December 27, 2010
WHERE THE BOYS ARE:
What the Military Must Learn from the Church (Tim Drake, December 23, 2010, National Catholic Register)
This week, our elected officials voted to repeal the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. By so doing, for the first time in this nation’s history, they’ve opened the U.S. military’s combat forces to practicing homosexuals. It would behoove the military to take a look at how such an open policy toward homosexuals worked in another male fraternity, that is, the Catholic priesthood.In Michael Rose’s 2002 book Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood, he explores the Church’s own period of openly accepting homosexual seminary candidates. Many seminaries celebrated the intimacies of homosexual relations, which are directly opposed to true “brotherhood.”
Rose describes the “lavenderization” of seminaries such as Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary and the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, and the homosexual culture present there even into the 1990s.
It is this culture that gave rise to the ordination of homosexuals who later went on to become serial abusers, men like Daniel McCormack, who reportedly had engaged in homosexual relations prior to and during his time at Mundelein. After his ordination, Father Daniel McCormack molested at least 23 boys.
The connection between homosexuality and abuse was clearly demonstrated in 2004’s The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, otherwise known as the John Jay Report, which was conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
According to the John Jay Report, 81% of the victims of clerical sexual abuse were males, the majority of whom were between the ages of 11-17.
Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has said that the report shows that the Catholic abuse crisis was “homosexual predation on American Catholic youth.”
Psychiatrist Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons has echoed that.
Sure, they'll be a less effective fighting force, but, on the other hand, they're much more likely to be put into combat situations.
