A high ranking Vatican spokesman yesterday blamed the escalating scandal over child molestation in the Catholic Church on too many homosexuals in the priesthood.
Who will be the next scapegoat? Feisty nuns? Secular humanists? Somebody has to take the blame for this nasty business and it couldn’t be the fault of all those Cardinals and Bishops who supposedly run the place.
No, the Church is more than blameless. Altar boys are being tied up and sodomized, but the Church is the victim rather than the perpetrator of these horrific acts. That was the far-fetched logic of a Vatican preacher who, just before Easter, likened pedophile priests to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, comparing attacks on the hierarchy to anti-Semitism.
The Bishops are being subjected to media criticism, not slaughtered like cattle in extermination camps, so it’s not a very good analogy. But consider: could the Vatican preacher have charged his critics with carrying out an Inquisition? A witch hunt? The Holocaust was a poor choice, but at least it didn’t raise memories of heretics burned at the stake.
A good friend of mine, who spent many years as a Jesuit priest before leaving his vocation to marry and raise a family, asked my opinion about the unfolding drama. I told him my own view counts for little. Since I’m not a Catholic, whatever I think or say can be dismissed and discounted as the prejudices of an outsider. I told my friend that ultimately, it would be up to officials in the Church to clean up their own house and make restitution for wrongs committed.
He suggested that thousands of conscientious priests resigning, in mass protest, might be the kind of jolt needed to get the higher-ups quit their stonewalling and come to terms with this problem of their own making. Perhaps. But unfortunately, that doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon. Instead, blame it on the queers.
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2 comments:
Well, I must admit to a similar illogic some years ago when our local newspaper reported the scandal of two teachers caught doing it in the middle school boiler room – during school hours! I fired off a letter to the paper exclaiming that, once again, heterosexuals had shown they can’t control themselves, and shouldn’t be teaching our children.
Via Andrew Sullivan: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/04/homosexuality-pedophilia-and-the-church.html
Julian Sanchez has a very well-argued response to the "Gay = Pedophile" canard:
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/04/13/the-curious-incident-at-the-american-spectator/
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