Sick of blaming homosexuals for the scandals

  • Thread starter Thread starter catholic1seeks
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
The Church is & has long been a boys’ club, priests had access to was boys serving as altar boys & other roles only open to boys. Up until very recently there was never such a thing as an “altar girl”. Likewise boys would be expected & entrusted to spend time around a priest at a local church as a father figure filling traditional masculine roles in male-only space, sometimes doubling in male-only roles such as teaching at an all-boys school or coaching a boys’ sports team, etc.

A man, including a priest, who spent a lot of alone time around little girls would have fallen immediately suspect as a pervert since that’s not normal, whether today or 100 years ago, a typical parent is far more protective of daughters & would not have seen it normal for their local parish priest to be showing up often to pick up their little girl to go spend lots of alone time with, the way it was seen as acceptable for boys to spend time with local male pillars of the community to practice serving for Mass on Sunday or discuss male growing up issues or whatever.

Look at pedophilia scandals that have hit the sports world. Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky was heterosexual married for life to a woman, a tough manly athlete figure . Meanwhile he raped dozens of little boys, sometimes with his wife in the house. Because Sandusky coached only football teams of boys; boys spending time with their coach was not seen as suspicious just as altar boys spending time with their priests weren’t. Until all these scandals recently broke, boys were entrusted to adult male authority figures, normal to have a fatherly male mentor figure trusted by the family, the idea of it turning sexual unheard of.

For pedophile men it was (and still is) much more difficult if not impossible to get families to think it normal to entrust their daughter to a grown man who becomes known for spending alone time with little girls. Pedophile priests or coaches could not have gotten away their whole lifetimes with secretly grooming & molesting little girls, who had no reason to be spending any alone time with a priest in the first place.
 
Are young girls as readily available to priests as young boys? I honestly don’t know. Well, we do know in such cases that, psychologically speaking, the sexual high that may be a component of such behavior is the result or by-product of the exercise of power and being able to get away with it. It is not so much the sexual attraction to young boys, although that too may be present, as it is an act of power. Same situation in the straight abuse of power with regard to minors. That is not to say there is no sexual component at all, but that is not the main driving force in pedophilia, hebephilia, and ephebophilia. However much sexual desire may play a role here, we also know that the vast majority of gay men do not engage in such behavior. Something in the sexual development of the priests who perform these acts drives them to do so. If it were just a matter of homosexuality, the priests would engage in sexual behavior only with other (adult) priests.
 
Last edited:
What is the word that is being used in USA Catholic circles for males hitting on post adolescent boys - something like “pederest” and for how long has that word been in common use there. I’ve never heard it used in the UK
 
catholic1seeks said:
I find it sick to see so many Catholics, especially on the online world, but even from clerics and cardinals, point fingers at gay people with NO NUANCE.
Click to expand...
There is nuance. The majority of abuse cases were homosexual abuse. You can try to avoid that fact but in the end there’s no getting away from it.

There’s no need to take it personally.
 
AdamP88 said:
There is nuance. The majority of abuse cases were homosexual abuse. You can try to avoid that fact but in the end there’s no getting away from it.
Click to expand...
As far as I can see, the vast majority of posts are still missing the point. It is the collusion of the Catholic Church to hide these abuses. I don’t care if some of these were not pedophilia; they then were either rape (including under age) or sexual assault. Collusion by those involved to keep this from the police is a criminal act, yes some Bishops are criminals. So stop making yourselves feel good, abuse by anyone in a position influence is the same as any other, whatever your theories are about their sexuality.
 
Last edited:
Because I’m well read but have never come across this word, pederast, which simply means paedophilia targeted at boys
 
Last edited:
“Pedophilia” vs. “hepephilia” vs. “ephebobilia” vs. “pederasty” have lost all meaning, since both pedophiles- and those who blame pedophile scandals on homosexuality, like the way Catholic League President Bill Donohue did in his recent article- essentially deploy those words/concepts in implicit apologism for pedophilia.

If your argument depends on trying to draw a meaningful distinction between a true “pedophile” adult man engaging in sex acts with a pre-pubescent 10-year-old as opposed to an “hepebile” or “ephebophile” “pederast” adult man engaging in sex acts with a 14-year-old whose public hair has grown in, as Donohue et al. have done, to try to make it into a “homosexual” rather than “pedophile” problem…then you should step back & re-evaluate how/why you became an apologist for pedophilia & child abuse.

Boys may be PHYSICALLY mature from puberty by 13, 14, 15, 16, but they are in no way mentally mature enough to be able to understand & consent to sex acts with a grown man authority figure.

Hormonal teens with new developed bodies may experiment with each other, but they are NOT psychologically equipped to recognize & resist an adult predator’s manipulative grooming techniques, preying particularly on the wide gap between their physical maturity- hormones raging making them especially prone to unwittingly “consent” to sexual experimentation- and their emotional immaturity that may keep them from realizing the full long-term consequences on their psyche from what’s really going on until years later.

Donohue’s Catholic League and those who agree with him that a gay ‘Lavender Mafia’ is to blame, not pedophilia:
A) Implicate millions of innocent people with homosexual inclinations who would never in a million years seek to sexually manipulate a minor (many of whom especially lay Catholics with same-sex attraction choosing to faithfully remain entirely celibate- unlike so many Catholic priests who actually take vows of celibacy)

B) Absolve actual pedophile predators of being pedophile predators. Instead of abusive priests being sickos with a diagnosable paraphilia disorder causing them to systematically seek out & prey on defenseless non-consenting children- why many such predators became priests- such priests are just homosexual ‘ephebophiles’ or ‘pederasts’ since in physical puberty terms their victims were “adults” so the blame goes to homosexuals not pedophiles…

For normal people not desperate to try to shift blame to gays rather than pedophiles- for normal parents, whether their child was a pre-pubescent 10-year-old or a 14-year-old with fully grown-in public hair when an adult man priest raped him is a distinction without a difference.
 
I don’t know what to say other than people wanting easy answers and not wanting to deal with the real underlying reasons. And others wanting to push forward an agenda and capitalizing on such events to do it.
It saddens me to see this is what’s happening instead of focusing on what is pertinent.
I’m praying for you and other Catholics to persevere and also to enlighten others during these difficult times.
 
PJH_74 said:
As far as I can see, the vast majority of posts are still missing the point. It is the collusion of the Catholic Church to hide these abuses. I don’t care if some of these were not pedophilia; they then were either rape (including under age) or sexual assault. Collusion by those involved to keep this from the police is a criminal act, yes some Bishops are criminals
Click to expand...
I would like to point out that after an extensive investigation, the grand jury issued two indictments against priests for abusing a child, zero criminal indictments for failure to report. A person is not a criminal because one believes everything one reads in the news. The fact remains, no bishops are criminals in this investigation.

Perhaps you are confusing this with the other scandal where a Cardinal failed to follow through with the Pope’s directive to eliminate homosexual men from the seminaries. As should be expected, there was a lot of harassment and abuse (of adults) that resulted from that failure.
 
Uriel1 said:
Because I’m well read but have never come across this word, pederast, which simply means paedophilia targeted at boys
Click to expand...
“Pederasty” by its proper ancient/classical definition did not “simply means paedophilia targeted at boys”. It referred to a rather complex institution found in ancient Greece (where the English terms are derived from), Persia, and other places throughout the ancient world.

In the Greek world, pederasty was a specific insitution to a close same-sex bond relationship between an older male ‘lover’ & younger male ‘beloved’, the older man was like a very close mentor to the beloved for life. Both men would also have wives & children, it had nothing to do with hetero or homo sexuality.

Marriages between men & women were typically arranged & their main purpose was procreation, pass on the family name & keep household, whereas married men were expected to court younger men/boys for true romantic relationships based on love (not necessarily sexual, and forms of sex between men in which one man played a passive ‘womanly’ rule were limited only to slaves & prostitutes, not in pederastic relationships which were supposed to be rooted in mutual love not submission).

In ancient Greece, the younger man in a pederastic relationship was typically in his teens while the older man was usually a young adult in 20s, 30s. But note it wasn’t unique in terms of age for ancients, Greek heterosexual marriages had the same age range/gap, i.e. girls became considered marriageable women as teenagers & married older men.

In the UK true pederasty survived famously into the 20th century (possibly still today?) in single-sex all-boys boarding schools & colleges, “public schools” in the British meaning. C.S. Lewis wrote of the pervasive pederasty between older male students taking younger male student lovers, close mentorship often going beyond mere platonic love, at Malvern College in Worcestershire, England, which was not at all unique phenomenon in such environments.
 
Last edited:
pnewton said:
The fact remains, no bishops are criminals in this investigation.
Click to expand...
Clergy in about half the country are now mandated reporters, likely this was not the case because of the time involved. But certainly now a good number are. There might have been some hyperbole to what I said, but the point was the magnitude of the cover up.
 
catholic1seeks said:
It’s just not fair.

You can be same-sex attracted and faithful.

You can also be heterosexual, rape women and children, and abuse church teaching as well.

As far as I can tell, most of this blame simply comes from the human desire to scapegoat.
Click to expand...
Agree, It’s not about their sexuality, it’s about the lack of chastity.
 
Last edited:
It is now illegal in the UK for teachers to fiddle with their pupils, so the use of the term pederasty is disingenuous - it is sodomistic paedophilia or sexual assault on a pupil, or both

It is a grave sin against God, and illegal

The fact that so many priests were involved is shocking; many bishops must have covered this up, or been incompetent managers

They who are so culpable have destroyed much of the Church, and must all resign and do public penance
 
Last edited:
catholic1seeks said:
It’s just not fair.
Click to expand...
The problem is that the issue of clerical sex abuse has been presented as a crisis of pedophelia, when in fact it is a crisis of active homosexuality; though it is terribly politically incorrect to say so. Furthermore, anyone inside the Church that campaigns to change the Church’s teaching on homosexuality is probably a closet pervert. In a world that celebrates homosexuality and presents it as wholesome, noble and virtuous, the Church needs to speak LOUD and CLEAR that it is an especially abhorrent abomination. The problem is that many do not want to hear the truth and get angry when somebody speaks it plainly… And those who have SSA need to stop announcing it to everyone and start filling their minds with wholesome thoughts.
 
Catholic1seeks, I would propose that you would not find this so troublesome if not for a lot of background noise, and if not for the Church’s longstanding callousness and lack of attention to gay men and women who long for chastity. For there is no other way about it: this IS a problem with gay men in the priesthood, period. That’s a fact.

But that fact on its own is not offensive, no more than it is offensive to straight men to say that MeToo is a straight man’s problem. It’s just truth.

There are bad straight men and bad gay men. Now the question becomes: who is failing these men, and enabling their wickedness? Hint: most of these enablers aren’t gay, and many of them aren’t men.
 
meltzerboy2 said:
Are young girls as readily available to priests as young boys? I honestly don’t know.
Click to expand...
You raise an interesting question. It has only been in the past 30/40 years or so that young girls have been in a position of increasing proximity to priests. I guess in 20 to 40 years, if there is a massive scandal of male priests molesting teen and pre teen girls, then something will have been proved. We will see. (And I predict that it won’t be widespread, but given the fallen/sinful nature of man, there will be sporadic incidents. Just like given the direction of society, there will be more school shootings.) I digress.

One poster is adamant that homosexual inclination plays no part in the past 70 years or so in the Church. That the issue is solely an “abuse of power” issue. I think that is over simplifying the issue. I have stated my position as to how I view people with an SSA inclination. (I’m trying to be as delicate and charitable with my words here). Exactly as the Catholic Church teaches. I know many good people with SSA and I don’t paint everyone with the same brush.

The problem/question I have is a grown, mature male, seeking genital stimulation and release with a teen or pre teen boy is acting in a homosexual manner. That cannot be discounted in this discussion. No matter how hard someone tries.

I know a few people who suffer from vertigo. They are good and decent people who live good moral lives. But I would not want them to be astronauts. Their situation puts everyone else in danger. There is a parallel in that analogy and the situation in the church at present.
 
catholic1seeks said:
As a same-sex attracted man in the Catholic Church who tries my best to live up to orthodox Catholic teaching on sexuality — among the rest of Catholic doctrine as well — I find it sick to see so many Catholics, especially on the online world, but even from clerics and cardinals, point fingers at gay people with NO NUANCE.
Click to expand...
The thing is that homosexuality is a hidden factor. If I knew you in real life, I would not have a clue that you are a homosexual. And that, quite frankly, is the way it should be. I’m not gay myself,needless to say not engaged in the gay life style, I’m not a counselor or psychiatrist, there would really be no purpose in telling me about it under any conceivable circumstance. This kind of information is something that is polite only to share on a need-to-know basis.
 
PJH_74 said:
As far as I can see, the vast majority of posts are still missing the point. It is the collusion of the Catholic Church to hide these abuses. I don’t care if some of these were not pedophilia; they then were either rape (including under age) or sexual assault. Collusion by those involved to keep this from the police is a criminal act, yes some Bishops are criminals. So stop making yourselves feel good, abuse by anyone in a position influence is the same as any other, whatever your theories are about their sexuality.
Click to expand...
Nobody’s denying that. And duh…obviously anyone involved should be in prison.

But acknowledging the nature of the abuse is also part of the process in order to ensure it doesn’t occur again.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top