Mattingly: A Catholic dad’s fight against abuse

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2 responses to “Mattingly: A Catholic dad’s fight against abuse”

1. George Michalopulos

   July 3, 2010

   Fr Hans, the rot began in the Roman Church when American seminaries lowered their standards and allowed homosexuals admittance. Or if not outright homosexuals, men who had an aversion to normal sexuality, what Harry Coin has rightly called the “never-married celibate” clergy. That is men who recoiled at the thought of being pressured into marriage and looked at the priesthood as an honorable option out. We have had this problem as well that is why I cannot condemn the Catholic Church. In fact, we bear more blame because the aversion to marriage was never in the cards as far our priesthood is concerned. It certainly wasn’t mandated, and in fact, it could be said that it was looked down upon.

   If I may develop this critique, and speaking only for myself, I draw the line and contrast these worldly bureaucrats with authentic monastics, men who are spiritual athletes undergoing authentic ascesis. I find that bishops who are drawn from these ranks to be far more merciful and compassionate to their priests than the CEO-type bureaucrat who is sent from corporate to tell the people what’s what. (Talk about a loss of accountability!)

   I realize that I’m painting with a broad brush, but when I think about some of our worst bishops, men who have destroyed the careers and families of priests in their care or who make outrageous demands on them, the one common denominator invariably is that these bishops were never monks in the real sense of the term. What they were was the aforementioned clerical functionaries who knew how to the play the game.

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   1. Eliot Ryan

      July 7, 2010

      the rot began in the Roman Church when American seminaries lowered their standards and allowed homosexuals admittance.

      George, the rot began in the Roman Church long time ago …
      ON PRIESTLY CELIBACY AND THE PRESENT CRISIS IN ROMAN CATHOLICISM:

      O, Cardinals of America, may you speak with wisdom in Rome, for the errors of nine hundred years are coming home to haunt you.

      A married priesthood was maintained in the Orthodox Church, East and West, on the insistence of a fouth-century Egyptian monk, St Paphnutius the Confessor (feast: 11 September), Bishop of Thais. He had suffered the gouging out of his right eye and other torments in the persecution of Maximinian in 311. A strict virgin himself, at the First Oecumenical Council in 325, he rose up against a proposal in favour of a celibate priesthood and supported the holiness of married life. He foresaw the difficulties and temptations compulsory celibacy would bring. He urged the Church to maintain Her traditional condition that, once ordained, clergy could not enter into marriage. On the other hand, he urged that the Church continue to ordain already married men. The support of marriage by a monk should not surprise – monastics know only too well the weaknesses of human nature.

      Since the official and unilateral introduction of compulsory celibacy by Roman Catholicism some 900 years ago in the 1070’s, contrary to the decisons of the First Oecumenical Council of 325, what, honestly, have the results been?

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