KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
August 21, 2018
By Brian Roewe
A lax following of church teachings on sexuality in the wider culture a recurring theme
This article was updated at 5 p.m. Central Time to include comments from theologian Todd Salzman.
Accusations of sexual abuse and misconduct by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and within several U.S. seminaries have rematerialized past charges placing gay priests and homosexuality at the root of the church’s escalating crisis, positions backed in recent days by a handful of bishops.
“It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord,” wrote Bishop Robert Morlino in an Aug. 18 letter to Catholics in the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin.
Morlino said the revelations around sexual abuse in recent weeks — from the Pennsylvania grand jury report, and allegations against McCarrick, which included grooming and sexually abusing seminarians and young adult priests — have left him tired: “of people being hurt … of the obfuscation of truth … of sin.”
He pointed to a deeper crisis of acceptance and diminishment of sin, saying “we have refused to call a sin a sin,” and urged the church to resist becoming a refuge for sin, including “deviant sexual — almost exclusively homosexual — acts by clerics.”
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