Sunday, January 18, 2015

A Profoundly Disturbing Documentary

PBS Frontline: Secrets of the Vatican.  It describes why Pope Benedict resigned; an unwillingness to confront a corrupt Vatican leadership dominated by a gay mafia that provided direction to archdioceses around the world to hide child sexual abuse and retaliate against victims, involved in drug dealing through the Vatican's bank.  Astonishing for a PBS documentary they acknowledged that the child sexual abuse was laregely homosexual in nature.

4 comments:

  1. Information about the homosexual component of the child sex abuse scandal has been available for a long time, for those who care to look. The John Jay report had details. (2004, commissioned by the Church) The media has almost never dared report on the true nature of the scandal.

    In the '60s, some in the US Catholic Church, responding to the times, decided that it was okay to have homosexual priests, and the seminaries, suffering declining enrollment, were opened to them. The idea was that priests were not allowed any sort of sex, so who cared what sort of sex they didn't have. Today, there are many homosexual priests who molest nobody.

    However, once the Church investigated the scandal (and it did it long before the PBS attack), it realized that admitting homosexuals was just too dangerous, and changed the rules. It also discovered a "gay mafia" in some US seminaries.

    This change in policy may have been one of the reasons that gay activists increased their attacks on the church. Much of the public attention to sexual abuse in the Church didn't appear until after this decision, long after the Church had acted to correct the problem.

    It is good that PBS reported this.; It is too bad that the media, to this day continues to drag out this old scandal. Most of the offenses happened decades ago, and the Church (in the US) got rid of most of the offenders a decade or more ago.

    Even so, the primary media narrative about the Catholic Church is that it is a hypocritical homophobic and misogynistic organization that is riddled with child abusers and their enablers. This is a very handy narrative for those who don't want to hear the Church's messages on sexual morality. It is also a vile slander.

    PBS continues this tradition of bashing the Church. When will PBS start regularly reporting on the scandal of child sexual abuse in the public schools - a scandal that continues to this day with a far higher offense rate than the Catholic Church ever had?

    We know the answer.

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  2. Disturbing indeed; admitting that any large institutions have a 'gay mafia' inside them.

    Couple of thoughts:

    How would PBS approach the Penn State, or BBC/Jimmy-Savile scandal?

    Would PBS ever admit if there were a similar 'gay mafia' in the entertainment world of the U.S.?

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  3. Certainly not! But admitting that the priests who went after post-pubescents were homosexual in orientation is progress.

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