Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

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   You get drivel about aliens, abduction etc from all sorts of people, not just Christians – there are atheists, agnostics…

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   […] last time I had had occasion to write about Rowan County clerk Kim Davis, above, was three years ago…

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   “The curriculum had already drawn tensions among the county’s religious parents, with some worrying about appropriateness and arguing the material…

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   As someone who produced dozens of nativity plays as a teacher and a Sunday School leader, that title ‘A Gay…

FOR years, Bill Donohue, above, head of the League, has insisted that there are very few paedophile priests within the Catholic Church, and that the abuse crisis within the RCC was all down to gay “psychosexually stunted” clerics targeting teens.

So is comes as no surprise that Donohue blew a fuse when he learned that the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin has emphatically dismissed the claim that clerical sexual abuse is linked to homosexuality, labeling it a “serious and scientifically untenable association.” 

According to The National Catholic Register, the cardinal’s remarks were published as the preface to a new book, Il dolore della Chiesa di fronte agli abusi (The Pain of the Church in the Face of Abuse), that includes contributions from a number of Catholic theologians, psychologists and other experts on sexual abuse within the church. 

Parolin, above, wrote:

Homosexual orientation cannot be considered as either cause or aspect typical of the abuser, even more so when it is decoupled from the general arrangement of the person.

Donohue went into meltdown and accused Parolin of “being in denial” and just plain “wrong”, saying:

Living in a state of denial about this verity is commonplace, and not simply among secularists. High-ranking officials in the Catholic Church are just as guilty.

And he posed this question:

If there is no direct cause between being a homosexual and molesting minors, why are homosexuals overrepresented in committing these crimes? We’ve known, at least since Freud, that many homosexual men are psychosexually stunted—they tap out in their adolescence—and it is this immaturity that attracts them to adolescents.

Some, though not most, homosexual men express their immaturity by molesting minors. It is this that accounts for their role in the sexual abuse of minors.

We will never cure this curse in the Catholic Church unless we come to grips with the disastrous role that immature homosexual priests have played in generating the scandal. As Catholics, we are called to pursue the truth. It’s time more did so.

A 2011 study found no link between abuse and homosexuality

The Register pointed out The 2011 John Jay College of Criminal Justice study, which was commissioned by the U.S. bishops’ conference, found no correlation between homosexual identity and the sexual abuse of minors.

Nor did the report find that homosexual priests were more likely to abuse minors than heterosexual priests, which is consistent with the findings of other studies.

The outlet also pointed out that the organisers of the high-profile 2019 Vatican summit on clergy abuse—which gathered the presidents of every Catholic bishops’ conference from around the world—”flat out rejected efforts to suggest homosexuality is linked to clerical abuse.”

Image via YouTube

The Register also referred to a November, 2022 article written by Jesuit Fr. Gerald McGlone, a clerical abuse survivor and formerly the chief psychologist at the Pontifical North American College in Rome.

He rebutted claims of an association between homosexuality and abuse.

Today, we know that the majority of pedophiles and other types of sexual offenders in the United States are white, married, heterosexual males.

It would be illogical, a tad uninformed and potentially harmful to suggest that being white, heterosexual or married has a role in, or even causes, pedophilia or sexual offenses.

Image via YouTube

Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich, above, who helped organise the 2019 summit, dismissed the connection, as well. 

It is not as a result of being homosexual that you abuse, as though homosexual people are more prone to abuse children than straight people.

Cupich, too, was accused by Donohue as being “in denial” and talking “nonsense”.

Dononhue seized on the Register report in a bid to plug a book he wrote on the subject.

We live in a postmodern world where people make up their own idea of truth. It’s delusional. People are entitled to their own opinion, but there is only one truth. And in my book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes, I amassed over 800 footnote citations telling the truth about how the scandal unfolded. The role of homosexuals was central.

While most of the reviews of the book are positive—88 percent of customers gave it five stars on Amazon, one wrote:

If you are familiar with Bill Donohue’s writings then you know that he deals in opinions not facts, assumptions not data, and deflection not truth.

This sad attempt to minimize the indefensible crime of clergy sex abuse is an insult to the thousands of victims and their families. Better for Bill to have written a book of apologies rather than of apologetics for the sexual abuse committed by Catholic clergy and their enablers.

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