Thursday, September 06, 2018

“The Gay Priest Problem”

Very succinct, and has parallels with the "Revoice" issue in Reformed churches.

6 comments:

  1. I have read that the RCC sex abuse scandal displays the same percentage of sex abuse as other denominations. Do you believe that to be accurate? It seems wildly underrated.

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    1. Trent — Rome wants you to think that. But there are disanalogies. Rome has priests, to whom one must confess sexual sin. So they can pick off easy targets. Plus there is that whole layer of bishop cover-ups, that no other denomination has. And as Steve mentioned in a comment below, there are wildly varying numbers about how many homosexual priests there actually are (who recruit not only among the adolescents, but among the other priests and seminarians as well. There really is no way to say for sure.

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  2. I think that he, and a lot of others, haven't come to terms with all the consequences of all the things they've realised. He says at the end that there is entire network of promoters and defenders of homosexuality throughout the institution... and he also says that for these priests, their homosexuality, and its defence, is fundamental to their identity and ministry. If you put that together, you have a problem that's unsolvable except through total, focussed, war.

    He implicitly acknowledges that those who aren't part of the homosexual network don't see that, and aren't taking serious measures to root it out. The logical consequence of that concession is that in a generation's time, nothing will have changed.

    I suppose that it's pyschologically difficult for sincere Roman Catholics, committed to the belief that Rome alone is God's true church, to face up to the consequences of all those observations and to join the dots... to conclude that for as far as the eye can see, without a sequence of drastic miracles, the Roman Catholic church in large parts of the world will be a self-perpetuating den of iniquity and (until the state intervenes) impunity, with no reasonable prospect of change. i.e. A synagogue of Satan. So, whilst describing the problems clearly, like the man in this video, they can't yet bring themselves to describe the only reasonable implications of their own clear-sighted observations.

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    1. (And, of course, in many places, the state does not see seminaries being dens of homosexuality as any sort of problem that needs addressing; they will only ever see a disconnected, isolated set of abuse events when under-age boys are involved. So, waiting for the state to break up the networks themselves is waiting for something that will never happen).

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    2. It does seem like a self-perpetuating situation. But it will become more and more intolerable for the conservatives, who will have to do something.

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  3. Consider the statistic that 20-60% of Catholic priests are homosexual. That's quite a spread. Let's split the difference. Suppose 40% of priests are homosexual. That's still a huge percentage. It's like a hull breach in which the hull is 40% full of water. At that point, how do you prevent the ship from capsizing?

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