Published by National Catholic Register on 23 December 2010. By Tim Drake.In Michael Rose’s 2002 book Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood, he explores the Church’s own period of openly accepting homosexual seminary candidates. Many seminaries celebrated the intimacies of homosexual relations, which are directly opposed to true “brotherhood.”
Rose describes the “lavenderization” of seminaries such as Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary and the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, and the homosexual culture present there even into the 1990s.
It is this culture that gave rise to the ordination of homosexuals who later went on to become serial abusers, men like Daniel McCormack, who reportedly had engaged in homosexual relations prior to and during his time at Mundelein. After his ordination, Father Daniel McCormack molested at least 23 boys.
The connection between homosexuality and abuse was clearly demonstrated in 2004’s The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, otherwise known as the John Jay Report, which was conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
According to the John Jay Report, 81% of the victims of clerical sexual abuse were males, the majority of whom were between the ages of 11-17.
Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has said that the report shows that the Catholic abuse crisis was “homosexual predation on American Catholic youth.”
Psychiatrist Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons has echoed that.
“The John Jay report has revealed clearly that the crisis in the Church is not one of pedophilia but of homosexuality. The primary victims have not been children but adolescent males. Fitzgibbons told Catholic News Agency that “every priest whom I treated who was involved with children sexually had previously been involved in adult homosexual relationships.”
It has always been the policy of the Church not to accept homosexuals as priests. For three decades that policy was egregiously disregarded. Following the sexual abuse crisis in the Church, and the results of the John Jay Report, the Church reaffirmed its policy in the 2005 statement, “Instruction 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.”
That statement indicated that “the Church…cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture.’” Furthermore, the statement went on, “Such persons, in fact, find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women.”
In an accompanying Vatican commentary on the statement, Monsignor Tony Anatrella argued that theologically, homosexual priests cannot effectively incarnate either the “spousal bond” between God and the Church, or “spiritual paternity.”
“He must, in principle, be suitable for marriage and able to exercise fatherhood over his children,” wrote Monsignor Anatrella. Because the priest acts in the “person of Christ,” Anatrella said that the Church calls only “men mature in their masculine identity.”
“The Church has the right to refuse holy orders to those who do not have the requested attitudes or who, in one way or another, are not in harmony with the teaching it has received from its divine master,” he added, saying that the homosexual tendency was actually a “counterindication to the call to holy orders.”
Homosexual relationships caused a deep fracture in the priestly male fraternity. Pseudo-intimacy and intrigue replaced the outward looking evangelization of apostolic brotherhood. Bishops were unwilling to discipline the abusive priests under their charge. The Communio became divided. Religious leaders hid their own homosexual proclivities. The worst priests desacralized the liturgy and their vows and their priestly identity, while good priests often became isolated, fearful, and rigid. All priests were maimed.
What will be the result once the military has been compromised by disordered love? What will happen when an 18-year-old recruit finds himself in an unequal power differential with a superior officer who wants something more than push-ups? What’s likely to happen when brotherhood is tested on the field in the midst of battle?
Albert Einstein once said that doing the same thing, yet expecting different results, is the definition of insanity.
Is there some relationship that all of us can understand, which is deeply harmed by eroticization? That relationship, of course, would be the family. This is why the incest taboo is universal. The relationship of brothers in a family is powerful because there’s absolutely a sexual taboo which disallows eroticizing that relationship. Just as incest destroys the family as a body, the eroticization of male-male relationships destroys true brotherhood – the kind of brotherhood that is necessary for group strength and unity.
According to the report of the Pentagon’s Comprehensive Review Working Group, 62% of service members predicted potentially negative effects from the repeal. 67% of U.S. Marine combat forces said that putting homosexuals in their units would hurt their effectiveness in the field. 48% of Marines said that it would hurt their effectiveness in “intense combat situations.”
General James Amos, commandant of the Marines, told reporters that the distraction of having homosexuals in the ranks could cost Marines their lives.
When the loyalty of a brother soldier is corrupted – whether in barracks, cockpits, or foxholes – the strength of a nation’s military is severely compromised.
Disordered love leads to disordered loyalties.
Take, for example, the case of open homosexual, Army specialist Bradley Manning. Asreported by the U.K.’s “The Telegraph,” Manning is the soldier who was demanding “equality on the battlefield,” and spent more than eight months downloading hundreds of thousands of classified documents and cables, which he later leaked to Wikileak.org creator Julian Assang.
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