While Cardinal Bertone isn't always the most inspiring Secretary of State we've had, it's been hard to view him negatively after his accurate and long-overdue statement about the implications of homosexuality with regard to children. The behavior itself, in its mephistophalean and sulfurous overtones, eschews objective moral criteria and cultural norms. Norms like, children or minor adolescents should not be sexualized and are often protected from homosexuals by tenuously existing laws.
So, we're surprised that Damian Thompson would credit the Vatican Press Office with making a good call by erroneously suggesting that the Church doesn't have the competence to judge Homosexuality, and moving along to look forward to a new and more hopeful appointment.
Never mind that the definition of essences is part and parcel of philosophy, and that the Church has judged the essence of the Homosexual act as intrinsically disordered.
The people who write these press-releases suffer from the same specialization compartementalization as many academics in mental health do.
It's well within the moral compass of a homosexual person to be disinterested in statutory restrictions of who his/her next paramour will be. And it's not understandable why people get so upset about this, but if you live in a utilitarian world-view, pederasty, like prostitution, and a host of all kinds of other behaviors generally regarded with revulsion by most people, can be justified. What's the problem and why won't they just admit that?
Isn't flouting conventional morality and rebelling what being a homosexual is all about? They certainly don't hold much truck with monogamy, as current AIDS infection rates have shown, despite the wide availability of condoms. ehem...
Still, it's surprising to see Damian Thompson criticize Bertone, since it's self-evident from the statistics which are actually much more decisively shifted toward homosexuals in other surveys, more like 80-90%, that homosexuals are the ones doing the deeds everyone supposed to be so angry about. It's even more interesting that the Vatican interlocutor doesn't cite the source of that data, which appear frequently in these discussions.
Here's the unfortunate Vatican Statement below. Let's stop avoiding controversy and go for the truth:
(14 Apr 10 - RV) Director of the Vatican Press Office, Father Federico Lombardi, issued a statement today to respond to journalists’ questions following remarks by the Vatican Secretary of State made during an interview yesterday. Cardinal Bertone was speaking from Chile, where he is currently on a visit.
In his statement, Fr Lombardi said:
Church authorities do not consider it within their competency to make general statements of a specifically psychological or medical nature, but refer to research studies undertaken by specialists in these matters.
With regard to their competency in the area of the causes of abuse of minors by priests in recent years, they refer to statistical data quoted by Mgr.Scicluna of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in an interview that addresses this issue.
According to the data, 10% of abuse cases can be classified as pedophilia in the strict sense. 90% of cases are better defined as Ephebophilia (ie attraction towards adolescents). Of these, approximately 60% are reported as same-sex attraction and 30% of a heterosexual nature. Obviously this data refers to the problem of abuse by priests and not to statistics regarding the general population.
Link to Radio Vatican...
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