I put on my hazmat suit this morning after a friend sent a link from Fishwrap to our chat group.
Vatican’s secretary of state: Clerical abuse not linked to homosexuality
Yet while the cardinal’s reflections are notable coming from the second-highest ranking person in the Vatican and indirectly push against claims from a number of right-wing prelates and activists who have repeatedly tried to tie clergy abuse to homosexuality, they are consistent with leading scientific findings on the origins of abuse.
Fishwrap… homosexuality… yeah. Never mind the percentages and ages.
River in Egypt.
Also, I learned that the Ass. of Catholic Priests met.
Assembly of US Catholic priests discusses calls for women’s ordination
If you read that one, get out your emesis basin or barf bag. No well-grounded person can keep down that quantity of sentimental Karo syrup. In short, a Hispanic woman comforted a crying young college age man (?), upset because others in his dorm were messy and wasted food. This means that women should be deaconettes and priests. We clearly need more synodality, it concludes. Beans gave a presentation. McElroy of San Diego:
Doctrine is in service to the pastoral service of the church. It cannot be erected in opposition to it or without reference to it without being more deeply and profoundly in the pastoral mission of the church,” McElroy said to applause.
Of course they applauded. That essentially means, “Put doctrine on the back shelf. Do what you will is the whole of the law”.
Fishwrap enriched our day with yet another story from the meeting of the Ass of Catholic Priests. Card. Tagle of Propaganda (aka Dicastery for Evangelization) was to address the Ass in person.
Cardinal Tagle tells US priests that resistance to pope is rooted in fear of change
He was, instead, sent to do something in the Congo so he spoke by video. The core: more synodality (“walking together”)! Anything other than leaving behind all that isn’t in keeping with a certain way of reading the Vatican II documents is rooted in “insecurity”. Sticking to tradition and reading Vatican II in keeping with tradition is “fear” and “ideology”.
Tagle said experience has taught him that fear of change can limit how the church responds to the needs of the world and works to further keep communities separated rather than unified. He expressed concern for the temptation to use faith-related matters to support ideology rather than Catholic teaching.
Am I wrong the key messaging in these stories? I don’t think so.
For the church of the future we need more homosexuality, female clergy, and wholesale jettisoning of everything that happened before about 1965.
Oh… and yoga. Yoga will help. Aimed at women and others.
Forming a sustainable Christian hope through the practice of yoga
Hmmm.
Forming a sustainable path to demonic oppression and possession through the practice of yoga
There. I fixed it.
UPDATE:
At Catholic World Report there is a lovely article by George Weigel about his high school Latin teacher who became Bishop of St. Augustine, the late Bp. Victor Galeone, who died at the end of May at 88 years of age.
A sample.
(His episcopate embodied his determination that the Novus Ordo be celebrated with dignity, including musical dignity. Thus a few years after he went to Florida, he called me one morning and said, “Hi, George, it’s Vic. You would have been very proud of me this morning.” To which I replied, “Victor, I’m always proud of you, but why should I be even more proud of you today?” “Because this morning I called the diocesan liturgy director and told her, ‘If the bishop ever hears “Gather Us In” at the beginning of a Confirmation Mass again, there will be no Confirmation!’”)
Not very synodal (“walking together”).
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Synod: Sin always polls well
We just need to find spaces where this Pope’s arglebargle doesn’t blow through.
There are plenty of solid parishes and chapels: Latin/Byzantine/Anglican use/Polish/Syrian Malarbic et al to shelter safely
[For the use of “arglebargle”.]
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
What a mess. They are trying to give a nice face to homosexuality it seems, because, well, they are homosexuals themselves.
Please, Holy Spirit, we want our One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church back! Oh, and we’d like to have our country back too. “Nothing is impossible with God!” In the meantime, we offer our pain to you, Lord.
Remember folks, when a cesspool of propaganda like Fishwrap says “right-wing”, those are code words for “orthodox” and “Catholic”.
If that rag calls you anything of the sort, it means you’re on the right side of history.
“Tagle said experience has taught him that fear of change…”
I find it distressing that so many of the hierarchy seem to think and speak in bumper stickers. “Fear of change” as a catch-all bit of pop psychology is so intellectually vapid that a moment’s thought provides sufficient reductios.
An anecdote or two. I once (well, several times) had cancer. Sometimes it was more advanced than at other times. Should I not have a “fear of change” that it would progress, or that it would return from remission? Several times I was in the hospital and was encouraged to move around and walk so as to not develop pneumonia during my convalescence. Should I not have a healthy “fear of change” that I would develop life-threatening pneumonia when my immune system is already taxed?
Sure, one might argue that they are not using the phrase “fear of change” so as to exclude such scenarios, but then why use it at all except perhaps a rhetorical cudgel? Why can they not speak like intelligent adults with substantive things to say? I recognize the perhaps rhetorical nature of these questions and shudder at the likely answers.
How many times will they bring up Women Deacons? They have discussed it ad nausseam and come up with the same results, No, No, No. In scripture they were women who helped protect the modesty of women who were fully immersed during baptism.
1. I thought you linked to an article about the Ass of Priests -in all the pictures I didn’t see anyone in priestly garb (you know, black cassocks or even just the black suit & collar) . . . did someone forget to invite the priests?
2. Homosexuality in no way involved in the abuses?!?!?! So the sexual abuses of boys / young men by other men is what, another form of hetersexuality? BTW, I know that many child abuses by men against young boys may not be generated by homosexuality, but the overwhelming number of priest abuse cases were committed on males older than young boys, and without getting graphic, the adult male characteristics on the abused males were essentially adult or adult like.
Reminds me of an exchange I had with a Diocesan rep at an Arlington, VA parish who was lecturing us parish volunteers about the sex abuse scandal. When I pointed out that something like 80% of the abuse cases were male-on-male and that it was obviously a problem with homosexuality in the priesthood, his reply was that 80% of the victims were male only because most of the young people accessible to abusing priests were boys, due to their prevalence amongst altar servers.
I was gobsmacked at this baloney. But that was the public line in diocesan chanceries. It wasn’t that the Church had a problem with homosexuality in the priesthood – the abusers would have abused girls in equal numbers if girls were available.
The sexual orientation of the priests was not to be discussed. The party line would not permit it.
“We are at war with Oceania. We have always been at war with Oceania.”
Read the “Assembly of Catholic Priests…” article, along with the accompanying photos. Looks like an AARP convention…
What should I say? I have, for the last four years (starting b. c. – before COVID), been developing the first mathematical model of the priest abuse crisis in the U. S.. It has not been easy, but I think I have a robust mathematical epidemiological model that explains the pattern of vertical transmission of abuse. Pope Emeritus Benedict and I have landed on similar causes.
I have access to all of the public data and all of the studies. I have analyzed all of the data. I would so love to put some graphs in the combox, here, to refute some of the ideas out there about the abuse, but since I hope to publish the model, I have to be concerned about copyright issues. Many journals won’t accept previously published work.
Let me just say:
1. Cornelius: the priest you mention is demonstratively wrong. I plotted the boy/girl ratio of abuse from 1950 to 2002 using the John Jay data and from 1950-1960 the boy/girl ratio is almost 50/50; then, starting in 1960-1985, it jumps up to 80/20; then, for some supposedly mysterious reason, it jumps back to 50/50 by 1990. This, despite the fact that the population of boy alter servers was falling after 1980, while the girl population was rising. If you want to see the graphs, send me an e-mail through my blog.
2. I, also, have heat maps of the U.S. showing the hot spots for abuse, both by raw numbers and scaled by Catholic population density for each state based on data from Bishop Accountability.org
3. With all of this, I can’t even find data on simple things like the number of alter boys in the U.S. Who do these guys think they are kidding? Nobody knows the epidemiology of the abuse crisis. I think my model might answer some questions, but I have to approximate some of the data, because it just isn’t available. Cardinal Parolin is on really shaky ground unless he has access to a ton of data he isn’t revealing.
What about Fr. Sullin’s work based on the John Jay and also the Kansas Star (?) data showing a 4:1 ratio of homosexual to heterosexual abusers? Even the federal government did a study of abuse in secular elementary schools that came to the same conclusion in the general population – they found the same 4:1 ratio.
I think I have a good theory about what happened. Cardinal Parolin does not, or at least he doesn’t present one. Indeed, just to pooh-pooh the homosexual argument without offering a better explanation is silly. What does he think the cause is? Is that crickets, I hear? How can they even begin to deal with the abuse crisis if they don’t have a reasonable cause?
“Best scientific evidence,” my foot. The John Jay study has been criticized because nowhere does it prove anything about homosexuality not being a heavy contributing factor to abuse. Indeed, it just makes this bald-faced assertion without any proof from data. There is no science, here. If I recall correctly, I am not sure that the sexual orientation is properly identified for each priest in the report. If it were, it would be easy to compile statistics of abuse vs. orientation, but that data is missing from the report. That is what the study should have done to prove its case. It did not. To be fair, I have not compiled data from around the world. I have been modeling the U. S. Perhaps, other countries have such data, but if they do, it has not come to my attention. All I can say is that the NCR report is wrong in citing the John Jay study.
Pederastery may be a cause, but it doesn’t explain the asymmetry in the data starting in 1960 and, strangely ending in 1990. I think I can explain the onset of the asymmetry and why it supposedly ended and, if I can get the work published, it will get peer reviewed.
Of course, there is literally no one doing this sort of analysis and no one collecting the data needed to do the analysis. Why? If this is an abuse epidemic, why aren’t people using the techniques of epidemiology instead of psychology? A lot could be done to establish network connections of abuse and geographic spread, but no one wants to do this. Certainly, chanceries aren’t providing the data except, most times, under court order.
Is the Vatican serious in trying to understand the abuse crisis and its origins, because if it were, they would be doing a completely different job of data collection. I know, because I can’t find half of the data, anywhere, to precisely define the constants in my model. I mean things like number of alter boys and alter girls, time from seminary to abuse, grooming time, etc.
How is anyone supposed to take this seriously when there is no transparency and no data? I have all of the publically-available data, I think, and it is slim pickings.
Sorry, to go on about this. I have been studying this problem in the abstract for a long time. I have tried to stay mostly with the reported numbers without examining each abuse case in detail looking for clues because first-hand interrogations are for people with stronger stomachs than mine.
The Chicken
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The above commenter thinks the gathering of priests in informal — to put it mildly — garb looks like an AARP meeting. Absolutely! My first thought was a poker game. If you have to be casual: good quality slacks, blazer, and a shirt with a (regular) collar. Plaid shirts on old men are a mortal sin.
“For the church of the future we need more homosexuality, female clergy, and wholesale jettisoning of everything that happened before about 1965.”
In other words we need to become the Episcopal Church. How is that working out for the Piskies? They are declining even faster than the (Novus Ordo) Catholic Church.
Also I am a little puzzled as to how a Hindu practice (yoga) helps us “form a sustainable Christian hope” whatever than means.
Great analysis by the Chicken. I wish the institutional Church could be as forthright.
To The Chicken, respectfully:
As you continue to perfect your work for publication be certain to spell altar without an “e”.
I hope that work is published.
Masked Chicken, you said, “The John Jay study has been criticized because nowhere does it prove anything about homosexuality not being a heavy contributing factor to abuse. Indeed, it just makes this bald-faced assertion without any proof from data. There is no science, here.”
But isn’t the fact that something like 80% of the abuse was male-on-male factor significantly into “proving” that homosexuality IS (was?) a heavily contributing factor to the abuse? It certainly proved it to me (as far as these things can be proven at all). Maybe I’m misunderstanding you.
BTW, the Diocesan rep I sparred with was a young layman, not a priest. Not that that makes any difference . . . .
Also, where is your website? I can’t find it.
Thanks.
A few years ago I reviewed a study that had taken a look at homosexuals. One important result of the study showed that homosexuals are interested in homosexual sctivity almost all of the time and not interested in much else.
Dear hilltop,
Sorry, about alter/altar. I was in a hurry and not thinking about things. It is spelled properly in the paper.
Dear Cornelius,
As for contacting me, I haven’t used my blog in a few years (although I still maintain it) because it reminded me of my brother who passed away. I hope to post new stuff on it, soon, although I don’t really have a political slant to it in that I see good and bad things in both U. S. political parties, so I feel justified in criticizing the bad and applauding the good in both. The main purpose of my blog is to look for hidden connections to Catholicism in the sciences, the arts, and life.
As for what laymen can do, I have been reviewing the available online Catholic databases and I have come to the conclusion that one reason for the decline in church attendance may be explained by Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what might be explained by stupidity. If you had seen the Catholic polling data from data collection sites that I have seen, you might agree that the lack of knowledge among the supposed everyday Catholic is so great that either negligence or malice from somebody (bishops, media?) has caused it. How else does one explain the following examples (from: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/religious-tradition/catholic/):
1. Sources of guidance on right and wrong among Catholics
Religion
30%
Philosophy/reason
10%
Common Sense
48%
Science
10%
Don’t know
2%
2. Belief in absolute standards for right and wrong among Catholics
There are clear standards for what is right and what is wrong
30%
Right or wrong depends on the situation
67%
Neither/both equally
1%
Don’t know
1%
3. Views about abortion among Catholics
Legal all/most cases
48%
Illegal all/most cases
47%
Don’t know
5%
4. Views about homosexuality among Catholics
Should be accepted
70%
Should be discouraged
23%
Neither/both
4%
Don’t know
4%
The last poll is especially significant for this post. If homosexuality is normalized, who would think it to be a causative factor in the priest abuse?
We laymen can inform our brethren. We need something like the old Catholic Evidence Guild from England in the days of Frank Sheed to go out into society and inform and challenge the complacency of postmodern influenced Catholics. I really think that the principle problem in the Church, today, is lack of clear guidance on the true mind of the Church. Yes, the abuse crisis hurt, but when hasn’t there been sinful wolfs in sheep’s clothing in the Church. It is hard for some to separate the indefectible Church from the sinfulness of some of its members. I really think that there is a crisis in education in the Church. I am thinking about starting a series: Catholicism 101 on my blog.
In any case, it turns out that the blog e-mail had some kinks to it that I had to change. This should work:
TheMaskedChicken@cathologies.org
Sorry, for posting an e-mail in the combos, but it is publicly accessible through the blog, anyways.
The Chicken