I just think that until we as laity in the church don’t demand a further discussion about these issues, this evil may go underground for a while but raise its ugly head once again. I find it necessary to continue probing the questions until we have truth forums like they had in South Africa….so we can get to the real truths…who knew what when and what they did or didn’t do. Only then will we be able to really set up systems that will help us have confidence that our children are safe in church.

It is all so terribly sad. It truly breaks my heart.

At an even higher level, you’re asking why there is evil in this world (hint:original sin). Find video/audio recordings by Father Corapi and watch/listen.

I’d love any insight from an insider as to how this could have happened.

I had a life…yes, a “Real Life”…long before I entered seminary. They don’t grow us in pods at the bottom of the ocean and float us up for theological training, ya know.

Fr. Philip, OP

The thing that perplexes me is the suggestion that a few years in seminary in an exclusive environment somehow over-rides the years of growing up in a “real people” family, going to school for 12 years with other “real people”. More likely, which I will touch on later, is that the conditions that make one a sex-abuser were there long before entering seminary.

The other point that sticks out to me is the idea that the laity should see the priesthood as not a superior, but different way of serving. Why in the world would we want to do that? I think I understand your point, but you may want to articulate it a little bit differently. The priesthood absolutely is an elevated and higher calling. Maybe what you meant to say was that priests, themselves, are not superior to anyone else? Clericalism is a real danger, but so is the non-chalance of diminishing the priestly vocation.

Finally, sex abuse is a sickening evil that is rampant throughout all sectors of our society. If you (anyone, not you in particular) investigate the support groups for victims of sexual abuse, you’ll see that all kinds of people from every different background abuse those around them. It’s time we looked into the soul of America - as a whole - and not single out the priesthood and seminaries.

The last time I noticed, the staff of CLS wasn’t an ecclesiastical court. You have to prove heresy, my friends. Lacking proof, this post is little better than a puerile attempt at name-calling. Y’all can do better.

“The trouble starts in the seminary, and gross sexual immorality and the protective network formed around that immorality is only one of the major issues that needs to be forthrightly addressed by the shepherds of the Catholic Church, as Goodbye, Good Men reveals. The fact is that many qualified candidates for the priesthood have been turned away for political reasons over the past three decades. Systematic, ideological discrimination has been practiced against seminarians who uphold Catholic teaching on sexuality and other issues; dissenters from Catholic teaching—including teaching on homosexuality—have been rewarded.

Goodbye, Good Men exposes this corruption: the deliberate infiltration of Catholic seminaries by what Andrew Greeley has dubbed the “Lavender Mafia,” a clique of homosexual dilettantes, along with an underground of liberal faculty members determined to change the doctrines, disciplines, and mission of the Catholic Church from within. Through the seminaries, liberals have brought a moral meltdown into the Catholic priesthood. If the sex scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church are to end, the individuals responsible for this moral meltdown must be rooted out. Only then will the “dark shadow of suspicion” be removed from “all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity and often with heroic self-sacrifice.”