What are your ideas for the LGBT person's vocation in the Church?

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Benadam said:
That mostly young males were the victims of abuse? Isn’t it evident that if that is the pool of victim’s that homosexual Priests were the abuser’s.
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No because sexual identity and sex behavior / acts are two different things. I understand that this is a difficult concept to grasp, but it has been affirmed time and again. Even the study commissioned by the USCCB affirms this:

“More than three-quarters of the acts of sexual abuse of youths by Catholic priests, as shown in the Nature and Scope study,were same-sex acts (priests abusing male victims). It is therefore possible that, although the victims of priests were most often male, thus defining the acts as homosexual, the priest did not at any time recognize his identity as homosexual.” p. 36

“The data do not support a finding that homosexual identity and/or pre-ordination same-sex sexual behavior are significant risk factors for the sexual abuse of minors. The only significant risk factor related to sexual identity and behavior was a “confused” sexual identity, and this condition was most commonly found in abusers who were ordained prior to the 1960s.” p. 64

 
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Prodigal_Son said:
I don’t think this is the whole explanation, but it is absolutely certain that gay men were specifically recruited for the priesthood because they were gay, in the 60s through the 80s. That is scandalous, and it is a major reason for the abuse crisis in the Church. No one is claiming that gay men should specifically be directed to the priesthood, now, happily. But that doesn’t mean gay priests would be lacking in self-control.

What we do know: priests who are taught in seminaries rife with sodomy are liable to be lacking in self-control! 😦
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I think that’s a fair assessment. It’s also a problem within the institutions that form Priests are too vulnerable to emerging currents of society. The winds of change so to speak. It may be that the corrective action is like a pendulum going too far to one side
 
Prodigal_Son said:
I don’t think this is the whole explanation, but it is absolutely certain that gay men were specifically recruited for the priesthood because they were gay, in the 60s through the 80s. That is scandalous, and it is a major reason for the abuse crisis in the Church.
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From the same report quoted above:

“Only 3 percent of diocesan priests aged sixty-six or older, who would have been seminarians in the early 1970s, answered affirmatively. In contrast, 40 percent of the priests aged thirty-six to fifty-five, who would have been seminarians in the 1980s and 1990s, reported that there was a clear homosexual subculture in the seminaries they had attended. As was shown in Table 2.1, 40.3 percent of the priest-abusers from the Nature and Scope study were ordained in the 1950s and 1960s and commit-ted sexual abusive acts in the 1970s. The men ordained in the 1980s account for a comparatively smaller percentage of the abusers, 7.1 percent. Finally, those men ordained after 1989 represent only 1.9 percent of the accused.” p. 38

 
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I agree that “harping” is condescending, and if done at all, should be as a form of gentle and supportive private counseling. Take this as a hypothetical situation: that a same-sex oriented Catholic rejects those feelings and inclinations as “near occasions of sin.” Therefore, there is no approved context for those in any public Church activity. So, an ssa Catholic will try like everyone else to fit into whatever activity appeals to him/her. By the same token, non-SSA catholics must avoid any form of harassment about ANYONE’S sexual orientation. All things will be revealed in the Final Judgment and we don’t need to worry about judging anyone BEFORE Christ comes to judge us.
 
Benadam said:
That mostly young males were the victims of abuse? Isn’t it evident that if that is the pool of victim’s that homosexual Priests were the abuser’s. Of course I’ve read peer reviewed studies. This is a decades old problem. I have to find them and post them for you to believe that heterosexual Priests aren’t the majority of abusers? Seminarians who didn’t support the gay lifestyle had to pretend they did to get ordained. I guess you don’t remember that stuff. That’s why they’ve changed the rules .
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It isn’t accurate to describe all or even most pedophiles who abuse boys as “homosexuals”. As noted by Prof. Gregory Herrick at the University of California, Davis:
Another problem related to terminology arises because sexual abuse of male children by adult men is often referred to as “homosexual molestation.” The adjective “homosexual” (or “heterosexual” when a man abuses a female child) refers to the victim’s gender in relation to that of the perpetrator. Unfortunately, people sometimes mistakenly interpret it as referring to the perpetrator’s sexual orientation.

As an expert panel of researchers convened by the National Academy of Sciences noted in a 1993 report: “The distinction between homosexual and heterosexual child molesters relies on the premise that male molesters of male victims are homosexual in orientation. Most molesters of boys do not report sexual interest in adult men, however” (National Research Council, 1993, p. 143, citation omitted).

To avoid this confusion, it is preferable to refer to men’s sexual abuse of boys with the more accurate label of male-male molestation. Similarly, it is preferable to refer to men’s abuse of girls as male-female molestation. These labels are more accurate because they describe the sex of the individuals involved but don’t implicitly convey unwarranted assumptions about the perpetrator’s sexual orientation.

The distinction between a victim’s gender and a perpetrator’s sexual orientation is important because many child molesters don’t really have an adult sexual orientation. They have never developed the capacity for mature sexual relationships with other adults, either men or women. Instead, their sexual attractions focus on children – boys, girls, or children of both sexes.
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http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_molestation.html
 
mrsdizzyd said:
“Only 3 percent of diocesan priests aged sixty-six or older, who would have been seminarians in the early 1970s, answered affirmatively. In contrast, 40 percent of the priests aged thirty-six to fifty-five, who would have been seminarians in the 1980s and 1990s, reported that there was a clear homosexual subculture in the seminaries they had attended. As was shown in Table 2.1, 40.3 percent of the priest-abusers from the Nature and Scope study were ordained in the 1950s and 1960s and commit-ted sexual abusive acts in the 1970s. The men ordained in the 1980s account for a comparatively smaller percentage of the abusers, 7.1 percent. Finally, those men ordained after 1989 represent only 1.9 percent of the accused.” p. 38
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Does this account for decreasing vocations, though? The per capita numbers might be different. I think that, after 1990 or so, many Catholic parents (my own included) wouldn’t be caught dead allowing a son to go into a seminary.
 
Thorolfr said:
It isn’t accurate to describe all or even most pedophiles who abuse boys as “homosexuals”.
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To a degree, that’s right. But most victims of priests were 14-18, and thus their body type would be virtually indistinguishable from a college student’s. Those offenders, it seems to me, must have either been gay or bisexual.
 
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“ The data do not support a finding that homosexual identity and/or pre-ordination same-sex sexual behavior are significant risk factors for the sexual abuse of minors.
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This points to something I’ve often observed: people who aren’t extremely repressed are less likely to abuse anyone – and probably, especially less likely to abuse children.
 
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Prodigal_Son said:
Does this account for decreasing vocations, though? The per capita numbers might be different.
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This is the number of accused abusers sorted by ordination. Here is a screen shot of table 2.1:

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
mrsdizzyd said:
This is the number of accused abusers sorted by ordination.
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Thanks, but this doesn’t give us a per capita number. We’d have to compare the number in that table to the total number of priests ordained in each decade. That would give us a sense of how bad the seminaries were, essentially.
 
Prodigal_Son said:
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Thorolfr:
It isn’t accurate to describe all or even most pedophiles who abuse boys as “homosexuals”.
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But most victims of priests were 14-18, and thus their body type would be virtually indistinguishable from a college student’s. Those offenders, it seems to me, must have either been gay or bisexual.
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I don’t think that most victims were in that age category. According to the Jay Report as summarized in Wikipedia, about 39.9% were between 14 and 17. The rest were under 14. Another breakdown is as follows:

“22% were younger than age 10, 51% were between the ages of 11 and 14, and 27% were between the ages of 15 and 17 years.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jay_Report
 
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OK, I stand corrected. But it would seem like two separate problems, in a way, then: one has to do with gay or bisexual men, and the other doesn’t (or doesn’t necessarily).
 
That’s so wrong to use the rainbow in this picture. The rainbow belongs to God! LGBT doesn’t belong in the church as a vocation. I don’t even know how 1 can be both LGBT and have read the Bible…
 
I wasn’t going to comment, but some of these posts make me cringe. Someone who is gay does not think about sex all the time or more than a person who is straight. We are not here to judge, that belongs to God alone. We are called to love and charity. Leave the judgement to God. I don’t know the answer to this question - to me celibate is celibate.
 
It’s the old attraction/behavior debate.

OP is pretty clearly not saying that being LGBT is a vocation. They’re saying that people with same-sex attractions can’t just be left on the outside of the church, being told that they have to stay chaste but even if they do they don’t really have any role, just a long list of things they can’t do.

It’s not like reading the Bible simply makes everything go away.
 
Don’t believe I’ve ever posted any here. But, it’s the thought that counts. Thanks!
 
He may well have been, but if you don’t know Dante or Catholic teaching on hell you might take him seriously. That’s a problem.
 
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