The Vatican has decided not to blame themselves or their backwards and unnecessary policies regarding sex and virtue. The Vatican has decided to lay all the blame for the lustful desires of the clergy on the United States.
The United States represents sexual liberalism and moral depravity. Without these American problems, the Catholic Church would not have homosexuality and, by extension of Vatican logic, not have pedophilia.
Beyond being blatantly dishonest in calling the clergy scandal an “American” problem, it is intellectually dishonest to put homosexuals and pedophiles in the same category. No matter how you feel personally about a person’s sexual orientation, if you can tell yourself that homosexuals are also pedophiles without raising any mental red flags, you have either blissfully gone through life without ever meeting a person that is homosexual or your head has been filled with irrational fear.
Or both.
Gay-rights groups have repeatedly denounced pedophilia. This is not a defense to shield themselves from Vatican slander. It is a legitimate philosophical position shared by 99.9% of humanity–sex with children is wrong. While most of the contributors at Cyberista have met some very strange homosexual characters, not a single one of them desired anything sexually beyond a consenting adult.
A consenting adult, incidentally, is also one of those philosophical positions shared by 99.9% of humanity.
An interesting defense of the Vatican is that pedophilia does not occur in any greater percentage in the priesthood than the general population. This is a fatally flawed argument because the priesthood cannot be compared in any way to the general population. The only way to statistically compare the frequency of pedophilia in the priesthood against the general population is to take a sample of men who, for reasons outside of institutional obligation, have explicitly taken a vow of celibacy.
Since these men are extremely rare, this “general population” would be smaller than the sample of the priesthood. In the United States, there are 46,000 Catholic priests. The result puts the occurrence of pedophilia in the priesthood off the charts in comparison to the general population. That is a sign of a much deeper problem than basic homosexuality.
If the Vatican goes through with plans to eliminate homosexuals because of their problems with pedophilia, the result will be nothing less than an ill-conceived witch hunt. At the most basic level of the concept of celibacy there is an understanding that there can be no sexual intercourse at all without violating the definition. If the sole crime of a priest is that he has homosexual fantasies or temptations, under Catholicism, he has committed no crime at all.
Catholicism requires confession only for actual transgressions. Temptation is not a sin.
If this logic is ignored and the Vatican continues to search and destroy suspected priests on the sole basis of their sexual preference prior to the vow of celibacy, the suspects will not be able to defend against any accusation of the sort. Celibacy precludes the possibility of a sexual history without evidence of an actual crime or a broken vow.
After locking out women and after locking out married men, the Vatican will find a very small crowd of supporters if they start removing honorably celibate priests on the basis that they were once active homosexuals. That should offend anyone’s sense of justice.
Celibacy is an artifact of the Council of Trent and is enforced by the demons that created the Inquisition. Prior to 1139, the Catholic Church was highly dependent on donations from local aristocrats. They turned over donated property to the clergy which, in turn, left their property to their children. To protect its assets, a vow of celibacy was required. If a priest was celibate, no descendant would have legal claims on Vatican property. The Church did not give a damn if these priests had secret marriages so long as there was no legal way to lose property to the descendants.
Like everything in this world, celibacy was about money. It is outdated, has nothing to do with Jesus and needs to lose its mandatory status. Women need to be allowed to be ordained. The Vatican needs to show more respect to its dedicated laity. While they’re at it, they should back off any inquisitions of homosexuals and instead they figure out how mentally disturbed people find their way through the rules to create the worst betrayal of trust possible against a parish.
Defending priests against any homosexual inquisition is important because once you can destroy an otherwise honorable person on charges of homosexuality, you can destroy any honorable person on any charge.
The Vatican pot has no business calling the American kettle black.
