Homosexuality, the most discussed and least relevant topic of the meeting of bishops

Called by Pope Francis to deal with the crisis of badual abuse of children by religious, nearly 200 leaders of the Roman Catholic Church came to the Vatican this week to attend conferences on the responsibility, responsibility and transparency.

However, in private, those present insisted on talking about another topic that was not on the agenda: homobaduality.

"We spoke about it," said Bishop Ricardo Ernesto Centellas Guzmán, president of the Bolivian Bishops' Conference, at the start of the four-day special meeting with bishops and other church leaders, which ended on 24 February.

Homobaduality is precisely a subject that the conference organizers wanted to avoid, with the help of numerous investigations that concluded that there is no link between homobaduality and pedophilia.

"The central conflict is power," said Rev. Hans Zollner, a member of the Vatican's Child Protection Commission and president of the Center for Child Protection of the Vatican. Pontifical Gregorian University.

The abuse "can be heterobadual or homobadual," he added in an interview.

Even then, some Catholic bishops and some conservative religious media continue to blame homobaduality for the crisis of badual abuse of children by clerics.

During the meeting, even as organizers and participants constantly tried to focus on pedophile conversations, opposing views on homobaduality seemed to distract attention from the subject.

Jean-Claude Hollerich, Archbishop of Luxembourg and Commission of the Episcopal Conferences of Europe, was the moderator of one of the Francophone discussion groups of the meeting, which was attended by Catholic leaders from French-speaking African countries.

On Saturday, he said that some bishops continued to consider the problem of homobaduality as an alleged cause of abuse, because "some people have deeply rooted ideologies and will always respect them".

He mentioned that he and other bishops intended to change their thinking; "I tell them that the Prime Minister of my country is gay," he said. "And that I would never abuse a child."

For example, Bishop Rochus Josef Tatamai, President of the Episcopal Conference of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, commented on Saturday that in his English-speaking discussion group "homobaduality was mentioned" in discussions on the formation of new priests. .

Tatamai suggested that the "desperate" need to recruit more priests in Europe and the United States had led seminarians to be more lax in evaluating candidates and, as a result, several of them have been found to be homobaduals and abusers.

Pope Francis tried to change the focus of the debate, if not the doctrine of the Church, to adopt a more inclusive position on homobaduality.

In 2013, in response to questions about an alleged "gay pressure group" in the Vatican, he said, "Who should I judge?" Commentary that liberal Catholics celebrated and the Conservatives lamented.

However, despite the teachings of the Catholic Church that homobaduals "should be greeted with respect," they also refer to homobadual inclinations and acts and "inherently disordered" acts.

Some conservative prelates wanted to overthrow Francisco, because they consider that it protects a gay subculture that corrupts the clergy. Some said that their position undermined the traditional values ​​of the Church and sowed the seeds of badual abuse.

Some bishops of Africa, Asia, and Latin America say that by neglecting the supposed link between homobaduality and badual abuse, the Vatican ignores the fact that "no one is going to do that. much of ecclesiastical abuse has male victims.

This argument was supported by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who was the main responsible for the doctrine until Pope Francis forced him to resign in 2017.

Müller told German magazine Der Spiegel in February that "far more than 80% of badual badault victims under the age of 18 were young people who were at puberty or at a later stage," and argued that # 39; homobaduality should have been a central theme of the Vatican meeting.

Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, favorite of Pope Francis and organizer of the conference, said on February 18 that it was not true that "homobaduals are more likely to abuse children than heterobaduals ".

Asked about Cardinal Müller's comments, Cardinal Cupich told reporters that "it is important to admit the fact" that a predominant number of minor victims are men. But he noted that leading studies conducted in the United States and Australia showed that homobaduality per se was not a cause of badual abuse on a child and that a relevant factor was rather proximity or contact with minors.

Each day of the meeting, Catholic and conservative media reporters flooded the organizers with questions about why they were not dealing with the issue of homobaduality.

The short answer: because it is not relevant.

Homobaduality "has nothing to do with badual abuse of minors," said Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, chief investigator of badual crimes committed at the Vatican, on Friday, 22 February.

Despite this, conservative Catholics and remarkable traditionalists remained firm in their arguments.

Cardinal Raymond Burke of the United States and Cardinal Walter Brandmüller of Germany issued an open letter to presidents of episcopal conferences representing several countries participating in the meeting, in which they urged them to end their "conspiracy of silence "concerning the" homobadual propaganda epidemic ".

In addition, the conference coincided, perhaps for strategic planning reasons, with the launch of the book by French author Frederic Martel, In the Closet of the Vatican, which portrays the Vatican as "the only one in the world. one of the largest gay communities in the world. "

Those who attack Pope Francis "are very homophobic and most of the time lead a double homobadual life," Martel said at a press conference in Rome, stating that, as a homobadual man, he was able to identify who was homobadual in the country. Vatican

The launch of the book has been criticized by advocates for victims of religious abuse.

"Let's clear this up," said Peter Saunders, a British expelled from the Vatican's Child Protection Commission for criticizing him for his inefficiency. "There is no connection between homobaduals and those who abuse children, and I think it's a lie that has to be eliminated by the roots."

Calculations of the number of homobadual priests vary greatly, but at least they are considered a considerable percentage. A priest in Florida recently told the New York Times that one-third of Catholic clergy were homobadual, one-third heterobadual, and that third-party advice remained a mystery even for themselves.

Some activists fighting for equality in the church of people of all badual orientations said their message seemed to have been heard by church leaders.

Francis DeBernardo, executive director of the New Ways Ministry in Maryland, a Catholic organization that supports gays and bads gay, said in Rome that he was pleasantly surprised to see that the conference had "refuted homobaduality in as a cause of abuse ". He hoped the Vatican would "make a more definitive and official statement from the pope".

However, among the bishops who were in the same room as Francisco, the problem was not solved at all.

Upon entering the conference, Bishop Gonzalo of Villa y Vásquez of Guatemala said: "I think it is legitimate to ask if there is or is not a link between homobaduality and abuse."

Copyright: 2019 New York Times News Service