The Vatican
The evangelical Christians and the Catholic Church may disagree on some pretty big things, but there's one thing they all agree on: When all else fails, blame the gays!
Such is the thinking behind the terrible child sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church – and cost it over a billion dollars in settlements – over the past few years. That's a big chunk of change for a church that had to shutter a slew of its schools recently due to lack of funds (but they still managed to dig between the couch cushions last year for a million bucks in Michigan to push the anti-gay marriage amendment. They've got to have priorities, after all).
The abuse scandal has been a devastating PR blow as evidence was uncovered that pedophile priests were routinely protected by the church and even moved from place to place when allegations of molestation arose.
Clearly the church had to do something – and blame someone – fast. Surely their focus would be to weed out abusers and pedophiles, right?
Um, no. That would imply culpability. Instead, the church is focusing on ousting gays, which would make sense if gays were the same thing as pedophiles. They are not, as every fully evolved human knows.
According to a Sept. 15 New York Times report, the Vatican has appointed investigators to sniff around the 229 Roman Catholic seminaries in the U.S. for "evidence of homosexuality."
This news doesn't bode well for the yet-to-be issued Vatican ruling on whether gays should be barred from entering the seminaries. Nor does the recent report that Edwin O'Brien, archbishop for the United States military, told The National Catholic Register that gay priests should be banned, even those who have been celibate for over a decade. And we all know where Pope Benedict XVI stands on gays (and if you don't: their throats, mostly).
Critics of the Vatican investigation have called it nothing short of a witch hunt.
A Sept. 19 editorial in The Globe and Mail pointed out that gay priests have been around for decades. It continues, "This tolerance for homosexual priests was not to blame for the pedophilia scandal. There are heterosexuals who are pedophiles; there are homosexuals who are not. The vast majority of homosexuals, like the vast majority of heterosexuals, are not pedophiles."
But right this very minute investigators are knocking on seminary doors to round up the homos in a frenzied and misguided attempt to cleanse the church's guilty spiritual palate.
But hey, it's a lot easier to blame the gays than ask really tough questions about power and abuse and responsibility. It's been working wonders in the secular political realm.
The most heartbreaking part of all of this is there are a lot of good, faithful gay and gay friendly Catholics out there who work so hard to make the church a welcoming place. This "investigation" is an affront to all gays and lesbians, but it is especially insulting to people like Sister Jeannine Gramick and the folks at Dignity USA who love the church even though it seems intent on breaking their hearts rather than opening its own to them.
