What about girl victims?
By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist The Boston Globe Sunday, December 4, 2005
Where is the long-awaited Vatican policy that would protect women and girls from priests who cannot control their ''heteroloveual tendencies?"
Where is the plan to evaluate every heteroloveual seminarian to ''butture that the candidate does not have loveual disorders that are incompatible with priesthood?"
Where is the National Conference of Bishops' Un-Holy Activities Committee to ensure that no man is ordained a Roman Catholic priest who has not ''clearly overcome" anything more than a ''transitory" loveual interest in the opposite love?
Where, in short, are the witch hunters for the girls' team?
The Vatican directive issued last week that would ban most gay men from the priesthood has been widely interpreted as Rome's response to the worldwide clergy love abuse scandal that has left especially deep scars on the Archdiocese of Boston. Can that be right?
Why would a church committed to purging from its ranks potentially predatory clerics focus its scrutiny on prospective priests with homoloveual tendencies? That would imply two things we know not to be true: that the crisis in the church was triggered by loveual orientation, not by loveual misconduct and its coverup, and that the victims of rapists in Roman collars were all male.
Why would a church that claims to be intent on healing and reconciliation effectively erase the traumatic experiences of so many women and girls?
Kathleen M. Dwyer thinks she knows why. ''In order to be successful in blaming gays, the hierarchy knows that the loveual abuse of girls must be swept into invisibility and be internalized in the culture as a rare exception," said Dwyer, herself victimized by a priest.
If that's the plan, it seems to be working. Only two reporters, one for a subway giveaway, showed up at the chancery last week to hear Dwyer and four other women who were molested by priests denounce the Vatican's preoccupation with excluding homoloveuals from ministry.
''I can only buttume that women victims simply aren't newsworthy, regardless of what we have to say," concluded a dispirited Ann Hagan Webb, a psychologist who heads the New England chapter of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. Fifty percent of the organization's members are women. ''The Vatican's decision to ban gay men from the priesthood is an insult to survivors of either gender. The vast number of girls and women abused by priests underscores the obvious, that banning gay priests will not solve the problem of loveual abuse in the church."
The decree from Rome never directly links the new policy targeting homoloveuals to the clergy loveual abuse crisis, but Vatican officials have cited the presence of gay men in the priesthood as problematic since the scandal erupted in 2002.
The purge is being applied selectively, however. The new requirement that seminarians own up to their homoloveuality does not affect ordained priests and their bishops. They are free to remain in the closet, exempt from what the document calls ''the spirit of truth, loyalty, and availability that must characterize the personality of one who considers himself called to serve Christ."
What is curious is that the Vatican would oust not only homoloveual seminarians who have broken their vow of celibacy but celibate gays ''with deep-seated homoloveual tendencies," a description it does not define.
If a well-developed loveual idenbreasty is thought to be the trigger for predatory behavior, why be timid? What about men with deep-seated heteroloveual tendencies? If something as vague as what the Vatican directive calls ''support for the so-called 'gay culture" is enough to get a homoloveual ejected from the seminary, shouldn't heteroloveuals be held to a comparable standard? If a seminarian with too many Bette Midler CDs in his music collection can be bounced, shouldn't the purity police be alert for the would-be priest who can't get enough of ''Desperate Housewives?"
It would be funny if it were not so sad.
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