Harry, I for one don’t think that the grass is greener now that I’ve decamped from the GOA. It’s just that I made a conscious decision that only in a local Church could there be any chance of problems being rectified. They simply will never be solved as long as churches view themselves as being colonial outposts (forgive my interminable use of this phrase). Are they solved yet? No. But they are definately on the way to being solved. That’t the difference.

It wasn’t the OCA leadership that policed its own ranks internally, it was the intense activity of dedicated laypeople and a few priests. Later Archbishop Job decided to get answers to whether ‘the allegations were true or false’ and that accelerated the process. But remember nearly all the same people that were sitting on the synod while the problems were happening are still there. The category of ‘two person monastery’ that looks alot like a common law gay marriage gives rise to some due questions.

And how fast did ‘self governing Antiochian archdiocese’ get dumped in high places when some accounting in Detroit got half of a sliver of momentary sunshine?

The Romanian Archbishop Nathaniel who pushed hard for Unity at the OCL seemed to do a quick 180 and lept to go work for the Romanian Patriarch, who recent news accounts has embraced diaspora remote management. This, more or less around the time allegations from a Fr. Susan about the gay activity of another priest came to light. Seems Fr. Susan was termed ‘disloyal’ (without his day in court) and got himself ‘transferred to nowhere’– a thing that happened plenty in the GOA. Still not clear who shot John there.

Still in all your point that absent foriegn pressures things get better shows to be true. The OCA is certainly better off than it was. Meanwhile the GOA is having a fellow in Turkey deem it wise to send a fellow from France to manage in America. Seems they don’t think we have anybody who ever worked here good enough to lead here. Though I had my share of problems there years ago I have to admit even though I live half a country away the Boston GOA group has built impressively.

Not only that Harry, but perhaps a purge (at least of the GOA bishops).

With the knowledge you’ve presented I think now you can see why Orthodoxy has done so very poorly creating converts in the Islamic world. All the Imam has to do is point to our bishops, say ‘ordained young never married bachelor– no wife, no kids, hangs out with men’ and point to our priests and say ‘is totally subordinate to -them-‘. Then he points to the other Imams and its all about how many wives and how many kids and family life and so on.

Now our priests show up explaining things and they sort of get winked and laughed at.

Empty nester or 50+ years and and childless also as bishops. Seriously. Soon.

very good point, Harry. Recently, I read an excellent piece about homosexuality in the Islamic world. It’s called “Dancing Boys,” by Phyllis Chesser. It’s about the homosexual rape of poor boys, forcing them to act and dress in an effeminate manner, etc.

In those Muslim countries in which polygamy is normative, the sexual imbalance is about ~3 single males for every female since a rich man can have four legal wives (thereby depriving three other males of ever getting a wife).

Petr,

“These men are predator pedophiles and their sin/illness/whatever you want to label it… is not related to homosexuality.”

That’s just flat out wrong. Most of the abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests (I think over 80%) was on pubescent males, not prepubescent males or females. That is not pedophilia. That is homosexual statutory rape.

It is normal for men to be attracted to females after they reach the age of puberty. We have to control this desire and not act on it because as a society we’ve made a decision that it is inappropriate for females under the age of 16-18 to have sexual relationships. However, nature and older cultures are not of the same opinion as modern western culture on this.

Pedophilia is a pathological attraction to prepubescents. This was not, for the most part, what the Catholic priest abuse scandal was about. The MSM has tended to downplay this fact because of the impact it might have on the gay community.

From an anthropological (dare I be called ‘darwinian’?) biological perspective back in the day, 1000+ years ago, when only around 28% lived to 30 years old and women lived 6 years less than men, consider what daily life presented: men outnumbered women 2-3 : 1, sex led to pregnancy and risked the woman’s life, and men will be, ah, well, men. Much as in the prison populations where the bullies ‘assert dominance’ and rape the weak.

In the modern context where either sex can control whether pregnancy happens, women live longer than men, and there are about as many men as women the only men interested in sexual bother with other men are either in prison or it’s because they aren’t interested in women to begin with.

I’m not sure whether to delete this post or dispute it. It tries too hard to normalize homosexuality by re-categorizing sexual behavior into adult and child categories determined not by age but by the object of desire (adults or children), and then lumping adult offenders into that child category. It’s a conceptual shift that does not work.

If you are saying that adult pedophiles and pederasts have arrested emotional development, just say that. Don’t say they don’t have an “adult sexual orientation.” Say instead that they are adults with sexual maladjustment.

Normative adult sexual orientation is heterosexuality in adult relationships (opposite sex marriage in advanced cultures). I’d be a little more cautious about dismissing the percentage of homosexuals in the culture as well. The Center for Disease control estimates that only 2.3% of the population considers themselves homosexual. See: While homosexuals claim they make up 10% of the population, the reality is closer to 1-2%.

Fr. G: The science has allowed for much more, but don’t look for it in a Catholic publication you quoted that tries really hard to obscure the fact that their cadre of only never married priests disproportionately, wildely , abused teen boys — and the only reason we know about it is because the civil authority holds that to be illegal and so investigates. The more horrific scandal is that both their church and ours has tremendous assets and yet depends on the civil authority to investigate and cause what is supposed to be Christ’s church to have managed to detect and rectify on its own. Where are the priests? Where are you? How many knew of the chaos with Fr. Graff in Florida or Fr. Karambis and so many others and do nothing? Why does not the church spend any resources policing its own ranks? Why does it take the interest of the civil authority to turn on the lights?

Why only these weak fig-leaf apologies that try and fail to remove focus on what’s killing us? Pointing out that the worst of society is, well, a bit worse than the church leadership? That’s what the canons had in mind for church leaders?

If you like to preserve the anti-gospel only-never-married clergy institution that has used parishioner money to pay off victims those collecting that money created and covered up and caused more of — well that’s alot for a consicence to carry.

Petr, you may be right, the phenomenon of human sexuality is multiform and complex. Regardless, the numbers of the percentage of the population that is homosexual were from the Batelle Study (done for the Alan Guttmacher Institute I believe). These numbers indicated that 3% of the males in the US were exclusively homosexual, not 10% as indicated by the discredited (but believed to be gospel truth) Kinsey Report.

Even if we took the spurious Kinsey numbers (10%), given that 36% of child molestation charges are same-sex, then this would still indicate that homosexuals are 3.5% more likely to molest children than heterosexuals.

As for the phenomenon of priestly/scoutmaster/teacher male juvenile abuse, the preponderance of such cases appear to be post-pubescent. This was the case in ancient Greece for that matter, where the adoration of youths (ephebes) was considered a higher form of love than that of women among certain men.

Regardless, the molestation of all children –pre or post-pubescent, male or female–is to be regretted at all times and punished with the utmost severity. And it goes without saying that men who have this propensity need to be nowhere near the priesthood.

Sorry, but this is incorrect. (I’m not gay and not a supporter of gay rights. I want everyone to understand the truth.) These men are predator pedophiles and their sin/illness/whatever you want to label it… is not related to homosexuality.

There is a fallacy concerning your three percent figure. Therefore, the mathematical equation and its result cannot be supported. There is no basis for concluding that gays are responsible for a disproportionate amount of child sexual abuse. Because the data is unreliable, one can’t prove that those who behave homosexually are not abusing children disproportionately, regardless of whether they claim to be gay or not. That means that if we really want to understand what’s going on, we have to look much more closely at the predators themselves.

With pedophiles “the commonest remarks concerning attractive features of the victims, were that the young boys did not have any body hair and that their bodies were soft and smooth.”

Marshal, W.L.; Barbaree, H.E.; Butt, Jennifer. “Sexual offenders against male children: Sexual preferences.” Behaviour Research and Therapy 26, no. 5 (1988): 383-391.

These disturbed predators are pedophiles and pedophiles have no adult sexual orientation. They just prefer soft, smooth, hairless children.

Chrys, thanks for the interest. Ask Fr Hanse for my e-mail address. Otherwise, I believe it’s archived on the OCL website.

George, I’m glad you took the risk of “singing (your) own praises – I’d love to read your paper! Any chance I can get a copy?

Fr Gregory, I don’t believe that celibacy is the causative factor for molestation of either sex. It’s just homosexuality that is. According to Catholic canons (pre-Vatican II) homosexuals (or men with the “homosexual inclination”) were simply barred from even entering the seminary. That’s the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. Indeed, that’s why the gay brownshirts have not come down forcefully on the Catholic Church, because they know what the real problem is and it would upset their agenda of gay marriage, gay adoption and gay scoutmasters.