involves “male on male sex abuse,” Cupich said, “homosexuality itself is not a cause.” It is a matter of “opportunity and also a matter of poor training on the part of people.”

WHAT?! You mean to tell me that a priest needs to be trained and formed to know that sexual abuse of minors is morally wrong?

“The screening is important, not in terms of homosexuality, but in terms of … if someone has an attitude with regarding sexuality that is not in keeping with the Church…,” Cupich continued.

Again, WHAT?! Do we really have to state that a priest in formation just really doesn’t know that sex with a minor is not in keeping with the Church?

Something’s rotten in Denmark…
 
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Nothing short of having all their evil deeds exposed to the purifying light of day will end this nightmare. Evil loves the dark. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
 
There are two extremes here. On the one hand, I don’t think we should conflate the abuse of minors and the issue of homosexual priests. These are two different issues. A homosexual priest is not necessarily a child abuser. Nor is a heterosexual priest necessarily a child abuser. That said, McCarrick and O’Brien, two cardinals disgraced in recent years, point to a real issue of homosexual predators among the clergy.
 
80 %± of the victims are male 14 years of age or older. Heterosexual Men do not abuse boys. Homosexual or bi-sexual deviants abuse boys. I do not find this to be conflating the issue. There is a rot within the clergy, at all levels, that must be removed.
 
irenaeus1 said:
“The screening is important, not in terms of homosexuality, but in terms of … if someone has an attitude with regarding sexuality that is not in keeping with the Church…,” Cupich continued.

Again, WHAT?! Do we really have to state that a priest in formation just really doesn’t know that sex with a minor is not in keeping with the Church?
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In fairness to Cupich, he doesn’t appear to be saying that these seminarians do not know that it is wrong and contrary to Catholic teaching. He is speaking of an “attitude” that they have that is not consistent with Catholic teaching. That doesn’t really say anything about their level of knowledge.

That’s not wrong. Men need to be screened out if they have views of sexuality that are not in conformity with Catholic teaching. That includes views on homosexuality, but it doesn’t only include views on homosexuality.

The way I read it, he is asking for more stringent criteria.

What that will actually mean concretely going forward remains to be seen. Though, I do think that seminary screening has improved remarkably in the past several decades. That’s one of the reasons why there is a much lower incidence of abuse now than there used to be.
 
I am willing to accept that clericalism is the problem but I don’t understand why homosexual clergy practice clericalism more than heterosexual clergy? Is clericalism then to be understood to be a gay trait?
 
DMorgan56 said:
Heterosexual Men do not abuse boys.
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They can, and do, however, abuse girls/young/not-so-young/vulnerable women. Perhaps 80% of the abuse was men on boys. But that doesn’t excuse the other 20%: 100% of abusers are wrong, wrong, wrong.
FraStefano said:
I am willing to accept that clericalism is the problem but I don’t understand why homosexual clergy practice clericalism more than heterosexual clergy? Is clericalism then to be understood to be a gay trait?
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Clericalism is an “attitude” or culture within the entire Church. It’s not that homosexuals “practice” it more than others. It’s that clericalism in the Church in general creates a climate where abusers feel a certain degree of immunity because of their status. It’s not just a problem with sexual abusers, it can lead to all sorts of other problems in the Church including abuse of power (not sexual). A good example was Quebec up until the late 1950s, where clericalism mixed with a touch of Jansenism nearly brought down the local Church, so big was the backlash against the Church in the early 1960s.
 
twf said:
I don’t think we should conflate the abuse of minors and the issue of homosexual priests.
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This is the question. It is the same question that arose in the wake of the John Jay study on clergy sexual abuse in 2010, and the same answer (which I consider an evasion) is being given: it’s not a homosexual problem. Here’s how it was “addressed” then:

There is no correlation between a homosexual identity and the sexual violation of a minor. Sexual abuse is a crime of opportunity, not of sexual identity…In any event, no Catholic pope, bishop, priest or layperson can in good conscience identify gay priests as the primary source of sexual abuse, even of boys.

It seems to me that Burke and Brandmueller are challenging that mindset, and it seems likely that for as long as this perspective is accepted, for at least that long we will continue to experience this problem.
 
I believe that there is a real issue of homosexual predators among the clergy (such as McCarrick)…preying on seminarians, for example, is clearly a homosexual oriented abuse. That doesn’t mean that abuse of minors is necessarily in the same category, even if primarily boys.
 
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