Gay Priests to Pope: Don’t Blame US for Child Sex Abuse

By Barbie Latza Nadeau
Daily Beast
February 15, 2019

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gay-priests-to-pope-dont-blame-us-for-child-sex-abuse

Giulio Origlia/Getty

The letter couldn’t have come at a better time. Just a week before Pope Francis convenes a crisis summit in Rome on systematic clerical sex abuse in the global Catholic Church, a group of gay priests from the Netherlands have written a letter trying to restore some perspective. In it, they ask the pontiff not to validate persistent gossip that a so-called “gay mafia” inside the Catholic Church is responsible for systematic clerical sex abuse of children.

In fact, orientation should not matter at all in the celibate world of the Catholic clergy. Priests and nuns take a vow of celibacy at ordination that prohibits them from engaging in any sexual act — including masturbation — no matter what their sexual orientation. But if the endemic clerical sexual abuse of minors, the majority of them boys, is confounded with homosexuality, that’s a convenient excuse for the church. The last three popes have pretended the pedophile scandal can be “solved” by getting rid of gay priests.

“We have the distinct impression,” the Dutch group wrote to Francis, “that the Vatican and the Congregation for the Clergy and perhaps even you yourself tend to suggest that those priests who are openly gay are the ones responsible for the sexual abuse of children and minors.”

In point of fact there is no link between the two, and that there is even ample evidence of widespread healthy, consensual gay relationships between gay priests living in communal situations. The more plausible answer regarding pedophiles is that they are attracted to the priesthood simply because of the well known access to and power over little kids.

The Dutch group clearly disagrees with the premise that gay priests are the problem, and instead says it believes unhealthy sexual repression is the key to the crisis. When young men enter the seminary, often as adolescents, they are told that sexual urges are sinful and that they must repent for being normal. The only way to talk about sex for a seminarian is in the context of the confessional.

“We believe that the current major crisis with respect to this context is primarily the result of the disapproval, suppression, denial and the poor integration of sexuality, and especially homosexuality, on the part of many individual priests and within our Church as a whole,” the gay priest group writes, noting that if young men entering seminaries were actually screened for sexually deviant behavior such as pedophilic tendencies, that would also help a lot.

It must also be stated that little girls were and are sexually abused by priests as well, and that it is now well known that nuns were kept as what Pope Francis called “sex slaves” to satisfy the sexual urges of some heterosexual priests.