Fr. Z's Blog

From the National Catholic Register with some editing and my emphases and comments.

While the consequences of abolishing Don’t Ask – Don’t Tell for the military is of great interest, for WDTPRS Mr. Drake’s comments on what homosexuality does to the priesthood and the whole Church are of greater importance.  I urge you also to take a look at the whole article.

What the Military Must Learn from the Church

by Tim Drake Thursday, December 23, 2010

Yesterday, our Commander in Chief – the man whose most central oath is to strengthen and defend our country and its military – signed into law an action that will do more to damage U.S. military strength than any bombs or tanks of our enemies. With all due respect to separation of Church and State, the U.S. military could learn some valuable lessons from the Roman Catholic Church.

The combat forces of the U.S. military, like the Catholic priesthood, have always been built on a distinctly masculine bond of obligation. Both bands of brothers gather to protect something Sacred. The priestly gathering is most visible whenever two or more gather around the altar to celebrate Mass, with Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, at the Sacred Center.

Just as the military bands together in its collective duty to protect the nation and her citizens, so the priestly fraternity bands together in its
duty to spiritually protect the Church and her members.

[…]

Been There, Done That

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.” [I’m afraid that this is true.   It was hell being in seminary in those days.]

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. [If that is the case (and it is) then this lavendarization must have begun a long time ago.]

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.” [And yet many will assert that there is no connection between the the abuse and homosexuality, pointing to some other psychic flaw.  I don’t buy it.]

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.” [It will be interesting to see what the breakdown of the nuclear family will have on generations of priests to come.]

“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. [maimed]

[…]
Yet, the Church bears, in herself, the answer. The Church already possesses a robust anthropology of male love. We, as a Church, have a sacramentalized male bond. We’ve been informed by the institution we are in that there is a proper way for men to love one another. The priestly fraternity images brotherly love, properly ordered. Homosexual behavior images disordered affection. [Don’t we often see how certain perverse thinkers attempt to turn storied and decent friendships between men in the past into some kind of twisted relationship?  Most famous among these distorted friendships are that of Bl. John Henry Newman and Ambrose St. John, or St. Hildegard and a sister in the convent.  “These two were friends, men who loved each other and therefore they were homosexual!”  B as in B, S as in S.]

In the priesthood, the priest unites with the spotless Bride – the Church. The priest sacrifices his own desires, giving up the love of another, for a far greater love. He surrenders his own singular needs and desires for the good of the many – Christ’s Body, the Church.

A soldier makes this same archetypal masculine sacrifice for the nation. He sacrifices personal freedom and family for the good of the nation. In both cases, it’s a sacrifice that, in different times and places, requires the shedding of blood – for God and country. And, in both cases, it’s a peculiarly masculine sacrifice.

The Church has an intimate understanding of the human person and properly ordered love. When the brotherhood is perverted, the institution breaks down. The breakdown in fraternity is a fissure that threatens to corrupt the entire institution.

[…]