Mrsm117

Thank you feeling sorry for me. It makes me happy that you are such a good person.

To Daniel;

Is English your second language? There seems to be an issue with you taking things out of context. I feel sorry for you Daniel you just don't know, or just plain refuse to,communicate honestly.

Mrsm117

I admit it; you're right; I'm wrong; gay people are bad; Catholics are good; you are more open and tolerant than I am; you win. You beat me fair and square. YOu are a better person than I. Congratulations.

Daniel wrote: "Gay people don't act on their sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is a personality trait."

Are you suggesting that people don't act on their personality traits?

To: DanielintheLionsDen

It's too bad that you don't know the difference between defending one's faith and being upset. I wouldn't waste my time on getting upset with you or anyone else on this blog who is disengenous and childish.

Your hiproacy is mind blogging. Tolerance for you but no tolerance for me. Why don't you go pick on someone your own size instead of the Catholic Church? Don't you have anything better to do?I guess not. She's not changing - not for you - and not for anyone so get over it!!!

Mrsm117

You seem upset. I am sorry that this has gotten so carried away. It is just people typing on the internet. Don't be so upset, on my account.

You said,

"You also didn't comment on my second question about 80% of the data supporting male to male sex and that this is homosexual activity because there is no way that you can refute that."

I don't understand your question. I must have missed something in the context.

You referred to being gay as a chosen life-style. It came accross as insulting. Since you seem to know that it is not a lifestyle, then perhaps refrain from saying that again in the future, unless you seek to be inflammatory. You are not required to say that, are you?

I see that another person's bad opinion of you has gotten you very upset. I am sorry about that, and hope that I have not gotten you in a bad mood and messed up your day.

But see how it is, when everyone is against you? Even if you cannot empathize, don't worry about it; just keep on as you have, and I am sure evrything will be ok.

DanielintheLionsDen

Firstly, I will never shut up when it comes to anyone slandering the Catholic Church.

You know absolutely nothing about me and yet you put me into some sort of mold, the type of sterotyping you detest when applied to gay people.

You scream that I don't get it when I don't agree with your point of view. Would you call that being tolerant? Some how I see nothing but intolerance coming from you making condescending and hateful comments. UNLESS I see things your way I and the Church are intolerant. Sounds a bit convoluted to me.

Let's get something straight, I don't set myself up above anyone. I do, however, choose to live according to the law established by God Himself. I hold myself accountable to a Superior Being - God. The Old Testament and the New Testament concur that homosexual activity is sinful. If you or anyone else who is gay doesn't want to hold themselves up to God's commands than that is your choice but you have no right to say that it is intolerant when someone or the Catholic Church holds a core belief that is different than your own. I am not telling you or anyone what to beleve; but I am defending the Catholic Church's right to defend her core beleifs.

I don't care what anyone's religion is. What I do care about is people unjustly bashing the Catholic Church which the gay community does vociferously. WHERE IS YOUR TOLERANCE FOR SOMEONE'S RELIGIOUS BELIEFS? DOES THE CATHOLIC CHURCH NEED TO CONFORM TO YOUR POINT OF VIEW IN ORDER TO BE TOLERANT? THIS IS THE HEIGHT OF ARROGANCE AND INTOLERANCE!!!!

You also didn't comment on my second question about 80% of the data supporting male to male sex and that this is homosexual activity because there is no way that you can refute that.

I do not live in a vacuum. I work for a large corporation with gay people. I am not so naive as to sterotype all gays as florists or flaming queens. Just another example of how you have stereotyped me.

Lastly, I'd like you to back up your statement with proof about gay Popes. Just some more spewing of slanderous comments because you just can't get out of yourself and accept there are people who see things differently and label them as intolerant.

Mrsm117

And another thing ...

... being gay is not a "life style." That is just one more negative spin that people like you try to foist on gay people.

All gay people are not florists or flaming queens. Gay people are also rednecks, businessmen, scientists, engineers, nerds, geeks, policmen, plumbers, store cashiers, taxi drivers, married men with children, and anything else you can think of, even Senators, even Presidents, even, sometimes, Popes.

(And that is just the men; the same applies for women, too!)

All you know about gay people are the lies that you have heard and which you obviously believe. So I do not think it is too harsh to suggest that maybe you should shutup on this subject.

mrsm117

Gay people don't act on their sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is a personality trait. It is neither acceptabale nor unacceptable; it just is.

It is no big deal except for people like you, who either allow the Roman Catholic Church to dictate false doctrines of personal bigotry to you, or else you use God and the hem of Jesus to hide behind to promote your personal prejudice.

You don't get it; you don't get it; you don't get it.

For whatever reason, you set yourself up above other people as superior and you blame them unjustly for everything bad in the world. I call that being a snob. You don't like that word being applied to you.

Can you think of a better word?

You don't like it when non-Catholic people think they are better than you. Then you turn right around and do EXACTLY the same thing to gay people.

If your little dark world of Catholicism sastisfies you, then fine; but don't expect everyone else to go along.

DanielintheLionsDen

I would like to ask you two questions:

1). How did you come to the conslusion that acting on your sexual orientation was acceptable?

2). If the statistics from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice revealed that 80% of the sexual activity involved males having sex with other males - would you not call that homosexual activity?

At no time did the Catholic Church ever take an offical accusatory postion. The Church made public the outcome of the study and people could come to their own conclusions.

Bill Donohue came to his conclusions based on the data he had in front of him and published something the media would not touch with a ten foot pole.

Mrsm117

I get tired of the Catholic Church blaming everything on the gays, then saying it is not us, it's God telling us this.

The fact is, you do not comprehend sexual orientation, much less what it is like to be gay, but only the misinformation passed along to you by church authorities who are not only ignorant on matters of human sexuality, but are themselves, twisted and repressed regarding the very own sexual orientations.

You are not really in position at all to comment on this subject.

mrsm117

The Catholic Church teaches false doctrines regarding homosexuality.

You are falsely and mistakenly conflating the Catholic Church with God. That is your big mistake, which you must live with. But it is silly and sbsurd to insist that I fall into the the same mistaken thinking that you have, without giving a good reason. Merely appealing to your unreasonble, unproven dogma is no argument, so you may as well stop making it.

All I am asking of you is to use your brain as it was intended, and think. If you choose not to think, but allow others to think for you, then that is your choice and your problem. Do not belittle others because they have made a much wiser choice, than yours.

I am responding to comments here that slander gay people, and blame gay people for the Catholic Priest pediphilia problem. If you want people to stop criticizing the Catholic Church for its anti-gay agenda, then the Catholic Church should stop scapegoating gay people for all of its problems.

To say that it is ok for the Catholic Church to scapegoat gay people because Muslims and Orthodox Jews do it too is not an argument or a defense. To pick the very worst aspect of your competing religions as a point of agreement and brotherhood is assinine. You do not know what you are talking about; you do not even know how to frame a reasonable or valid defense of your Church. Perhpas it is indefensible; did you ever think of that?

Once again, I say that there is nothing wrong with being gay. The only think that is wrong with being gay is the perssecution gay people must suffer at the hands of religious fanatics, including the edicts of the Catholic Church, and Catholics foolish enough to take these lies serisously.

fizzy1

Hmm, I'm sure you have the statistics to back up all of your claims. I would be very interested in seeing them.

As far as the church not having the "best and the brightest" I'm sure you would include in that assessment Thomas Aquinas, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI - I guess they would not be considred bright in your estimation.

Just for your edification. God calls men to the priesthood so I guess you would be questioning God's judgment. Being a priest is not a job - it is a calling.

If any misfits as you call them, made it in to the seminary it was poor judgment on the part of the rector. Clearly the priest crisis bears out that homosexuals were admitted who should not have been. Perhaps the rector thought it would work out.

You are also incorrect in your assessment of seminary attendance. Men entering the seminary in the United States these days are mature and heterosexual and quite bright with advanced degrees. Mediocre - not hardly. Here again, I would ask you to provide statistics on your claims. You talk a big talk now let's see the proof.

The Catholic priesthood does not necessarily attract what we would call "the best and the brightest." Instead, it has historically been a haven for social misfits, men with sexual identity crises, and the sons of large, poor familes. Like the Marines, the priesthood is looking for a few good men. Unfortunately, those few good men come at the expense of the many mediocre and disturbed individuals that enter seminaries every year.

To: DanielintheLionsDen

Since the Catholic Church is the Church established by Christ she does not teach false doctrine. So I guess what you are saying is that God teaches false doctrine

This blog was to be used to respond to Bill Donohue's article regarding pedophilia vs. homexuality. Stop using it as a sounding board to defend your postion on homosexuality.

Do you take up your assault equally with the Orthodox Jewish community and the Muslim community since their views on homosexuality are the same as the Catholic Church? Somehow I think not.

To all others, there is no dissident thinking in the Catholic Church that is acceptable. You are either obedient to the teachings of the Church or you are not. You cannot call yourself Catholic if you are disobedient.

Once again those of you that disagree with the Church's position are interjecting your subjective "truth". There is no subjective truth. The Truth comes directly from God whether you choose to believe it or not.

O'Donaghue is portrayed as a Fred Phelps but he is not. He is just someone trying to achieve balance. Sorry to gay men that they get caught up in it and offended but the Catholic Church gets much more unfair vilification and O'Donaghue is doing a job that more sensitive men would probably shrink from. He expresses himself for a good cause with the best of intentions but with an unfortunate lack of sensitivity.

The fact is that paedophilia is very underrepresented in the Catholic clergy but the media reports that conflate homosexuality and paedophilia (O'Donaghue didn't start it) and overreport each incident would suggest the opposite.

Others do it more. However since the Catholic Clergy are supposed to be a brotherhood in Christ the existence of an underrepresented level of abuse balances things out. Given the general unpalatable nature of the Church to many journalists the Catholic Church is unfairly singled out. Even so balance isn't good enough for Catholics. The 'sins of the past' (although I'm sure it is impossible to eliminate crime here or anywhere else) are a huge source of shame and outrage to Catholics including the Pope. That is why he wants to "sweep the filth".

O'Donaghue is trying to express this in a context where fables that a few Bishops asleep at the wheel make the 1.1 billion person organisation an international criminal racketeering organization. Accordingly, he expresses himself strongly in defence and doesn't take time to think about the way gay men might feel.

Likewise, contrary to the victim perpetrator mentality of modern society which is as unrealistic as the hero villain mentality it replaced where one side is pure goodness and the other is pure evil, there are good and bad victims. The bad ones fire up O'Donaghue and he lashes out. He is too macho to consider that his tactlessness can hurt the feelings of all victims.

Again he is no Fred Phelps but people who are adversely affected by his comments need to walk in his mocassins, appreciate his limitations and not judge him as a sensitive new age guy who is analysing their feelings. He is a brawler against a wall fighting against injustices with fists wildly swinging. The only way to deal with him is to understand that and get out of the way and let him get the job done.

sftkg593

"The Catholic Church is the Truth. This is not a subjective truth but an ojective truth and your willingness to accept this is irrelevant."

It is an objective truth that the Catholic Church teaches false doctrines regarding gay people. You can know the truth, or not, it is your choice.

When you use the clinical term homosexuality, I assume that you are referring to sexual positions. No one is asking you to support any kind of specific sexual posiitons.

Just knock off the childish, snobbish, anti-gay attitude; that's all.

elizdelphi

A lot of your thinking is mixed up and wrong. You are seeking to defend the Catholic Church, right or wrong, without thinking. You said the sexual desire, of any kind, is disordered. That is far afield from this discussion, but it shows how wrong you gone in your thinking. Sexual desire is not disorderd, intrinsically,existentially, or any other way. That you should be hair-splitting these Catholic legalistic terms should indicate how wrong you are.

If you are so attached to the Catholic Church tha you CANNOT leave it, then you should at least explore dissident trends in Catholic thinking, not to be come a dissident trouble maker, but to get a better more realistic view of life.

Once again, the Catholic Church does regard being gay as intrinsically, existentially disordered. Ask your priest and see what he says. Almost all ethical people, including almost all priest disagree with this condemnation of gay people, so I would predict that your priest will try to put a softer spin in this harsh judgement without actually disagreeing with it. I predict that not will not get a straight answer from him.

Being gay is an existential state, alot more complex then mere sexual desire, which you obviously do not understand. But there is nothing wrong with it. Same sex desire is not unwanted in the first-person if the I of gay person; it is only unwanted in the third person he of the gay person. You have an anti-gay attitude. You may think that some of your friends are gay, but I doubt than any of them consider you a friend.

1. The Catholic Church is the Truth. This is not a subjective truth but an ojective truth and your willingness to accept this is irrelevant.

2. You cannot be an authentic Catholic and support homosexuality. Being Catholic and supporting homosexuality are in direct conflict so stop passing yourself off as a Catholic if you are going to support homosexuality.

3. Get your facts right before making claims about the Catholic Church that are inaccurate.

4. Christianity and the Catholic Church in particular do not condone hatred for anyone. The hate I see demonstrated is coming from homosexual activists on this blog.

1. The Truth (Christianity and the Catholic Church) is not a subjective truth. It is objective Truth and is not determined by your willingness or lack thereof to believe or accept it as Truth.

2. Christianity (and the Catholic Church) does not condone hate.

3. The only hate that I have seen demonstrated in this thread is coming from homosexual activists who insist on having others accept their way of life.

5. The homosexual activists responding to this thread are not interested in what's happening in the Catholic Church. Their only interest is Catholic bashing.

6. The comments that are presented about the Catholic Church are inaccurate. Know your facts before you make claims about the Church that are untrue.

7. Anyone who says they are Catholic and condones homosexuality is not an authentic Catholic and is "Catholic" in name only so stop passing yourself off as one.

""As a Catholic, I am continually being embarrased by william Donohue's complete idiocy. He does not speak for Catholics!!! He is a far-right, homophobic nut, and I wish people would stop giving him air time.

Posted by: Mortal""

Well, it's your 'Catholic League' he's head of, isn't it? Or is it?

I think you're more in a position to repudiate him than the rest of the world.

These are lies and denialism and hatemongering, meant to quiet moderates and alienate liberals, and so the Church and homophobes can attack the rights of others while blaming them for its own crimes and gaining political influence at the expense of the human rights and dignity of others.

Donohue's words, and much from the Church *is* hate-speech, even if they whine as if they don't get an explicit and special exemption from accountability for such *hate speech* ...and act as if they're the ones being oppressed when they are in fact trying to use the government's power and their massive institutions to harm others.

Quite honestly, I wouldn't be a Christian now, even without this nonsense: (My Goddess had other ideas. :) ) ...*but* I did get the Hel away from that Church as soon as I was able for a reason.

Decades later, why the *Hel* are these priests still able to jam up my life? I don't care *what* you think is holy or unholy: beyond certain responsibilities as a witness, I'm *out.*

And Christians, and particularly the Church still think they have some right to take government and economic power and keep trying to *hurt* me and who I love most, while saying, 'It's good for your soul, you're really oppressing *us* just by being so 'sinful' and not submitting.'

Yah, yah. You wanna know where I heard *that* before?

Learn a thing or two about *boundaries,* the lot of you. No wonder the clergy's full of sexually-immature pervs.

And show some backbone against the lies and hatred, progressive Catholics. I've still got relatives in that church.

IN REPLY TO (IRT)
RENSHAW
“THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH”
POSTED BY: JULY 25, 2010 6:53 PM

http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a9p3.htm

“The Church is one: she acknowledges one Lord, confesses one faith, is born of one Baptism, forms only one Body, is given life by the one Spirit, for the sake of one hope (cf. Eph 4:3-5), at whose fulfillment all divisions will be overcome.

“The Church is holy: the Most Holy God is Her author; Christ, her bridegroom, gave Himself up to make Her holy; the Spirit of holiness gives Her life. Since She still includes sinners, She is "the sinless one made up of sinners." Her holiness shines in the saints; in Mary she is already all-holy.

“The Church is catholic: She proclaims the fullness of the faith. She bears in Herself and administers the totality of the means of salvation. She is sent out to all peoples. She speaks to all men. She encompasses all times. She is "missionary of Her very nature" (AG 2).

“The Church is apostolic. She is built on a lasting foundation: "the twelve apostles of the Lamb" (Rev 21:14). She is indestructible (cf. Mt 16:18). She is upheld infallibly in the truth: Christ governs Her through Peter and the other apostles, who are present in their successors, the Pope and the college of bishops.

"The sole Church of Christ which in the Creed we profess to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, . . . subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him. Nevertheless, many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its visible confines"(LG 8).”

Consequently, God didn’t make a bunch of different Church that would be superfluously irrational. Hence there is only One Church through which all men must pass through in different ways, through different religions, but no one can come to God without a sincere effort to do the will of God with all their mind, with all their heart, and with all their strength. In the Catholic Church there is an abundance of supernatural gifts given to succor to the salvatiion of man. Only She can give these graces through Her Sacraments, and that is why it is propitious to be in the embrace of Her loving arms.

IN REPLY TO (IRT)
RENSHAW
“THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH”
POSTED BY: JULY 25, 2010 6:53 PM

Outside the Church there is no salvation"

http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a9p3.htm

"All men are called to this catholic unity of the People of God. . . . And to it, in different ways, belong or are ordered: the Catholic faithful, others who believe in Christ, and finally all mankind, called by God's grace to salvation."

"Fully incorporated into the society of the Church are those who, possessing the Spirit of Christ, accept all the means of salvation given to the Church together with Her entire organization, and who - by the bonds constituted by the profession of faith, the sacraments, ecclesiastical government, and communion - are joined in the visible structure of the Church of Christ, who rules Her through the Supreme Pontiff and the bishops.

Even though incorporated into the Church, one who does not however persevere in charity is not saved. He remains indeed in the bosom of the Church, but 'in body' not 'in heart.'"

"The Church knows that She is joined in many ways to the baptized who are honored by the name of Christian, but do not profess the Catholic faith in its entirety or have not preserved unity or communion under the successor of Peter."

Those "who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are put in a certain, although imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church." With the Orthodox Churches, this communion is so profound "that it lacks little to attain the fullness that would permit a common celebration of the Lord's Eucharist."

IN REPLY TO (IRT)
RENSHAW
“THEY THINK”
POSTED BY: JULY 25, 2010 6:53 PM

Outside the Church there is no salvation"

"How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers?335 Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:

http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a9p3.htm

"Who belongs to the Catholic Church?
The relationship of the Church with the Jewish People.
The Church's relationship with the Muslims.
The Church's bond with non-Christian religions

"Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door.

"Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.336

"This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:

"Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.337

"Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men."

IN REPLY TO (IRT)
APSPA1
ABSURDITY BEGTS ABSURDITY”

IRT:
The Church and sex - a few gems:

ANS:
Unless you can source these ridiculous statements better than the Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven”,, they only can be perceived as coming form Cartoon Network.

Augustine did not write the Summa Theologica. Aquinas did.
The rest of your artifices, appear to have the same fustian claptrap that this one does. There’s a quip you might think about. Garbage In; Garbage Out. It apparently describes your source.

IN REPLY TO (IRT)
AREYOUSAYING
GOD’S LOVE

IRT:
If Christ cares so much that every gay denies his or her homosexuality, why was He the foundation of a Church that bashes gays at the same time they protect pervert priests?

ANS:
The Catholic Church does not bash Gays; it bashes gay sex which is an abomination of human nature. It is a stark violation of the Natural Law of which God is its author; therefore a refutation of God Himself. The Church does no defend pedophilia or pederasty, it attempts to treat the disease and save the soul.

Moreover, gay sex is a major cause of AIDS and HIV. Illicit sex is a major cause of STDs. Some 26 million or more have died from AIDS worldwide and some 33 million worldwide have HIV. In all probability twice that many have STDs.

Consequently, the Church is adamant against these pestilences. In addition, the Church has instituted the most renowned AIDS assistance program in the world; its called the Dream Program. It is a volunteer program that services all AIDS and HIV patients in South Africa, even people in Jail. Notwithstanding, Catholic Charities is the world's greatest NGO that succors to those afflicted and in need. However, defending gay sex is defending a right to commit suicide viz. Russian Roulette.

Why does the Church assiduously protest gay sex? Because the Church is the greatest defender of human dignity and the sacredness of life in the world and she is unrivaled in Her defense. The criminal, the rapist, the murder, and the sinner are all human persons and are dignified. To the Church the salvation of all men is the most important thing the world, viz. to save man from Hell. Jesus came to heal the sinner.

IRT:
I don't think I like your version of Christ very much. As a matter of fact, if I were Jesus I would change my last name because of you.

ANS:
It's no my version, it's God's version He transmits through His Church. That’s the way it is, but don’t second guess God. Many have tried and look where they've ended up, a.k.a. Satan, Adam & Eve, Marx, Hitler, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Saddam. Would you wish to have been them?

Can you believe these people? When someone calls them on their nonsense, they not only call it attacks and mockery - no, people, it is just criticism and deserved criticism - they rejoice in it! They want to be abused!

And just so we know where they stand - they think most everyone who is not Catholic will burn. So when the Nazi burned Jews in ovens, the Catholics stood by and did nothing. They didn't care since they believe all Jews are responsible for killing Christ anyway.

So, ELIZDELPHI, your anti-Semitism is showing through wonderfully, as well as your anti-Protestantism, anti-Islam, anti-Buddhist sentiments. No wonder you think Donohue and all those who protect the priest rapists are wonderful.

And the other one gives the greatest response of all - all those children raped by priests should die in order to have a good life.

Well, to both of you, my child was raped and the priest who raped him is married now with kids of his own. My son is dead - he killed himself because of this. And the bishop who protected this priest is sitting in luxury.

You think I mock? You think I'm angry? Yes, I am! The Catholic Church ruined my son's life, my life, and my family's life. You are all so naive!

Renshaw wrote:
"What arrogance! To think that the Roman Catholic Church is the only "portal" of God."

Jesus Christ is savior of mankind, He and none other. We receive Christ through the Church.

"We believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church." The Roman Rite of the Catholic (this word means universal) Church has a certain primacy among the true particular churches (which include the various Eastern Rite Catholic Churches aka "uniate" churches, and also the Eastern Orthodox Churches, though these are not in perfect communion with Rome).

What about just people of other faiths? Actually, our belief is that in the goodness of God Who is pleased to save the people He has created, some of them may also be delivered from suffering hell (understood that their relationship with the Church, such as it is, must be essentially positive), this is necessarily by Christ and through the Catholic Church, even if in life they are not visibly Christian.

I am saying this in reply to Renshaw who is full of mockery and dislike for Catholicism and may not care. But, this is what Catholics believe, as best I can explain it.

IN REPLY TO (IRT)
RENSHAW

IRT:
“And if your God is so all powerful, all knowing, all holy and all loving - why doesn't he stop children from being raped?"

ANS:
Man was created perfect in Adam and Eve; they suffered no pain but Adam sinned and sin and evil entered the world. Second, man has a free will. Do you want God to take away man’s free will? That would make all men androids and man would be no different than the animals that operate on instinct. It would change man’s nature from human to animal.

IRT:
if you say that he stands by and lets it happen because he gave people free will, then your God is capricious and cruel. An all loving and all powerful and all knowing God would stop little children from being anally sodomized. You people really sicken me.

ANS;
He permits not only rapes, but adultery, murder, stealing, bank robbers and arsonist, divorce AIDS, HIV, and STDs. The final end of man is not in the world but in Heaven or Hell. The innocent child will be rewarded, the rapists won't.

Why does God permit abortion? Abortion is the cruelest crime man can commit against a child. Are you anti-abortion? Think about how they are done. The curette cuts them into pieces until they die. A vacuum sucks them apart legs arms head while they are alive.

Saline solution scalds the child to death; some survive and the executioner, posing as a doctor, strangles the child or drowns it in the blood of its own mother. Obama voted to protect the murderer three times. And after three attempts to stop partial birth Abortion, still four Justices voted not to ban it.

Partial Birth Abortion takes a little innocent child being born, gasping for its first breath and the butcher plunges a surgical scissor into the back of its skull and he sucks out its brains, and the child’s body parts are sold on the open market.

God didn’t bring evil into the world, man did and for the evil man does, there will be recompense.

It is written that the fate of those who harm little children would be better off if they had a millstone tied around their neck and tossed in the sea. Man does evil, not God, and America approves of Abortion, not God or the Catholic Church; She abhors it under all circumstances, because She is unrivaled in Her defense of human dignity and sacredness.

If Christ cares so much that every gay denies his or her homosexuality, why was He the foundation of a Church that bashes gays at the same time they protect pervert priests?

I don't think I like your version of Christ very much. As a matter of fact, if I were Jesus I would change my last name because of you.

I am feeling blessed to be mocked for my faith!

Renshaw wrote:
"I think Jesus wouldn't agree (with hating sinners). He forgave sin"

Amen. You understand what Jesus came here for, He loves us and wants to forgive sin. Thus for instance you see how John the Baptist came as forerunner of Christ with his calls to repentance--which is essential for sin to be forgiven. Nobody can seriously dispute that homosexual behavior is seen in Scripture and throughout the mainstream of Christian tradition as sin. Neither can anyone dispute how much God loves sinners, since He became flesh for our sake and suffered and died for our sake. Let all repent and believe in the good news, that we are God's beloved, that He has loved us unto death!

nsive Comment

IN REPLY TO
AREYOUSAYING
“SMALL MINDS”

IRT:
May your small and shallow god have mercy on the perverts in your clergy and those of you who hide and/or make lame excuses for them.

ANS:
My God is also your God, like it or not. Surely you’re not so shallow as to claim you created yourself, or to hide from the fact that He made you?

Thus it is written: Luke 12: 22cf. “And which of you by taking thought can add to his stature one cubit? If then ye be not able to do so much as the least thing, why are you solicitous for the rest? Be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat, or for your body, what you shall put on. Your life is more than the meat; for the body is more than the raiment.

"Consider the ravens, for they sow not, neither do they reap. They have no storehouse or barn, and yet God feedeth them. How much are you more valuable than they?

“Consider the lilies, how they grow: they labor not, neither do they spin. But I say to you, not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of these. Now, if God clothe in this manner the grass that is to-day in the field and to-morrow is cast into the oven: how much more you, O ye of little faith?” To the Church even the molesters have value and dignity though they've sinned.

What are the excuses? No one has excused anyone. The Church has the command and duty to save everyone, even you.

Matthew 9: 10cf. “Why doth your master eat with publicans and sinners? But “Jesus hearing it, said: They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill. Go then and learn what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. For, I have not come to call the just, but sinners.”

Thus, the Church today makes this solemn prayer that you may know there is a God, “Father, open their eyes to see your handy work in the splendor of your Creation in the beauty of human life. Touched by your hand the world is holy; help them to cherish the gifts that surround us and to share your gifts with our brothers and sisters, and to experience the joy of life in Your presence.”
-----------------------

How sad you are so delusional that your believe your cherry-picked scriptures have any credibility with or any authority over me.

How sad you look the other way at felony sexual child abuse and criminal obstruction of justice in your delusional state of "holier than thou"

No prayers for the victims, please. You need them much more than we do.

Other than the RCC's unnatural vows of human nature , the RCC administration has done and still is by silence the full truth of the sexual crimes agaist children by their cover up crimes of the past are still damagening the RCC. The administrators that at any time covered a sexual crime agaist a child MUST resign as a RCC administrator.
Posted by: usapdx | July 21, 2010 10:18 AM
Report Offensive Comment
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Are you kidding?? If the Administrator covered up a crime, he's guilty. He should not be forced, or allowed to resign. He should be cuffed, arrested, and imprisoned.
Dennis

IN REPLY TO (IRT)
RENSHAW
“MORE HEADACHES, MORE SICKNESS”

IRT:
“What arrogance! To think that the Roman Catholic Church is the only "portal" of God.

ANS:
Only the Truth will set you free and cure you of your sickness. There’s only one religion that God established and that’s the Catholic religion.

God did not create 26,000 to 35,000 versions of Christianity that contradict each other in whole or part; man did.

Man established the Muslim religion as did man establish the Hindu religions and the Shinto, Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist and Shinto religions, not God.

The real God came and established the Catholic Church which has the four marks for authenticity, Universality, One, Holy, and Apostolic. The Church is Universal for all mankind, One in doctrine, Holy by its Founder Who is God, and has the unbroken Apostolic succession. The Catholic Church is the only Church that has never changed its doctrines since it began, and is the only Church with the mark of infallibility in its universal teachings and beliefs.

When the Catholic Church was being persecuted by St. Paul, Paul was struck from his horse. A voice cried out to Paul, “Paul, Paul, why have you persecuted Me?” Paul was persecuting God’s Church and consequently God Himself.

Thus, all religions must pass through the portals of the Catholic Church to gain life everlasting, if they live a devout life in honor of God because all gifts that come from God pass through His Church.

fr mrsm117:
>...You can spin all you want but homosexual acivity is not normal!! Just look at your anatomy - it's pretty clear human beings were made to be joined and to procreate as man and woman. Two men or two women cannot conceive a child.
-------------------------------------------
Not all marriages are set up to "conceive a child". As a gay Christian woman who married my lovely WIFE two years ago, I take great offense to your statement. Grow UP and get the FACTS about glbt's. Quit listening to donohue and his gang of four.
Posted by: Alex511 | July 23, 2010 7:25 PM
Report Offensive Comment
-------------------------------------------
I'll add to your offense.
Homosexual acts, affiliations, marriages are "not normal." They "cannot" be made fruitful, productive, or "normal."
You may have fun, sex, passion, and perhaps, even love, with your lovely "wife." But, in a thousand years, after we're both dead, you'll have contributed "nothing" to the earth, or Mankind, out of your association/relationship, with your "lovely wife."
My offspring will be happily, traipsing the earth, and productively continuing the species. You'll have been a complete Negative impact, upon the earth. But, this is perhaps, your elected choice.
Dennis

SAMARITANS:
The Samaritans are not quite Jews. They didn’t seem to like the Jews..So what ever they were, they weren’t part of the Jewish nation.

"The Samaritans (Hebrew: שומרונים‎ Shomronim, Arabic: as-Sāmariyyūn) are an ethno-religious group of the Levant. Religiously, they are the adherents to Samaritanism, an Abrahamic religion closely related to Judaism.

"Based on the Samaritan Torah, Samaritans claim their worship is the true religion of the ancient Israelites prior to the Babylonian Exile, preserved BY THOSE WHO REMAINED IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL, AS OPPOSED TO JUDAISM, WHICH THEY ASSERT IS A RELATED BUT ALTERED AND AMENDED RELIGION BROUGHT BACK BY THE EXILED RETURNEES.

"Samaritan literature consists of writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and for the Hellenistic period, Greek. The number of writings at present in the possession of the Samaritan community at Nablus is small. Barton has given in "Biblioth. Sacra", LX (1903), 612 sqq., a list of these books and manuscripts drawn up by Jaqûb, the priest at Nablus. From the seventeenth century on, manuscripts have been acquired by various European libraries.

"Ancestrally, they claim descent from a group of Israelite inhabitants who have connections to ancient Samaria from the beginning of the Babylonian Exile up to the birth of Christ. The Samaritans, however, derive their name not from this geographical designation, but rather from the Hebrew term שַמֶרִים, "Keepers [of the Law]." Wikipedia

Hey TTWSYFAMDGGAHJMJ1:

Samaritans were Jews, not pagans.

"...all things that come from God pass through the portals of His Holy Church because its founder is Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Holiness itself. Why prefer any other?"

What arrogance! To think that the Roman Catholic Church is the only "portal" of God. There it is again, folks - you Jews Buddhists, Muslims, and all you other poor slobs (in their opinion) - when God reaches out to you, it is really through the Catholic Church.

And if your God is so all powerful, all knowing, all holy and all loving - why doesn't he stop children from being raped?

And if you say that he stands by and lets it happen because he gave people free will, then your God is capricious and cruel. An all loving and all powerful and all knowing God would stop little children from being anally sodomized.

You people really sicken me.

What that moronic antisemitic homophobe Donnohue "thinks" is irrelevant to all intelligent people. That, of course, doesn't matter to Donnohue since he is clueless as to the meaning of "intelligence."

RENSHAW |
POSTED: JULY 24, 2010 10:46 AM
“WHAT PSEUDEPIGRAPHOUS PRIGGERY!”

“Here it is, folks - the real belief - all of you who are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist and all other non-Catholics - your prayers are not as powerful as their prayers are - you are not as chosen by God as they are!
You see, they're the best on earth. All the rest of us are going to hell in a handbasket.”

ANS:
What preposterousness comes from the bent mindset, captured by their abstruse predispositions. They see only what their biases let them see. Except for these troglodytes, nothing could be farther from the truth. Did Jesus not disavow the uncharitable Jews and give tribute to the Good Samaritan, a pagan? Did God not exemplify the publican, praying in the temple, who was not a Jew, over the aggrandizing Pharisee's prayer that boasted about his tithe?

God said, “Ask and you shall receive; seek and you shall find, and knock and the door will be opened to you.” He didn’t say only if you are of a certain religion. God answers the prayers of all who love Him with all their heart, mind, and strength.

God, who created man, taught us how to pray; it’s called the “Our Father.” I think if one believes in God, one should listen to what He tells you. Your facetious remarks show your ignorance about prayer; you must not do much of it. Because God loves all mankind, He answers all sincere prayers regardless of religion, sex or origin.

God’s Mother has promised enormous benefits for praying the Rosary. Only a fool would ignore the Mother of God, whose miraculous intercessions have been documented at Lourdes, Fatima, and throughout the world for all people in need.

And, who can love God with all his heart, mind, and strength, and not wish to be with God in the Eucharist and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass? Nowhere is there such abundance of supernatural graces than in the Church God created for all mankind.

God's Church is one, not many, and not contradictory; it is infallible in its universal teachings so that man will have no doubt as to the Church’s authenticity and certitude.

Her Sacraments and the supernatural graces they give are unfathomable. Consequently all things that come from God pass through the portals of His Holy Church because its founder is Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Holiness itself. Why prefer any other?

The religious-based homophobia and shame is a prime *weapon* of abusers within the Church.

It's built-into the homophobic theology: there are more male victims because the homophobia that Donahue promotes makes boys more *vulnerable,* *manipulable,* *and far more-easily-silenced.*

IN REPLY TO
AREYOUSAYING
“SMALL MINDS”

IRT:
May your small and shallow god have mercy on the perverts in your clergy and those of you who hide and/or make lame excuses for them.

ANS:
My God is also your God, like it or not. Surely you’re not so shallow as to claim you created yourself, or to hide from the fact that He made you?

Thus it is written: Luke 12: 22cf. “And which of you by taking thought can add to his stature one cubit? If then ye be not able to do so much as the least thing, why are you solicitous for the rest? Be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat, or for your body, what you shall put on. Your life is more than the meat; for the body is more than the raiment.

"Consider the ravens, for they sow not, neither do they reap. They have no storehouse or barn, and yet God feedeth them. How much are you more valuable than they?

“Consider the lilies, how they grow: they labor not, neither do they spin. But I say to you, not even Solomon in all his glory was clothed like one of these. Now, if God clothe in this manner the grass that is to-day in the field and to-morrow is cast into the oven: how much more you, O ye of little faith?” To the Church even the molesters have value and dignity though they've sinned.

What are the excuses? No one has excused anyone. The Church has the command and duty to save everyone, even you.

Matthew 9: 10cf. “Why doth your master eat with publicans and sinners? But “Jesus hearing it, said: They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill. Go then and learn what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. For, I have not come to call the just, but sinners.”

Thus, the Church today makes this solemn prayer that you may know there is a God, “Father, open their eyes to see your handy work in the splendor of your Creation in the beauty of human life. Touched by your hand the world is holy; help them to cherish the gifts that surround us and to share your gifts with our brothers and sisters, and to experience the joy of life in Your presence.”

Catholics should take a lesson from the Muslims.

When Muslims are confronted with the fact that the founder of Islam was a pedophile, they retort that Aisha was not 9 when the 56 year old Muhammad forced her into his bed but she was 12.

Aisha was six when the 52 year old Muhammad married her and when she turned 9 and had her first menstrual period he took her to bed.

Catholics should come up with similar evasive tactics and then threaten to kill any one that draws an image of Jesus. Then the Catholic religion will be everlasting.

Catholics should take a lesson from the Muslims.

When Muslims are confronted with the fact that the founder of Islam was a pedophile, they retort that Aisha was not 9 when the 56 year old Muhammad forced her into his bed but she was 12.

Aisha was six when the 52 year old Muhammad married her and when she turned 9 and had her first menstrual period he took her to bed.

Catholics should come up with similar evasive tactics and then threaten to kill any one that draws an image of Jesus. Then the Catholic religion will be everlasting.

ELIZDELPHI

Sweety, go away somewhere to a nunnery and live out your life. Most of us couldn't care less how the Catholic Church defines homosexuals. It's how you treat homosexuals, that's what bothers us. You people say, 'love the sinner but hate the sin.' Your actions tell us that you define homosexuals, all homosexuals, as sinners and your actions tell us that you hate both the homosexual and their lives and, so called, sins.

I think Jesus wouldn't agree. He forgave sin, didn't hate it. He didn't hate anybody.

You go ahead and do all the mental back flips you need to justify your hatred of homosexuals, and your defense of priests and bishops and popes who preach their hatred. You're not going to convince us.

You see, sweety, we live in the real world and not the world created by men wearing dresses.

Danielinthelionsden wrote:
"You never did answer the question, how to get the gayness out of a gay person."

Someone can have desires of this kind that they never sought--having desires for something that isn't right simply is NOT understood by Catholics as an existential condition. Put another way, we don't consider you intrinsically, existentially "gay", like for instance we wouldn't consider someone intrinsically an over-eater or intrinsically angry, or intrinsically, existentially sick with some mental or physical ailment, that is something afflicting them which they may have to bear with, but not who they "are" as a person. Regardless of your opinion, the Catholic Church does not understand ANYONE to be existentially "homosexual" or "gay", rather we understand people as either a man or a woman, and we understand the sexes objectively to be complementary, regardless of the person's subjective experience of their sexual orientation, or their sexual behavior. To have disordered desires, and the temptations that tend to go with that, is a suffering, a cross to bear together with Christ. All the Saints were tempted; they heroically resisted sin; to be tempted is not at all to be a bad person, and certainly not a weak person, since we gain a great deal of strength by fighting these spiritual battles. When I had desires to have sex with someone I wasn't married to, that was also disordered, however, there is no such thing as being existentially a fornicator, nor does it mean I'm existentially a fornicator if unwanted sexual thoughts cross my mind even though I'm vowed to celibacy. I bear witness that chastity is possible.

I don't view celibacy as punitive or as something extraordinary, even though at times it is uncomfortable or difficult (so can faithful married life be). It's the ordinary lot of every unmarried or widowed person, and there are many of those. There are many heterosexual people who can't or shouldn't marry, or whose life vocation is to celibacy. I don't think it's probably any more or less difficult for people with homosexual vs heterosexual desires. And for everyone, people today often pursue their desires without regard to what is morally right, and few children grow up today with healthy guidance and good examples about this.

I've almost always liked the homosexual people (and some transgender) I've known, by the way, and identified with their suffering and loneliness. I've always been an outsider and "different" kind of person, often felt unaccepted, alone etc.

The mormons used electroshock to try to "cure" their gays. I wonder if it would work on TTWSYFAMDGGAHJMJ1 to "cure" his closed-minded homophobia and blind defense of his complicit church.

@TTWSYFAMDGGAHJMJ1:

"The Church has all the purview to overcome this evil debauchery; it has the Sacrament of Confession, the Mass, the Eucharist, and the Rosary, the most powerful prayers on earth and in Heaven, but man must come to God."

Here it is, folks - the real belief - all of you who are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist and all other non-Catholics - your prayers are not as powerful as their prayers are - you are not as chosen by God as they are!

You see, they're the best on earth. All the rest of us are going to hell in a handbasket.

So they can stand by and do nothing as their priests rape children, as bishops lie and cover up for their rapist priests, and as Jews and Gays go to the ovens.

And they think that our posts are just works of the devil and they think they have to pray for us. What utter and complete nonsense this is.

Who ever you are - you are sorely deluded!

IN REPLTY TO (IRT)
DITLD
“CHANGING ORIENTATIONS”

“If you're so smart and have all the answers, then tell us all how to get the gayness out of a gay person.”

ANS:
Saint Augustine quoted Deuteronomy 6:5, “Love thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole strength,” and then said Augustine, “Go out and do what ever you want.”

No one can cure any addiction—be it drugs, alcohol, or sex,—unless they turn to God and seek His intercession. Jesus said, “With God all things are possible. With man nothing is possible.” Hence, it is written, "Ask and all good things will be given to you."

Since God is both Mercy and Justice, He will never let man be afflicted with such an evil that cannot be overcome. However, those who do not know God, cannot love God or cannot trust God will find overcoming there affliction near if not completely impossible.

The Church has all the purview to overcome this evil debauchery; it has the Sacrament of Confession, the Mass, the Eucharist, and the Rosary, the most powerful prayers on earth and in Heaven, but man must come to God. In the wake of man's love for God, never has it ever been found that God has ever failed to answered man in need. Never! Thus, the AMA reluctantly admitted that with religion man might overcome his affliction.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,840542,00.html

“One reason why homosexuals are so rarely cured is that they rarely try treatment. Too many of them actually believe that they are happy and satisfied the way they are. Another reason, says Philadelphia's Dr. Samuel B. Hadden, is that too many psychiatrists are still inhibited by the 45-year-old pessimism of Freud, who was convinced that the condition was discouragingly difficult to treat.

Even when psychiatrists do try to aid homosexuals, their efforts are likely to be ineffectual because they themselves have so little confidence of success. Both patients and doctors are wrong, Dr. Hadden told the American Group Psychotherapy Association in San Francisco last week.

"Male homosexuals,* he said, "are more treatable and curable than is generally believed. And the people who are the most effective therapists are other homosexuals who have been under treatment for a while."

"As a psychiatrist actively practicing group therapy for the treatment of neurotics and psychotics of all sorts, Dr. Hadden, 64, marshaled impressive evidence to support his case.”

May your small and shallow god have mercy on the perverts in your clergy and those of you who hide and/or make lame excuses for them.

God Bless you Bill! Hang in there! The truth will never set them free, as they are all locked in their own prisons of lies and sin. We can only do our best, the rest is up to them...

Pedophilia yes, homosexual pedophilia. Is that unfair to say?

Clergy are often utterly sexually immature. That's the real issue.

Telling lies is back-breaking work.

Telling the truth is as easy as sipping a cool drink.

Because to tell the truth, you don't have to try to match up all your stories to get them to make sense. Because it is the truth, it all matches up, without effort, automatically.

When I look in a mirror, I see my face, my nose, my eyes, my hair, my skin tone; whether I am ugly or handsome, I know that I did not choose what I look like, but that the appearance of my body is simply a fact of existence, presented to me, like all other facts of existence, which I had no chance or opportunity to choose or determine.

And so, the interior workings of my mind are the same; if I am dumb or intelligent, it is neither anything to feel ashamed of or to be proud of, because none of it is my doing; the mental processes of my mind operate without my will or knowledge, a mystery, unknown to me.

And I do not choose my beliefs, either, but inherit them from a previous generation, and then watch them become transformed according my doubt that they can be true, or my fear that they cannot be true, that my doubts and fears, act on the inheritance of my beliefs, and sculpt them into something that is different than my original inheritance. But it is not consicous and free will that causes me to believe that "this" is true or that "that" is false.

Belief is, instead, determined by what I call an inner will, which is beyond our conscious control. When I think of freedom to choose my beliefs, I mean the free expression of this inner will, which itself, operates outside of and beyond our abilitiy to understand or control it.
Therefore, a Christian cannot coax an atheist into believing, and an atheist cannot coaxt a Christian into unbelief.

These kinds of arguments cannot work. Each believes according to the setting into which they were born, and the physical landscape of experience upon the earth.
People sometimes refer to the "system" when they speak about the political or economic rules and constraints of our lives. But we also live in a "system" of physical existence. I believe that at the foundation of this system that determinses our lives, is a God-like Providence, and that it is not important or vital that any one religion be seen as a correct or valid reflection of God's will and God's "plan" for us.

I do not believe Christianity is the true religion, nor that there is even any true religion that all people could comprehend together, at once, because, the variety of settings and physical landscapes, and the variety of inheritances of belief is too varied, and too different, from person to person and from place to place, and even the capacity to understand, and the willingness and interest to understand,is too varied and too different, to ever make them unified.

These things are the concerns of men and not of God.

The Catholic Church appeals to natural law to justify itself. But there is no natural law; natural law does not exist; the Catholic Church's appeal to natural law is the vestigial remains of worshipping stone idols.

The Church and sex - a few gems:

Bernadine of Siena (d. 1444): "It is better for a woman to have relations in the natural manner with her own father than with her husband in an unnatural manner"

According to John Paul II. . . a hemophiliac with AIDS may not have intercourse with his wife, ever, not even after her menopause, because God has forbidden condoms. And if the hemophiliac husband can't manage to abstain, it's better for him to infect his wife than to use a condom. Catholic sexual morality has turned into a morality of horror.

"Nowadays many people think that in cases of mortal danger to the mother the Church allows abortion, but this is false. Rather the Church has merely agreed to respect medical decisions when otherwise both mother and child will die.
"Plainly put, in 1976 the German bishops did not approve, they only respected, the decision of the doctors that one dead body was better than two."

"Every ejaculation that cannot lead to procreation is considered unnatural, thus onanism is a vice that according to Thomas Aquinas is worse than intercourse with one's mother . . . ."

"Pleasure-hating clerical celibates preferred concentration camps to sterilization. Cardinal Faulhaber reports a conversation he had with Hitler in 1936, where the Fuhrer argued in favor of sterilizing the so-called "hereditarily diseased" to prevent the birth of a sickly new generation. Said Hitler: "The operation is simple and doesn't incapacitate them for a trade or for marriage, and now the Church is holding us back." To which Faulhaber replied: "From the Church's standpoint, Herr Chancellor, the State is not forbidden to isolate these vermin from the community, out of self-defense, and within the framework of the moral law. But instead of physical mutilation other defensive measures must be tried, and there is such a measure: interning the people with hereditary disease" . . . . Internment camps meant concentration camps, which were evidently within the "framework of the moral law," but sterilization, whether voluntary or involuntary, never was because it means a capacity for pleasure without a capacity for procreation."

Pope Gregory, "Pleasure can never be without sin."

Augustine's Summa Theologiae: "The father should be loved more than the mother, because he is the active principle of generation, while she is the passive one."
and
"Nothing drags the mind of man down from its elevation so much as the caresses of woman and the bodily contacts without with a man cannot possess his wife."
and
"As a defective creature, still somehow on the level of the child, woman is capable of bearing children but not of education them. The intellectual training of the children can only come from the father, since he is the intellectual leader."

I've had enough. It is painful to read such inhuman cr*p.

Donahue represents practically no one, yet, WaPo types feel compelled to quote him, anyway. More claptrap form the Post's silliest column.

fr mrsm117:

>...You can spin all you want but homosexual acivity is not normal!! Just look at your anatomy - it's pretty clear human beings were made to be joined and to procreate as man and woman. Two men or two women cannot conceive a child.

Not all marriages are set up to "conceive a child". As a gay Christian woman who married my lovely WIFE two years ago, I take great offense to your statement. Grow UP and get the FACTS about glbt's. Quit listening to donohue and his gang of four.

Yes, MRM117, it must be tiring to fabricate and then justify it with delusional thought. Do you often use your mind and judge pothers by it? Fact is, if you were them and they were you, it would be you fighting hard to be recognized as a normal person with unique interests.

And what about hermaphrodites? Seems that according you you, what ever choice they make, they are sinners. No way out for them, huh?

mrsm117

Well, if you are tied, then you should rest. I know this is hard for people like you.

Even if you will not admit it now, maybe we have warmed up your frozen heart just a little, and one day, you may remember an echo of this conversation.

TTWSYFAMDGGAHJMJ1

If you're so smart and have all the answers, then tell us all how to get the gayness out of a gay person.

Just how do you go about it? Maybe you might start off with a hands-on course called "Kissn' Girls 101." Somehow, I can't imagine the Catholic Church giving sex lessons to cure gay people. But how else would you do it?

If the natural law does not come naturally to someone, then what you do to force nature? You got to have some kind of an anwer instead of just complain and criticize. Be constructive, Girl!

The truth is only visible through the victims. Until victims are allowed court hearings, the deflectors will continue with fabrications of gay. Even John Jay will state their data is grossly in error since they were paid by US bishops and given a set of rules to follow.

The following comes from victims and victims groups, untainted by the RCC. This is the real data.

Fact: Over 60% of claims of abuse were of pedophilia.

Many victims are female, though slightly more were male since males were more accessible to the priest pedos by volumes. With so many females abused and only few females available, this clearly states the pedo priests would prefer female. Again, from victims, not some peoples imagination looking to blame a group.

If females were more accessible, then only few males would have been victims of priest pedos. In other words the same proportions as the normal population would have experienced abuse - females more often than males.

Proves it has nothing to do with gay.

How is it possible for any group, other than victims, to define percentages. Most victims of abuses, over 90%, are not even know by the dioceses, the news media and the courts simply because they are denied justice. You can thank catholics for denying those already abused again. Now the catholics can make up what ever suits their agenda of deceit.

So if you don't know about these victims, male or female count, age of victims, then how is it even possible to blame gay or state most were not pedophilia? You must be all lying as the pope, cardinals, bishops and priests do because this is their oath - do what ever distractions, lies, to protect the church first (cardinal oath). That is unless, and now makes sense, you are clergy.

MRSM117

Go in peace, dear. By the way, gay men and women can conceive and bear children - just not with each other. And if anatomical ability determined what was moral and what wasn't, we'd all be in trouble.

You say we're filled with hate because we criticize the Catholic Church. No, dear, criticism is not hatred. I am angry at the Church for protecting the rapist of my son, and for protecting the Bishop who protected the rapist of my son - but I don't hate the Church.

You, on the other hand, do hate gay people. You hate Jews and you hate Muslims and you hate all people who aren't like you. Be careful, dear, that hatred will come back to bite you. It probably already has.

I'm tired of going around and around with you guys and I really don't have the time or the inclination to respond to people who just are interested in spin.

Congratulations you took the honor away from Bill O'Reilly (oh horrors I watch Fox News and Bill O'Reilly - now make sure that you repeat that in your next post!)

You can spin all you want but homosexual acivity is not normal!! Just look at your anatomy - it's pretty clear human beings were made to be joined and to procreate as man and woman. Two men or two women cannot conceive a child.

Your attempts and mocking the Catholic Church and creating spin in your posts are very transparent. People can see right through you. You are an angry militant mob who just doesn't like what the Church stands for on moral issues and so you will grab at any attempt to ridicule the Church or anyone who is an authenic Catholic.

I'm getting off this treadmill. Peace to all of you.

quote: "If one cannot tell the differences between a woman and a man..."

If this is not the most idiotic statement thus far. I know many gay men and many lesbians. I assure you - they know the difference between a man and a woman very well.

You are making the assumption that gay men somehow self identify as women or see other men as women. No. Gay men identify as men and see other men as men.

You are bringing into this argument, without actually saying it, that there are certain behaviors or identity traits that are masculine or male and others that are feminine or female. Many of these traits or social behaviors are culturally conditioned and have nothing to do with orientation.

I know very masculine men who are gay and very effeminate men who are straight. I also know very feminine women who are lesbian and vice versa.

Whoever you are, go peddle your hate-filled voodoo academics elsewhere. They - and you - are just wrong!

IN REPLY TO (IRT)
DITLD
“ASSUMPTIONS?”

IRT:
“If a gay person needs to be healed of their gayness, you are assuming that there is something wrong with them, to be healed. That is a false assumption.”

ANS:
If one cannot tell the differences between a woman and a man, I assure you there's something wrong with them. Maybe you can explain why even the APA, against their mythos, admits religion may override orientation.

http://www.narth.com/docs/psychobiology.html

"Dr. Robert Spitzer's study on gays who have changed their sexual orientation is well supported. Spitzer's study is the best recently available for establishing that at least some with Same Sex Attraction can change profoundly.

"The APA recently dismissed a group of conservative religious leaders and counselors who were requesting input into the proceedings of APA's new Task Force. Church denominational leaders, practicing psychologists, counselors and organizations dedicated to assisting individuals who want to change their sexual orientation [An APA DISQUALIFIER] requested to meet with the American Psychological Association task force to share their understanding of the issue," according to a Baptist Press story.”

"Psychologists who agree that gays can change their orientation are termed homophobic. Such efforts are especially troubling because these critics abrogate the patient’s right to choose the therapist and determine therapeutic goals. They also deny the reality of data demonstrating that PSYCHOTHERAPY CAN BE EFFECTIVE IN CHANGING SEXUAL PREFERENCES IN PATIENTS WHO HAVE A DESIRE TO DO SO.” In fact, an investigation of the developmental factors correlated with homosexuality would constitute career suicide for most researchers."

http://www.narth.com/docs/lastword.html

"To the task force members' credit, they do acknowledge the importance of client self-determination and religious diversity. Judith Glassgold, the Task Force chair, is quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying, "We're not trying to encourage people to become 'ex-gay,' but we have to acknowledge that, FOR SOME PEOPLE, RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IS SUCH AN IMPORTANT PART OF THEIR LIVES, IT MAY TRANSCEND EVERYTHING ELSE."

"She makes no allowance, however, for non-religious individuals to seek psychological care when they are distressed by their unwanted attractions and seek help to diminish those attractions and make changes in their lives consistent with their personal values or worldviews."

http://www.narth.com/docs/deemphasizes.html

"Although there is no mention of the research that influenced this new position statement, it is clear that EFFORTS TO "PROVE" THAT HOMOSEXUALITY IS SIMPLY A BIOLOGICAL FAIT ACCOMPLI HAVE FAILED. The activist researchers themselves have reluctantly reached that conclusion.

"There is no gay gene. There is no simple biological pathway to homosexuality. Byne and Parsons, and Friedman and Downey, were correct: a bio-psycho-social model best fits the data."

quote: "TTWSYFAMDGGAHJMJ1's position on gay people can be boiled down to this: snobbish, pretentious, and stuck-up."

Amen.

And don't forget - hate!

Renshaw |

Take heart.

Whenever this controversy comes up, there is always one side that has clear and reasoned arguments that promote the truth.

And there is always one side the is reduced to insensible babble and red-faced hysteria. Like for instance, that being gay is equivalent to being a murderer.

TTWSYFAMDGGAHJMJ1 is fascinated with Latinized English, big words, complex sentences, but always empty and without meaning.

The only two reasons that Catholics can give for labelling gay people as intrincisclly disordered because God says so, or because natural law says so. Neither is a good or satisfactory answer. Both are capricious and with reason or explanation.

What they are really expressing is the sentiment that straight people are superior to gay people. But that is just a type of social snobbishness, to feel superior and better than other people.

TTWSYFAMDGGAHJMJ1's position on gay people can be boiled down to this: snobbish, pretentious, and stuck-up.

Beyond that, ther is no argument at all.

@Daniel

She has no argument except for the words her priests and nuns tell her to use. She is part of this cult of hatred they call the Catholic Church. There is no welcome for gay people, divorced and remarried, non-Catholic Christians unless you tell them you're going to convert or might convert, Jew, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. They think single people are strange and that all married people need to have scads of kids because they can't use birth control.

It's sick!

Donohue is trying to shift the focus of the problem of pedophilia to that of gay men.

Flailing around about gay men (and women) is not going to stop pedophiles. Getting rid of the rule of celibacy is not going to stop pedophiles.

Pope Benedict will have no other legacy than what he does about this problem. Just as Pope Pius XII will be known for his silence during the holocaust.

What the Church needs to eo is get rid of the requirement of celibacy and the exclusion of women for the priesthood and Church hierarchy. The leadership of the Church is a muddle of men who only talk mainly with other men. Are they even really in this world?

TTWSYFAMDGGAHJMJ1

You can split a hair 40 ways, but that still does not change the truth.

@TTWSYFAMDGGAHJMJ1 - three things, dear:

1. All child abusers are not homosexual. The priest rapist who raped my child is now married with a child. He self identifies as heterosexual. Most child rapists are heterosexually oriented men

2. Go ahead and compare the priest rapists to school teachers, doctors or garbage men for all I care. Only the priest claims to talk for God, to be "another Christ", to forgive sins, etc. Not even Protestant ministers claim they can forgive sins! That is why it IS a CRISIS!

3. Being Gay is normal. Being Straight is normal. There is no problem with orientation. And even to use the word "pederast" shows where your thinking is.

You Catholics disgust me. All you want to do is defend your priest rapists and bishops who cover for them, blame the whole thing on gay men and be done with it.

Honey, the Catholic Church has ordained homosexual men since the beginning.

PEDOPHILIA & THE CHURCH:

“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct. Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain –and most fools do.” The Political Correct (PC) has inflamed the situation by protecting gay sex in the Courts, Industry, Media and Literature. Although the facetious iconoclasts are willing to accept any kind of garbage to prove the Church is the center of pederasty and pedophilia, the truth has a little different twist than Her detractors and vilifiers want you to believe.

“The authoritative work by Penn State professor Philip Jenkins, “Pedophiles and Priests" found that between .2 and 1.7 percent of priests are pedophiles [99.8 are not]." That is not a crisis; it’s a problem. The figure among the Protestant clergy is "between 2 and 3 percent.” In NY Public Schools it is around 5%.

The work of researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health reported that “86 percent of sex perpetrators were known to the family. Dr. Garth A. Rattray reports that “about 85 percent of the child sex offenders are family members [NOT PRIESTS].

Hence, the Catholic Church is not the epicenter of pederasty. Sex abuse is a cultural problem caused for the most part by the malefic American Psychiatric Association's (APA) dauntless reliance on the Kinsley Report, the progenitor of the Sexual Revolution. The APA facetiously had to abandon its previous claim that homosexuality was a normal lifestyle.

http://www.calcatholic.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?id=b14d02b9-2022-4f0e-b4b1-9e40ba41cb99

Dr. Judith Reisman urges bishops to take action against these sex therapists who have advised the Church. And, if they don't, "the laity should." Reisman has served as an expert witness in lawsuits involving sexual abuse.

Susan Brinkman gives the details in her book, "The Kinsey Corruption" (Ascension Press). "Certain Catholic Church administrators hired sex educators who taught Kinseyan values. This employment pattern held as well for some selected psychologists who screened aspiring seminarians, many of whom were rejected because they were said to be too sexually 'orthodox,' not 'tolerant' of homosexuality. Bishops sent pedophile priests for treatment to therapists who accepted pedophilia as an “orientation.”

Did the Bishops screw up in handling these cases? Yes! They had relied inadvertently on the Political Correct (PC) and admitted Homosexuals into the priesthood. They exacerbated the problem by relying on these therapists to solve the problem that the Kinsley APA mythos had unwittingly created. Subsequently, the APA canon envenomed the situation more, and it was costly even before the law suits began to cascade. This wasn’t a cover-up; cover-ups are intentional, this was a snafu by the Church caught in the vortex of the PC Culture.

... pardon me, I think it was Huckleberry Finn, not Tom Sawyer ...

Whenever this type of discussion comes up, some Christian nit-wit always says, "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve ... " with a silly smirky grin, as though he has just said something clever, even though it has already been said thousands of times by thousands of nit-wits.

But it's a good point. If God did not create Steve, then where did Steve come from? And what is it about Steve that makes him an abomination and disordered?

Merely to say that being gay is a violation of natural law is not a good answer. Because what does that mean? The Catholic Church has no good answer. It has a tortured, legalistic, hair-splitting answer, but no good answer.

It does not really mean anything.

Could it be that Steve is not intrinsically disordered, but extrinsically disordered? Could it be that his is disorder comes from the people who regard him as disordered and tell him he is disordered, when otherwise, this disorder would be unkown to him or to anyone else?

Sure, you could tell a left-handed person that he is disordered too, and torment him into suicide over his left-handedness. But who would really be disordered?

Would you tell a black person that their black skin means that they are intrinsically disordered, but not to worry about because God loves them anyway? No matter how kind you try to be about it, it is the expression of a mean spirit.

In the book "Tom Sawyer," Tom decided to help the runnaway slave, Jim, even though he knew he would go to Hell for it. I think that Catholics need to get up the courage of Tom, to do the right thing, even when threatened with Hell.

Renshaw

It is just common sense that being gay cannot compare to murder. Even the woman who said that does not really believe that. She just got tied up in her arguments that she did not know what she was saying. But that shows that she has no real argument, doesn't it?

Gay people are a part of life and always have been. They are everywhere, in all countries, in all cities, in every state, and even in little towns and villages.

If you get out of the house at all, you encounter gay people every day of your life. When you walk through a mall, eat in a restaurant, fly in a plane, even in a Bible study group, and sitting in church, there are gay people around you.

They are not reptiles with scales.

They are just people.

quote: "If someone is "born" with the inclination to set houses on fire AND kill people does not mean they follow their inclination or is it a violation of the natural law?"

Here is her real thought: gay people are criminally minded and murderers. No one needs to justify their life to this kind of idiotic thinking. Why don't you try to join the 21st century? Homosexuality is an orientation. Nothing more, nothing less. People are born this way. Just as they are born with red hair, freckles and left handed. Of course, you probably think that left handed people are somehow evil too. Catholic nuns used to tie the left hands of some kids behind their backs and force them to write left handed.

Your own church says that gay people don't choose their orientation, so I guess you're a cafeteria Catholic along with the rest of the hypocrites. Wake up!

Does your God create people only to torment them? Oh wait, since you believe that only Christians, who are only 1/3 of the world's population, are going to heaven - you believe in a God who creates most people on this earth to burn in hell. Silly me, for a brief morment I forgot how sadistic your Church is.

There are millions of gay people in the world. In the past they have been mute. Now, more and more of them are finding a voice. Now, when a gay person is bullied, there is a good chance that he will speak up. Merely speaking up for oneself is the "problem." And it is a "problem" that will not go away.

In the progress of humanity, sexual orientation is now viewed differently than it was in the past. The younger generation has become transformed in its consideration of sexual orientation and homosexuality. To them it is just part of life instead of an unacknowledged subject of taboo.

The old taboo against gays is gone, and it can never be brought back. That is the progress of history. There is no tactic that anyone can devise that will undo this fact.

When right-wing Christians rant against gay people, and trump up all kinds of "proof" that God is on their side, that only hurts them, and imperils the position of Christianity in the world even more, as each new generation extends to Christianity less and less credibility.

Gay people are not bad, they are not sinful; they are not perverted. When you vilify and demonize gay people in the name of God, then you are spreading false doctrines. You can listen to false doctrines all you want, and can repeat them over and over to yourself and to others, but that does not make a false doctrine true.

Gay people are normal. Gay people are good; they are as good as straight people. Gay people are few in number, and mostly hidden from view. Being gay is no big deal, except to anti-gay religious fanatics, who have exaggerated everything about gay people, and who seem hyper-aware of the existence of gay people in the world. Denial of these facts does not change the facts that gay people are as good as straight people.

The existence of gay people upon the earth tests the instruction and obligation of Jesus, that says, to love your neighbor, love your enemy, do good to those that hate you, for if you love only those that love you, then what is the credit in that?

Anti-gay Christians fail the test. On the central theme of Christianity, they are ignorant and blank; instead they are eaten-up with their false doctrines, which are arrayed, with willful, direct, and true aim at the heart of Jesus and towards the destruction of Christian values.

Anti-gay Christians have heard false doctrines vilifying and demonizing gay people for so long that they have lost the ability to think for themselves. Their church has stolen their free will. They are but drones, listening to and repeating false doctrines and lies about how wicked and evil gay people are, when in fact, gay people are not wicked or evil; gay people are good.

Being gay is not a sin. Being gay is not bad. Gay people do not need to justify their existence to religious conservatives.

mrsm117

Being gay is not comparable to commiting murder. Comparing gay people to murderers is disingenusous, insincere, and in bad faith. Even the Cathholic Church does not go that far. I know you think that you are right, and you are grasping for any kind of argument to prove that you are, but in these arguments, you are not sincere.

@Renshaw

I never gave any thought to my sexual identity. Growing up I was always attracted to boys and as a grown up to men and it was not something that required choice or thought. You are trying to get me to say "I was born that way". Lame argument Renshaw and irrelevant. A person can choose to believe that they were born that way to give themselves "permission" to act out on their homosexual orientation. Actually I disagree with the assessment that homosexuals are born that way. But even if that were true it still violates the natural law. If someone is "born" with the inclination to set houses on fire AND kill people does not mean they follow their inclination or is it a violation of the natural law? Of course it's a violation of the natural law - we know setting houses on fire and killing people is wrong so we don't do it. We make a CHOICE not to do it. And, we seek out help with those inclinations.

Two men and two women are not physiologically able to conceive a child. It it anatomically impossible! You know very well what the catechism was saying!

A man and a woman who cannot conceive are certainly not depraved and they suffer at their inability to conceive a child - the difference is - they can physiologically conceive a child.

MRSM117 - when did you "choose" to be heterosexual, presuming you are heterosexual? What date or year was that?

And may I ask you - are people who are born without the ability to conceive also intrinsically disordered and violations of Natural Law?

quote: "To suggest that an adult who has sex with a pre-pubescent child is driven by the need to control another person as opposed to being driven by a depraved sexual urge is truly astonishing."

What is astonishing is how little you know about rape. Rape is an act of violence and aggression. While sexual violation is almost always a part of rape - rape is not, I repeat NOT, a desire for a meaningful sexual relationship.

Your thinking is the kind that starts the slippery slope of blaming the victim, i.e. somehow, the victim enticed or seduced the rapist into raping them. Do some research before you start blaming every member of the gay community for the actions of rapists.

@Daniel. I do live in the real world but "my world" consists in doing the will of God not making up God's will to my specifications.

You know very well what the Catholic Church teaches on homosexuality so why do you twist the language - here's what the Catechsim of the Catholic Church says - "

"Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,141 tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered."142 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved."

If someone chooses to live in a world just for today without doing God's will I think it's a very empty unfulfilling life regardless of your orientation.

Actually I prayed for light. I don't hate anyone and neither does the Church. The point is this. The Church cannot accept homosexual activity because God condemns it. It's just that simple.

mrsm117

The problem with people like you is that you are in denial about real life and not interested in a serious discussion.

Blame the Catholic pedaphilia problem on the gays. Gay people are not only an abomination, but are intrinsically disordered; period; case-closed.

Pray for them that God will "do something" to fix this problem.

The end.

But the problem persists.

mrsm117

Yes, I am angry at hypocrisy.

When you pray for gay people, what will you pray for? that they go back into the closet? that they go away? that they recognize the intrinsic state of their disoder, and commit suicie, or just crawl under a rock and hide their wickedness so as not to bother other people? Do you pray to God that he reverse his intrinsic order that caused their disorder? Or do you just pray that you do not get bothered anymore by them?

Pray for your own heart, that you can live in the world with other people as they are, since gay people exist upon the earth and in the Catholic Church, and they are not going away.

Elizabeth

"Intrinsically disordered" DOES MEAN existentially disordered. If you do not understand this, then ask your church authorities what it means.

Elizdelphi

You never did answer the question, how to get the gayness out of a gay person. A frontal lobotomy might accomplish that. Would you support that? Even if you would support that, doctors would not do it, because it is a radical treatment for a normal condition,.

In fact, for all of your opinions and comments on gay people, on being gay, and on gayness, on feeling sorry for gay people, for praying for their gay feelings to go away, you do not seem to have a clue about what it actually is. How can you so casually comment on something that you not understand, and on which you are filled with misinformation?

The problem with gay people in the Catholic Church is that they are not wanted or welcome, but they just keep on getting born.

Elizdelphi

You assume that a man's lust for a man is more intense and therefore worse than a man's lust for a woman or a woman's lust for a man. Otherwise, why target gay people in the way that you do?

If being gay is intrinsically disordered, then it cannot be compared to illness or sickness. It cannot be compared to sin. It cannot be comparted ot psychologial problems. It is intrinstic. This is the definition that the Catholic Church has given it, that you seem to agree with. This definition was carefully desinged, so as not to sound hostile and bigotted, yet at the same time, to isolate and box-in gay people so that it is impossible, even improper for a gay person to defend their very pesonhood, which is really what is under deliberate and hostile attack.

The reason that same sex attraction is unwanted and troubling to gay Catholics is because of the Catholic Church and people like you who tell them it should be unwanted. You are telling them that as disordered as they are, don't worry because God still loves them. But you may as well just go ahead and say, that God doesn't like them because they are gay. They suffer in silence and in the closet because of people like you. The commit suicide because of people like you who persist in an anti-gay attitude.

Insisting that gay people live chaste and celibate lives is silly and unreasonable. It is the gay person's punishment for being gay.

Why do you seek to penalize people for something that you cannot understand, nor even cmoprehend? Like gay people, you did not choose your sexual orientation. It just so happend that peoeple did not preach to you all of your life what a bad person you are, since the outcome of your sexual orientation turned out to be the politically correct one.

I am very sorry, but I do not believe that God goes by your simple-minded notions of political correctness. I believe that you are trying to defend Catholic authority in this matter, but you are not stopping and taking any time to consider, first the very meaning of the words you say, and their profoundly destructive implications, and second, the harm and damage that words from people like you have on other people.

The Cathollic Church is not interested in helping gay people. It is interested in making them feel bad for what they are, and then for trying to change them, with all kinds of unreasonable qualifications, which are obviously impractical, if not impossible to meet.

The Catholic Church does not like gay people, and does not want them around. That should be an easy enough problem to solve; gay people should leave. But if they have a bitter after-taste from their traumatic Catholic experience, then do not act suprised.

The International Lesbian and Gay Association controversy
In 1993, the International Lesbian and Gay Association achieved United Nations consultative status. NAMBLA's association with ILGA drew heavy criticism, and many gay organizations called for the ILGA to dissolve ties with NAMBLA. Republican Senator Jesse Helms proposed a bill to withhold $119 million in U.N. contributions until U.S. President Bill Clinton could certify that "no UN agency grants any official status, accreditation, or recognition to any organization which promotes, condones, or seeks the legalization of pedophilia, that is, the sexual abuse of children". The bill was unanimously approved by Congress and signed into law by Clinton in April 1994.

IN 1994, ILGA expelled NAMBLA and two other groups (MARTIJN and Project Truth) because they were judged to be "groups whose predominant aim is to support or promote pedophilia." Although ILGA removed NAMBLA, the U.N. reversed its decision to grant ILGA special consultative status. Repeated attempts by ILGA to reacquire special status with the U.N. were finally successful in 2006.[9]

Gregory King of the Human Rights Campaign later said that "NAMBLA is not a gay organization ... They are not part of our community and we thoroughly reject their efforts to insinuate that pedophilia is an issue related to gay and lesbian civil rights."[10] NAMBLA responded by claiming that "man/boy love is by definition homosexual," that "man/boy lovers are part of the gay movement and central to gay history and culture," and that "homosexuals denying that it is 'not gay' to be attracted to adolescent boys are just as ludicrous as heterosexuals saying it's 'not heterosexual' to be attracted to adolescent girls."[10]

Thank you, Jerry - you summed it all up beautifully - that is exactly what this this is all about!

I have to admit that now I am laughing at the insulting comments directed towards me Those of you that are on the insult and attack wagon don't even realize how ridiculous you sound.

I notice SarahTX2 hasen't commented on the links she asked me to provide on sexual abuse statistics in the Protestant churches.

To the person who said the Pope has a lover I ask you to provide us with proof of that instead of making accusations. Let's see what you have to prove that!!

And last but not least to Daniel......I do get it Danie. The problem is, you don.t. You are an angry person who only gets validation when attacking others. Call it anything you wish - the fact remains that if you have a homosexual orientation you are called by God to live a chaste life! The same would be expected of a heterosexual unmarried person.

Homosexuality has been called an abomination going back to the Old Testament. If you want to delude yourself that God is accepting of homosexual activity, then you are very sadly mistaken.

I'm heading off to Mass this morning and I will pray for all of you - that should get your ire up!

It seems the nutters are out in force again attacking Bill Donohue.

The fact remains that over 80% of the child sex abuse in the Catholic Church is male to male. That aspect of the abuse problem is all that makes the sex abuse within the Catholic Church different from sex abuse in other institutions.

Clearly the powerful Gay lobby don't want to acknowledge the "Gay" problem. To suggest that an adult who has sex with a pre-pubescent child is driven by the need to control another person as opposed to being driven by a depraved sexual urge is truly astonishing.

Danielinthelionsden wrote:
"What would you heal? ...to get the gayness out of them?"

Learning to be chaste in a healthy way, sometimes for the first time since one was a little child, is HUGE. This is a certain kind of freedom, and it usually doesn't come without a battle. I am speaking from personal (albeit mainly heterosexual) experience here. For some portion of those who formerly had same-sex relationships, this freedom can bring with it the possibility of choosing marriage. On what do I base this? The fact that it sometimes, in fact, happens (there's a book called Beyond Gay in which the author's story is of this surprising kind). For many others, the same sex desires continue, but they gain a confidence that they don't have to act on them, that they can have friendships that are real, healthy friendships that aren't sexual, if they're Catholic that they can participate fully in the sacramental life of the Church (also, HUGE because this is intimacy with Christ).

"Intrinsically disordered" does not mean existentially, as if your very being were disordered. The idea is that the same-sex desires are disordered, they are out of order of sexuality as God intended it. Having desires to severely overeat rich foods is also disordered, and there's a level on which that can obviously be understood as a difficult human problem. I'm using that comparison simply to illustrate the sense of "intrinsically disordered" here is not moral. For something to be a sin, there has to be a consent of the will. Someone can experience same sex desires (considered a form of temptation to lust), or other kinds of temptations, and not sin at all because they don't give any consent of the will. In fact it may cause sincere religious people a great deal of suffering having these unwanted thoughts (of whatever nature).

And where there IS actual sin, and contrition--God is all Mercy.

"(this implies that) it is part of God's plan to create some people in this disordered state"

Actually God allows a lot of things that are not an original part of his plan. For instance, we believe that sickness and death were not original to the creation, but they were effects of the first sin. There are some Gospel stories that I think answer this question, for instance Jesus is asked about a man born blind "was it because of his sin or his parents' sin?" and Jesus says something like "neither, it is simply that the glory of God may be seen in him" and Jesus heals him... the divine purpose of the blindness is that it is the occasion for this healing contact with God, with Jesus.

quote: "So, if the Catholic Church would do a better job of screening out Homosexuals .....Keep the homos and perverts out, keep more children safe!"

Let's start with the Pope and his boy toy Mgsr. Georg! That love affair has been going on for decades now. It would be wonderful if they just admitted their love for each other and kissed each other on the steps of St. Peter's.

You want to kick out all the gay clergy? No one would be left to say mass!

I have absolutely nothing against gay clergy. In fact, I prefer gay men to be priests.

The priest who abused my son twenty four years ago was kicked out of the priesthood three years ago. He's now married and has a twin boy babies. He was and is as straight as an arrow, he just likes little boys!

IN REPLY TO (IRT)
AREYOUASKING

So you don’t think it’s a culture problem; it figures. Unfortunately, America is awash in the Sexual Revolution and the Church is caught in its ravenous net. However, the iconoclasts think you can have your cake and eat it too. The Church is the only one doing something about it. It's certainly not the iconoclast left wing; they're promoting it.

“Violence and pornography, which is a felony against the human spirit, are the atrocities of despair” Dr. Koop, former Surgeon General, explained, adding, “The people who commit them have an appetite for outrage. They devour what we cling to as civilized life.” And, they are devouring our public libraries, creating a “hostile environment” for normal women, children and men.

http://www.special-guests.com/reisman4.html

Reisman, J. (1990). Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler, U.S. Department of Justice, Grant No. 84-JN-AX-K007.

"It is time to identify what effect Alfred Kinsey, the father of the sexual revolution and sex education has had on the lives of so many.

"Since 1968, the ravages of divorce have severed more families each and every year than did maternal deaths in childbirth throughout the entire period from 1915 to 1998.

"The last 40 years have seen the percentage of persons living together as unrelated individuals increase from six to 16 percent of the general populace. By 1999 only 66 percent of the population lived in a married-couple family.

"In 1998 there were more than ten times as many women cohabiting as in 1960. In the year 2000, one in every three babies was born out of wedlock. The number of children living in single-parent families has more than doubled in the past three decades. And the list goes on.

"These facts are but the tip of the family-disintegration iceberg; obviously Kinsey does not merit all the blame, but his publications were influential and his disciples have been even more so.

"Kinsey promised "free sex" and "sex without consequences." Yet women and children have paid an exorbitant price tag, and the consequences are evident in the scourge of STDs, abortion, cohabitation, and disconnectedness.

"Since 1968, the ravages of divorce have severed more families each and every year than did maternal deaths in childbirth throughout the entire period from 1915 to 1998.

"We are fast approaching the point of no return with growing numbers of single-parent families. The restoration of marriage and family is no longer a luxury that would be nice; it is a necessity for the survival of American civil society. Thanks, Dr. Kinsey."

Mrsm117

Being gay is not a life-style; it is a sexaual orientation.

Regarding ALL gay people as participing in a "homo-sexual" life-style, is, to be kind, a little ignorant, no offense to anyone who has chosen a Catholic "life-style," such as the mafia, for example.

And, to help you along with this, I am not seriously equating Catholicism with the mafia; I am throwing a little sarcasm your way, to accentuate the point (which, you probably won't get).

Elizdelhi

In a previous post, you said, about gay people:

" ... some, after a period of chastity and healing, feel able to marry (someone of the opposite sex) ... "

If a gay person needs to be healed of their gayness, you are assuming that there is something wrong with them, to be healed. That is a false assumption.

What would you heal? How would you tinker with their psyche, their personality, their inner will, to get the gayness out of them? To do that, you would have to alter them radically. What if they do not want an outside force to alter them radically? What if they do not want a Priest to reach into their minds, and twist things around, so that they become a different person? To say that you love someone, and then to demand that transform into a different person is not love; it is personally destructive, and more like hate than love.

But the Catholic Church regards gay people as intrinsically disordered. That phrase was cleverly devised by a committee of theologians; it is a clever, tricky, and wiley phrase to isolate and persecute gay people.

To be instrinsically disordered is not a sin to repent and there can be no repentence or forgiveness. It is not an illness to be cured. It is not a psychiatric condition to be worked out.

Implicit in this phrase "intrinsic disorder" is that it is part of God's plan to create some people in this disordered state, and there is nothing that they can do about it, but wait for people like you to pray for them, which will in any event, not re-order their disordered state, since it is "intrinsic."

This is all poppy-cock. It is an incomplete, political resolution to a problem that the Catholic Church cannot understand, and cannot deal with. What good is a religion that cannot deal with reality?

You do not seem hostile, but you do seem very naive and misguided. A gay person in the Catholic Church is a tragedy. In an ideal world, such a person would get out of the Catholic Church and as far away from Catholic influence as possible. But often by the time a gay Catholic realizes this, a lot of the damage has already been done, which often cannot be undone.

Danielinthelionsden wrote:
"problem there is in being gay is all the people who hate gay people for being gay; that's the problem."

Well, I assure you of my love and the love of God.

"After all, would a heterosexual person be happy married to a gay person? Why don't you test out your theory and marry one to see?"

I'm happily vowed to celibacy for life. However, I completely agree that someone who has predominately same sex desires should not get married. That is not going to work. I believe the right thing in such a situation is to be celibate. I don't say that lightly at all, because it seems to me that even though the orientation toward the same sex is dis-ordered (I am NOT trying to offend, our conviction is there's a beautiful order and purpose to human sexuality, which is absolutely not embodied by same-sex contact) such people often have normal enough desires for intimacy and family. A life alone is often especially tough to come to terms with if it's not what you've actively chosen, but not impossible especially with prayer and virtuous friendship (which Aristotle says is the key to happiness!). I have never prayed for gay people to marry the opposite sex (I suppose I would pray for that if they asked me to) but certainly for their chastity.

"So there is nothing intrinsic in being gay that makes it a state of being any different than being straight; the Catholic phrase "intrinsically" disordered, is particularly insulting"

I used to completely agree and sympathize with what you're saying. Really, I still sympathize because I know you're speaking sincerely. However, in learning more about my Christian faith, I realize that God made human beings in his own image, and the complementarity of man and woman and the fruitfulness (a new person results!) of the love shared between them is one of the profoundest images of the Holy Trinity. Sexual contact of two men or two women do not form the likeness of God. It is sexual intimacy and pleasure divorced from its life-giving purpose (we're very consistent about the importance of this profound purpose of sex--artificial contraception by heterosexual couples is a sin too, so is masturbation). Also, we believe that as baptized members of the Church we are part of the Body of Christ--and St Paul admonishes in one of his letters how wrong it is to make Christ's body "one flesh" with that of a prostitute. This gives a startling insight into the identification of the body of the individual Christian as belonging to Christ, as having a radical dignity. Fornication or homosexual activity by the Christian offends against our own body... and against Christ's body. St Paul says somewhere else "I am giving you as chaste virgins" to the Bridegroom Christ. In the scriptural symbolism all humanity is symbolically female--bride.

Here's my response to the questions addressed to me.

Definition of homosexuality by Merriam-Webster - Sexual desire directed towards another person of the same sex. - Notice SarahTX2 there's nothing in there about CONSENT. I also NEVER AT ANY TIME said the minors involved consented nor is it something I would ever say.

Regardless of the age of the victim, having sex with a member of the same sex makes the initiator engaged in homosexual activity. What part of this do you not understand?

The Catholic Church is actually growing in numbers and not dying - especially in Africa and China. We are 1 billion in numbers and the largest contributors to charity.

Jesus Christ absolutely established the Catholic Church. It's pretty easy to find that out historically.

Here are several links addressing the issue of child sex abuse in the Protestant churches in the U.S.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0405/p01s01-ussc.html

http://www.reformation.com/

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,286153,00.html

I make no excuses for bad behavior by anyone in the Church. The Church more recently issued drectives on not admitting men into the seminary who have a deep seated homosexual orientation. That demonstrates the Church recognizes there is a problem and is concerned about the abuses that have been directed at minors over the years.Today we have young chaste priests who embrace celibacy;having priests marry has nothing to do with this crisis.

Lastly, some of the comments directed at me have been absolutely despicable.I have never used this opportunity to attack anyone personally. And if anyone wishes to question my maturity I would ask them to re-read what they posted and decide who is the more mature.

Being attacked because neither I nor the Catholic Church supports a homosexual lifestyle frankly is a waste of time. Everyone has the freedom to make their own choices in life. I don't force any of you who support a homosexual lifestyle to support my views why do you feel the need to attack me and others who don't want to embrace that lifestyle?

I'm not in the business of redefining Christianity to conform with some modern day polical correctness or misguided tolerance. That being said, trashing "my" faith with horrible accusations and disgusting comments demonstrates the level of anger and ignorance within some of you. It's clear that some of you don't want civilized discussion.

All of us have free will - and that's really where it begins and ends. Some of those choices can have dire eternal consequences. I hope that none of make those choices!

elizdelphi

The only problem there is in being gay is all the people who hate gay people for being gay; that's the problem.

Otherwise, there is nothing wrong with being gay. It is not bad; it is not wrong; it is not a sin; that is a false doctrine promoted by the Catholich Church, the Baptist Church, the Mormon Church, most other Protestant Churches, and Islam.

The homophobia of the Catholic Church and in fact its general sex-phobia is what is at the root of so much of its problems. Praying that gay people can turn straight and marry someone of the opposite sex is misguided.

After all, would a heterosexual person be happy married to a gay person? Why don't you test out your theory and marry one to see?

The attraction that gay men feel for other men is no more powerful nor depraved than the attraction that straight men feel for women. So there is nothing intrinsic in being gay that makes it a state of being any different than being straight; the Catholic phrase "intrinsically" disordered, is particularly insulting, considering the source.

What the Catholic Church teaches and promotes on this is nothing more than neurotic dysfunction, which is not helpful to anyone.

Expect if there are any good priests, most have either left or were demoted, especially if they spoke out.

Most bishops knew of the volumes of abuse. Most cardinals knew of the abuse. Even Ratzinger when confronted with the Boys Town episode - selling boys for sssseeeex, tried to deflect back in the 90's. He made a comment to a Nebraska senator and others that there are far more acts of pedophilia in the US than any other country. He never knew this stuff would have blown up. Today he acks as if he is just learning about it.

Keep in mind, bishops, cardinals, popes and priests have dirt on each other. Not likely a bishop would make it if clean, the others would worry.

Look at the deflections, look at how they continue to deny victims, look at how they twist words and meanings, look at how they blame, look at how the pope says just enough without going too far,.. look at it all - a filthy organization that has covered up child abuse. How sick. Most people can now see the truth.

If I own a store and keep all the chocolates behind the counter, so you need to ask me for one, and the breath mints on a store shelf away from me, more difficult to watch, would it be a fair statement to say "Theives steal more breath mints than chocolate"?

Same holds true for the RCC pedos, girls were more difficult to get to. Had both been equally accessible, expect the clergy would have abused more girls than boys.

Unless you are working directly with victims, not through a church, you will have no ideas of the volumes of abuse and that over 60% are of pedophilia. How would anyone know unless they had direct data. The RCC's money and power stop the cases from coming forward. The VICTIMS have no voice, they sure know how old they were when abused.

Now the gay crap.. Pedos need access to children. How do they get it? Well in the RCC, boys are alter boys, boys go to events with priests and boys are invited to the rectory. Girls were not allowed to be alter girls, most responsible parents would not allow a small girl to be with a man, a priests or not, and girls were not allowed to go to the rectory alone.

Boys were more available to pedos. Pedos don't care - boy or girl, just look at national statistics. If girls were not as available and boys were a super easy target, guess who the pedo gets.

Even in spite of all that, girls were sll abused by pedos. In fact one of the largest victims group is predominately female victims.

For resonable people here, I hope you can now see that real data is simply not available with regard to clergy abuse. Gays want a partner to enjoy ssseeexxx with them. Pedos control their victim, they don't look for enjoyment from the victim.

Until laws change, victims are denied the truth - they were rrraaappeeddd and ssssoooddddooommized by pedos. The RCC won't let this happen because they buy politicians to stopping laws that would.

Quit deflecting and harming victims with deflections of "gays did it", "most were not pedos". Your deflections cause damage to those already damaged. Quit being selfish. There are more victims who were abused by pedos, not gays.

If you want the truth, call your lawmakers and demand laws change, help the victims - don't continue to harm them with your selfishness and fabrications.

AREYOUSAYING - I will soften my remarks a bit in light of ELIZDELPHI's comment below. If you were abused, please know that you are not responsible for your having been abused. Please also know that there is no excusing or rationalizing the behavior of an abusive priest, or for that matter, the behavior of a bishop who fails to act sufficiently when informed about abuse. Please also know that the Church was slow to respond in an appropriate manner to evidence of altogether widespread abuse. I believe that some (not all) of the slowness was a result of a desire to protect the Church, which is to say place the interests of the Church or its priests over those of abuse victims. This is wrong. Full stop.

I will add that to properly address the evil of sexual abuse in the Church it is necessary to understand the nature of the abuse - and specifically of the abusers. Such an understanding should allow the Church to identify problem priests, and properly screen and form new priests. Such an understanding should also allow the Church to craft policies to protect those vulnerable to abuse. Any conversation about the patterns or nature of the abuse have no bearing on the victims of the abuse. More specifically, I have not seen any comments in this conversational thread can be attributed to defenders or sympathizers of the Church that demonize or blame victims, or that excuse abusive priests.

Areyousaying, I've read your posts on WaPo for a long time and truly with a lot of concern. You were harmed in a way that continues to harm you. I hate it that that happened to you, and deeply desire that it happen to no one else again, and that you may have peace even in this life, especially that even in the midst of such pain and betrayal you may feel the love of God for you, of which I'm so convinced. I've prayed for you several times in the past from my heart, and I am praying for you now.

AREYOUSAYING - Who in this conversation thread has demonized or blamed victims? Who in this conversation thread has suggested that classifying abuse in one way or another makes the crime of abuse less heinous or the victims culpable? Please provide specific quotations from specific comments in this conversation thread because I have read every one of them and have not seen an instance of a defender of the Church making such arguments.

SARAHTX2 wrote:
"ELIZDELPHI,
What the heck are you talking about? That no one should have sex?"

Oh, No, of course not, there's a chastity proper to married people who of course have sex and this is sacred indeed, and they have a vocation to become parents if they're able to (that's why they call it "Matrimony"). For those who aren't married, indeed we should be abstinent. I didn't used to understand or accept that at all, I lived with a man for some years. Obviously, I've become deeply convinced that was wrong, and I thank God that He has forgiven me, and I believe that Catholic teachings on chastity have tremendous value and can even make for a more authentically peaceful and joyful life.

PETALAFOND - I appreciate the chance to exchange views with you in a respectful manner. I note that you still haven't stated whether you agree with my original argument about the fundamental dishonesty in Stevens-Arroyo's (S-A) editorial.

In your second paragraph, you assert that the data needed to draw conclusions is not available, and that because the data that is currently available is limited, it cannot be trusted. In other words, you suggest we cannot draw conclusions about the whole from a part of the whole. However, in your fifth paragraph you draw conclusions about the John Jay Study based upon an anecdote regarding a New York bishop. In other words, you draw conclusions about the whole of the John Jay Study based upon a part of the whole. I detect a conflict in your argument.

In your third paragraph you assert that the John Jay Study is grossly in error because the John Jay institute accepted funding and followed guidelines provided by the US Bishops. This is fallacious reasoning. It may be true that the guidelines were restrictive or that the John Jay Institute was corrupted by Catholic funding, but if so you must prove the point rather than simply assert its validity. (As an aside I would note that I believe the bishops created an independent committee that then commissioned the study.)

You suggest that a quick call to the John Jay Institute will result in their denouncing their report. Who should one call, and if they will so quickly denounce their report have they not done so publicly already, and where might one find a link to their public repudiation of the report?

Finally, you suggest that New York does not allow victims to come forward? I suppose you mean that there is a statute of limitations in place that time-limits lawsuits. This is standard legal practice in countries and states around the world. It does not preclude victims from coming forward with allegations of abuse at any time, it only precludes their filing charges outside of legally defined time periods.

Danielinthelionsden wrote:
"The problem in the Catholic Church is not homo-sexual priests; the problem is repressed, self-loathing homo-sexual priests, who are weirdly maladjusted.... Cahtolic homophobia destroys lives and families, and often leads to suicide, often among teens."

Same-sex attraction must constitute a great trial for those priests who experience it strongly. The policy in the US today is that strongly and persistently same-sex attracted men, or self-identified gay men are not accepted into Catholic seminaries. This is common sense--priests are strongly obliged to chastity. I know there was also formerly a real problem in some places, of homosexual activity and gay culture in the seminaries themselves, there is utterly no place for this at all. Remember former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland who had sexual contact with a gay seminarian who later blackmailed him and was paid off. To say nothing of other men who could and should have been identified in the seminary as having sexual problems, who went on to commit abuses against children and adults. Vocation directors and seminaries are far more careful today.

I feel for the young people who experience same sex attraction. Most kids today have very poor formation in chastity and relationships, the heterosexual ones very much included, but there are a lot of self identified gay youth today and they suffer especially and often feel especially alienated from the Church, and sometimes their family. I've heard of some really sad and sometimes really criminal things done against homosexual people, including personal friends. The problem of suicides is heartbreaking. Jesus Christ died for love of them, to take away their sins, that they might be truly children of God!! May those in such a bad place in their life have graces of faith and hope, that they may choose life, and find kind good people to help them and love them. I've long dedicated my own celibate chastity in a particular way to homosexual Catholics, who I have remembered often in prayer. Although some, after a period of chastity and healing, feel able to marry (someone of the opposite sex), many will find that celibacy, well supported by prayer and Christian friendship, is the way of life that can be lifegiving and peaceful for them.

The day I finally blow my brains out over this ongoing torment of denying, blaming, diverting, demonizing victims, word games, and outright lying from the Catholic Church will be the day Donohue and all you complicit Catholics have more blood on your hands.

Then you can go on to destroy other lives with your sniveling "others do it, too" excuses while sick old men of the cloth continue to get their jollies with little boys.

ELIZDELPHI,

What the heck are you talking about? That no one should have sex?

Jesus, Joseph and Mary, of course priests who molest little boys are homosexual.

Doe that make the crime less heinous or the victims culpable?

Does that make all gays pedophiles or hebephiles or what ever words Catholics want to mince to divert the focus in their blind defense of these atrocities?

I wasn't a practicing homosexual at age 14 and never even thought about it much until a priest groomed and raped me. Then I had no doubt it existed and what it was. You Catholics are one sick religion if you believe 11 year old boys seduce priests.

What is wrong with you people? Are you so devoted to your church that you would destroy even more victims to protect its image? You make Di Vinci code and Angels and Demons sound less like fiction with every post.

SARATX2 - Your assertion in your first paragraph that "[h]omosexuality takes place only between two consenting adults" beggars belief! It is like saying that heterosexuality takes place only between two consenting adults, which, if true, would mean that by definition there is no such thing as heterosexual rape - a preposterous assertion! While homosexual acts can occur between consenting adults, they can also occur between consenting adults and minors (who by definition cannot give informed consent). The latter instances are properly referred to as homosexual rape because they involves homosexual acts. Neither Donahue, nor the Church make assertions about the sexuality of victims of abuse being a contributing factor in acts of abuse, and Donahue's argument that most instances of Church abuse involve homosexual predators has nothing to do with the sexual inclination of the victims of abuse.

Quite simple, PUBLIUS30

Real data is not out. The vast majority of cases have yet to be disclosed to; Boston Globe, John Jay ,... How are they to speculate and call it proof? They have little knowledge of the vast majority of victims. However, if you were engaged with victims, you would know the truth - over 60% are of pedophilia.

Call John Jay, they will tell you their data is grossly in error. After all, they were following the guidelines of the US Bishops who paid them.

Then again, how deceitful of the RCC; Pay Johyn jay, give them parameters, so that it looks as if it is an official report by some expert resource. Not what the report was meant for, John Jay will tell you.

Another fact, one bishop in NY protected a pedo and bragged how he had no pedos in his diocese. he denied a victim who is now 56 years old. Just two years ago, the priest he protected, sexually abused a little girl. Another bishop in upsate NY is a violent pedo, he is surrounded by pedos who acted as he did. A few are around children today. He gave John Jay a number of 15 priests of which only one was a pedo, without names of course. Victims in his diocese accuse him and almost 60 other priests.

You see, none of those are reported. NY state does not allow victims to come forward because the bishops lobby to stop laws that would enable them to come forward. Most don't trust the RCC, rightfully so, and will not go there.

Tell me know, how can all the statistics you claim by all those people and entities be true?

You people twist what ever data you can to mold it to your advantage.

Meanwhile, the truth has its hands tied behind its back because of the power and money of the RCC.

No one will find out the truth until cases are allowed to come forward. Any claim you or anyone else makes to the contrary mean zero.

These many priests are around children today and as long as the RCC owns the politicians, nothing changes - not even the truth exposed.

mrsm117,

Now you're misrepresenting the John Jay Report. The age group with the highest amount of abuse is 10-14 according to the John Jay Report. Homosexuality takes place only between two consenting adults. No boy between 10 and 14 is ever an adult consenting to sex. Only you and Donohue are willing to call a 10 year old boy a gay man. You religious people have some really rotten views of children. You're certainly in the right church.

Just for fun, could you provide the "information gathered from insurance companies"?

Lastly, your church is dying. Because the evil beliefs and practices that it has thrived on for 2,000 years are no longer being tolerated by modern man. By that I mean religious wars, hatred and fear of women, scorn and disdain for children, persecution complexes, homophobic men wearing dresses and petticoats, and last but not least, people eating flesh and drinking blood.

Jesus Christ had absolutely nothing to do with the Catholic Church.

The problem in the Catholic Church is not homo-sexual priests; the problem is repressed, self-loathing homo-sexual priests, who are weirdly maladjusted. They should not be around children, and they should not be counselling or advising adults on anything.

From the very top, down, this is the ultimate Catholic problem.

Cahtolic homophobia destroys lives and families, and often leads to suicide, often among teens.

I would certainly say Cardinal Bernard Law made terrible choices in managing priests of his diocese, which included some of the most awful of abusers. That is certainly an example of placing too much faith in the ability of therapy to "cure" pedophilia. He was right to resign!!! Whether he personally broke the law (for instance, a "mandatory reporter" law etc), I don't know offhand, I'm not aware that he did--if he did in fact then I readily agree he should face up to that. But, if his disastrous mistakes didn't actually break a law himself, then on what grounds do you want to throw him in jail? As to being given other duties in Rome, or being honored with the honors with which all Cardinals are normally honored, let him do all this with modesty and a real sorrow for the people in his diocese who were harmed and the harm that came to the Church. He remains a capable person who can serve and work in the Church. He's not in charge of a diocese now. Nobody has any illusions about how seriously things went wrong under his leadership of his diocese.

The US Church's effective response to witnessing and suffering these grave mistakes include not only apologies and prayer, and making deep sacrifices in order to pay huge fines and settlement costs, but the formalization of canonical penalties for child sexual abuse, "safe environment" programs enforced in most if not all US dioceses, and in the US and other places "Numerous bishops ... stating that there is now "zero tolerance" for priests who sexually abuse: they will be dealt with by civil and ecclesiastical law and will be removed from ministry." (http://www.usccb.org/comm/blanchette.shtml)

Petalafond -

The Stevens-Arroyo posting links to a response by Bill Donahue. In the response, Donahue cites the National Review Board, Robert Bennett, Paul McHugh, Roderick MacLeish, Jr., Michael Paulson, Richard Fitzgibbons, Leslie Lothstein, The Boston Globe, and the John Jay Study, as sources for his assertion that much if not most of the abusers were homosexual predators. You suggest that Donahue's contention is incorrect but provide only the skeleton of an argument (a couple of your points are interesting) to the contrary. Can you put flesh on your argument with real sourced data? Otherwise, are you not merely speculating?

Donahue does not seem to suggest that there are no pedophile priests or instances of pedophile abuse, nor does he excuse the Church's handling of the abuse problem - however one chooses to define that problem. He does seem to suggest, using hard data and primary and secondary sources, that, by far, most instances of reported sexual abuse involve homosexual predators and post-pubescent victims and you have not managed to close the door on that argument.

Lastly, do you not agree with my original argument that Stevens-Arroyo grossly distorted the argument made by Donahue and the Catholic League in the advertisement that Stephens-Arroyo cited, and do you not agree that Stevens-Arroyo (or anyone else given the On Faith podium) has an ethical obligation to engage in honest discussion and debate?

PUBLIUS30

Just wanted to make sure that people know the real facts, most were acts of pedophilia. To search out groupings and name them as post-pubescent as if the victim found it pleasurable is wrong - that is exactly what the RCC wants people to think. Most of the abuses were of pedophilia, that is fact.

The John Jay report came out before most victims came forward. And as we later find out, many were small girls too.

How is John Jay to know the facts when they went to the diocese for data and better yet, Donehue? They have no idea of the real classification of victims unless they involve in non-religious groups that help victims.

In those groups you will find the majority were victims of pedophilia. Another important note as I had mentioned much earlier below, had the church allowed alter girls and had parents allowed their daughters to be alone around priests, the lion share would have been girls by the same percentages as the rest of society.

Statistics only works when you don't shape it to some agenda and take all data into place. ie. When applying abuses, what % of males and females available. Then apply that to your abused.Likely you will find that a higher percent were girls. (not higher numbers, higher percent)

Just wanted people to know the truth. The bigger truth is that the vatican is responsible for the worst crimes of all, the cover ups. Because of these cover ups, many children victims later committed suicide and others mentally ill. Instead of the vatican writing documenting instructions for cover up and had they done what was good and compassionate - these children would have lived their potential instead of destruction. That is the issue that needs to be addressed, not all these other deflections, Donahue included.

Petelafond - I understand that Donahue contends that the Church has a homosexual problem. My point is that Stevens-Arroyo (S-A) abuses the trust of his readers by utterly mischaracterizing the nature of the argument that Donahue uses in making his point. It is S-A and not I who actively deflects inconvenient facts. If Donahue actually were to argue, as S-A erroneously contends that he does, that the fact that most instances of reported abuse involve males-on-males is proof of a homosexual problem, then we wouldn't need S-A to tell us that Donahue's argument is silly because the silliness would be self evident. Donahue argues (in simplified form) that most cases of reported abuse involve males-on-males, and most of the male-on-male cases involve post-pubescent boys. These facts do not diminish the horrible nature of the abuse or excuse the Church's slow response to the abuse - let me repeat that I do not accept these facts as excuses for the how the Church addressed reported abuse. These facts, taken together, however, point to the possibility of a problem of predatory homosexual behavior that is dramatically larger than the problem of pedophilia. Both problems must be addressed by the Church.

PUBLIUS30

What Donahue meant and still means is that it is a homosexual problem. He lies as most are post pubescent. Most were pre., get the fact right. There is only one line to draw, most were elementary students, how disgusting.

You missed the point. Looks you work hard at interpreting, the rest of us have heard Donahue enough times to catch his deflections and know what he is saying.

Children's lost lives, destroyed. That is the real issue. Your post was more deflection of pure rubbish.

BTW DANIELINTHELIONSDEN

When they claim catholic bashing they are referring to to victims, their families and those who care for the sanctity of human life. In fact it must be catholics and good people who bash catholics. They crucify the victims. Sure places the victims, families and those who care for the sanctity of human life in good company.

Stevens-Arroyo (S-A) massively distorts - I assume deliberately - the argument made by Donahue in the Catholic League advertisement. S-A provides the following quote from Donahue: "Eighty percent of the victims of priestly abuse are male" and then suggests that Donahue argues from this quote that "[t]he male-with-male character is sufficient to change pedophilia into homosexual relations." In fact, the full quotation from Donahue is as follows "Eighty percent of the victims of priestly abuse are male AND MOST OF THEM ARE POST PUBESCENT" (emphasis added). By failing to note that Donahue constructs his argument using both gender and sexual maturation as data points, and by deliberately suggesting that Donahue uses only gender as a data point, S-A abuses both his readers and his position as a contributor to On Faith. Regardless of whether the Post's readers agree or disagree with Donahue's arguments they deserve to have those arguments fairly represented and then debated in full rather than suffering through S-A's sophistic attack on straw man argument of his own devising. S-A owes Donahue and the readers of On Faith an apology for his sophistry.

DANIELINTHELIONSDEN

Ignore those who deflect. Healthy and reasonable thinking people don't blame gays, they blame pedos and mostly the RCC's cover ups, the worst crimes.

These are deflections to take people away from the real damage caused to small children by the cover ups. Had the church instead done what was good and compassionate, and helped the child instead of their own reputation first, as the pope too, the child would have likely lived to their potential. Instead, many children later committed suicide and others mentally ill due to the abuses.

Deflections distract others from the truth, making those who help by repeating them as evil. It's called selfish-salvation.

krasnit

What a big liar you are. You Catholic bigots wonder why there is so much Catholic-bashing in the world, when all you live for is to hunt down gay people and get rid of them by any means possible.

Being gay is a personality trait which has as one aspect, same sex attraction.

If you do not want gay priests, them subject ALL priests to investigation of their private lives, including, and especially, the Pope, and then kick them out, if there is a suspicion that they might be gay.

Adults having sex with children is not being gay. Straight people do that too.

Just blame all your problems on gay people and then everything will be solved.

If you hate gays, please do not justify it with God's blessing. It is some weird perversion inside of your own heart; and you should own up to and assert it, truthfully as your own persona prejudice.

The Catholic Church's witch hunt against gay people not only destroys individual lives, it destroys whole families. And it is even more hypocritical when it is plain and easy for anyone to see that the church is run by repressed, self-loathing gay men, going right up to the VERY TOP.

Stop the abuses. Stop the deflection.

Stop denying victims of lost lives.

What have the catholics done to help victims? Don't insult me with therapy. And if you do, MOST were denied if the crimes were too severe.

I'll tell you what catholics do. Their donations pay for lobbyists to stop laws that would expose the pedo, expose the cover ups and deny victims civil rights. Great job catholics, you just joined the cover up effort to destroy the victims of already destroyed lives.

You chose evil over over those who need help. You deny by not staying on the other side of the road ignoring those harmed, but actually walking over and pouring vinegar in their wounds.

You are shameful.

They all, including Bill, Like to refer to the John Jay study, in justifying that it is an homosexual problem, and there is no doubt that there were, and are, many homosexuals in the clergy (just look at those red shoes and all that lace)

What they don't tell you is that the John Jay researchers specifically say, that it is not a gay problem, it is an undeveloped sexuality.

They claim to be good Catholics, but they LIE to support there prejudice. They cherry pick the evidence.

Just look at Maciel. Not only did he abuse seminarians, he kept assorted wives and mistresses, and then sexually abused his children. And this was a "conservative" Catholic.

@Eliz:

2 words for you: Bernard Law.

The RCC gave him a promotion... he deserves jail.

That alone signals that the RCC aren't serious about this.

Weak, pompous defenders of the Church's history of clergy buggering boys and it criminal cover up try to distract us from the real issue which is mandatory requirements for reporting suspected abuse to civil authority.

It's more important for them that the Church not bow to civil law while turning their backs, once again, on past and future victims.

Crying "others do it, too" and blaming homosexuals and the victims is right out of Catholic Goebbels playbook.

Joeagnost wrote:
"But Eliz - what does your comment have to do with the current RCC crisis? ....How does valuing chastity fix the cover-up problem within the RCC?

I have to be honest, I see an extremely sincere and strong effort in the Church to deal with these situations in ever better ways. In a few cases there was a cover-up, or moving problem priests around from one place to another, foolish presumptions of "he's been cured by therapy", or a good deal of denial, in some cases this had horrifying results. I think there's increasingly less naivete' about how to deal with priests who do these things, and increasing awareness of how seriously the victims were harmed. It would disappoint me very much if the Church today anywhere in the world was "covering up" genuine instances of child molestation. Like I said, it seems like there's a sincere desire almost everywhere to deal with it honestly, with real concern for the victims and doing what can be done to prevent such crimes.

As to how valuing and diligently practicing chastity relates, most of all it relates to preventing people from ever being tempted to gloss over such things, and preventing such crimes from happening in the first place! I hope for that extremely much.

Petelafond wrote:
"Bye ELIZDELPHI, good people don't like those as you, you're evil."

I thank you Petelafond. It's true, God alone is good, and with all the rest of suffering humanity, I am a sinner in need of Mercy. My conviction of the good of chastity, is not, however, evil.

Ignore KRASNIT .

Using foolish deflections. The issue is cover ups of the rraapppes and ssssooodddomies of small helpless children. Everyone knows if they allowed alter girls, then the lions share would have been girls harmed. Most parents would NEVER allow a daughter to be alone with men. Your logic matches one of a pedo, everyone look up pedo characteristics. pedo is all about control over a victim, many hate children. pedos deny and lay blame.

Bye KRASNIT , good and mature thinking people don't like those as you, you're evil.

"Sexual orientation.... is about whom you seek to love."
What nonsense. It is not about love but about whom you have sex with. The Christian message is to Love your neighbour, but that does not mean having sex with your neighbour. Your idea of love is perverse.
Over 80% of the sex abuse here has been man-boy and only a fraction of priests are homosexual: that seems pretty conclusive and I do not need a Phd in science to figure that one out.
Control and sex are 2 very different things. You would not have the contol here if it were not for the sex. Being an authority figure is just an easy street for sex. Why not just admit that, inspired by ancient Greece, you are in favour of legalising man-boy love as are most homosexuals today.

Ignore MRSM117.

Using foolish deflections. The issue is cover ups of the rraapppes and ssssooodddomies of small helpless children.

Bye MRSM117, good and mature thinking people don't like those as you, you're evil.

But Eliz - what does your comment have to do with the current RCC crisis? The crisis is about the systematic and purposeful covering up of this abuse that has so many outraged at the RCC! You ignore this like it doesn't exist.

How does valuing chastity fix the cover-up problem within the RCC?

Up pops Donohue's inbred cousin TTWSYFAMDGGAHJMJ1

Until you and your Church uphold civil requirements to report abuse to civil authorities you just robed religious thugs.

Ignore ELIZDELPH.

Using foolish deflections. The issue is cover ups of the rraapppes and ssssooodddomies of small helpless children.

Bye ELIZDELPHI, good people don't like those as you, you're evil.

One thing we know for sure is that we usually caught pedos in our public schools and bus drivers, we've been hearing this on the news forever. The positive thing here is that teachers have always been heroes for blowing in pedos - who wouldn't. Then again priests were heroes for protecting the pedo. All reports, including the Hofsta one, refer to older high school children. In fact they include "you look nice in that dress, Mary" as a form of abuse, read the report. It was rare for a public school to allow violent acts of pedophilia do go unpunished, most were let go. Thanks to the teachers, many women who cared for children first.

Now we also never heard of goons coming down from the public district office to threaten the child, and family, that they would get kicked out of the school district if they told anyone. Then again, the RCC did. In fact excommunication was the threat. Image your grandparents feeling the effects of a threat as that, it's like being sent directly to hell.

Keep the issue focused and ignore their deflections. Tell your lawmakers that you want complete justice and exposure.

After Vatican II (starting before that really) the Church had, in many sectors, a crisis of devaluing chastity in general. Clergy and laity alike. For the clergy, it often seems to have been proposed that chastity, along with poverty and obedience no longer mattered like they "used to" and weren't important to effective apostolate (some, like the extreme liberal nun Joan Chittister, insisted that poverty chastity and obedience were no longer what is needed today, even in religious life--where these are the basic foundations!), and psychologists urged priests and sisters to let loose and "get in touch with their desires", not to mention the sexual depravity of the surrounding culture. For the Christian laity, the influence of the culture has been even harder to resist, and there's been widespread outright rejection of Catholic teaching on chastity, resulting in a majority of Catholics using birth control, a lot of fornication etc, many probably are even genuinely unaware today that masturbation is also a grave sin which also prevents a person from licitly receiving Communion. Meanwhile, few go to confession anymore! Granted, the religious instruction for the past 30-40 years has typically been so poor for Catholics that the lack of basic understanding of sexual morality or what good is it or why it matters, as well as of Catholic belief in general leaves a lot to healed, fortunately there is reason for hope that catechesis is getting better. Healing Catholics' understanding of chastity is not going to be a cure for all genuine mental sickness like that leading some people to do really horrible things like molest children. But, you know, it would help a lot, both by giving from the start a genuinely suitable human formation in how to think about sexuality, and strengthening the climate of valuing chastity which can increase the likelihood of people with real problem behavior to be corrected or removed from their position, before they do something heinous.

I invite Christians to value chastity as fundamental to rightly ordered and authentically loving relationships with other people and with God, as self-gift. I invite you to learn and educate your kids on the beauty and wisdom of chaste love. And to practice the Sacraments including a renewed participation in the Sacrament of Penance, and teach your family to do so too, because this is a great source of grace and strength.

Now add this, they now claim that therapist in the past didn't know these pedos would do it again. Wrong, there are many documents to the contrary with exception. The exception were therapist who were also priest, this is the group that twisted logic. Pedophilia, bank robbery or violence against individuals - most therapist would NEVER guarantee those that committed these crimes wouldn't do it again. The RCC may fool some, but not the rational thinkers. Ignore the blaming on therapists, you all know the truth now.

Think about this for a moment, of all crimes - wouldn't you do everything possible to make sure a pedo wouldn't strike again? A bank robber, well we would incarcerate to punish and prevent, not rely on therapy alone. A child rapists? Good folks just wouldn't take the chance. And wouldn't it have been caring for the child if responsible parents were alerted to watch their children and know who to trust?

Stop the deflections, don't repeat what they tell you.

In fact with all those documents to keep the secret and their constant "pretend" to care for children, then why wasn't there a document that stated; get the child immediate medical attention, tell the parents so they can protect their child and tell authorities to protect other children. There wasn't simply because this organization cared for their own reputation over the lives of small helpless children.

All you are hearing are their excuses to bail out of the worst crimes imaginable, please do not reduce yourselves to their level. Don't help them by repeating nonsense. It wasn't gays who raped and even if that were the case, by along stretch, it wasn't gays who committed the worst crimes of all - the Cover Ups.

And finally, the reason many never came forward until much later in life was due to the mental illness caused by the abuse. In fact the more violent the pedo, the much longer in life it takes to come forward - some 50 or 60 years. And you want to let this group off the hook?

Keep it simple, simply post "Stop your deflections. Small children were -rrr-appp-ed and -sssso-dddd-omized. Many children later committed suicide and others mentally ill due to the abuses. That is the issue and it starts and ends there." Ignore their denial of women priests, that was a mere deflection to cause controversy so to minimize the real crimes. They have lots of deflections to separate people into clusters to ultimately distract from the real issue at hand. Just repeat what is in quotes and stay focused.

Note: --- The writer and few posts are ignoring the larger crimes, not pedophilia, but the cover ups by the RCC to protect their reputation over the lives of children. Had these children received help, many would not have committed suicide and others not mentally ill due to the abuses. The cover ups were the worst crimes of all. We find documents by the vatican that demand the silence be kept for purposes of hiding. They now pretend to act as if the silence was to protect their investigation, wrong. It was to protect their reputation over the damaged small child. Folks with common sense will tell you they lie when they say that keeping the silence does not mean not reporting. Reporting alone denies the demand of silence, see now? Big joke, and the joke is on those that believe them over the children rrrrappppped and ssssssoddddomized. This organization committed, crime tactics, the worst offenses of all and now twisting words and meanings to find an escape root. Please do not stoop so low to believing them and helping them by repeating their foolish nonsense, you are only damaging the children victims again. Is that christian?

They claimed they cared of children, yet they did nothing to help the child. All the documents were of cover up content. Likewise, Ratzingers letter of 2001, was one of the worst obstruction to justice yet. Not only did he refer all bishops to early "secret" documents, but he also demanded all cases be "extinguished" until the child reaches adulthood plus 10 years. Why? Because statutes of limitations in the largest states as NY now protects the pedo, the cover ups and denies the victim's civil rights. How much more damage to victims can this church impose on victims? Yes, even more. They sway dishonest lawmakers with promises if they stop laws that would let us know who the pedos are and stop the child victim from getting justice again. Imagine that, they pay lobbyists to destroy victims again.

@mrsm117

You keep ignoring the REAL issue - how the RCC has covered up the abuse for decades!

The abuse is horrid - there is no question. The way the RCC chose to deal with the issue is the real crux of this issue. Call it a homosexuality problem, call it a celebit problem... it doesn't matter.

Until the RCC starts taking the issue seriously they will remain the enemy of rational, loving people. To start they could produce Bernard Law and have him face the authorities.... but it won't happen because I don't think they actually care. They only care about keeping power with the RCC.

WHO’S CRISES IS IT?

Listening to the Church muckrakers, one would think that the only place that pedophilia occurs is in the Catholic Church and by priests. On the contrary, Pedophilia and Pederasty is not a Catholic crisis; it is a Cultural Crisis in America. Because of this crisis, the Church has inherited a problem from it.

In “Lawrence v. Texas” the Court equated gay-sex with “conjugal love” in Marriage, notwithstanding laws proscribing landlords from denying gay-couples lustful habitation, plus gay hate crime legislation making their criticism suspect. States are being forced by courts to legalize Gay Marriage against the repeated "vox populi." Moreover, we have a President promoting gay-sex, Gay Marriage, and forcing the acceptance of gays in the Military.

In New York City alone, at least one child is sexually abused by a school employee every day. One study concluded that more than 60 percent of employees accused of sexual abuse in the New York City schools were transferred to desk jobs at district offices located inside the schools. Most of these teachers are tenured and 40 percent of those transferred are repeat offenders. They call it “passing the garbage” in the schools. One reason why this exists is due to efforts by the United Federation of Teachers to protect teachers at the expense of children. Another is the fact that teachers accused of sexual misconduct cannot be fired under New York State law

http://www.bishopaccountability.org/reports/2004_02_CatholicLeague_SexualAbuse.htm

“According to a survey by the Washington Post, over the last four decades, less than 1.5 percent of the estimated 60,000 or more men who have served in the Catholic clergy have been ACCUSED of child sexual abuse.[iv] According to a survey by the New York Times, 1.8 percent of all priests ordained from 1950 to 2001 have been accused of child sexual abuse.[v] Thomas Kane, author of Priests are People Too, estimates that between 1 and 1.5 percent of priests have had charges made against them.[vi] Of contemporary priests, the Associated Press found that approximately two-thirds of 1 percent of priests have charges pending against them.[vii] “

It seems Arroyo, as most Catholic detractors do, failed to mention the Church’s renowned charitable Dream Program, that has treated thousands of HIV and AIDS patients in Africa, or the multifaceted Catholic Charities who succor to the needs of all society. Nor is it mentioned of the scams being perpetrated against the Church with accusations some 30 to 50 years back against dead priest unable to defend themselves.

Mrsm117

What would Jesus do?

Blame it on the gays.

JeannieGuzman

I dont think the Peter Principle applies here, because, I could be wrong, but it is my understanding that Bill Donahue runs a one man operation out of his basement, and that he is basically a one man crusade, that does not really operate for or on behalf of, or at the employ of the Catholic Church.

Why they don't shut him down, I dont know. Church silence on his statements are more or less and endorsement of them, I suppose.

@Are You Saying - You are a very, very angry individual when you say to me, "Are you defending Donohue and saying that you are a lame, closed-minded apologists for your Church's vile crimes against children?"

I don't consider myself lame or close-minded because I totally support the teachings of the Catholic Church This is definitely a crisis of homosexual activity. The statistics bear that out despite your denial. And just for the record the church is not "my church". The church belongs to Christ.

All your questions directed to me merely point out just how desperate you are when you know quite well I never said any of the things you accuse me of. I am not daunted by your attacks because I know where the truth is and Who is the Truth!

Some of you have said the Catholic Catholic is homophobic but are you really aware of the Church's position on homosexuals? I think not. Check the Catechism and you will see the Church does not hate homosexuals and the church is not afraid of homosexuals that; is what you meant isn't it? :-)when you accuse Dononue and the Church of being "homophobic". What the Church does say is that homosexual acitvity is immoral. This is not some idea conceived by the Catholic Church. This is God's law!!! The Catholic Church is merely upholding God's commands. If any of you have a problem with that then I suggest that you take it up with God and stop spewing your collective hatred because the Catholic Church does change to your view of Christianity. Many people are leaving the Episcopal Church because of their ordination of an openly gay Bishop. They realize that is not authentic Christianity!

If you don't like the Catholic Church then go somewhere and form your own skewed version of Christianity and stop this obessive need to change it. The Catholic Church is not changing, ever, for any of you who hate her. Thank God! She answers to Christ and not to me and to any of you!

To me, Bill Donohue aptly illustrates the premise of Dr. Peter Hull's Book, "The Peter Principle." The main premise of the book is based on this thought: In any Hierarchy, people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. It doesn't make any difference if it is in government, the military, the private sector or the Church, people naturally rise to the level of their incompetence, where they prove themselves to be so incompetent that they are no longer promotable. Lucky for every Catholic alive that Bill is not ordained into the Catholic Priesthood, because we can all rest assured that he'll never be voted in as Pope in the next conclave! He has risen to the level of his incompetence and he's doing an excellent job!

So, if the Catholic Church would do a better job of screening out Homosexuals from the priestly order, then the number of sexual abuse cases would drop dramatically.

Sounds like a good plan to me! Keep the homos and perverts out, keep more children safe!

Priests having sex with males is homosexual activity any way you look at this.
Going to post this????

Posted by: mrsm117 | July 22, 2010 9:56 AM

And what is your point other than stating the obvious? It is that defining felony sexual child abuse as "homosexual activity"
makes it less heinous?

What is your point?

My full comment was never published - especially my challenge to Mr. Stevens-Arroyo regarding his statistics and the statistics by the John Jay College of Criminial Justice. Why post only part of my comments. 80% of the abuse was with males betweeen the ages of 11-17. Priests having sex with males is homosexual activity any way you look at this.
Going to post this????

The leadership of the Roman Catholic Church has been negligent in observing the Church's own laws on sexual abuse probably since the fourth century and it is now well known just how remiss they have been over the last fifty to a hundred years.

There has been no documentation of the horrific abuse of power and authority in regard to the frequency of sexual abuse in any other religious denomination or group that is worse than that in the Catholic Church.

Crimes have been committed. The crime is the sexual abuse of children no matter who the predators are.

These crimes are about power and control. More males were abused because of access when speaking of children.

The sexual abuse of adult women, other vulnerable adults including nuns and sisters all over the globe is another issue that needs attention.

Cardinals will no longer claim this to be an American problem as it is clearly obvious that the problem is pandemic is scope.

More lives have been ruined and lost than will ever be known. The blame for that belongs squarely on the bishops and others in leadership who enabled it and covered up for it. Yet none have been prosecuted for their facilitation of such crimes.

Read the 2005 Philadelphia Grand Jury Report. The reason none were prosecuted was because the statute of limitation had run.

The church has not observed its own Canon Law regarding the sexual abuse of children since about the fourth century. Should anyone trust them to do so now? I would not recommend it.

Bishops and Catholic Conferences are viciously opposing statute of limitation reform in every state where it has been proposed.

Bishops continue to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy to avoid telling the truth about diocesan complicity in enabling such abuse over years. Bishop Malooly and the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware is a case in point.

It is society's responsibility to protect the common good and bringing states' criminal and civil laws into the 20th century is the way to do it.
__________

HOLDING CLERGY AND CHURCH LEADERS ACCOUNTABLE BEFORE THE LAW

Professor Marci Hamilton and Sister Maureen Paul Turlish on NPR's Radio Times on WHYY in Philadelphia, April 12, 2010

http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2010/04/12/holding-clergy-and-church-leaders-legally-accountable-for-child-abuse/

Sister Maureen Paul Turlish
Victims' Advocate
New Castle, Delaware
maureenpaulturlish@yahoo.com
____________________

SUPPORT THE REMOVAL OF ALL STATES' SOLs IN REGARD TO THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN AND INCLUDE WINDOW LEGISLATION FOR PAST OFFENSES.

It really doesn't matter what you call it. It doesn't matter that other people/organizations have had this problem. It doesn't matter what you personally think of the RCC.

The only thing that matters is that the RCC has (for decades or longer) systematically and purposely covered up the abuse and ensured that it would continue. They made every attempt to cover it up, and continued this practice well into this millenium (has it ~really~ stopped?).

Now that the world is outraged the RCC is doing it's best to ~appear~ to be taking the problem seriously - but choosing to retain Bernard Law (and giving him a nice promotion to Rome) just underscores how out of touch the RCC is about this whole issue. Bernard Law should be in jail - not in Rome working for the Vatican.

Whatever name you choose to assign this abuse (I choose pedophelia myself) is irrelevant. The problem is DIRECTLY tied to ~how~ the RCC "handled" this problem - and the lack of justice speaks volumes.

And if the Church had not been ill-advised by liberal shrinks as to the ability to cure these "pedophiles" through therapy, then it would have never been in such a mess.

Yeah, it's all about "Justice denied by the worst criminals of all - those who help deflect from the truth and do not demand justice for these victims of lost lives. "

Kind of like the AIDS crisis.

Why people still refer to the John Jay report daunts me. This was a report commissioned (paid for) by US bishops. They were only following the rules. Most data was gotten from the diocese, which by the way most cases were not reported to the diocese since it is a well known fact they continue to cover it up. Even today, most victims will not come forward, the embarrassment. In fact John Jay will tell your their data of child molesters is well underreported - there are many more child molesting priests (in some diocese of 20%).

These were predominately elementary school children. Had alter girls been allowed and had parents, at least most parents knew better to allow their daughters to be with men, then expect the volumes of girls to well outnumber males. Pedophilia is a crime of control. In fact pedos are still active in their 70's and 80's, fact. Another fact is that in states as NY, senators protect the pedos because they are catholic. Catholic votes count during elections, get it?

In some states, pedophilia is defined as it should be - under the age of 17. The true definition of pedophilia is crimes against a child who has not fully developed sexually, physically and mentally.

Then again, the RCC has their zombies who care less of the victim, those on selfish-salvation trips, and repeat deflections told them. We need to forget gays as the problem, that women can't be priests (RCC likes to create deflections that are controversies), everyone else did it (now how childish is that), and so forth. The RCC loves these because it denies the real truth.

What is the real truth? Many victims committed suicide and others permanently mentally ill due to the abuse and the church lobbies to stop laws that would expose the pedos, expose the cover ups and deny victims civil rights. These are the truths, period.

Why did victims take so long? Just as we have learned about the 29 year old woman Jaycee, abducted at age 11, she could have escaped or asked for help - yet she didn't. Why? It was not the physical captivity, but a mental one. And we have seen this over and over again. The same with other acts of pedophilia. Pedophilia, severe trauma, causes a physical change in the childs brain development. Some say, if not found, Jaycee may have been 50 or 60 before coming forward.

Now imagine the fears of a child, never able to concentrate again, who sees men dressed in black each day in schools and churches. What effect do you think this might have? Now imagine the child repeatedly threated from telling anyone. The child knows they mean business.

Justice denied by the worst criminals of all - those who help deflect from the truth and do not demand justice for these victims of lost lives. Just like the pedos helpers,

This writer is disingenuous by ignoring Homosexuality in the Priesthood. In Miami 11 out of 12 Churches have Gay Pastors--today.
Our seminaries were polluted with Homos. Witness the book “Goodbye (Heterosexual priestly candidates) Goodmen” by Michael Rose.

Last year a Gay Cardinal in charge of all things Priestly formation was caught by the Italian press soliciting homo sex.

The ignorance lies in our congregations not knowing that the infiltration of Gay priest led to sexual abuse and liturgical abuse. It is no mistake that the Tabernacles are hidden all over our churches. Look no further than the Gay Pastors (closeted) that moved a foundation of our faith out of sight.

"His opinion is contradicted by numerous court documents, statements of the U.S. Bishops, the Vatican, and Pope Benedict XVI, each of whom have condemned the pattern of covered-up case of clerical pedophilia."

Anthony: The problem is your lead in statement is erroneous.

The report by Bishops not long after exposure in 2002 was that 80% of sexual abuse of our kids [not Protestants, 0r Jews kids their problem is 100 times greater in public/synagogue than ours which they choose to ignore) were of a homosexual nature on post puberty kids.

The argument over what to call this horrible crime is ridiculous. Let's get both sides to agree on calling it child rape, because that it EXACTLY what it is.

Christ is the head of the Church, meaning it will endure...despite all of our human short-fallings. We can work past this scandal and tragedy (which the Church has actually taken immense steps to do since 2002). In the past year, there have been no more than 6 abuse cases. This is still inexcusable, but nevertheless a strong testimony to the progress we are making in a community of 6 billion people.

Areyousaying I think you are the only closed-minded person in this discussion b/c what you try to do is manipulate everything we say, and taking the small pieces of things we say into what you want us to mean. If you are going to refuse to listen to reason, what's the point in engaging in honest constructive discussion?

Why are pederast homosexuals in denial? there are plenty of sick heterosexuals that abuse girls in their early teens. Sick sexual attraction exists in both homosexuals and heterosexuals.

it is holy because Christ is the head of the Catholic Church. It belongs to Him. He established it more than 2,000 years and promised to be with her until the end of time.

Posted by: mrsm117

And this is what Christ had in mind?

A time honored tradition of the old men of his clergy helping themselves to the bodies of little boys?

If so, I don't like your version of "Christ" very much. In fact, if I were him, I would change my last name because of you.

Posted by: mrsm117

Just for the record, Pedophilia is the definition for sex with pre pubescent children; post pubescent minors are identified as epheophiles.

If 81% of the victims were male between the ages of 11-17 I don't know what else you could possibly call this except homosexual activity.

---------------------------

Oh, really? Are you saying that makes it all better because they're hebephiles instead of pedophiles?

Are you saying the "homosexual activity" of the male victims between the ages of 11-17 was voluntary and their idea? Are you saying 11-year old boys seduced priests?

Are you saying the all victims were complicit?

Are you defending Donohue and saying that you are a lame, closed-minded apologists for your Church's vile crimes against children?

VOTE: Remoove The "Sovereign Nationa STATE" status Of the Vatican via U.N. et al. Also Remove All "TAX EXEMPT" Status's From The R.C.C. in U.S.A. Forever. NO Excuse! etc..

There is; The BUDDHISTs Churches, Monastery, Have little [Reported/Complaints] or Unknown Pedophilia incidents therein; likewise:

There is; The HINDU Churches, Ashrams, Not Manu Child Rape Cases,

There is; The JEWISH Churches Yeshiva, Not Many Child Rape Cases

Ther is; The iShlami Churches Madrasas, Not Many Child Rape Cases,

There is; The CHRiSTIAN Churches (none Cathoholics) Sunday Schools, (Some Child Rape cases & infidelity, not many : B

There is the Greek/Russia Orthodox Churches, Schools, Not many Complaints. BUT

but There is; The Roman-CATHOLIC Churches Parochial Schools System/INSTiTUTION and they Have Too Too Many VICTIMS, all around The World;

REVEALation: The Fact That the Roman Catholic Church/Parochial Biz folk committed such "MASS PEDOPHILIA CHILD RAPES" or Atrocities entitles the Roman catholic Church gets/wins The

GUINNESS-BOOK Of Church-Based Pedophilia & CHILD RAPES" cases on Earth & History.! Note: HISTORY is OUR "JURY" (Judge & Witness). Soo, NO, Nada, Excuse.

It is Tantamount To Hitlers Mass Murders. Raping 1 or 2 victims is understanding but mass Raping 10's Of Thousands????

WHEREFORE: The R.C.C. Is "Guilty As SIN"!& Curse, of Mass-Systematic Child Abuse. NO Exceptions nor Excuses plkeazzaaa.

A {RCC] perpetrated Child Abuse HOlocaust, aye.

Talking Blue in the face or cunningly Using Nice Sounding Names to Abusing the TRUTH (opposite Myth) of the Case via Church Leaders & their "WORD MERCHANTS" is not Going To Heal Anything. TODAY or Next 10,000 Years!

Glossing over the overwhelmingly homosexual nature of these crimes is the most despicable political correctness and an outright lie. Shame on the author.

Mr. Stevens-Arroyo - You have conveniently skewed the data provided by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. 80.9% of the victims were male; the majority of the victims (77.4%) were between the ages of 11-17 so it is misleading to just state the majority of the abuse began before the age of 14.

Just for the record, Pedophilia is the definition for sex with pre pubescent children; post pubescent minors are identified as epheophiles.

If 81% of the victims were male between the ages of 11-17 I don't know what else you could possibly call this except homosexual activity.

Furthermore, abuse occurs in all walks of life within the secular world with females being the vast majority of victims.

The Protestant Church has a somewhat highter rate of abuse than the Catholic Church. These statistics come from information gathered from insurance companies.

Other religions have also not been immune to abuse allegation such as the Orthodox Jewish community.

I'll leave all of you with this one thought. Despite the absolutely vicious attacks against the Church because many don't like the moral postions of the Catholic Church, she will go on. The Catholic Church is not holy because of its members who sin like every human being does, it is holy because Christ is the head of the Catholic Church. It belongs to Him. He established it more than 2,000 years and promised to be with her until the end of time.

The proper name for the majority of priests that abused children is "pederast"
Every pederast I know is sexually attracted to pubescent boys. Why the denial of the homosexuality of it?

Donohue has been like this for decades. He is a racist, a homophobe, and has drunk the Kool Aid right from Rome. He is all that is sick and twisted from this Church. He defends rapists and defends the priests and bishops who defend rapists.

He would have fit right in with the Nazis as they burned Jews alive, burned homosexual people alive, and tortured people. He would have justified their behavior. He is a very sick man and it is a crime that people actually listen to him.

When they're this adamant about their anti-gay feelings, I always wonder who the man is that they're sleeping with.

So what motivated the old hate bag Donohue to rip the scabs off these old wound just when the controversy surrounding Ratzinger was calming?

Fame?

Attention?

Stupidity?

Rome's bidding?

The long term effects of alcohol?

Why would he do it?

Bill Donahue's slogan should be:

"If there's anything I can't stand, it's weird people."

I am not Catholic, but I want Priests to marry and I want woman to be ordained.

Why?

Because, I am Methodist, and we are taught since birth to but-in to other people's problems.

So if Catholics tell me to "but-out" I am not going to.

Congratulations, Catholics, you have your very own Fred Phelps.

It is of no importance or significance to me whether priests are allowed to be married or not married nor whether women are allowed to be priests.

That is the your and your Church's business.

What is my business is your Church's habitual and universal contempt for civil law in regard to felony sexual abuse of young boys and criminal racketeering in covering it up.

Bill Donahue is a sick, sick man. His slavish devotion to a religious corporation has twisted his mind so that he is incapable of seeing a reality that is staring him in the face.

We could feel sorry for him if he wasn't actively aiding and abetting child abuse with his delusions. But he is. Like any other addict in denial, he needs to face the consequences of his actions and learn to see what his addiction has done to his mind.

If you actually read my comment, what I said was it is still INEXCUSABLE. But we can't point to priestly celibacy as the culprit. What the statistics from newsweek support is that the MAJORITY of sexual abuse comes from families and MARRIED people.

The priests who committed these acts did not fail as priests, but as human beings. Are you saying that sexual abuse is wrong b/c they are priests? Or is it wrong in whatever context?

What I'm trying to tell you is that having married priests or women priests wouldn't solve the problems of the human heart, seeing as the majority of the people who commit these crimes are married and are women.

Check the facts. I'm not saying what the Church did was OK. I'm simply saying the culprit isn't celibacy.

fr sajanas:

>...The RCC still keeps Cardinal Law on staff in the Vatican, after he spent years covering up the crisis...

Let's not forget roger mahoney, who for years KNOWINGLY shifted pedophiles from one parish to another and didn't bother to tell the new parish about Father X's "little problem". mahoney should be arrested on pedophile charges, tried, convicted and imprisoned for life for it. He deserves NO retirement pay, NO benefits, as they should be directed to his victims, the children.

Donohue calls abuse victims "gold diggers"

http://www.google.com.mx/search?q=Donohue+calls+abuse+victims+gold+diggers&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=H9c&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=v&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=-yRHTOK9LYKingeVn6X1Aw&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBwQqwQwAA

Donohue links homosexuality to pedophilia:

http://www.google.com.mx/search?q=Donohue+on+homosexuality&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=Kqx&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=v&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=ZyVHTMqWB4SlnQely4zNBA&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCMQqwQwAw

Donohue denies Catholic child abuse"

http://www.google.com.mx/search?q=donohue+denies+Catholic+child+abuse&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=Srx&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=v&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=rSVHTOS_H4OBnQfjtqSJBA&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CCcQqwQwAw

If "On Faith" allows Donohue to stereotype all gays as pedophiles, would they let me stereotype him as a big red nosed, red faced, ranting, out of control, Irish Catholic drunk?

I don't think so.

Before you over-criticize, look at the facts. The Catholic Church isn't even one of the leading perpetrators of sexual abuse.

"... be careful because the Catholic Church isn't the enemy here.
Posted by: toleck
-------------------------------

"..others do it, too"

"..others do it, too"

"...nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah!"

"..it's OK for Christ's Church 'cause others do, it, too.

Except "others" don't claim to be "Brothers of Christ" and have an international criminal racketeering organization behind them to protect them.

The Catholic Church is the enemy against past and future victims as long as it allows this to continue, covers it up and allows the President of the Catholic League
to rub salt into victims wounds by denying this is going on, demonizing the victims, and stereotyping all gays as pedophiles.

HAVE YOU CATHOLICS NO SHAME?

Bill Donahue has a rude awakening coming, along with those he defends and shills for. The Vatican and its global empire are about to come crashing to earth because they have much more to hide and fear than the currently unfolding scandals and debacles. Certain ancient lies have way of coming back to haunt those who have gained so much wealth and power because of them.

Finishing the Mysteries of Gods and Symbols
http://www.sevenstarhand.org/

There are far bigger lies than those told about why they methodically rape children and then conspire, as an international cabal, to hide and protect the perpetrators. Remember the saying, "The truth will set you free." Only the truth about certain ancient deceptions can prevent lies about God from being used to prey upon children (and others) and afterwards cow legal authorities from impartially performing their duties. Justice requires the truth...

My first "male-with-male" experience was when I was 14 and the other male was a "kindly priest" who befriended, groomed and brutally raped me.

http://sexual-abuse.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_pedophiles_groom_victims

Even though I never asked for one filthy semen and blood stained dime from Donohue's "holy church", he still demonizes us victims and calls us "gold diggers.

May this son of Satan be reincarnated as a lonely, awkward and vulnerable 14 year old boy who is befriended, groomed and raped by one of his "Brothers of Christ" while church authorities look the other way and transfer Christ's monster brother to another parish to abuse again.

Donohue is a vile representation of Catholics. Like Baptists who fail to denounce Fred Phelps even though he uses their name in his church, few Catholics do nothing to denounce Donohues hatred and stupidity. In fact, there are many who high five him like my Muslim co-workers did on 9/11.

As long as this Church claims to be above civil law and its penalties for felony child abuse and felon racketeering by covering it up, it is indeed the business of the rest of us and we will not be silenced or go away no matter how many prayers to Mother Mary.

WMARKW-And what are the obvious solutions?

The Anglican Church has women and married priests and few such problems.

WMARKW-And what are the obvious solutions?

ElizDelphi thank you for your comment. Great insight and I'd have to agree with you :).

Donohue is part of the problem. They deflect the responsibility of the church to report these crimes by trying to make it about the media, gays, women, etc. That other people abuse children is not something people aren't aware of. However, other organizations do not cover up, hide, and ignore these problems, or if they do, the people that do the cover up are reviled and fired.
The RCC still keeps Cardinal Law on staff in the Vatican, after he spent years covering up the crisis. They talk about doing penance while hiring lawyers to defend themselves against judgments in court. They are not interested in protecting anything but themselves, and people like Donohue are a big part of that, by providing Catholics with excuses instead of actions.

In some ways there is no pedophilia crisis in the Church- there was a pedophilia crisis. We are dealing with the aftermath. Perhaps we can now turn our attention to the very real pedophilia crisis in our families and schools.

I think almost anyone acknowledges that pedophilia is a disorder distinct from homosexuality. However, certainly adult males abusing boys can also be characterized as homosexual, because it is in fact contact between two people of the same sex. If an adult man rapes an adult man, likewise that is homosexual rape. And people engaged in either pedophilia or adult homosexual behavior are clearly not practicing chastity. Although chastity is a virtue for everyone, priests in particular are very obliged to it. One should be concerned for, and quite possibly about, any priest obliged to celibacy, who engages in any form of sexual activity. Someone who is faithful to regular silent prayer, regular sacramental Confession and Eucharist, is guarding their chastity by not sexually pleasuring themself, keeping "custody of the eyes" in not looking at anyone with lust and certainly not pornography, and diligently guarding their thoughts against even the first inclinations toward sin, as all Christians are obliged to, is not going to consent with the will to do something heinous like molesting little boys. Someone who does something like that was already failing severely at the more basic practices of chastity. And in my opinion someone who has chronic serious problems with those more basic practices probably should not be in active priestly ministry.

Finally, the evidence does actually suggest that the psychosexual damage caused to a boy by molestation as a child not infrequently leads to homosexual desires as an adult. I have repeatedly seen self identified gay men acknowledge this and/or point to it as a factor in their own experience. It surprised me, because I had previously been convinced "they're just born with that inclination". Although it still seems possible to me that some people are a little more predisposed to it, I am not so sure anymore that it's normally inborn. It's also widely acknowledged that those who were molested as children, have a higher likelihood of later molesting others. Clearly not all same sex attracted men are child molestors--nor for that matter do all of them engage in unchaste behavior with other men. I have the greatest respect and reverence for those who experience strong and unwanted homosexual desires and who act with self control! Or for that matter those who have wrong desires in regards to the opposite sex, and who act with self control. Fighting these kinds of battles with diligence and authentic love of God and of neighbor, has far more value than most people imagine.

As a Catholic, I am continually being embarrased by william Donohue's complete idiocy. He does not speak for Catholics!!! He is a far-right, homophobic nut, and I wish people would stop giving him air time.

The Catholic Church has a repressed-horny-guys problem. And it rejects the obvious solutions.

Before you over-criticize, look at the facts. The Catholic Church isn't even one of the leading perpetrators of sexual abuse. In an article last April in Newsweek, these statistics were released:

-40-60% of Abuse takes place within families
-There was a married pediatrician in Delaware who was guilty of 471 counts of sexual abuse
-There were 290,000 cases in American public schools between 1991 and 200
-A significant amount of abuse cases in the past 20 years have come from MARRIED clergy in other denominations.

It is inexcusable that priests would abuse their privileges, but be careful because the Catholic Church isn't the enemy here. Check out my full opinion in the June 27th post on my blog:

http://tonyoleck.blogspot.com/

Other than the RCC's unnatural vows of human nature , the RCC administration has done and still is by silence the full truth of the sexual crimes agaist children by their cover up crimes of the past are still damagening the RCC. The administrators that at any time covered a sexual crime agaist a child MUST resign as a RCC administrator.

Hail Mary, full of grace, let's blame it all on the gays ... yada ... yada ... yada

Newsflash: Bill Donohue's a jerk! Who knew?