Gay Priests: The "Lavender Mafia" Inside Catholic Church
There has been talk of a "homosexual subculture" in the priesthood, and a "Lavender Mafia" that operates within the American church. This hidden network, it is claimed, promotes a gay agenda and seeks to cover up scandals.Concern has been expressed that this subculture may deter young men from training for the priesthood, at a time when there is a serious shortage of new recruits for the ministry in the United States and Western Europe.
Michael Rose, the author of a study of American seminary life called "Goodbye, Good Men", believes the teachings of the Church are being undermined.
"One aspect of this gay subculture of both priests and seminarians is that too many men who want to be chaste, whether gay or straight, are propositioned, harassed or even molested," he wrote in a recent article for the Dallas Morning News.
"This is not simply about homosexuality or homosexual acts. It is about an agenda and subculture that systematically undermine celibacy." BBC NEWS
DON'T BAN GAYS FROM PRIESTHOOD, BAN HOMOPHOBES
The Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, who headed one of the largest religious orders within the Catholic Church from 1992 to 2001, has slammed any suggestion of barring homosexuals from the priesthood, and suggests further that those who would ban homosexuals from the priesthood should themselves be banned from the priesthood.
An Englishman and former Master General or international head of the Order of Friars Preachers - commonly known as the Dominican Order - Radcliffe has written a letter to the London Times saying:
"A document from the Vatican on the admission of seminarians is expected soon but we do not as yet know its contents. If it were to contain such a ban (on men inclined to homosexuality), which is highly unlikely, most Catholics, at least in the West, would find it unacceptable."
Most revealing is Radcliffe's assertion that homosexuality should not bar men from the priesthood but what he calls "homophobia" should. "Any deep-rooted prejudice against others, such as homophobia or misogyny, would be grounds for rejecting a candidate for the priesthood, but not their sexual orientation."
The 2002 book, Good Bye Good Men, by Michael Rose revealed that homosexuals and their radical feminist supporters in seminaries and chancery offices have created a "lavender mafia" or homosexual underground.
For many years in many seminaries, reported Rose, only those sympathetic to the cause of the sexual revolution, made it past these gatekeepers.
Those men who applied to seminaries who upheld the teachings of the Catholic religion - especially believing homosexual acts are gravely sinful and the homosexual inclination is intrinsically disordered - were systematically excluded. LifeSite
THE LAVENDER MAFIA
How many gay priests are there? No one can say with certainty; the American bishops have never formally studied the issue, and, for obvious reasons, it is all but impossible to determine an accurate number.
Richard Sipe, a laicized priest and psychotherapist who has studied the phenomenon of priests and sex abuse for most of his 40-year career, believes 20 percent of Catholic priests are homosexual, and that half of those are sexually active.
In his book, Fr. Cozzens cites various studies putting the total much higher, but these surveys typically suffer from methodological problems that skew the numbers upward.
But those who lowball the numbers could equally be accused of wanting to downplay the problem.
The Rev. C. John McCloskey, a member of the conservative Opus Dei organization, claimed recently that the number of gay priests is "two percent to four percent at a maximum," or equivalent to the estimated number of homosexuals in the general population
If that were true, however, it would be hard to explain why, according to experts, Catholic priests are dying of AIDS at a higher rate than males in the general population.
The raw numbers are less important, though, if homosexual priests occupy positions of influence in the vast Catholic bureaucracy; and there seems little doubt that this is the case in the American Church.
Lest this be dismissed as right-wing paranoia, it bears noting that psychotherapist Sipe is no conservative — indeed, he is disliked by many on the Catholic Right for his vigorous dissent from Church teaching on sexual morality — yet he is convinced that the sexual abuse of minors is facilitated by a secret, powerful network of gay priests.
Sipe has a great deal of clinical and research experience in this field; he has reviewed thousands of case histories of sexually active priests and abuse victims. He is convinced of the existence of what the Rev. Andrew Greeley, the left-wing clerical gadfly, has called a "lavender Mafia."
"This is a system. This is a whole community. You have many good people covering it up," Sipe says. "There is a network of power. A lot of seminary rectors and teachers are part of it, and they move to chancery-office positions, and on to bishoprics. It's part of the ladder of success. It breaks your heart to see the people who suffer because of this."
In his new book, Goodbye! Good Men, Michael S. Rose documents in shocking detail how pervasive militant homosexuality is in many seminaries, how much gay sex is taking place among seminarians and priest-professors, and how gay power cliques exclude and punish heterosexuals who oppose them.
"It's not just a few guys in a few seminaries that have an ax to grind. It is a pattern," says Rose. "The protective network [of homosexual priests] begins in the seminaries."
The stories related in Rose's book will strike many as incredible, but they track closely with the stories that priests have told me about open gay sex and gay politicking in seminaries.
The current scandal is opening Catholic eyes: As one ex-seminarian says, "People thought I was crazy when I told them what it was like there, so I finally quit talking about it. They're starting to see now that I wasn't."
Goodbye! Good Men links homosexuality among priests with theological dissent, a connection commonly made by conservative Catholics who wonder why their parish priests have practically abandoned teaching and explaining Catholic sexual morality.
But one veteran vocations-team member for a conservative diocese cautions that Catholics should not assume that theological orthodoxy guarantees heterosexuality or chastity.
"You find [active homosexuality] among some pretty conservative orders, and in places you'd not expect it," he says. "That's what makes this so depressing. You don't know where to turn."
An especially nasty aspect of this phenomenon is the vulnerability of sexually active gay priests and bishops to manipulation via blackmail. Priests, psychiatrists, and other informed parties say they encounter this constantly.
"It's the secrecy," says Stephen Rubino. "If you're a bishop and you're having a relationship, and people know about it, are you compromised on dealing with sexually abusive priests? You bet you are. I've seen it happen."
Longtime observers predict that in the coming weeks, bishops and priests will be forced to resign under fire after their closeted homosexual lives, including sexual abuse, become public.
The disgraced pederast former bishop of Palm Beach, Fla., is probably not alone. If this happens, the Vatican will face mounting pressure from the Catholic rank-and-file to take action.
As Fr. Greeley has written, "The laity, I suspect, would say it is one thing to accept a homosexual priest and quite another to accept a substantially homosexual clergy, many of whom are blatantly part of the gay subculture."
Rome has explicitly discouraged the ordination of homosexuals since at least 1961. For the past decade, the Vatican has been ratcheting up the pressure against gay ordination — to little avail in most U.S. dioceses.
Last year, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, a top Vatican official, said gays should not be admitted to seminaries, a line that was reinforced in early March by the Pope's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls. Recent reports indicate that the Vatican may soon release another document to restate and clarify this policy.
Today, those who defend allowing homosexuals into the priesthood point to the Church's official teaching, which distinguishes between homosexual orientation (which the Church does not consider sinful) and homosexual acts (which the Catechism labels "grave depravity").
There is nothing wrong, the argument goes, with ordaining a homosexually oriented man committed to living chastely and to upholding the Church's teaching on sexuality. Surely there are many such faithful priests in service.
This argument, though, seems persuasive only under conditions far removed from those under which priests have to live today. We now have a culture in which there is little support for chastity, even from within the ranks of the Catholic priesthood.
Conservative theologian Michael Novak says he is not prepared to argue for the exclusion of homosexuals from ordination, but as an ex-seminarian, he strongly believes gays should not be on seminary faculties, directing the formation in chastity of young men.
Other Catholics who are more liberal than Novak on many Church issues go further on the question of gay ordination.
Sipe believes gays shouldn't be admitted into seminaries at the present time — for their own protection, against sexual predators among the faculty and administration, who will attempt to draw them into a priestly subculture in which gay sex is normative behavior.
Fr. Thomas P. Doyle, another critic of celibacy who has been deeply involved in the clergy-abuse issue, concurs: "Ordaining gay men at this time would be putting them, no matter how good and dedicated, in a precarious position."
No one wants to stigmatize homosexuals as abusers, because most of them are not. Still, it's hard to gainsay the contention that if there were few homosexuals in the priesthood, the number of sex-abuse victims today would be drastically lower.
"We're learning a significant lesson from all this," says Dr. Fitzgibbons. "We have to protect our young. The protection of children and teenagers is more important than the feelings of homosexuals."
Though the American scandal is nowhere near played out, it seems likely that the barrage of humiliating revelations and mounting financial losses will force the Vatican to get tough on gay ordinations.
To have any hope of being effective, Rome will have to clean house at most American seminaries. This can be done only if local bishops can be trusted to be both loyal to Rome and resolute — and that will happen only if the Vatican forces them to be accountable.
That still leaves the problem of current and future priests who are both homosexual and unchaste.
It is true that most of the abuse cases that have reached the public's attention today involve older priests, and the situation in the seminaries has apparently been reined in somewhat from the anything-goes heyday of the 1970s and 1980s.
Nevertheless, the problem is still enormous. Most of the cases reported in Goodbye! Good Men involving homosexual corruption date from recent years.
One priest who left his seminary teaching post in the mid 1990s in despair over rampant homosexuality — and episcopal indifference to it — told me ominously: "The things I have seen in my years there are probably previews of coming attractions." National Review