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Homosexual Culture Undercuts Priesthood
Phil Brennan,
NewsMax.com Friday, April 5, 2002 Editor's note: See part one of this series, Anti-Catholic 'Experts' Fuel Church's Scandals. Father Andrew Greeley called it the "Lavender Mafia," a homosexual underground within the Catholic Church in America that has managed to dominate many of the seminaries and must bear the largest share of the blame for the sex scandals afflicting the church. Like the gay underground in the British Foreign
Office of the past where for scores of years the road to advancement was open
only to homosexuals, the Lavender Mafia has been the gatekeeper determining who
will be admitted to seminaries and ultimately to the Roman Catholic priesthood.
In Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of
Vocations From the Priesthood," author Michael S. Rose quotes a former Mundelein
seminarian, Joseph Kellenyi, as saying: "The issue was never one of my
suitability for ordination Rather it was that the gay clique had been given veto
power over who got ordained."
'Gay Profession' In his book, "The Changing Face of
the Priesthood," the rector of St. Mary's Seminary in Cleveland, Father Donald
B. Cozzens, warned that the priesthood was becoming a "gay profession." And in
the seminaries it wasn't merely a preponderance of gay students, but also "a
disproportionate number of homosexually oriented persons," including faculty, he
wrote. That kind of atmosphere, Rose notes, "deters the heterosexual man from
continuing to study and prepare for the priesthood." Rose wonders how can "any
healthy heterosexual seminarian expect to be properly formed and prepared for
the priesthood when constantly subject to that which is so clearly contrary to
Church teaching and discipline?" 'Threatening Atmosphere'
He asks: "How many heterosexual seminarians,
whether orthodox or not, have decided to leave the seminary and abandon their
vocations because of the 'gay subculture' they were forced to endure, because
they had been propositioned, harassed or even molested? We're not talking here
about the presence of a few homosexually-oriented men who conduct themselves
with perfect chastity. Rather there exists an intense and often threatening
atmosphere." Indeed, so horrific is the situation that "certain seminaries have
earned nicknames such as Notre Flame (for Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans)
and Theological Closet (for Theological College at Catholic University of
America in Washington, D.C.); St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore has earned the
nickname 'The Pink Palace.'"
Visiting the Gay Bars At some of the seminaries,
faculty and students would don their gay apparel and head for gay bars. In March
2000 the liberal Greeley, often called the church's resident pornographer for
his racy novels, testified that seminary professors "Tell their students that
they're gay and take some of them to gay bars, and gay students sleep with each
other." Greeley is not alone in exposing the homosexual behavior rampant in many
of the nation's seminaries:
According to Father Andrew Walker, the situation at
the Baltimore seminary was so bad that the vice rector delivered a lecture "in
front of at least 150 people when he stated, "Yes, we accept openly gay
seminarians; that's our policy." According to Father John Trigilio, while
visiting the Baltimore seminary he observed: "There was no discretion at all.
The few times I was there, some of the seminarians would literally dress like
gays from [Greenwich] Village. They would even go so far as to wear pink silk;
it was like going to see La Cage Aux Folles." "In my day at St. Mary's,"
recalled Father John Despard (a pseudonym) "down the hall there would be two
guys in the shower and everybody knew it." Rose cites numerous instances of gay
domination at many of the nation's seminaries. One priest described the
situation at Chicago's Mundelein seminary in the 1970s. Many of the younger
students would be placed into situations where they compromised their sexual
integrity," said Father Wayne H. Wurst during a radio broadcast. "This would be
used against them by older students for favors. And those older students
actually had faculty members who would request from time to time a friend who
would come and visit them because they were lonely. And these students would
supply fresh meat. "So there were madams, pimps and prostates all in a major
seminary system that from outside, if you to walk through, would look very
holy." Heterosexuals Driven Out Heterosexual students at a number of seminaries
were persecuted by the gay subculture. Reporting homosexual behavior by
classmates could get them expelled, as could resisting homosexual advances. Rose
cites scores of cases of heterosexuals driven out of seminaries because they
refused to accept the gay culture. In Cozzen's book, "The Changing Face of the
Priesthood," he wrote that there has been "a heterosexual exodus from the
priesthood" due, Rose notes, in part to the unrestrained gay subcultures in some
seminaries, the resulting "overwhelming gay clergy culture will have an effect
on how the laity views the priesthood and it will have an effect on incoming
vocations. Potential candidates for the priesthood who are heterosexual will be
intimidated from joining an institution where the ethos is primarily that of a
gay culture." Anyone wondering how the church could have got itself in the mess
it is now experiencing need look no further than the pages of Rose's
extraordinary book. What we are seeing today are the results of a gay priesthood
being loosed upon parishes all across the nation, where they have abused
impressionable young men they treated as "fresh meat" to satisfy their unnatural
sexual urgings. Next: Bashing orthodoxy: how false teaching demoralizes and
discourages aspiring priests.
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