Slander from the NY Times

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‘It Is Not a Closet. It Is a Cage.’ Gay Catholic Priests Speak Out (Published 2019)

The crisis over sexuality in the Catholic Church goes beyond abuse. It goes to the heart of the priesthood, into a closet that is trapping thousands of men.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

Without referencing any actual research, Dias claims: “gay men likely make up at least 30 to 40 percent of the American Catholic clergy, according to dozens of estimates from gay priests themselves and researchers. Some priests say the number is closer to 75 percent.”

This is what slander looks like; this article is baseless from the very beginning and should be retracted. Maybe Ms. Dias should have done some actual research, not just interviews with homosexual clergy, to arrive at her estimate of gay priests. This LA Times survey remains the only true “data” on this topic and contradicts the NY Times in a big way: http://articles.latimes.com/2002/oct/20/local/me-gaypriest20.
 
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I read the article in its entirety. I am wondering why indicating there are homosexuals in the priesthood is considered slander (?). There is nothing sinful about being homosexual, and these statistics are nothing new.

I found the article to actually be quite insightful and believable. I know several young men who were sent off to seminary boarding school as 9th graders, and their descriptions of what took place are accurately reflected in the article, for the most part.
 
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Being a homosexual isn’t sinful in itself. Indeed, it could be described as a heavy cross. So I agree with a previous poster and question why the OP describes this as slander?
 
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I tried to link to the article, but it requires me to subscribe to the NY Times. It will not allow me to read the article without paying.
KJW5551 said:
This is what slander looks like
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Is it right to pay a company that prints slander?
 
For those saying it’s not slander: the underlying premise of the piece is that the Catholic Church is hypocritical for condemning homosexuality while having upwards of 75% homosexual clergy. It’d be like saying 75% of Greenpeace activists secretly owned Hummer dealerships or 75% of PETA members secretly owned butcher shops.

BoomBoom, great that it’s not legal slander. It’s still shoddy journalism and nothing more than another hit piece against the Church. A hit piece, I’m afraid, that most will take at face value, furthering the Church’s perceived flaws.
 
17 years after Boston, and as the ink on Mr. McCarrick’s defrocking is still drying, how can anyone say “perceived flaws?”
 
You and I well know the Church has flaws. But the general public thinks it’s rotten to the core. This article furthers that perception.
 
Catholic sites like Church Militant have reported news similar to this.

Such interesting times we live in.
 
KJW5551 said:
It’s still shoddy journalism and nothing more than another hit piece against the Church. A hit piece, I’m afraid,
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I didn’t think it was shoddy journalism. Getting 2 dozen (anonymous) gay priests on record is no small task.

It’s definitely not a hit piece either. I didn’t see it that way at all. The premise of the article was not ‘the hypocrisy of the Church’. There was nothing of the sort in the article. The article was emphasizing the fact that the Church has struggled with the issue of sexuality among its clergy precisely because so many clergy themselves struggle with their own sexuality. That’s not hypocrisy, it’s just an unfortunate situation.
 
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Reporting one incident about a priest coming out to his parishioners, the article says. “At Sunday Mass, during Advent, he told his suburban parish he was gay, and celibate. They leapt to their feet in applause.”

It left me a little puzzled. Would the reaction have been the same had he reported that he was heterosexual and celibate? Why the obsesion with sex, especially if no one is having sex?
 
Unrelated to the substance of the article, the topic should be libel—not slander.
 
I don’t think that if the priest had said he was heterosexual that the reaction would have been the same. I’m guessing that the applause wasn’t an affirmation of his sexuality, but an appreciation for his courage to tell a truth, whether the parishioners needed to know that truth or not. In the context of what is happening today in the Church, it should be obvious why it would take courage for a parish priest to announce his SSA.
 
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The New York Times has a good record for getting thing correct.
Could they be wrong in this story?
Time will tell.
 
I don’t get why we need to know the sexuality of someone who is required to be celibate. Unless maybe the priest is tired of hearing negative remarks about gay people from his parishioners. As I don’t make such remarks, I’m not really interested in whether the priest swings gay, straight, or both directions.
 
JulianN said:
Unrelated to the substance of the article, the topic should be libel—not slander.
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KJW5551 said:
Without referencing any actual research, Dias claims: “gay men likely make up at least 30 to 40 percent of the American Catholic clergy, according to dozens of estimates from gay priests themselves and researchers. Some priests say the number is closer to 75 percent.”
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That’s not libel. It’s very clear: This is an estimate by priests based on their experience. If there’s any libel or slander involved, it would come from those priests, not the reporter who, presumably, accurately reported what they said.

And frankly, we don’t have anything better to represent the climate today. The LA Times article you cited is from almost 20 years ago, and it revealed that younger priests were more likely to have SSA than their older counterparts by about 8%. If the trend continued rising by 8% over 20 year time periods, as the LA Times showed, then the 1/3 estimate would be about right for younger priests. But of course, we don’t know that. (And as an aside, it’s still much lower than Sodoma’s claim that there are about 80% gay priests high up in the Church hierarchy.)

Either way, the article’s point is less to get a more up-to-date percentage and more what it’s like being a priest with SSA.
KJW5551 said:
It’s still shoddy journalism and nothing more than another hit piece against the Church.
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I’d hardly call this “shoddy journalism”. She, in an article discussing what it’s like to be a priest with SSA, managed to interview multiple priests to share their experiences about being a priest with SSA, correctly put it all within the context of what’s going on with the Church right now, and even cited at least one study for her claim that research shows no correlation between SSA and sexual abuse (albeit doing so way too long after making the initial claim). I mean, I know that you might disagree with this or find it uncomfortable or biased, but none of those make it shoddy.
 
Whenever the print or broadcast media exposes things many of us do not want to read, their work is labeled shoddy journalism or a hit piece.
 
I have no doubt about the high number of gay priests in the Church.

In years past, gay men had to hide in the closet and the priesthood was an attractive profession for them.

Also, families often followed the tradition of giving one of their children to religious life and often, they suggested to the one who didn’t seem likely to marry, to look at the religious life.

Today, with gays able to live in the open, less gay males are seeking to become priests

It probably accounts for the shortage of priests today.

Jim
 
I don’t doubt there’s a higher percentage of gay priests in the church now because in the 70s and 80s, a whole bunch of the straight ones quit to get married.
 
The fact of the matter is that the only reliable data says that 15% of clergy are gay. Not 30%. Not 40%. Not 75%. Shoddy journalism.

And let’s not forget Pope Benedict’s 2005 document “Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies
in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders” which of course says that those with deep-seated homosexual tendencies must not be admitted to seminary. So if anything, the number should have gone down since the LA Times study.
 
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