What follows is the text of a column published in Catholic Insight in May, 2010, and concomitantly posted on Priceton.org. I re-post it now because of its depressing topicality, in light of the revelations about Cardinal McCarrick’s illustrious career of homosexual depredation. Apropos which, I will be posting an essay in due course on the recent remarkable and courageous letter by Archbishop Vigano denouncing the “homosexual current”, as he calls it, that is deeply entrenched in the hierarchy of the Church.
One can only admire the linguistic creativity with which the Progressive Axis advances it agenda. When it wishes to normalize and dignify a relation between members of the same gender whose “sexuality” involves the depositing of sperm into a congenitally sterile orifice intended for defecation, it calls it “marriage”. When directed against blacks or other minorities, systematic state-sponsored discrimination is denominated “racism” or “apartheid”; against white males, it becomes “affirmative action”. The killing of babies in the womb is designated by the splendid oxymoron “reproductive rights”. When the Axis proclaims its moral outrage over the sexual abuse of young boys by Catholic priests, it defines their perversity, with calculated expansiveness, as “pedophilia”.
Outside of the progressive lexicon, the word pedophilia has always denoted the sexual molestation of children (of both genders). Indeed, in the vast preponderance of cases, it has involved sexually incontinent adult males preying upon young girls (most notoriously, their own daughters, step-daughters, or female dependents). I.e., said pedophiles have often been married, living with their girlfriends, or in otherwise adult sexual relationships, such that enforced celibacy could hardly have been the “root cause” of their aberrancy. (But I’ll return to this flaming red herring later.) By contrast, the victims of predatory priests have, in the overwhelming majority, been young boys. The Axis knows that if it can train the dull beast of public opinion to indiscriminately lump the priests’ crimes in with pedophilia of the more typical contrasexual sort, it can deflect attention away from the glaring fact that their adolescent male victims are the unfortunate cynosures of what it calls an “alternative lifestyle”.
Thus Cardinal Bertone’s common-sensical asseverations that psychiatry has long recognized the link between pedophilia and homosexuality, and that, in any case, the crisis is not one of pedophilia but of homosexuality, have elicited a predictable tsunami of indignation from the world’s opinion leaders. “To stigmatize the homosexual community” is “one gaffe too many”, chastised La Libre Belgique. “I don’t know which psychologists Cardinal Bertone has been reading, but the consensus among reputable mainstream ones is that sex abuse of minors cannot be and should not be conflated with homosexuality”, warned The Guardian. “Totally insensitive and totally wrong”, declaimed the director of SNAP (the psychologically instructive acronym of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests). “Not a question of sexual orientation”, declared the British Catholic Bishops Conference (with friends like these, does Rome need enemies?). Even the French Government, that paragon of sexual probity, felt obliged to issue an official reprimand: “This is an unacceptable linkage and we condemn this.”
Only in the modern progressive’s Orwellian imagination could the sexual titillation of adult males by boys be said to have nothing to do with homosexuality. (But then, AIDS was also said to have nothing to do with homosexuality.) After four millenia during which Civilization’s moral and cultural luminaries have universally denounced it as an unnatural vice, suddenly, within a generation, homosexuality has achieved the sacrosanctity of dogma, exalted beyond criticism. Shame on the Vatican for suggesting a link between the abuse of boys by male priests and the presence of homosexuals in the priesthood! (Nothing to do with it. Sheer coincidence.)
How then do we explain it? Heterosexual priests whose sensory receptors are misfiring?; experiencing a moment of sexual dis-“orientation”? You’ll have to forgive me for having a spot of difficulty with the professions of deep revulsion and shock by members of the Axis, gays in particular, over priests abusing boys, given that the Movement dismisses criticisms of “fisting” as bourgeois, and is on record as advocating the active recruitment of young boys by older gay “mentors”. Under pressure from a systemically homophobic societal code, you see, adolescent boys have been forced to deny and suppress their authentic selves; older gay “mentors” merely encourage them to affirm it. As late as the early eighties, I recall hearing grandiloquent comparisons to Socrates–nothwithstanding that Plato regarded homosexuality as a detestable Spartan aberration, and Socrates, in the Symposium, told the pretty Alcibiades to take his affections elsewhere–in conjunction with descriptions of the bathhouses that made them seem like campuses of the Athenian Academy. Now that homosexuality is entirely normative and mainstream, all is forgiven and forgotten, and governments and corporations line up to be official sponsors of homosexual festivals and propaganda campaigns.
No one is suggesting that gay priests operate within the church as a clandestine fifth column; but if homosexuality really is inborn and unsusceptible of environmental influence (one of the shibboleths of the Movement for which there is not a shred of scientific evidence; but leave that aside) then the Church would be guilty of self-loathing if didn’t take decisive steps to obviate its inevitable manifestation.
As Cardinal Bertone put it in his original statement , “While homosexuality does not cause predatory behaviour, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay.” The language is so hedged and qualified that it might have come right out of one of the style-books for political correctness. Nonetheless, the logic of the syllogism is ineluctable: No gay priests, no abused boys. If the Church had really wanted to eliminate sexual abuse, it should have been fiercely vigilant in screening out candidates for the priesthood with homosexual tendencies and refusing them entrance to her seminaries. I suspect the policy she has followed, during Rome’s post-Vatican II Age of Aquarius, is the ecclesiastical equivalent of the military’s Don’t ask, don’t tell. This, it seems to me, is the Church’s real crime. But then the Axis, already enraged with Christianity over its antediluvian disapprobation of homosexuality as a sin, would hardly approve of such a policy.
Then again, the Axis is obviously far less concerned with protecting vulnerable children than protecting progressive sensibilities.