Quote:
Originally Posted by Orwn Acra
Oh, and writing a poem never stopped anyone from calling me a fag. Your poem ain't gonna do shit.
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Well, it's already done a little.
Two weeks ago, I attended one of the eight listening sessions that Bishop McElroy held in the San Diego Diocese. The fact that my poem about the Church's mishandling of the clergy sex scandal had been published in
First Things gave me the authority to be taken seriously by two conservatives at my discussion table who were determined to blame priests' rape of children (and the subsequent cover-up of the same) on a "homosexual subculture" within the priesthood. They were outraged that Bishop McElroy has flatly refused to purge the diocese of priests who have honored their vows of chastity but who have, in someone's (whose?) judgment, "homosexual tendencies." They blamed the cover-ups of pedophilia on homosexuals protecting each other.
I told those at my discussion table that I had published a poem about the clergy sex scandal in the conservative journal
First Things, and that I thought my own three years of childhood sexual abuse--although not committed by anyone affiliated with the Church--qualified me to testify that pedophilia and homosexuality are entirely different things.
Homosexuality is sexual attraction to post-pubescent people of the same sex as oneself. Homosexual actions, like heterosexual actions, can be--and usually are--consensual.
Pedophilia, in contrast, is a sexual attraction to a situation. That situation involves a grossly lopsided power dynamic, in which an adult enjoys exploiting the vulnerabilities of someone physically prepubescent and mentally naïve. Pedophilia can, by definition, never be consensual, because a child is incapable of understanding the full consequences of what is going on, including the existence of sexually transmitted diseases and the potentially long-term physical and emotional effects of what is about to be done to them.
Although pedophiles usually have a preference for either boys or girls, that preference does not make their motivation inherently homosexual or heterosexual.
I told my discussion group that purging priests who are suspected of being gay, whether or not there was any evidence that these priests were either acting inappropriately with children or breaking their vows of chastity in other ways, would do nothing to protect prepubescent children, because pedophilia and homosexuality are different things. Attacking good priests who have done nothing to harm children might make angry laypeople feel that they are "doing something" about pedophilia; however, our goal should be to prevent kids from being victimized, not just to make angry laypeople feel good about having "done something."
I also mentioned that my family's response to my own victimization (i.e., beating me with a belt and threatening me with eternal hellfire if I continued to tell "filthy lies" about adults my parents trusted and respected) had obvious parallels with the excommunications for breaking secrecy in the Vatican's 1962
Crimen sollicitationis document, which Cardinal Ratzinger (later known as Pope Benedict XVI) had the chief responsibility for enforcing for twenty years. Preventing negative social repercussions for the rest of the family was my family's top priority, just as in the Church. And the psychopaths interested in victimizing children knew this, and took full advantage of it.
Did my poem change anything? Not per se. I did not read it or show it to anyone. And a guy at my discussion table later later emailed me links to two screeds he has since published on other folks' blogs, in which he said that by refusing to scapegoat gay priests, our bishop is promoting heresy. So I certainly didn't make any dents in that guy's views.
And what I said did not even make it to the larger group, because one of the other members of my discussion table was a man who had been repeatedly raped and gaslighted while a teenager in a seminary, so obviously we all ceded to him the one question that our table was allowed to ask the bishop publicly. (He asked for more details on how independent the bishop's "independent" commission reviewing his handling of clergy abuse accusations really was, if the bishop had appointed them all. He and I were both satisfied with the bishop's answer.)
But the fact that I had published a poem on the subject in
First Things did at least earn me a minute or so in which to present my points to a gay-hostile audience, without being immediately shouted down as a heretical liberal. So that's something.
Incidentally, I really think that the Catholic Church is about to split up into pro- and anti-Francis factions, permanently. The printing press brought the Protestant Reformation, and the Internet is bringing
the Benedict Option, for people for whom the Catholic Church just isn't puritanical and authoritarian enough anymore. Those folks are about to say "Enough."
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