Vatican spinning like a top on homosexuality

The homosexual lobby in the media and centres of progressive thinking has thrown a collective and predictable hissy-fit over Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone's statement linking the Church's sex abuse problem to homosexuality in the priesthood. (See yesterday's post here.)

Proving once again that it cares more for "public opinion" than the opinion of God, the Vatican is backtracking furiously, without actually saying His Eminence was wrong. This they do by way of "a clarification" of Bertone's statement.

Vatican spinmeister Fr. Federico Lombardi says, "We refer here of course to the problem of abuse by priests and not in the general population. Putting it another way, the Church says it knows what the problem is with Her priests, but doesn't really have a clue why the 1000s of other homosexual pedophiles do what they do.

Fr. Lombardi went on to say that the Church does not "make general statements of a specifically physiological or medical character," and Cardinal Bertone did not intend to speak on the relationship between homosexual orientation and pedophile offenses. Walt wonders how Fr. Lombardi would know the cardinal's intentions? Does Bertone go to him for confession?

However, Father Lombardi continued, in a statistical examination of reports on clerical abuse, the Vatican's chief prosecutor has found that only 10% of the cases involved true pedophilia (abuse of small children), while 90% were cases of ephebophilia (abuse of adolescents). [Hey, we learned a new word! ed.] He added that 60% of all cases involved same-sex victims...in other words, men assaulting other men or big or little boys.

That 60% figure falls significantly short of the statistics for the United States, where a thorough analysis in the John Jay report showed that more than 80% of the reported instances of abuse by American Catholic priests involved boys.

You can read Vatican Radio's report of Father Lombardi's statement here. It's also worth taking a look at "Vatican No.2 'didn't mean gays outside Church'". The subheadline for the article is "Religious officials not competent in medical sphere" to which Walt would add that they seem to be lacking as well in competence in proclaiming the Church's traditional teachings on homosexuality.