Catholics, Gays and Pederasts

[trailingvortex]

There has been much excitement in the last week or so about some high-up in dear old Mother Church claiming that gays had a tendency towards paedophilia (not to be confused with haemophilia, which incidentally does not mean being aroused by the sight of blood, or Philadelphia, whose founding ethos did not centre on brothers touching each other

Comments

[oxeador]

So, the solution to paedophilic churchmen may well be to preferentially recruit homesexual men into the clergy. Not only for the reason above, but also because they could have a sexual outlet in each other, rather than taking out their frustrations on innocent choirboys.

I do not know how seriously you propose this but it is often said that gays are overrepresented among catholic priests, and there are always stories of those who had a very active sexual life in a convent or seminary. It is not entirely unreasonable: a man who has been indoctrinated into the Catholic dogma and who discovers he is not sexually attracted to women may misinterpret this as a call to priesthood.

Personally, I think that a much more efficient way to to paedophilic churchmen is to get rid of the church, or at least of all its power and undeserved privileges. After all, it is not the fact that some priest abused minors that is worrisome, but the fact that a large and powerful institution reacted to it the way they reacted it. The church is rotten. If it did not have paedophiles among its priests it would show its rotten core in a different manner.

[trailingvortex]

Maybe so. The way the Church reacts to these things seems anomalous to say the least. I would suggest that that might be either due to a close-knit sense of mutual defense and support that churchmen feel ('my brethren good or bad') or possibly paedophilic tendencies may be so endemic that it is a matter of pederasts supporting pederasts. I suspect more the former than the latter. Or possibly, as you say, it's just rotten in more fundamental ways.

I propose it as seriously as any hypothesis without direct evidence is proposed. The precise opposite has been proposed as well, with less grounding, I think, so why not. Clearly there is research to be done, and the scientific method may tell us conclusively one way or another, or it might find no correlation.

But the consequent proposal I made to recruit more gays into the church WAS a joke. Not only because they would never actively choose to do so anyway, but because we have already established that in civilised western society it is generally wrong to discriminate against or for an individual because of the discovered variable tendencies of some arbitrary social grouping he belongs to (whether those groupings be male/female, gay/straight, dark-skinned/fair-skinned).