A Springfield, Mass.-area Roman Catholic priest has publicly called for Pope Benedict XVI (a.k.a. Joseph Ratzinger) to resign.
According to today’s Boston Globe, Rev. James Scahill of St. Michael’ Parish said the pope’s untruthfulness constituted a violation of an important tenet of Catholicism. The Globe added that Scahill “has long been outspoken on the need for accountability among church leaders.”
Unfortunately, his superiors are far less courageous.
Mark Dupont, a spokesman for the Diocese of Springfield, was quick to distance the diocesan leadership from the comments made by Scahill.
“It in no way represents the position of the bishop,” Dupont said. “We find his statements to be unfortunate.”
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, two of the world’s most prominent atheist intellectuals, are seeking means to try the pope for crimes against humanity, their lawyers confirmed this weekend.
The pair are said to be working with British lawyers to see if the pope can be arrested for his part in the alleged cover-up of widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church during a visit to the United Kingdom in September
The Vatican has suggested that the pope is immune to prosecution as he is a head of state – Dawkins and Hitchens suggest that he is not immune as the Vatican is not represented at the United Nations.
Hitchens told the Sunday Times of London: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalized concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.”
Dawkins and Hitchens are correct to assert that the Pope is not above or outside the law. Anyone connected to covering-up child rape ought to pay the societal consequences.
The sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is similar, in some respects, to last year’ financial meltdown. In both cases, powerful, arrogant abusers were shielded from the consequences of their predatory behavior, while the victims were offered pain, platitudes and empty promises.
Like the gargantuan firms in lower Manhattan, the Vatican believes it is too big to fail and demands a bailout from the faithful. However, the overpaid bankers and the clergy banking on infinite forgiveness from their flock are in grave denial. Major religions come and go — whether it is worshipping the unbridled corporate casino or a church that does not protect its most vulnerable members.
Alarmingly, new rules and systematic restructuring to prevent future catastrophes from occurring have still not come to fruition. It is breathtaking to watch these behemoths act so contemptuous of the law and reckless in their responsibility to those that they were created to help.
The United States is wealthy enough, for the time being, to withstand the fiscal fiasco. However, the same tax code and lax regulations are still in place that encourage irrational marketplace speculation. Unless substantive changes are made, history is almost certain to repeat itself. And, if it does, the public will be in no mood to play Santa Claus to these very naughty children.
Likewise, the Catholic Church and its surrogates believe that spin and slander can distract the masses from impious priests defiling children. I suspect the Church may be correct and barely weather the scandal — at least temporarily. They will blame gays, play the victim card and pretend that significant changes have been made to stop future child abuse.
It doesn’t take a genius, however, to figure out that the grotesque scandals will continue. As soon as the current crisis subsides, a new crop of equally shocking sins will emerge. The tragic fact remains that the rules for priesthood encourage sexually dysfunctional and emotionally stunted human beings to apply at disproportionate rates.
There are certainly many wonderful priests who feel called to serve the church. These individuals should be commended for their heroic work, such as feeding the hungry, helping the poor and providing guidance for young people. But one can’t deny that the institution is uniquely set up as a magnet for unhealthy men who view the priesthood as an escape hatch. The collar provides an effective way for sexual reprobates to command respect from society.
What better cover than celibacy for a child molester or tormented homosexual than joining the Catholic clergy? It ensures the adulation of friends and relatives who no longer ask pesky questions about sexuality or relationships. By ending the celibacy stricture, the church would no longer serve as an oasis from those hiding from their inner-demons. Quite simply, the question, “who are you dating” would once again be asked, thus ending a sanctuary for sick minds.
Exacerbating matters is the “good ole boys” club that is the priesthood. This insular world would immediately end if the Vatican allowed female priests and heterosexual priests to marry. It would also behoove Rome to allow openly gay priests, who would end the incentive of using the vocation as a desperate, last ditch measure to suppress homosexuality. Until these concrete steps are taken, no one should expect different results.
Still, the pit bulls and the bullheaded living in their bubble continue to defend the Vatican’ bumbling response. For example, a New York Times ad by the Catholic League criticized that newspaper claiming, “The Times continues to editorialize about the “pedophilia crisis”, when all along it has been a homosexual crisis.”
But most people aren’t buying this smear campaign because the fondling and fiddling is occurring in church confessional booths — not predominantly gay neighborhoods, community centers or churches.
What amazes me the most is the incompetent efforts by the Vatican to mitigate the fallout. They have an exorcist blaming the devil, a priest comparing the church’ predicament to the historic plight of Jews and another holy man confusing “gossip” with playing “grab ass” with minors.
Another excuse is that these cases are old news from another era. But just this week we learned of a priest in India who is still working after allegedly sexually assaulting a 14-year old girl a few years ago in Minnesota.
A friend of mine e-mailed this week saying his traditionalist father was heartbroken after a neighborhood Catholic school had shut down. He said parents were afraid to send their children for matriculation because they feared priestly ejaculation. What kind of future does such a church hold?
The Vatican pretends to be serious about ending the crisis. But, how can this be if there are 400,000 priests and only 10 people working on the avalanche of abuse cases?
Whether it’ groping by priests or greed on Wall Street — institutions that don’t change in the face of crisis and public indignation will eventually become irrelevant. If history has shown one truism, it is that nothing is too big to fail.
The embarrassment of the New York Times, Ross Douthat, seems to think that liberals are at least partially to blame for the fact that Catholic priests have been raping the hell out of children for decades:
Liberal Catholics, echoed by the secular press, insist that the whole problem can be traced to clerical celibacy. Conservatives blame the moral relativism that swept the church in the upheavals of the 1970s, when the worst abuses and cover-ups took place.
In reality, the scandal implicates left and right alike. The permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s deserves a share of the blame, as does that era’ overemphasis on therapy. (Again and again, bishops relied on psychiatrists rather than common sense in deciding how to handle abusive clerics.) But it was the church’ conservative instincts ‚Äî the insistence on institutional loyalty, obedience and the absolute authority of clerics ‚Äî that allowed the abuse to spread unpunished.
Wait, when in the 1970′s was child rape part of the “permissive sexual culture”? Just curious!
No.
Here’s why this is happening:
1. Enforced celibacy is not only weird, it’s completely unnatural. Hetero- or homo-, we have bodies and brains that are wired for intimacy with other consenting human beings. Normal human beings can go through non-sexual dry spells, but that’s entirely different from “You may not have intimacy with another person.”
2. Because of the rape culture environment of the Catholic church, people are pressured and shamed into relegating their sexuality to the strictures of, oh what do you know, celibate men:
Rape culture crops up when male power over women and children is exalted, when sexuality is demonized, and when men are encouraged to think of women (and children’) bodies as their property. All these aspects of patriarchy aren’t only part of the Catholic church, they’re celebrated. The exuberant love of male dominance that is the Catholic dogma is going to turn men into rapists who get a rise out of sexually dominated people they believe are lesser than them.
Duh.
(…)
Rape culture specifically likes to make big distinctions between different kinds of rape. Part of this is innocent enough—attacking children is a special kind of horror, after all. But when we put rape of women in one category and rape of children in another and rape of men in another, we’re discouraging people from seeing the connections. But there is a line between tolerating the abuse of women and tolerating the abuse of children. In a culture where male sexuality is assumed to be domineering and debasing, then some men will, for various reasons, skip right past raping women on to raping children.
3. Likewise, because sexuality, and along with it, sexual paraphilias and disorders, are taught to be good and evil and, again, in need of reconciliation with the ruling men in dresses and fancy hats, those with psychosexual issues often end up signing up for the only life they think might protect them from themselves: the celibate priesthood. The underlying issues, however, remain unaddressed.
4. Finally, this thing has festered for decades because the dominance of the Catholic church is hanging on by a thread in the developed world, and they care much more about protecting the church than they do about any pesky 10 year old rape victims. Educated people are leaving the church in droves, and though the church is having some success in recruiting starving people in the third world by giving them false hope for a better life, they’re also doing their part to kill those very same people with their discredited, sex-shaming policies on HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention. So the faster it becomes public knowledge just how widespread the Catholic child rape problem is, the more people (including their own parishioners) will realize that the jig is up and that they really don’t need to be opening their souls and their pocketbooks to men in white frocks who just might have been diddling their children thirty minutes ago.
So there you have it. Maybe one day the Times will realize what a disastrous mistake they made when they hired Douthat, but I’m not holding out hope.
It is with mixed elation, sorrow, anger and shame that LGBTIQ South Africans, their friends and family learnt of the arrest of Aubrey Levin of Calgary, Canada. Levin has been described as South Africa’ own Dr. Mengele. Many are happy that he has finally been caught for something seemingly related to his alleged activities in South Africa – but there remains a great deal of unfinished business left behind. If the reports about him can be believed, it would seem that Aubrey Levin literally got away with murder!
He was not prosecuted in South Africa. He disappeared to Canada before any such charges could be brought against him and did not appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He has since avoided coming to South Africa because of the alleged risk that he may be charged. Justice might still not have been served in South Africa.
The charges he is currently facing in Canada are not nearly sufficient to make up for his alleged activities committed at 1 Military Hospital and the alleged heinous violations of the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender conscripts, conscientious objectors and others whom the Apartheid government considered undesirable. The charges he might face are as chilling as any which would be levelled against his Nazi namesake, who disappeared without a trace, never to be brought to justice.
We ask that Aubrey Levin not be allowed to go unpunished for his alleged crimes. We ask that he face the full might of Canadian law for his crimes there – and the full might of South African law here. (Read More)
Last week, TWO’s Evan Hurst reported that House Minority Leader John Boehner joined right wing Catholics to attack the Human Right’s Campaign’s Harry Knox as an “anti-Catholic bigot” and called on him to resign from President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
Why?
They were allegedly upset that Knox correctly stated that the Pope is hurting people in the name of Jesus by actively working against honest sex and contraception education in sub-Saharan Africa, and is thus contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS on that continent.
The attacks on Knox over old comments seemed oddly timed and forced – as if those leveling the bogus charges were desperately groping to find a political issue to serve as a smoke screen to distract the world. It was unclear at the time why these pious henchmen wanted us to avert our gaze.
Well, today the other Prada shoe fell.
It became sickeningly obvious why the Church needed to quickly find a Boogie Man. A new child abuse scandal rocked the Roman Catholic Church in Pope Benedict’s XVI native Germany. According to The New York Times:
The widening public scandal began last month with allegations that three priests at the elite Canisius Jesuit high school in Berlin had sexually abused students in the 1970s and ’80s. In the midst of a steadily growing uproar over the handling of that case, the German magazine Der Spiegel published an article that said nearly 100 clerics and laypeople had been suspected of abusing children and teenagers nationwide since 1995.
Der Spiegel said that at least 94 clerics and laypeople had been suspected of abuse since 1995, based on a poll of 27 of Germany’s 30 Catholic dioceses. The magazine’s cover this week was illustrated with an image of a priest reaching suggestively under his robes.
Making matters worse for Rome, Irish victims of the church’s rampant sexual abuse wrote a letter to the Pope asking him to take responsibility for the church’s concealment of child molestation by forcing out bishops implicated in the decades of cover-up.
Exactly, why hasn’t The Pope done this already? Why isn’t punishing child rapists a top priority, rather than the Vatican’s outrageous campaign against marriage equality, where consenting adults commit their lives to each other?
The way I see it, conservative Catholics, such as Boehner, Thomas Peters of the American Papist Blog, Dr. Kevin Roberts of Catholic Families for America, and Larry Cirignano of Faithful Catholic Citizens tried to pick a fight with America’s largest LGBT rights groups last week over condoms only days before the German report and Irish letter were publicly released. They knew this week’s shameful news would turn stomachs and they needed to find a scapegoat.
Fortunately, their conjured anti-gay dust-up fooled no one and the world’s eyes are firmly fixed on the real issue — the church’s continued exploitation of youth and the heartbreaking cover-ups.
Before the Roman Catholic Church preaches about values and points fingers, I believe it must clean up its own house. At the moment, it has no moral authority to talk about sexual matters – from condoms to birth control to homosexuality.
The Vatican has a priority problem. I suggest it take a break and spend the next year devoting all of its energy, time and financial resources to healing the hurt it has caused to its own members. Indeed, Germany has lost 3 million Catholics since 1990. Today’s tawdry revelations won’t help reverse this trend. Nor will launching fake attacks on LGBT people and leaders as a diversion from perversion that has brought the church to its knees.
Ex-gay organization had been source of contention locally
By Todd A. Heywood 12/16/09 9:57 AM
LANSING — Gay rights advocates are lauding a split between the controversial Lansing-based ex-gay ministry Corduroy Stone and prominent ex-gay ministry group Exodus International.
“Exodus has removed their affiliation and the board of directors has dissolved. Now he’ just some guy,” said Patrick McAlvey, 24, who earlier this year told his story of dealing with Mike Jones and Corduroy Stone Ministries to the national organization Truth Wins Out.
“He’s not a mental health professional. He’ not a pastor,” McAlvey said of Jones, a retired Michigan State University employee. “He’ just some guy with made-up theories and outlandish techniques claiming he can help people change their sexual orientation. He is dangerous and I hope people steer clear of this predator.”
Despite accusations that he sexually accosted a young male client and uses public property to promote sectarian religious bigotries, Mike Jones and his Corduroy Stone ex-gay ministry will continue to receive its web hosting from Michigan State University.
The Michigan Messenger reported Friday that David Gift, vice provost for libraries, computing and technology at MSU, said that the university’ hands are tied because Mike Jones is a retired university employee.
We have made systematic progress over the past year at removing public purchased web publishing and e-mail accounts that had been established at MSU. However, retirees have the benefit of continued use of their MSU web space and our existing policies for controlling their use of that space are quite limited and do not permit us to address this particular case. The owner of this site is a retiree, and after we closed his purchased account under our general change of business practices he set up shop in his retiree space. He apparently has arranged for a .com URL, but has that URL redirected to his MSU personal webspace.
Terry Denbow, vice president for university relations, further explained MSU’s policy:
The point is that we do allow retirees to have Web spaces that link to other organizations. The fact that this organization has material that is offensive does not, in and of itself, violate any University policies. We cannot, under the First Amendment, make content based distinctions on what sites we allow and which ones we do not. We are continuing to review and update our acceptable use policies and will take this under advisement as we do so. In the meantime, so long as Mr. Jones is in compliance with U policy, his web space will remain available to him.
Denbow said that while the university was blocked from further action under
current policies, it might be time to revisit those policies.
Truth Wins Out executive director Wayne Besen and Jones’s victimized client, who is no longer ex-gay, reacted here.
It is frankly alarming that MSU policy allows alleged predators to host websites on public property simply because they are retirees. MSU’s see-no-evil policy may serve as an open invitation for other retirees to launch sites inciting prejudice and sexual violence against ethnic and religious constituencies.
A true “conservative,” small-government, or libertarian policy would demand that no personal or private sectarian sites of any kind be hosted on taxpayer-supported government property. Instead, taxpayers are being forced to host the work of a predatory ex-gay who inflicts his failures upon students.
Truth Wins Out has sought comment from Corduroy Stone and from Exodus International regarding the accusation of sexual abuse; both have refused to comment.
After assuring LGBT activists and leaders for two years that a controversial website would be removed from its computer servers, Michigan State University said last week it will continue to host the website of the ex-gay ministry Corduroy Stone.
In an email, David Gift, vice provost for libraries, computing and technology at MSU, told Michigan Messenger that the university’ hands are tied because Mike Jones, who runs the site that promotes therapy as a way to convert gay individuals to a straight lifestyle, is a retired university employee.
Wayne Besen, executive director of the national organization Truth Wins Out, which opposes the ex-gay movement, also called on the university to remove the website:
“Michigan State should cancel Jones’ e-mail address and immediately stop hosting his site. It gives the false impression that the university endorses a dangerous form of therapy that was just condemned by the American Psychological Association.”
Besen is particularly familiar with Corduroy Stone because when he was in Grand Rapids earlier this year to speak at an event at Grand Valley State University aimed at countering the national ex-gay conference held locally. While there, he met Patrick McAlvey, 24, of Lansing, who says he was victimized by Jones and the Corduroy Stone programs. He even went so far as to do a video interview with Besen, which was posted last month on YouTube. And Besen features McAlvey’ story on his website.
“As both a graduate of Michigan State University and a recovering victim of Mr. Jones’ “ex-gay” therapy I find it sickening that the Corduroy Stone website continues to be supported by MSU. It is horrifying to think that taxpayer money, including my own, is supporting Mr. Jones and his strange and dangerous “work” with Corduroy Stone,” said McAlvey in an email to Michigan Messenger. “I am disturbed that this use of MSU server space could be be mistakenly interpreted as lending Corduroy Stone some sort of credibility it certainly doesn’t deserve and in reality does not enjoy.”
With a gift of $35 to Truth Wins Out, you can receive an autographed copy of "Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth."
According to today’s Boston Globe, Rev. James Scahill of St. Michael’ Parish said the pope’s untruthfulness constituted a violation of an important tenet of Catholicism. The Globe added that Scahill “has long been outspoken on the need for accountability among church leaders.”
(Weekly Column)
Last week, TWO’s 
