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Has anyone wondered why the church is so adamantly opposed to legitimizing homosexual unions through marriage? One very real possibility is that homosexual marriages present a genuine threat to the priesthood and therefore the church itself. Over the past twenty years, homosexuality has integrated into the mainstream. It is shunned by a few, tolerated by some and accepted by most of the general population. Since Vatican II, many heterosexual priests have left the priesthood to get married. They left for the intimacy that was designed into their beings and fulfilled their natural needs.
When homosexual priests realize that they too can live a shameless life with a lifetime partner, a commitment, and intimacy among the general public, the priesthood will lose its appeal as a safe haven for homosexuals. This bears repeating: the priesthood will lose its appeal as a safe haven for homosexual men. When homosexual priests start to leave the priesthood for committed relationships outside the priesthood, they will leave the church in critical condition. Along with that, the number of homosexual men needing refuge in the priesthood will drop too.
Behavior no longer considered deviant, equates with no more power. The RCC is pulling out all the stops to prevent the legalization of homosexual marriages because its future depends on it. If it doesn't succeed, it is doomed to atrophy. Their recent bid to attract Anglican priests upset by the ordination of homosexuals is nothing more than attempt to shore up their dwindling clerical numbers. Without homosexual priests, the church will deteriorate at an even faster pace spurred on by an extremely critical shortage of priests.
Portends for the Future
Someone once said, "Hope springs eternal." In the case of the RCC, we have to have serious doubts. Despite fifteen hundred years of evidence to the contrary, celibacy and chastity are still required as means of assuring control of the priesthood. The inhumanity that it has created has been catastrophic. The following is your assurance that nothing will change in the near future.
The pope was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith for some twenty odd years and during those years maintained the culture's status quo. He says he was horrified by the stories he read as head of the CDF. As pope, he has assured the maintenance of the status quo by appointing Archbishop Levada to his former post. Jesus predicted this well when he said, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves."
Since past behavior is pretty much indicative of future behavior, we need to look at Levada's record regarding sexual abuse to determine if he is a party to the culture that has dominated and perverted the Catholic Church over the past thousand years. Let's start and end with the case of Bishop Ziemann which defines the depths to which Cardinal Levada will sink. Ziemann combines the elitist culture with the lack of humanity we've been discussing. Bishop Ziemann was arrested while receiving oral sex from a priest in his own car. To make matters worse, Ziemann forced this priest wear a pager so that he could be summoned for sex at the Ziemann's whim. According to the priest's testimony, Bishop Ziemann had twice given him Venereal Disease infections. When Ziemann left the diocese of Santa Rosa, he left it sixteen million dollars in the red. Consider the following from the San Francisco Weekly.
"He has been protected by and remains intimately connected with three influential fellow hierarchs, including San Francisco Archbishop William J. Levada. It was Levada who presided over Ziemann's skipping away from Santa Rosa with criminal impunity after church officials refused to fully cooperate with authorities. Ziemann's mentor and chief patron is Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, whose problems with pedophile priests rival the scandal-plagued Boston archdiocese's. The other member of the troika is Manuel Moreno, who until his surprise resignation this month for health reasons, was bishop of Tucson, Ariz., and in whose diocese Ziemann was given refuge at the Holy Trinity Monastery... Moreno has a long and tawdry record in covering up for pedophile priests"
At a time when someone else might have tossed him to the wolves, Levada lauded Ziemann to the bitter end in Santa Rosa. The day Ziemann resigned, shortly after a lurid audiotape surfaced exposing the bishop's illicit relationship with the priest, Levada extolled his friend as someone who had done much to help the diocese. It didn't seem to matter that, right up until the revelation of the bishop's tape-recorded apology to Father Jorge Hume Salas for forcing him to engage in sex, Ziemann's personal attorney proclaimed him to be "a very holy man" and the bishop steadfastly denied any misconduct."20
Bishop Ziemann recently passed away retaining all his faculties.
Why did Benedict XVI pick Lavada to replace him as head of the CDF? His unwavering loyalty, no matter how disgraceful, to a brother bishop and the church seems like the most logical answer. Silence is the golden rule. Levada has publicly proven the depths to which he is willing to sink in order to protect a fellow bishop from criminal prosecution. His is a sterling quality, a la Bernie Law, which is obviously deeply appreciated by the Pope. When handling future accusations of sexual abuse against priests and bishops, Levada has already shown how low he can be expected to drop the deviance bar. With Levada at the helm of the CDF, the culturally imbedded concept that bishops have the right and obligation to cover-up for abusers will carry on into the future.
Not being satisfied with Levada and Law, the pope has recently given Bishop Raymond Burke a slot at the Vatican. This is a man who handed out excommunications like pedophiles hand out candy. Like the queen of hearts in Alice and Wonderland, he ran around yelling, "To hell with your souls!" Burke is noted for his ability to silence victims as noted here.
But some members of Raymond Burke's former flock paint a far different portrait of the erstwhile bishop of La Crosse. If cases of clergy sex abuse were few and far between, they say, it was because Burke was a master at keeping a lid on them. Several victims who claim they were abused by priests in La Crosse tell Riverfront Times they were stonewalled by Burke, who declined to report their allegations to local authorities. And while some of his fellow church officials nationwide were reaching hefty settlements with victims, Raymond Burke was unyielding in his refusal to negotiate with victims' rights groups. He declined to make public the names of priests who were known to have been abusive, and he denied requests to set up a victims' fund. Most strikingly, Riverfront Times has learned, while bishop in La Crosse Burke allowed at least three priests to remain clerics in good standing long after allegations of their sexual misconduct had been proven -- to the church, to the courts and, finally, to Burke himself.21
Burke has recently been appointed by the pope to an office that will handle the worst cases of the clergy sexual abuse as the prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. Once again, we have the pope planning for the future and insuring the status quo. What chance is there of change with men like these in positions of power?
Conclusion
The unified theory of clergy abuse shows how supposedly good men are so hypocritical in their nature, that they can one day preach justice and morality before a packed cathedral and the next day transfer a serial child rapist to another parish as easily a donning a vestment. It also explains the "less than" treatment of victims caused by the loss of humanity and exposes the sick culture that has put these values in place..
