The most disturbing article I’ve read since starting Jesuit Watch appeared on the blog Clerical Whispers.
The Gay Priest Problem, discusses (and criticizes) the persistence of homosexual activity by and among American Catholic priests and seminarians. It comes out swinging. In the second paragraph it references a Kansas City Star report:
The death rate of priests from AIDS is at least four times that of the general population, the newspaper said. Kansas City Bishop Raymond Boland says the AIDS deaths show that priests are human.
This is something I never really thought about—gay priests and seminarians who engage in anal intercourse should use condoms, just like the rest of us.
If you’re one of those who think the whole celibacy thing is creepy, this article explains why your skin sort of crawls.
The author is attacking the Catholic hierarchy hard, but from the right, as in this bare-knuckle passage:
From almost all sides one heard the complaint “Why doesn't somebody do something?” Why not indeed.
A large part of the answer is implicit in the remarkable response to the situation tendered by Bishop Boland. To aver that a priest shows he is human by dying of AIDS is to say either that yielding to this sort of temptation is something that might happen to any normal person or that it is somehow natural to our human state to engage in acts of passive consensual sodomy, from which the resultant infection takes its predictable course.
The author’s solution to this problem is to purge the clergy of all homosexuals and all who support gay sex in any way.
The solution proposed by Jesuit Watch is for the Catholic Church to completely revamp its sexual morality. [Catholic sexual morality would make sense if humans had the sex drive of pandas.]
Clerical Whispers estimates the number of gay priests at shocking levels.
Gay priests themselves—who, though admittedly partisan, admittedly also have unique access to the facts—commonly assure us that they are legion within the priesthood in general and well-represented even among bishops.
Obviously, they have an interest in exaggerating their numbers—for both psychological and political reasons. But the Kansas City Star series mentioned above notes that, of 26 novices who entered the Missouri Province of the Jesuit order in 1967 and 1968, only seven were eventually ordained priests. Of these seven, three have (to date) died of AIDS, and a fourth is an openly gay priest now working as an artist in New York.
Later, the author proposes specific steps. Talk about a hard-ass:
Restore simplicity to priestly life. Physical comfort is the oxygen that feeds the fires of homosexual indulgence. Cut it off.
When you enter a rectory, take a look at the liquor cabinet, the videos, the wardrobe, the slick magazines, and ask yourself, “Do I get the impression that the man who lives here is in the habit of saying no to himself?” If the answer is negative, the chances are that his life of chastity is in disorder as well. It goes without saying that reforming bishops should lead by example in this department and not simply exhort.
I believe it was J Sobrino, S.J., who scoffed at the idea of theology being written in air conditioned rooms.
Recently I mentioned this article to a lady (Lutheran) in my tennis group. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “my husband spent a year in a Paulist seminary. He said it’s all gay.”
Her kids went to St Ignatius, my alma, “but the Jesuits teach contraception,” she assured me.
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