Friday, April 16, 2010

“Now We Don’t Ask Because Some Seminaries Will Reject Them For Being G@y.”

“While h@mosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, and most g@y priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been g@y.” Critics suggest that such remarks say more about the Church’s history and the Vatican’s attempt to distance itself from the current crisis. “The truth is that Bertone is clumsily trying to shift attention to h@mosexuality and away from the focus on new crimes against children that emerge every day,” said Aurelio Mancuso, former president of an Italian g@y rights group, in response to the Vatican official’s statement. 
Thomas Plante, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in California, said the concern about gay priests likely starts with the Church’s basic view of h@mosexuality. “The Catholic Church sees h@mosexuality differently than the mental health community,” he said. “It’s not a disorder and we’re pretty adamant about that.” 
The Church describes homosexuals as “objectively disordered,” though it states h@mosexuals “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity.” It also calls on h@mosexuals to live a life of chastity. Prof. Plante also noted a 2005 Vatican instruction that discouraged the ordination of men with “deep-seated h@mosexual tendencies.” The instruction said those tendencies “gravely hinder [h@mosexuals] from relating to men and women.” 
Prof. Plante helps the Catholic Church screen candidates for the priesthood and has interviewed more than 600 men over the past 20 years as well as dealing with abusive priests. “Before 2005 I would ask candidates their orientation to make sure they had a healthy psycho-s@xual development, to see if they were mature enough,” Prof. Plante said. “Now we don’t ask because some seminaries will reject them for being g@y.” 
He said there is no scientific proof that homosexuals have more trouble remaining celibate than heterosexuals. And the one aspect he agreed with Cardinal Bertone is that there is no link between celibacy and pedophilia. “Just because someone is celibate doesn’t make little kids appealing,” Prof. Plante said. “I’ve talked to a lot these abusers and it comes down to who they have contact with and whose trust they can gain. It’s not a g@y problem and if you get the g@ys out this situation the problem won’t go away.”

Link (here) to the full blog article at Holy Post

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why, Fromm@ge' do you use @n '@mpers@nd' when you spell the word 'g@y'? Is it bec@use you cannot be@r to use it?

Joseph Fromm said...

I love it! No, your implications are "tres absurd!". I use them because I do not want search engines to label this blog as P@rn@graphic.

Sussex Catholic said...

It is important to echo what Fr.Lombardi SJ said in the official Vatican statement in response to Cardinal Bertone's comments. The Church makes no claim to particular scientific or psychological insights and makes no judgments from that perspective. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes homosexual acts as "objectively disordered" and does this as a moral judgment not a scientific one. The reason why The Vatican Instruction forbids men of "deep seated homosexual inclinations" from the priesthood is not necessarily because they will find celibacy more difficult than a man with heterosexual inclinations. Rather it is because the Vatican has decided that such men lack the "affective maturity" to renounce physical fatherhood and offer themselves instead to spiritual fatherhood. In that sense what the Vatican is saying, whether one chooses to agree with it or not, is that such men are not making an offering of the same thing which heterosexual men are in choosing celibacy, and that because this is not an offering of fatherhood it is not appropriate to the priesthood.

On the specific issue of whether homosexuality is considered a psycho-sexual disorder, it used to be according to the American Psycholgical Assocation's official literature but was removed on a vote of the members after political pressure in the 1970's.

Anonymous said...

Why is a man like this, with a mind obviously at variance with Catholic faith and doctrine, entrusted with screening candidates for seminary formation?

Anonymous said...

It is kind of like Jesuit hara-kari, this guy with a poorly formed catholic understanding is inflicting bad vocations on the Society. It explains the why the Society is declining in numbers.

Pete in San Fran

Anonymous said...

Having met Dr. Frauncis and his psychiatrist neighbor Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, Andrew and Anthony joined an informal network - small but rapidly growing - of priests and seminarians who say they have been subjected to a Church-run psychiatric gulag, usually operated by theological liberals, often by men who are openly and actively homosexuals.

Some of these men were sent to treatment facilities by their ecclesiastical superiors for evaluation of such "conditions" as doctrinal "rigidity," "compulsive" praying, and "homophobia," and returned with a diagnosis that they were "unfit for ministry." Others went willingly, hoping for help in their struggles against homosexual temptations, only to be told that their orientation is genetically determined, and that they should learn to be comfortable with themselves and discreet in their sexual practices. Some were sent away because of more serious problems (such as sexual offenses, alcoholism, or clinical depression), kept in treatment centers for a year or more, and denied effective treatment; evidently their bishops already decided that they should not return to ministry, regardless of their response to therapy.

Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, a Catholic psychiatrist in the Philadelphia area, treats many priests who seek him out after hearing about his faithfulness to Church teachings and his approach to treating homosexuality. As the number of priests among his clients grew, Fitzgibbons noticed a troubling pattern among those who had been treated in Church-run psychiatric facilities: loyal Catholic priests who had been sent to treatment centers for outpatient evaluations, or who had relatively mild problems (such as recurrent homosexual temptations which they had not yet acted upon), were kept in the centers for extended periods of time - six months or more - and pressured to request laicization. Yet, they reported, many heterodox priests who had committed more serious offenses were sent back to their parishes - sometimes after months of treatment, sometimes immediately.

Fitzgibbons's patients told him about clashes with therapists whom they described as openly homosexual, who urged them to "come out of the closet" and who claimed that the priests' opposition to the ordination of women was evidence of a personality disorder. They reported centers where trysts between homosexual patients were permitted or condoned, and where patients who supported Church teachings on sexuality were ridiculed in group-therapy sessions.