Is the Pope a homophobe?
**The Spectator **
**Damian Thompson **
1 October 2005
angelqueen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3333
Damian Thompson is editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald.
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Why is this proposal even on the agenda? One answer is that for many years the Catholic Church has been alarmed by the growth in seminaries of the sort of arch gay subculture previously associated only with the campest Anglican theological colleges. Famously, the mark of this subculture is to give women’s names to one’s fellow students and clergy — names which, incidentally, tend to stick: one English Catholic archbishop is still trying to shrug off the sobriquet ‘Catwoman’. The authorities hate this sort of silliness because they assume that it correlates with immorality. Actually, in my experience, the opposite is true: the name-calling is usually a harmless release of tension and a substitute for sex.
A more important reason for the suggested ban is that its supporters believe it would end the scandal of clerical sex abuse. Opponents of the ban say it would do no such thing, and I think they are quite right about this. Two points are worth making. First, the scandal that has sent American dioceses spiralling into bankruptcy is effectively over. The incidence of sexual relations between priests and teenage boys has fallen sharply since the 1980s and will fall even further now that rigid diocesan safeguards are in place on both sides of the Atlantic. Only the most dedicated paedophiles will slip through the net -– and, not being stupid, they will do so by presenting themselves as chaste heterosexuals rather than homosexuals.
Second, the epicentre of clerical abuse is in Africa, not Europe or America, and it involves young women. If the Church wants to root out misbehaviour, it might start with the East African teachers’ training college where dirt-poor girl students routinely sell their bodies to (by local standards) well-off seminarians. But it won’t, because Third World vocations are regarded as a gift of the Almighty, and many African priests are allowed to do pretty much what they like, including entering into polygamous ‘tribal marriages’.
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