"Many psychologists, many psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relationship between celibacy and pedophilia but many others have demonstrated, I was told recently, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia. It is true. That is the problem." This, unbelievably, is the recent declaration of Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State — in other words, the Catholic church’s top diplomat. Yet less diplomatic, more self-serving, less righteous words have rarely been spoken...
"Many psychologists, many psychiatrists have
demonstrated that there is no relationship between
celibacy and pedophilia but many others have
demonstrated, I was told recently, that there is a
relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia.
It is true. That is the problem."
This, unbelievably, is the recent declaration of Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State — in other words, the Catholic church’s top diplomat. Yet less diplomatic, more self-serving, less righteous words have rarely been spoken.
Less diplomatic because the assertion further damages a relationship, between gays and the church, that is already hideously frayed. More self-serving because it is a feeble and transparent attempt to shift the focus of the Catholic church’s ever-growing child-abuse scandal from where it belongs to where it in no way belongs. Where the focus belongs, quite demonstrably, is on the deceitful, irresponsible, and ungodly actions taken by a great many Catholic bishops and cardinals, all the way up to the man who both would be and now is pope, to cover up the innumerable instances of abuse rather than work to eliminate them and bring the perpetrators to justice. Where the focus doesn't belong is on a population which, as a whole, lies blameless in the entire scandal: The homosexual community.
Yet although this scandal rightly leaves our community unscathed, a deeper analysis of the mechanisms that created the scandal strongly suggests that the converse is not true; that the Catholic church has devastated the lives of the priests who committed the loathsome acts, even as the lives of their victims have been left in ruins by the priests.
"Thou shalt not bear false witness." — the Ninth Commandment
Cardinal Bertone: You commit the lesser sin of omission when you neglect to acknowledge that, although a small percentage of child sexual abuse is homosexual in nature, study after study indicates a statistically far greater incidence of child abuse that is either heterosexual in nature or not specific to homo- or heterosexuality. Yet your cardinal sin of false witness is regarding something else entirely. For despite your assertions to the contrary, there is a direct and demonstrable relationship among the priesthood, the celibacy you require of its members, and the child sexual abuse that many of your priests have perpetrated. And the un-Christian teachings of your church lie at the very heart of that relationship.
To be sure, those predatory ministers who have committed inhumane atrocities against the children of humanity are abusers. And unavoidably, because these abusers are human, some of them are gay as well. Yet regardless of whether they were "born gay" (an immaterial debate if ever there was one), they were not born as abusers. No, quite to the contrary, abusers is what they were made, by you and by others like you, Cardinal. You, who with your left hand spread lies about our community, that we are depraved, that homosexuality is a sin, akin to pedophilia, to bestiality. You, who with these sinistral falsehoods create in every homosexual son and daughter of God a burden that God does not desire for us and that was not there when we were born: The burden of shame.
The self-loathing induced by your lies, falsely pontificated as the word of God from your high holy altars, does not affect everyone in our community equally. The fortunate among us are able to bring about the healing dissolution of this literally shameful yoke via therapy, in all its glorious and blessed forms. Less lucky are those of us who earnestly yet foolishly seek escape from our shame where healing can never be found: In drugs, in alcohol, in expressions of self-destruction as byzantine as your churches, those innumerable palatial monuments to hypocrisy.
But most pitiable of all are those of us who direct our religion-born shame outwards, toward others. And here lies the greatest of ironies. For many such abusers seek to take flight from their shame, which you create with your left hand, through those doors that you open with your right, doors which lead them deep within your hallowed hollow edifices to the priesthood and celibacy. What a wonderful escape your gilded portals must seem to some of the men who pass through them, shamed by you into believing what is not true: That their innate urges to love other men render them wicked, ungodly, besmirched by Satan.
Yet their choice to find relief in the oblivion of your priesthood is as foolhardy as is the choice of others to seek relief in the oblivion of addictions. For it was within your wretched halls that their burden of shame took root! Many centuries ago, the first of your order began to twist the loving and tolerant message of your messiah in order to accrue greater power over humankind for themselves and the church. And the criminal distortions that began so long ago continue to this very day, in your shameful lies as well as in your self-serving conspiracy, which reaches to the very highest among you, to prevent the deliverance of these predatory priests to the just consequences of their actions, to that place where healing would otherwise have begun for them.
No, by the leaders in your highest chambers, these predators — your hatred and intolerance made flesh and returned to the place of their spawning — are denied every pathway to redemption, to greater Godliness. And so over the years their shame festers, grows, and eventually emerges with a force and virulence matching that of the Catholic preachings which installed the shame within them in the first place. And when it emerges, destructively, within your church walls, who is there to receive it? Guileless children, sent by their unwitting parents into a maelstrom of self-loathing and the arms of the priestly predators of your creation. And thus is your hellish iniquity paid forward, generation after generation.
Yet there is good news. And it is that God has shown me the truth, Cardinal, a truth which has the power to break this heretofore endless cycle of shame and abuse. And the truth is that you are a liar. There is no connection between pedophilia and homosexuality. But as year after year of headline after headline continues to demonstrate, there is a very real relationship among pedophilia, the Catholic lure of celibacy, and your catholic gospel of deceit.
The cross of shame, Cardinal Bertone, belongs not on the good men and women who make up the vast majority of the homosexual community. It belongs, for all eternity, on you.
— Rey Howard
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