Catholic Church Demands Celibacy- for Gays Too

Vatican's search for gays in seminaries raises alarm By Jason Szep
Fri Sep 16, 5:48 PM ET


BOSTON (Reuters) - A Vatican investigation of U.S. seminaries for evidence of homosexuality, sparked by a scandal over pedophile priests, infuriated gay rights advocates on Friday.

Teams of American Church officials will visit 229 seminaries, which train about 4,500 future priests, beginning this month and ending in spring, U.S. church officials said.

The Catholic Church demands celibacy of its priest and gay activists said the latest review amounted to a witchhunt.

The Vatican approved the seminary review, known as an apostolic visitation and the first in America since 1983, in response to the sexual abuse crisis that erupted in 2002 and triggered lawsuits by thousands of people abused by priests.

"There should not be any doubts about the lifestyle the priests ought to live," said Monsignor Francis Maniscalco, spokesman at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "It is an evaluation of seminaries to see if they are doing their job."

Underpinning concerns among U.S. Church leaders and conservative Catholics is a 2004 survey by John Jay College of Criminal Justice that found that, of 10,667 individuals abused by priests between 1950 and 2002, 81 percent were male.

Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, a conservative Catholic journal, expects the review to lead to a ban by the Vatican on gays in America's seminaries. "Is there a particular concern about homosexuality? Sure," he said.

Edwin O'Brien, archbishop for the United States military who is supervising the seminary review, told The National Catholic Register that even gays who have been celibate for 10 or more years should not be admitted to seminaries.

Brian Saint-Paul, editor of the Catholic journal "Crisis," said he hoped the probe would not spark a witchhunt in the priesthood but that it was long overdue. "It's like having a heterosexual young man live in an all-female dorm," he said. It's not a reasonable position to put someone in."

Faculty members, seminarians and graduates from the last three years will be interviewed confidentially in the review, which was agreed when U.S. Cardinals visited the Vatican in April 2002 to discuss the abuse scandal, Maniscalco said.

"SCAPEGOAT"

Gay rights advocates such as Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, said the Church was making gay men scapegoats for pedophiles.

"You have this massive problem within the Catholic Church and the Church's response to it, in one sweeping gesture, seems to be 'we're going to travel around the country and ask people if they are gay'," Solmonese said.

"What the Church is doing, to the outside observer who reads this, is immediately equating gay men with the abuse that is going on here that is perpetuating something that is absolutely not true."

The real problem is the Church's fixation on celibacy, said Daniel C. Maguire, a professor of moral theology at Marquette, a Jesuit university in Wisconsin.

"I see it (the investigation) as a diversionary tactic away from the real problem of Catholic clergy which is enforced celibacy," he said. "It's highly unrealistic. I would call it a failed experiment in human control." he said.

He said some studies he had read estimated about 50 percent of students studying at U.S. seminaries were now gay, and he believed the review could ultimately drain the Church of future priests.

"It's an impossible plan because if they eliminate the gays they are going to eliminate half their clergy in some of their places," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...olic_gays_dc_1

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Underpinning concerns among U.S. Church leaders and conservative Catholics is a 2004 survey by John Jay College of Criminal Justice that found that, of 10,667 individuals abused by priests between 1950 and 2002, 81 percent were male.




Yeah they're called altar boys for you geniuses who can't figure that out. The fact that priests molest more boys than girls has nothing to do with homosexuality.

"I see it (the investigation) as a diversionary tactic away from the real problem of Catholic clergy which is enforced celibacy," he said. "It's highly unrealistic. I would call it a failed experiment in human control." he said.


That's a very reasonable opinion. I think he meant Chastity though.

Simple solution---lose the altar boys and let adults do the job.

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"Some men eventually stumble over the truth but they usually pick themselves up and walk on as if nothing ever happened."
-Winston Churchill

" What does a pope do? "
- Fidel Castro

WHAT? If you are a man and either suck off or fuck another male in the ass regardless of age you are choosing to be queer, it has everything to do with homosexuality choice.

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Communism is a great idea-Charleston Chad 9/11/06

Step number 2. Don't leave your children alone with an adult no matter how much you trust them. The more you trust them the more likely they are to be a child molestor actually. Child molestors make damn sure to make themselves appear very trustworthy. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to molest children. That's why it's usually a family member or a priest etc...

If you think that pedophiles are that concerned with gender you are fooling yourself. The point is that equating homosexuals with child molestors who molest boys is stupid. To be intellectually honest with yourself you'd have to make the same connection with heterosexuals and people who molest girls.

Are you expecting us to believe that pedophilia only exists in the Catholic church because of the age of altar boys and the fact that they are male?

__________________
"Some men eventually stumble over the truth but they usually pick themselves up and walk on as if nothing ever happened."
-Winston Churchill

" What does a pope do? "
- Fidel Castro

I never said that. If you read one of my previous posts in this thread you will see that I say that pedophiles are people who represent themselves as being trustworthy. Priests can easily do that because people assume that priests are good people. They are around boys and alone with boys fairly often. This isn't that difficult of a logical puzzle to put together.

And you're guessing that there are no gay pedophiles in the priesthood?

__________________
"Some men eventually stumble over the truth but they usually pick themselves up and walk on as if nothing ever happened."
-Winston Churchill

" What does a pope do? "
- Fidel Castro

OK this is getting stupid quick. I don't believe that pedophiles should be seperated into homosexual and heterosexual. If I'm wrong about that and pedophiles really do care that much about gender then so be it. By your definition of homosexual pedophiles why would you even ask such a stupid question?

Well since in reality we are all heterosexuals, well normal so to speak, then yeah that would be true but your psychobabble about not being concerned with gender is foolish. What rerally is going on here is queers want that little lie to become truth because they would like to keep it a secret that they are astronomically much more likely to be perpetrators of pedophilia.

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Communism is a great idea-Charleston Chad 9/11/06

Because of this stupid ass comment. If pedophilia is spread so evenly between homos and heteros, why are nearly all of the victims male? The catholic church has females you know. Are these homosexual priests chasing them around? Doesn't appear so.

__________________
"Some men eventually stumble over the truth but they usually pick themselves up and walk on as if nothing ever happened."
-Winston Churchill

" What does a pope do? "
- Fidel Castro

You've fallen into a false logic trap. You have been deliberately led to the trap and pushed in. Let's look at the stats that you use to arrive at your conclusion.

Homosexuals only make up 5% of the population, yet 25% of molestation victims are boys who were molested by men. This was worded very carefully by people with anti-homosexual agendas. They don't come right out and claim that homosexuals are 5 times as likely to molest children as heterosexuals, they KNOW it's not true. They want people to get to that false assumption by dividing 25% by 5%. Did you notice that there is no claim that 25% of pedophiles are homosexual? Again, that claim isn't made because it's KNOWN to be false.

The reason it's false is because of the stat that homosexual pedophiles have 7 times the number of victims as heterosexual pedophiles. The math works like this:

Out of 28 victims, 25% or 7 will be boys molested by a man, 1 man. The remaining 21 girls will be molested by 21 men. Clearly, the ratio of men who molest girls to men who molest boys is 21:1 or approximately 5%.

Those who need/want/desperately desire to have an excuse to villify homosexuals will ignore the truth and continue to use the false logic of the first paragraph and continue to be dupes for the propoganda machine of Falwell, Robertson, et al.

Most of the victims are males because most of the altar servers are males. It's usually people that have a close relationship with the priest that get molested and often times that is altar servers. This isn't rocket science.