Recently, a storm has been
brewing in Pennsylvania and it involves members of the Catholic Church. But the focus wasn’t on the average Catholic
in the pew. The focus was on a
Pennsylvania grand jury report, in “the most exhaustive investigation of the
church taken on by a state,” accusing over 300 priests of sexual misconduct, abusing more than 1000 children.
Not only were there priests
involved, but there were monsignors, bishops, archbishops, and even cardinals,
either directly involved in sexual misconduct themselves, or involved in a deliberate
cover-up of the ordeal.
According to one website:
“Instead of contacting law
enforcement, senior church officials would regularly shuffle offending priests
from parish to parish, where they would continue to have contact with minors.”
According to this same source,
less than a week after the Pennsylvania grand jury report came out, Pope
Francis formally apologized for the church’s mishandling of the sex scandal. Yeah, that’s way too little, way too late. Not impressive at all. We don’t think that anyone that high up could
be unaware of the things that are going on in his own church. Pope Francis, as well as the previous popes,
should have started weeding out these perverts long ago. But now, hundreds and hundreds of victims
have already been damaged.
Another source states:
“It is time to face the
horrible truth: The Catholic church is a pedophile ring.”
“… the grand jury report
includes, but is by no means limited to, the case of a ring of pedophile
priests in Pittsburgh, who raped their male victims, took pornographic pictures
of them and marked them by giving them gold crosses to wear so that they could
be easily recognized by other abusers.”
Concerning the Catholic
Church’s cover-up of these crimes, this same source said:
“These strategies used to
subvert stories of abuse were so common that the FBI reviewed a significant
portion of the evidence collected and received by the grand jury and found a series
of practices engaged in by church leaders to conceal the truth. For instance, church authorities who
documented the cases for internal use never used the word ‘rape,’ only
‘inappropriate contact.’ Investigations
were conducted by other clergy members, rather than trained personnel. Church-run health centers, not lay
psychiatric facilities, were used to examine priests accused of
pedophilia. Housing and funds were
provided for priests, even when it was known they were raping children. Priests were moved from the area only if
their communities found out, to other communities where the abusers and abuses
were not known. Most importantly, the
hierarchy was instructed to not inform law enforcement about abuses reported by
parishoners, but to consider any such case an ‘internal personnel matter.’”
And finally:
“What the now-multiple
Pennsylvania grand jury reports show clearly is that the Roman Catholic church
has treated the protection of its pedophiles, rapists and sexual abusers as
their highest priority.”
One source sums it up this
way:
“Mitchell Garabedian, who
represented many of the Boston victims… added that the report, ‘lays out the
standard blueprint of dishonesty, immorality, criminality and cover-up of the
Catholic Church which has been previously revealed in Boston and archdioceses
and dioceses worldwide.’”
Much more has been revealed
through many media sources on this investigation, but sadly, this is just the
tip of the iceberg.
Ok, so since there are so
many problems with sexual perversion in the Catholic Church, could there
possibly be something wrong with the Catholic system, itself? Is there a problem with the structure of the
hierarchy, or maybe with the environment that is produced therein?
According to the following
Catholic source, there is indeed a problem with the environment in which
priests are placed:
“Even if a seminarian’s
homosexuality isn’t ‘deep-seated,’ it will likely become deep-seated when he is
placed in an all-male environment for five to eight years, and sleeping in
bedrooms with men. Putting homosexuals
in an all-male environment is what’s called ‘an occasion of sin,’ that is, it
leads to deep-seated temptations. You
might as well put heterosexual men in the convent or a nunnery for five to
eight years, and let them sleep in bedrooms with girls and women, and see how
long they remain chaste.”
A friend once asked me if I
had ever seen a masculine looking priest.
Neither of us could honestly answer yes to that question, even though we
both live in a heavily Catholic area.
We’re not saying that all priests everywhere are feminine looking, but it
appears that at least the great majority are!
But why is that? Do they purposely
ordain gay or feminine priests in the Catholic Church? This is what one source revealed:
“According to a news story in
The New York Times (Sept. 15, 2005),
Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J., the former Editor-in-Chief of America, said that ‘with the shortage of priests, the church can
hardly afford to dismiss gay seminarians.’”
So, it seems that they don’t
really have a problem ordaining gay men into the Catholic priesthood, in spite
of the fact that homosexuality is a sin (Genesis 19:1-29; Leviticus 18:22; 20:13;
Romans 1:24-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10; 1 Timothy 1:9-10; Jude 7). So with the type of men they are recruiting,
and with the environment that these men are subjected to, is it any wonder that
all these things are now surfacing?
