For now, at least, and in the Italian media, Italy's Panorama newsweekly magazine has succeeded in opening a new front in the assault against the Church for the sins of some its ministers. Not pedophilia this time but probably what is its most general underlying cause - the inability of some priests to discipline their carnal lusts, in this case, homosexual. Which, in turn, leads to the widespread secular myth that at least 50% of Roman Catholic priests are homosexual, as many books and articles claim.
Surprisingly, in the same issue, Ignacio Ingrao, the Panorama commentator whose portraits of the Vatican purportedly from a privileged inside view are usually unflattering, has a commentary that presents the context which is completely ignored by the main article - whose voyeuristic and prurient intention may be deduced from the lurid cover illustration showing the close-up of a priest holding a rosary, but to whose hairy wrists a woman's hands with pink fingernails have been photoshopped.
Nonetheless, Ingrao manages to work in some 'poison' towards the end. Here first is Ingrao's commentary: ....
Benedict XVI's painful crusade:
Since 2005, zero tolerance for
homosexual priests and seminarians
by IGNACIO INGRAO
Translated from
Issue of July 23, 2010
I think the sense of the headline is too sweeping. Especially in the case of those concerned who are already priests, the problem is not whether they feel themselves to be homosexual or not - but whether despite their self-identification, they continue to live up to their vow of chastity. Exactly the same heroic, almost superhuman, discipline is required of them that is required of priests who have normal heterosexual urges.
He has said he will use the rod against priests who 'behave in ways unworthy of priestly life".
When he addressed some 15,000 priests from all over the world who had gathered in St. Peter's Square for the concluding rites of the Year for Priests last June 11, Benedict XVI made it clear: "The Church can no longer tolerate in its priests 'orientations which are really disorientations". Among this, homosexuality.
No one had ever heard him sound so firm and resolute. It was the latest act of a crusade he launched almost right after the Conclave that elected him Pope. On August 31, 2005, Benedict XVI ordered the publication of an Instruction from the Congregation for Catholic Education that he had approved on May 31 - barely six weeks since he became Pope. The Instruction effectively closes admission to seminaries for homosexuals.
The document immediately raised outrage among the associations for gay rights, especially since it is leaves no room for equivocation in its statement that the Church considers 'homosexual acts' to be 'grave sins' because "they are intrinsically immoral and contrary to natural law".
That is why, it makes clear, "the Church cannot admit to the seminary whoever practises homosexual acts, presents profoundly-rooted homosexual tendencies or supports the so-called 'gay culture'."
Existing canon law provides that if an ordained priest is caught 'sinning against the Sixth Commandment'
['Thou shalt not commit adultery', but which has always been understood to cover all impure sexual acts and thoughts] , the punishment is suspension from priestly duties, to which if the offense is repeated after the first admonition, other punishments may be added up to dismissal from the clerical state" (Art. 1385 of the Code of Canon Law).
Benedict XVI soon followed up the Instruction with action. The first to be struck out was the secretary of an important Vatican congregation who was forced to resign because of his frequent and widely known nocturnal assignations.
Shortly afterwards it was the turn of the man who had been a bureau chief in the Congregation for the Clergy, Mons. Tommaso Stenico, a clinical psychologist, popular broadcaster and writer.
[Ironically, he also edited two volumes putting together Benedict XVI's various addresses and responses to priests and seminarians.]
In October 2007, an Italian TV channel broadcast video taken by a hidden camera showing Stenico in his office with a young man he met on the Internet. He claimed that he was doing research on the subject and that he had been set up.
Nonetheless, the Vatican dismissed him from his position and any association with the Roman Curia.
The same thing happened to an Italian archbishop who was relieved of the presidency of a dicastery.
Likewise, an investigation was deemed necessary on the eve of the nomination of a brilliant theologian archbishop to a prestigious Curial position. The case was shelved for lack of evidence.
And recently, a young Nigerian seminarian who was a member of one of the Vatican choirs, was dismissed from the choir when it was learned that he had procured boys for Italian wheeler-dealer Angelo Balducci, who was named a 'Gentleman of His Holiness' during the previous Pontificate. [The Vatican says Balducci will no longer be listed among the 'Gentlemen'.]
To further reinforce his prohibitions and exhortations on strict screening of seminarians, Benedict XVI authorized the Congregation for Catholic Education in 2008 to publish guidelines enjoining all seminaries to use psychological experts and tools to determine the emotional maturity and sexual orientation of candidates for the priesthood.
But there has always been controversy on this issue. Some in the Curia claim that the Pope has played favorites ,in that some who are believed to be just as culpable as those who have been dismissed from the Curia have remained in place because they are 'powerful'.
[That is a major accusation against the Pope. Ingrao owes it to the reader to name names if indeed there is any ranking member of the Curia whose 'active' homosexuality is tolerated!)
Meanwhile, I had no choice but to read the Panorama article - all five pages of it. Someone is bound to make 'hot tamales' of it to peddle in the Anglophone press, anyway.
And it does make the assumption that the three men 'documented' by the writer and his accomplice represent the priests of Rome, since the reporter also quotes - a-critically and unquestioningly - one of the priests claiming that '98% of all the priests he knows are homosexual'.
Of course, it is simply revolting that the reporter knowingly used his accomplice as bait for the priests and had him take part in sexual encounters with them that were filmed and now posted online. I have not bothered to look at the videoclips but the still photo for one of the encounters is bad enough. The article itself thankfully does not describe what happens after the writer says something generic like "He took him to the bedroom, undressed and lay on the bed". He does describe matter of factly the suggestive moves done with clients - in this case, one of the priests - during seminude dancing in a gay club.
I have translated the teaser account online for the article:
'Le notte bravi dei preti gay':
A major investigation
Translated from
Issue of July 23, 2010
An investigation with hidden TV cameras, followed by minutious verifications and careful checks. For 20 days, Panorama reporter Carmelo Abbate, with the help of a gay friend, infiltrated the 'nights on the town' of some priests who have been conducting a double life in Rome: by day, they are priests in cassocks; by night, they take off the tunic and become perfectly integrated into the homosexual circles of the capital.
[In the article, the friend is identified as a gay young man who met one of the priests, Paul, in a sauna one week earlier and had been invited by him to attend a gay night in a Rome club. The youth's telephone call to the reporter about this appointment with the supposed priest prompted the reporter to plan his 'investigation' posing as the young man's 'fiance'.]
The result is a field investigation which allowed the unprecedented
revelation [Revelation??? Surely, homosexual priests who indulge themselves in violation of their vows are nothing new] and in many cases, disturbing: priests taking part in nocturnal orgies with male escorts; who have sexual relations with casual partners; who are habitues of Internet gay chats and appointments.
Panorama has identified
numerous cases
[How numerous is numerous? Dozens? Hundreds?] and tells the story of three in particular, Paul, Carlo and Luca (the names are invented to protect their identities).
The first, a 35-year-old Frenchman, met the reporter and his friend on Friday, July 2, at a gay feast in a bar in Testaccio. With him were two male escorts whom he had sent for from Sardinia and paid to dance semi-nude with himself and other partners (and then had sex with some of them). Also present was Carlo, the second priest, about 45-50 of age.
The night ended in Paul's house where the reporter's gay friend had sex with the priest, an encounter that was filmed by our hidden TV camera.
The following night, Paul and Carlo arranged to meet the reporter and his friend at the Gay Village, another club where the two priests seemed very much at home. On this occasion, Carlo disappeared a few times, saying
he did so to avoid encountering priests and catechists who might know him.
[A convenient way to insinuate that the Gay Village is populated by 'other priests and catechists' besides just the two priests with the reporter.] The night closed in the same way as the previous night.
The next day, Sunday, July 4, Paul said Mass at an altar in his residence for the reporter and his friend. Panorama later verified that Paul was indeed a priest.
Our first one-on-one meeting with Carlo was in a downtown restaurant whose usual clientele is gay, including many gay priests, according to Carlo, who pointed to two men at the next table, saying one of them was a priest and that the two were 'engaged'.
Carlo also claimed that at least 98% of the priests in his acquaintance are homosexual, but that the Church today has an 'intransigent' part that refuses to look at reality, and a 'more evangelical' part which recognizes and accepts the phenomenon of homosexual priests.
After that lunch, Carlo took the reporter's friend to his apartment which adjoins a major building belonging to the Church. They had a sexual interlude, also filmed by our hidden camera.
We also filmed Carlo when he said Mass at a church not far from his apartment.
All the video films to support this story have been available at Panorama online starting July 23.
[The summary says nothing about the third 'priest', Luca. In the article, the reporter claims that they were unable to establish whether he was really a priest, because they could not contact him again after the first encounter when he brought them home to 'his apartment', said to be on the second floor of a building attached to a church, where he promptly had sex with the reporter's friend. The reporter says no one in the building seemed to know anything about him.
The two presumably verified priests, Paul and Carlo, both claim to have served Mass for the Pope at the Vatican - Paul claiming to have "he celebrated Mass for him for a whole year".] [The writer just quotes him so uncritically! How exactly do you celebrate Mass 'for the Pope'? It's not as if the Pope has to have someone else celebrate his daily Mass for him - and in any case, he says his daily Mass in his private chapel with only his household.]
Paul reportedly goes on to say that the Pope is not as bad as the media portray him and that he is burdened by having to carry on Wojtyla's legacy. He apparently had nothing worse to say about the Pope, thank God!, but volunteered to say that when Benedict XVI took over the papal apartments, he did not ask for anything special other than to have the walls repainted, and that any additional furniture he needed was ordered from Ikea. And he praised him for channelling all the royalties from his books to various charities. (All of that, except perhaps the Ikea bit, has been common knowledge, and does not prove Paul has a privileged position in the Apostolic Palace. Now, if he had said something about a cat...)
An additional video online has the deputy editor of Panorama saying that he has the full names and addresses of the three priests and some other practising homosexual priests in Rome, if the Church wishes to confirm the Panorama story. (But wait! I thought they couyld not confirm Luca's identity!)]
Pardon my constitutional intolerance, but why should homosexuals who have no intention of observing chastity persist in remaining priests? Either they have deluded themselves into thinking that there is nothing wrong with their double life and they can do as they please because there is nothing wrong with homosexual acts; or they derive additional perverse pleasure in thumbing their noses at the 'rules' of the Church, with heroic visions of helping to break down her Tradition to make her conform to the 'anything goes' amorality of secular society.
Obviously, the Panorama 'shock du jour' is not really an investigation - it cites no facts and figures independently researched about the issue, and it is completely limited to the reporter's observations (supported by videos taken by the hidden camera] and documentation of what the three priests did during the 20 days that he recorded their doings.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/07/2010 12:34]