Interesting article from a gay man about the abuse

[Lea101]

Presenting plain data and giving your take isn’t it, though. You would need to show that being a homosexual makes one more inclined to be a pedophile than a heterosexual if you’re going to make statements that would target a whole group of people.

Also psychology is the most political field ever. It isn’t a science at all.

Depends on what field of psychology. Freud was nonsense, for example. Cognitive Psych or stuff like that wouldn’t be political. Anyway, ignoring the whole field and giving your opinions instead isn’t much better.

 

[PetraG]

There were only so many points I could object to for the sake of clarity!
Yours is another, but to be fair a large number of sexual abuse cases were same sex with physical “adults” technically speaking.

However, at least in the pre 1980s I think paedophilia and heterosexual abuse was more prevalent.
This seems to involve misuse of personal power as well.

There are different causal mechanisms in play I suppose.

The author only cited instances of sexual abuse in seminaries. He did not say there would be no sexual abuse crisis at all.

Sorry, this is a ridiculous article, among other excerpts:

"Like many same-sex attracted men, I have at times compulsively engaged in risky anonymous behavior with other men. "

This man has his own experience; but that doesn’t mean he can generalize it. I’m sorry, but being gay does not make one a sex seeking automaton. I’m fully convinced any priest has the same basic ability to control his sexuality as any other.

The most telling example was not his history with other men, but rather his experience in the confessional, in which he was told that he was not sinning and that the Church will change.

 

[PetraG]

I think a good case can be made that those with SSA are hypersexual. I think this is definitely true of males who live a homosexual life. That being so I absolutely think they could tend to abuse more.

There are those who would make the case that men in general are hypersexual. I don’t think that is necessarily true when compared to women who do not think they can get pregnant. Humans have a sex drive and some humans have either a degree of self-mastery, an internal set of sexual ethics or both that prove to be no match for the combination of their sex drives and a hyper-sexual advertising industry.

I fear that in many parts of the world the problem is not that people are “hypersexualized,” although the bombardment with messages stressing how necessary it is to be “sexy” certainly exacerbates the inappropriate directions a normal human sex drive can take.

I fear that a major problem with the priesthood is held in common with a major problem with marriage: that is, that there is not the same societal pressures to learn self-control nor the same societal norms that remove near occasions of sin as there could be. When moral prudence is matched against individual liberty, individual liberty always wins. Society is instead bombarding everyone with false messages about their sexuality and how strongly they ought to be working to develop a positive self-concept based on sexual attractiveness. This pressure also increasingly makes commitment to the religious life seem like an impossible challenge and an unrealistic way of life.

We need to come to a greater acceptance of what we are up against by living in the society we live in. Many people in the early Church, confronted with just such a society, fled to the desert. We have used the desert to set up an oasis of self-indulgence, gambling and prostitution.

I did not make up the idea our of thin air that Las Vegas has a big sector that was founded to be without either soul or conscience; this comes to me from residents of the town. I am not singling Las Vegas out, either. I am saying that Las Vegas is a symptom of the difference between today’s world and past times when there were more places to flee from the World, the Flesh and the Devil. If those three things are not renounced, where can, as Pius XI worded it, " the flowers of the sanctuary" come to “grow and bloom”?

I’m saying homosexuality is not the problem. The way our society as a whole thinks about homosexuality and deals with the challenges of homosexuality and homosexual persons is a symptom. The pendulum has swung from one bad extreme to the other, which is to say from vilification and shunning to all the way to celebration of genital expressions of a sexual disorder. That is one example of all the problems facing the Church when it comes to the task of encouraging and supporting holy vocations to the priesthood, religious life and marriage, not to mention holy lives among those who remain single and have no household to hold them accountable for their private sex lives.

 

[Inquisitor85]

No, homosexual desires are innate. However there is such a thing as situational homosexuality, and as I said above most sex CRIMES are crimes of opportunity. If you only have access to boys and teenage males who do you think the victims will be?

 

[exnihilo]

Presenting plain data and giving your take isn’t it, though. You would need to show that being a homosexual makes one more inclined to be a pedophile than a heterosexual if you’re going to make statements that would target a whole group of people.

That is what the data clearly shows. Which is why I said data was really pointless. People will spin it however they want. It doesn’t really mean what it means. What can you do then to prove it when all data is explained away?

 

[exnihilo]

No, homosexual desires are innate. However there is such a thing as situational homosexuality, and as I said above most sex CRIMES are crimes of opportunity. If you only have access to boys and teenage males who do you think the victims will be?

Your first two sentences are contradictory. Or they are just another way to explain away the obvious facts. Once we are explaining away facts then data is irrelevant. All that matters is our preexisting beliefs.

 

[PetraG]

No, homosexual desires are innate. However there is such a thing as situational homosexuality, and as I said above most sex CRIMES are crimes of opportunity. If you only have access to boys and teenage males who do you think the victims will be?

Exactly. It is homosexual behaviors among men that often are situational. There are a good number of heterosexual men who engage in homosexual behaviors while in prison or in other situations isolated from the opportunity to engage in sexual activities with women, men who then return entirely to heterosexual behaviors when they return to the society of women. The same pattern is not seen in women’s prisons: that is, few heterosexual women turn to lesbian behaviors as a sexual outlet when there are no men around.

 

[PetraG]

Let us remember, as we talk about this, that while it is necessary to exclude men from the priesthood who are apt to engage in grave sexual misconduct, doing so does not remove the problem of a society that is permissive of grave sexual misconduct, providing that the misconduct is “consensual.”

We have a lot of people who want to the Church to enshrine grave sexual misconduct in the same holy banns as the sexual conduct for which the human faculty to engage in sexual relations was created. We have members of our own Church who argue that such a move does no harm to the Sacrament of Matrimony.

Our society’s twisted view of the challenge of same sex attraction has untwisted from despising people afflicted with this problem and re-twisted into the glorification of a disorder into the equal of normal sexuality and the glorification of sexual self-expression as a necessary element of the life of any adult human. We cannot believe that such false attitudes have no effect on the institution of the priesthood.

Do Catholics set ourselves apart from the World in this respect? Really? I would argue that we are trying to have our cake and eat it, too: that is, we think we can be obsessed with sex and yet not be its slaves. That isn’t possible.

 

[JimR-OCDS]

My position is that studies have shown that 80% of the sexual abuse cases by Catholic Priests, have been homosexual priest with teen ager boys or seminarians.

However, we must keep in mind the time that these men became priest, when being gay was kept in the closet. Many Catholic Gay men, not seeing a career for themselves as gay males, chose the priesthood.

Today, as homosexuals are living in the open, there is less pressure to chose a profession where one can hide from society their sexual tendencies.

The Church’s policy today along with the fact that less gay males will even bother with the priesthood, will lesson the sex abuse cases. It will never be 100% for predators will always chose a way to have access to children.

Jim

 

[PetraG]

Today, as homosexuals are living in the open, there is less pressure to chose a profession where one can hide from society their sexual tendencies.

I think, rather, that the good intention of convincing people facing this challenge that self-loathing is out of place and convincing others that vilification of people with this attraction is sinful has gone past the center ground over into the opposite fault, which is celebration of a disorder as if it were a normal and healthy expression of human sexuality. These attractions do not make a person “damaged goods” any more than other any form of concupiscence does, but it is a mistake to celebrate the strongest manifestations of disordered desires we find in ourselves as a positive aspect of our identity. These are weaknesses to be mastered–weaknesses that because of the Fall may be the challenges that must come with any overall positive endowment, mind you!–not inborn virtues to be proud of.

 

[PetraG]

Sometimes, by the way, do you ever wonder why the objection to Gay Pride parades is not just that they are about homosexuality but that our society has gotten to the point that we throw parades for the purpose of telling the whole world how proud we are of ourselves?

Does anyone else think the whole concept of any kind of a pride parade is deeply misguided right off the bat?

I think that development alone shows that our society has little interest in virtue next to the temptation of achieving happiness via self-approval. We don’t have parades about virtue. Most of our society disdains processions having to do holiness. We have parades about pride, instead. Anything not ruled by Bacchus is deemed “puritanical.” There was once a short carnival season–now our society wants all Carnival all the time, with no Lent and without Easter. What can we do with that? How does that kind of society ever produce good marriages or holy priests? I think the answer is “only in spite of itself” and “only with the exception proves the rule.”

 

[Thorolfr]

The relative rarity of SSA attraction in the general public shows just how bad it is. If even ten percent of the population were homosexual you’d expect around ten percent of the victims to be male. But the actual rate is ninety percent. There are a few ways to reconcile the numbers. The homosexuals could molest far more victims than the heterosexuals. The priesthood could be ninety percent homosexual. Or homosexuals could be more likely to abuse.

You’re making a lot of false assumptions. For instance, you say that if ten percent of the population were homosexual, you’d expect around ten percent of the victims to be male, and, of course, for ninety percent to be female. But this assumes that priests have equal access to both boys and girls or in the case of the abused seminarians, both men and women. But that’s not the case.

I personally know someone who was abused by a priest starting when he was 14. He attended a co-ed Catholic school and the priest who was the principal of the school started sending hall passes to his class requesting that he be sent to the principal’s office. Some of the abuse took place behind the locked door of the principal’s office. Sometimes this principal would tell his secretary that he had forgotten some papers at home and needed to go get them or make some other excuse and would take this person I know with him when he left. This person later wondered why none of the other adults in the school questioned why the principal was leaving campus with an underage male student. But I’m sure that a lot more questions would have been asked if this priest was regularly having a 14 year old girl report to his office and spending a lot of time with her behind closed doors and was taking a 14 year old girl with him when he went home to supposedly get papers or something else he had forgotten.

Also, as others here in CAF have already pointed out, altar boys were a source of victims, but there wouldn’t have been any female victims available in the same way since there weren’t any altar girls for most of the time that abuse was taking place. In general, priests had much more access to boys than to girls.

Or in the case of the seminarians, there aren’t any female seminarians to be abused are there? Having read some of the accounts about “Uncle Ted”, I’m sure that men in authority like him who were heterosexual would have had a much more difficult time finding women to take on sleep overs. And it would have been more difficult to ask woman to share a bed overnight with him as well.

So, if priests had had just as much access to females as what they did to males, the number of female victims would probably have been much higher. And we can’t overlook that fact that predators who are attracted to boys might have been disproportionately drawn to the priesthood because it provided an easy source of male victims. But this doesn’t mean that gay men in general are more likely to be sexual predators.

 

[Lea101]

Out of topic tbh, but the whole hoopla stemmed from severe discrimination in the past (and some would argue in the present faced by individuals). This is their way to commemorate them overcoming truly horrible acts committed against them. It isn’t random celebration of how proud they are. Obviously I would agree current pride parades aren’t godly, but we would need to educate ourselves on why they’re being held in the first place.

 

[Lea101]

Also just a reminder to all that we have homosexual posters and readers here, so treating them like potential child abusers is not a good way to welcome them. Please be more cautious about the things you say and how they can come across to other groups of people.

 

[PetraG]

Out of topic tbh, but the whole hoopla stemmed from severe discrimination in the past (and some would argue in the present faced by individuals). This is their way to commemorate them overcoming truly horrible acts committed against them. It isn’t random celebration of how proud they are. Obviously I would agree current pride parades aren’t godly, but we would need to educate ourselves on why they’re being held in the first place.

I know that pride parades grew out of political marches. Having said that, even the first march had this theme:
"Say it clear, say it loud. Gay is good, gay is proud.”

Not “gays are people, too,” but “we are proud to have this inclination and we intend to express it in our behavior.”

That was not a good societal development. These marches intended to encourage those with this inclination who have not already done so not just to accept themselves or be willing to admit the urges they have, but to give in to their urges. That is profoundly sad.

This article explains the whole phenomenon. The depth of how misguided the whole movement is cannot but make a person very sad. These are well-meaning people, but they’re throwing their lives and even their identies into their willing cooperation with vice.

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mashable.com

Even worse yet, these very parades also exacerbate reactionary sins of irrational hatred towards homosexuals. Far worse even than grave sins of the flesh indulged in out of having been misled during one’s sexual formation are the sins of irrational hatred towards other human beings.

I am NOT blaming the people who put on these parades for the bigots who respond to them. I’m saying that the horrible reality is that these parades bring those persons out of the woodwork demonstrate the depth of the challenges we have to deal with in spreading the Gospel. Those persons whose most visible inclination is not towards sexual sins with persons of their own sex but towards unbridled hatred are WHY these parades were seen as necessary in the first place!! We are facing a society in which too many of those who do not embrace homosexual behaviors* feel inclined to express vicious hatred towards homosexual persons. That is the worst possible societal situation, and the hatred is the worst part of it. (*Let’s note that the most vicious opponents of outward expressions of homosexuality may be contending with homosexual attractions themselves. Being too proud to admit our own inclinations so often results in loathing of others with the same inclination that it is almost cliche to suspect a connection.)

 

[JimG]

The author or the article says this:

“I broach the subject with trepidation. I am convinced that most homosexual priests are good and holy men.”

He is not saying that all homsexuals are molesters. They are not. But he still agrees that the Church’s prohibition on ordaining men with deep seated homosexual inclinations is a good policy, a policy for safety, and he gives his reasons.

The majority of child abuse cases in the Church have been instances of homosexual predation on post-;pubescent adolescents, that is, pederasty. Obviously, not all homosexuals are pederasts. But pederasts are mainly homosexual.

It is not true that priests only have access to boys. I recall an unusual case in the Kansas City Mo diocese where an abusing priest was mostly inclined toward the girls in the parish school. But that case was an outlier. The vast majority of cases have been male on male.

 

[Lea101]

Not “gays are people, too,” but “we are proud to have this inclination and we intend to express it in our behavior.”

I say this without a hint of snark, but honestly what else do you expect from non practicing Catholics? If you put yourself in the shoes of someone who is gay, who isn’t a practicing Catholic, you will most likely come to the same conclusion as them. They can’t think something is a mortal sin when they don’t even believe in the Church in the first place. And telling them that (that it is a sin) would not be fruitful if we don’t even show God’s love, the existence of God, the validity of the Church etc first imo.

 

[exnihilo]

You’re making a lot of false assumptions. For instance, you say that if ten percent of the population were homosexual, you’d expect around ten percent of the victims to be male, and, of course, for ninety percent to be female. But this assumes that priests have equal access to both boys and girls or in the case of the abused seminarians, both men and women. But that’s not the case.

No, I’m making one assumption. Actually it isn’t an assumption. It is using the plain meaning of the word. I am asserting that men who have sex with males are homosexual. If a priest wanted to have sex there are plenty of adult women that would oblige him. He could even pay a prostitute. If he derives sexual pleasure from other males then he is homosexual, unless the word is going to be stripped of all meaning.

 

[PetraG]

I say this without a hint of snark, but honestly what else do you expect from non practicing Catholics? If you put yourself in the shoes of someone who is gay, who isn’t a practicing Catholic, you will most likely come to the same conclusion as them. They can’t think something is a mortal sin when they don’t even believe in the Church in the first place. And telling them that (that it is a sin) would not be fruitful if we don’t even show God’s love, the existence of God, the validity of the Church etc first imo.

St. Paul didn’t tell early Christians to change the World or to take themselves out of it. He told them they had to insulate themselves from its influences, though. That is a recommendation we probably take to heart far too little. It is necessary to embrace the sinner in order to love the sinner, but the sin itself has to be made to wait out on the street, not welcomed into the house.

 

[Lea101]

It is not true that priests only have access to boys. I recall an unusual case in the Kansas City Mo diocese where an abusing priest was mostly inclined toward the girls in the parish school

‘only’ would be inaccurate, but it doesn’t mean that they had equal access to both sexes in general tbh. So there are obviously other variables in place besides homosexuality