Meet Fr. Mike Papesh!

Here's the blurb:

Award winning author, Diocesan Director, Priest, Scholar Michael Papesh is a presbyter of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. He has served in parishes as parochial vicar, weekend assistant, principal, CRE and pastor; in seminary spiritual formation at the undergraduate and graduate school levels; and on numerous diocesan committees and boards related to priestly life and ministry. He also spent five years as a layman in campus ministry before ordination. He is author of Good News Parish Leadership from Twenty-Third Publications, and of Clerical Culture: Contradiction and Transformation from The Liturgical Press, as well as articles on clerical culture and liturgical presiding. He has won two Catholic Press Association Awards, one for Clerical Culture and one for Good News Parish Leadership. He is currently Director for Lifelong Catechesis, Diocese of Pueblo, Colorado.

Here's his non-solution for the problem with sex abuse, coupled with a non-diagnosis from New Oxford Review in 2002. But wait, this is why there's a vocations crisis, because these are, we're told, the cream of the crop:

By now you’ve probably heard every conceivable remedy — and quack remedy — for the priestly sex scandals.

Bet you haven’t heard this one: Writing in the Jesuit weekly America (May 13), Fr. Michael L. Papesh blames the scandals on “a repressive clerical culture” and says the remedy is for priests to get together for “forthright, discerning and free discussions about male sexuality.”

Fr. Papesh, who was ordained in 1983, takes us back to his years as a seminarian: “When a friend was propositioned by a priest one evening, my friend winked and we winked. Even when, after being plied with alcohol, I was sexually assaulted, I winked. My seminarian friends winked…. Before I was 19, I learned that when it came to sexual matters, the clerical culture winked.”

Fr. Papesh doesn’t like the winking, nor do we. But his remedy is zany: “open discussion about sexual curiosity, orientation, experience, joy, fear and anxiety” among priests.