A news magazine accompanied a number of priests to gay clubs and engaged in casual sex. The Daily Mail reports:
A gay priest sex scandal has rocked the Catholic Church in Italy today after a weekly news magazine released details of a shock investigation it had carried out.
Using hidden cameras, a journalist from Panorama magazine – owned by Italian Prime Minister and media baron Silvio Berlusconi – filmed three priests as they attended gay nightspots and had casual sex.
Today there was no immediate comment from the Italian Bishops Conference and the Vatican – which has been rocked by a series of sex scandals involving paedophile priests since the start of the year.
The diocese of Rome responded that no one is forcing homosexual prelates to remain as priests. It said “we don’t want to hurt them” but their conduct “muddies the reputation of all the others.”
This is awful and it seems that the priests were in on it and they need to be handled immediately as they went out of their way to hurt the Church.
Update: Bloomberg reports:
The Vicar of Rome today called on homosexual clergymen in the Catholic Church to “come out” and leave the priesthood.
The Vicar of Rome, one of the most important positions in the Vatican, was responding to a report today in Panorama Magazine that said Catholic priests were conducting a double life, citing secret video footage.
“No one is forcing them to stay in the priesthood to exploit the benefits,” the Diocese of Rome said in a statement posted on its Web Site. “If they are coherent, they should come out into the open.”
July 24, 2010 at 3:52 am
This is the time Catholics should pray for their priests and criticize them of their lifestyles. What they do ultimately is felt by the whole Church…
Let's pray for them… pray unceasingly.
July 24, 2010 at 5:14 am
Your first line left me wondering how a news magazine could engage in casual sex! Please reread it. You need something like "where they' where the "and" is.
I have known about this sort of thing for about 25 years. My husband was a chef in a Baltimore restaurant. The waiters there told him the priest of our parish hit on them, and that he would come in after his vacations in the Caribbean and show them pictures of the young men he had had sex with there, bragging of his conquests. He wasn't obviously gay, but later a young priest who was, was transferred there to live in the same house. It certainly made one wonder. I had to take a long view, remembering how much corruption had been in the church in previous eras of history, yet it was still the church.
Susan Peterson
July 24, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Non criticism of top management permeates Catholicism because criticism of the Pope is the one way to commit suicide as a Catholic writer financially. Benedict is a great writer but canon law describes Popes as managers who have "supreme" and "immediate" power over all the churches.
Benedict is hiding from managing in liturgy and in writing. He should be apprehending these priests…a magazine should not be beating him to the punch.
Last year was similar. Police and not the Pope or his Cardinals caught the papal choir member pimping gay seminarians to a married papal advisor to the office for evangelization of peoples. Geoffrey Miller also pointed to this immunity of Popes that is killing us.
July 24, 2010 at 6:02 pm
This is not shocking, and it is not news. Anyone involved with clergy, specifically seminaries, knows this goes on every day. There ARE good people in the hierarchy who attempt to stop this and week such behavior out of the priesthood/seminaries. But there are SO MANY PRIESTS that got in during the 70's when it was all "cool"/I'm OK, you're OK. Now these priests are in their 60's (some even bishops) and firmly entrenched in their parishes/dioceses etc. One I know was even a chaplain in the Army for 30 years, and I won't go into details on what he is doing now…and still a priest with his own parish.
Sad, but not shocking.
July 25, 2010 at 3:25 am
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July 25, 2010 at 4:01 am
Another thing I'd like to add:
The Catholic Church didn't tell anyone to cover up anything! The Government is allowed to have secrets, the military is allowed to have secrets but the Church isn't? This attitude is just plain silly and it's stupid!
The Pope has no political authority nor legal authority to enforce the teachings of the Church whatsoever, ultimately its up to the choice of individuals to accept or reject them.
Bannon, you need to understand something here. There's a big difference between privacy and covering it up! So let's stop turning these sexual abuse cases into big gigantic soap operas for the world to see ok?
If he's a secular priest, the bishop can suspend him. If he's a consecrated religious, his superior can suspend him. This does not go to Rome. Rome is not interested in doing other people's job. Got that Bannon?
July 25, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Mysterious
Canon law disagrees with you (giving the Pope "power" that is "supreme" and "immediate") as does every parent disagree with you near to whose child a molester was placed while the one placing kept private that the man was dangerous. No one blames you for not using your surname. Even you sense that you are off kilter in this area.
July 25, 2010 at 1:37 pm
PS Mysterious,
Read Pope Benedict's last encyclical. It calls for governments to be "transparent".
July 25, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Bannon, rather than wasting my breath on responding to your ad hominem attacks, here's Father John Trigilio's blog on Benedict XVI and the sex abuse scandal.
http://blackbiretta.blogspot.com/2010/07/new-yorks-times-and-all-news-thats.html#comments
Also Bannon,
Try reading this blog too by Father Z:
http://wdtprs.com/blog/2010/07/supreme-court-about-priests-as-vatican-employees-sky-not-yet-falling/#comments
July 25, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Bannon,
PS Try reading Pope Pius XII's Mystici Corporis Christi (1943) taught that the Church is the mystical body of Christ, rather than just a human and social organization.
July 25, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Another thing,
The problem that the American and European press are having with the Vatican is the difference in worldview between the press and the Vatican. The press is speaking from its position in a Western nation, whichever nation that may be. The Vatican is looking at this from a global perspective. The Catholic Church exists all over the world. Unfortunately, civil laws are not the same around the globe.
It is very difficult for the Vatican to make one rule that fits every country in the world. In some countries, sexual activity between adults and minors is governed by civil laws very different from those of Western countries. There are countries where heterosexual intercourse between adults and minors is legal and homosexual intercourse between any age group is punishable by death. There are some countries where homosexual relations between adults and minors are considered rites of passage. There are other countries where the law is biased toward Christians and they do not get their day in court. Finally, there are countries where every accused is guilty until proven innocent. It's very hard to prove your innocence on a crime such as this, unless you have a witness that can testify that at the time of the alleged crime you were miles away from the victim.
When you’re as big as the Catholic Church, you have to deal with different legal systems separately. One size does not fit all. The Vatican has a policy for the United States and countries with the same legal system as our own. You report the allegation to the civil authorities and to the proper ecclesial authorities. The Sacred Congregation for the Faith has a very difficult job trying to make sure that the accused and the victims are justly treated and that their dignity is protected. To pretend that one solution will work in every legal system around the world is unrealistic. It won’t work.
July 25, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Mysterious,
Strangely, I don't accept homework assignments on the net. But I like how you have preserved the name/address etiquette of primitive man. It makes one want to follow you into a paradigm of Church as already perfect….despite Lumen Gentium.
July 25, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Which shows that you are unwilling to engage in discussion.
July 25, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Another thing Bannon,
I refuse to put my private information on the net thank you.
July 25, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Moderator
I would urge you to edit whenever the above poster addresses people by their last name. I feel like I've entered a slovenly milieu of a bygone era.
July 26, 2010 at 12:23 am
The RCC has had a Homosexual Priest problem for hundreds of years. This is the main reason why so many Priests have participated in the sport of Altar Boy chasing in their spare time. The culture of the RCC Priesthood has to change. The question is, however, does the Church Higherarchy want the culture to change?? Are they revealing their true selves by not pushing forth positive culture change in the RCC Priesthood?? As it stands now, the Pope and the RCC have lost all moral credibility in just about every part of the Christian world. If the RCC goes down for the count, the entire of Christianity goes down also.
Positive culture change is adopting the Eastern Orthodox model of the Priesthood. Married, family oriented men encouraged to attend Seminary and being ordained to the diginty of Parish Priest. As time goes on, the culture of the RCC Priesthood will cycle through positive change, with more and more RC Churches being Pastored by married, family oriented men who are Parish Priests….
July 26, 2010 at 1:49 am
The problem is not the Latin Church's discipline of celibacy but the question of faithfulness, honesty and enforcing the disciplinary measures available to the Church. You speak as if making marriage optional for priests will effectively deter hypocrites, liars, and vicious men from entering the priesthood (which, let's face it, is what these priests who habitually engage in sodomy are).
The most it will probably do for the gay-priest-issue is cast a shadow of suspicion over those who will honestly choose celibacy over marriage – and perhaps sooner or later highlight one of those funny facts of life: that married men also have been known to engage in gay sex.
What it all boils down to is our need of faithful and honest men. And this is a problem that humanity suffers in general. The crisis in the priesthood is just one aspect of it.
July 27, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Anon,
The Church's problem with homosexual priests is a recent thing. And pray tell, if fidelity to the Church's teaching is being broke by these gay clerics, what makes you think they'd be any less faithfull in the Eastern Rite? And I would like to see some numbers on divorces that come from non-Catholic ministers.
You make the common error in conflating fidelity to one's vocation to that of sex. Celibacy has everything to do with fidelity and nothing to do with sex. Christ will and does provide the graces needed for both priests and married couples. The divorce stats as well as the huge increase in cohabitation (not to mention the siring of illegitimate children) defies your own rather pristine fantasy of married priests. Being married in no way makes a man more "holy". Child abuse cases are actually higher with Protestant ministers and public school employees than with Catholic priests. And the majority of the perpetrators are married.
Finally, I don't see a stampede of anyone running to the Eastern Rite churches. Despite the so-called credibility problem which you insist upon, a 120,000 new adult Catholics get confirmed every year.
July 27, 2010 at 10:02 pm
This is what happens when people delude themselves into thinking that loads of homosexuals can become priests without this leading to problems of all sorts.
Disgusting and alarming as this latest filthy episode is, let us not forget that homosexual priests are involved in a vast number of abuse cases.
The Church Hierarchy now pays the price of its ideological blindness – or I should say outright stupidity and forgetfulness of common sense – in the past.
Pope Benedict has thankfully already drawn the consequences by excluding people with deep-seated homosexual tendencies from the seminars. I do think that a little "giro di vite" with those who are already ordained would be fully in order here.
Don't tell me that no one knew.
Oportet ut scandala eveniant and when such lessons are learned the hard way, they are learned more effectively. If some deserving heads should roll, the better.
Ecclesia sempre reformanda. Let us be angry, but not discouraged. Better days ahead.
July 27, 2010 at 10:12 pm
july,
carrying a heavy cross (or perhaps being merely a pervert; let us not do as if we didn't know it) does not give anyone the right to become a priest.
If you have a tendency to child raping, you can't become a priest; if you are alcoholic, you can't become a priest; if you have a drug addiction, you can't become a priest.
If one is homosexual, priesthood is not for him, pure and simple. The Holy Father has recognised the problem and acted bravely and in a wonderful politically incorrect way.
This idea that we must allow everything to everyone is what has brought us to this situation in the first place. And no, I do not think they those priests spied by "Panorama" had great vocations either. What they wanted was safe employment, social prestige and people of the same sort to amuse themselves.