BOULDER (CO)
The Daily Camera
September 2, 2018
Top leaders of the Catholic church have a lot to answer for following recent back-to-back miserable stories — first that Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, had resigned over allegations that he sexually abused minors and adult seminarians and, second, that according to a grand jury report more than 300 priests had sexually abused 1,000 children over seven decades in Pennsylvania.
Clergy offered apologies and expressed disgust. You would expect that. But many of them ventured to assign blame — not solely to the perpetrators and those who enabled them but also to homosexuality. This calumny against gay people brings shame upon a church already teetering under the weight of massive humiliation.
In a letter he wrote in response to McCarrick’s resignation, Samuel J. Aquila, the archbishop of Denver, said that an aspect of the sex abuse crisis was that “too many, both clergy and lay, have listened more to the world than to Christ and the Church when it comes to human sexuality,” and that the church must teach that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” He continued: “The sexual revolution occurring in our culture, which essentially says, ‘Anything goes if adults consent to it,’ is not the way of God and only leads to where we are today.”
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