The Sex Crisis Post-McCarrick.

The Holy Father has summoned the bishops for  conference on the homosexual priest crisis in Rome, Feb. 21-24. Elizabeth Dias of the Times has used the occasion to relate half-truths concerning the crisis brought about by the

Mr. McCarrick

unchastity of many, not all priests with homosexual orientations in the Body of Christ.  No doubt the idea that the homosexual sexual orientationis behind the abuse crisis will be of paramount importance in the discussions. Anyone wishing to fully understand the nature of the current crisis facing the Church brought about by not "gett(ing) it right sexually." (to paraphrase one priest interviewed in Dias' article), will be led further from the truth of things after reading the Times exposeˊ.

In his work, Goodbye, Good Men, author Michael Rose documents the abuses that took place in American seminaries and diocesan vocation offices not long after the Second Vatican Council ended. Mr.  Rose did not set out to explain the crisis of sexual misconduct among Catholic priests. Rather, his book is an exposé of a more profound spiritual problem, one I wrote about in the book around which this blog is centered. Rose reveals telling picture of Catholic seminaries to 1990, wherein homosexual promiscuity was rampant and even encouraged, where dissident authors and heterodox textbooks were required reading, and where seminarians faithful to the Church’s teachings were persecuted. 

Rose for understandable reasons uses anonymous sourcesthroughout his book, and so  likely could not have anticipated the interrogation his book would receive post-2002. Nevertheless, reliable sources including Fr. Peter Stravinskas, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, professor Ralph McInerny, and many, many others believe that Goodbye, Good Men presents an accurate picture of the debased condition of American seminaries after the Council. 

The thesis of Goodbye, Good Men is that the shortage of vocations to the priesthood in America is artificial and contrived. He writes, “the priest shortage is caused ultimately not by a lack of vocations, but by attitudes and policies that deliberately and effectively thwart true priestly vocations.” The rest of the work studies these phenomna. Among the more relevant findings for puroposes of understanding the present situation in the Church:

• In his third chaper Rose discusses he screening process often used at diocesan vocation offices to “weed out applicants that are perceived as ‘Old Church, ’ i.e., "pre-Vatican II." 
• Chapter four documents in detail how a homosexual subculture  was in evidence in many American seminaries. In this chapter a shameless homosexual seminary underworld is revealed, an underworld that Andrew Greeley dubbed the “Lavender Mafia.” (The sexual and emotional abuse chronicled in this chapter is demonic). 
  
• The tenth chapter examines how the corruption in American seminaries went undetected. 
• Chapter eleven explains the cause of these problems as a desire for the termination of the male, celibate priesthood on the part of seminary administrations and diocesan vocation directors.

Ms. Dias' contends that "Studies repeatedly find there to be no connection between being gay and abusing children." This is sophistry, as the problem is not pedophilia, defined b y the DSM-V as a "diagnosis assigned to adults (defined as age 16 and up) who have sexual desire for prepubescent children (American Psychiatric Association, 2013a-emphasis mine). Ms. Dias has not done her homework here. In response to the scandal over sexual misconduct with persons under age eighteen by members of the Catholic clergy, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to conduct a comprehensive study of the problem. The study The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950–2002, was released in 2004.1 This was followed by Supplementary Data Analysis released in 20062 and the Report on the Causes and Context study in May 2011.3 The data in the reports strongly suggests that homosexual abuse of adolescent males is at the heart of the crisis. Furthurmore, a number of well-designed studies have found that men with the homosexual orientation are more likely to have psychiatric and substance abuse disorders and STDs than heterosexual males, and are more likely to have a positive attitude to sexual relations between adult and adolescent males. In short, most abuse incidents consist of homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men, not children, as is oft reported in the secular media. One bishop hits the nail on the head:

There has been a great deal of effort to keep separate acts which fall under the category of now-culturally-acceptable acts of homosexuality from the publically-deplorable acts of pedophilia. That is to say, until recently the problems of the Church have been painted purely as problems of pedophilia — this despite clear evidence to the contrary. It is time to be honest that the problems are both and they are more. To fall into the trap of parsing problems according to what society might find acceptable or unacceptable is ignoring the fact that the Church has never held ANY of it to be acceptable — neither the abuse of children, nor any use of one’s sexuality outside of the marital relationship, nor the sin of sodomy, nor the entering of clerics into intimate sexual relationships at all, nor the abuse and coercion by those with authority.

To "get it right on sexuality, the Church needs only follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and His Church on the moral use of the Father's gift of sex, (the call to chstity) which requires metanoia, and that one be in right relationship with Him. It is that Simple.  Strive to enter through the narrow gate. Oremus.