Your Excellencies: As a Catholic psychiatrist and psychologist who have treated a significant number of priests from various dioceses and religious communities over the past 25 years for same-sex attraction (SSA or homosexuality) and for pedophilia and ephebophilia (homosexual behavior with adolescents), we believe that our particular expertise and those of our colleagues in the Catholic Medical Association may be of help to the American bishops as they seek to create effective long term strategies to prevent the recurrence of the problems in which the Catholic Church in the United States now finds itself enmeshed. Many have pointed out that solving the problem of sexual abuse by clergy will necessarily involve addressing the problem of SSA among priests. Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, admitted at a press conference in Rome on April 23 the existence of an ongoing struggle to ensure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men. As the revelations of abuse have become public it has become increasingly clear that almost all the victims are adolescent males, not prepubescent boys. The problem of priests with same-sex attractions (SSA) molesting adolescents or children must be addressed if future scandals are to be avoided. In treating priests who have engaged in pedophilia and ephebophilia we have observed that these men almost without exception suffered from a denial of sin in their lives. They were unwilling to admit and address the profound emotional pain they experienced in childhood of loneliness, often in the father relationship, peer rejection, lack of male confidence, poor body image, sadness, and anger. This anger, which originated most often from disappointments and hurts with their peers and/or fathers, was often directed toward the Church, the Holy Father, and the religious authorities.
http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/2010/04/16/a-letter-to-the-catholic-bishops-from-2002/
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1 comment:
"our particular expertise"
Hmmmm. It was the "expertise" of those folks who got the Church into trouble in the first place.
Psychiatry is a "discipline (!!) that determines its methods by popular vote of members of its main organization (who bother to vote) every few years.
But he's right that this is an issue of men having sex with men.
Homosexuals who deem themselves to be "gay", that is, those who are proud of their disability (it shortens their lives by 20 year; CDC studies) are offended by the existence of those secretive homosexuals who are incredibly offended to be publicly known as being homosexual.
But they both still have the same disability. How they deal with it is the difference.
Male on female rape is often not a crime of passion, but a crime of violence. Thus the occurrence of young men raping elderly women.
No doubt the perpetrator in those cases was himself raped as a child, most often by a family member or friend of the family.
Most probably bisexual child abusers were also abused as children.
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