"Yet imagine that an opponent of this new openness to homosexuals in the priesthood had uttered a warning cry. Imagine that someone had said, back in the 1970s, when homosexuals were flooding into Catholic seminaries all over the U.S., that substantial numbers of gay priests, far from accepting the rule of celibacy, would deliberately flout that rule, both in theory and in practice. Suppose that someone had argued that homosexual priests would gain control of many seminaries, that many would openly "date," that many would actively cultivate an ethos of gay solidarity and promote a homosexual culture that would drive away heterosexuals -- especially theologically orthodox heterosexuals - - from the priesthood. Suppose this person went on to argue that, at its extreme, the growing gay subculture of the priesthood would tolerate and protect not only flagrant violations of celibacy, but even the abuse of minors. Then suppose that this person predicted eventual public exposure of the whole sordid mess, an exposure that would precipitate a crisis within the Church itself.
"Naturally, anyone prescient -- and foolish -- enough to say all of these things in the wake of the Sixties would have been excoriated and ostracized as a hysterical gay-hater. It is simply bigoted, he would have been lectured, to claim that large numbers of homosexuals would take the vow of celibacy without making a good-faith effort to adhere to it; and even more so to claim that gay priests would embark on a campaign to deliberately subvert the Church's sexual teachings. And surely our foolish (and hysterically homophobic) friend would have been assured that an institution like the Catholic priesthood would attract only the most conservative homosexuals, not a bunch of "queer" radicals. Besides, even if a very few homosexuals did go so far as to actually abuse the children who had been given into their care, surely the number of such cases could never rise to the point where the stature and credibility of the Church itself would be put into doubt.
"Yet all of these things have happened. Consider Jason Berry's extraordinary account in Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children (1992), all the more striking for coming from the pen of a liberal Catholic who would himself like to see a liberalization of the Church's sexual teachings. According to Berry, as the proportion of homosexuals in the priesthood increased dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s, many gay priests were visiting the seminary "on the make," frequenting gay bars, and "befriending" high- school students. Berry reports a study of 50 gay Catholic priests, only two of whom said that they were abstaining from sexual activity: "Sixty percent said they felt no guilt about breaking their vows. Ninety percent strongly rejected mandatory celibacy . . . and slightly less than half reported that they engaged in sex in public toilets or parks." According to Berry, Richard Wagner, author of the original study of these gay priests, found that 34 percent of his interviewees called their sexual partners "distinctly younger." (Wagner did not say how young.) What's clear from Berry's account is that sexual abuse of boys by homosexual priests (the typical form of abuse in the current scandal) was part and parcel of a larger gay subculture within the priesthood, a subculture that effectively enabled the abuse of minors by encouraging flagrant homosexuality, and openly flouting the rule of celibacy itself. Indeed, in a now infamous case, a priest who has been the subject of abuse allegations over a period of three decades, the Reverend Paul Shanley, went so far as to advocate abuse in an address to the convention that led to the founding of the North American Man- Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Here, the connection between sexual abuse and an openly "queer" culture was frighteningly direct." (Kurtz)
