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We Told You So: The Homosexual Network Twenty Years Later
Free Congress Foundation | February 8, 2002 | Connie Marshner
Posted on Wednesday, April 17, 2002 7:22:31 PM by Slyfox
Don't you hate people who say "I told you so"? Well, with apologies in advance, hold your horses. Here at Free Congress Foundation, we told you so. The year was 1982; the book was The Homosexual Network: Private Lives and Public Policy. The author was Enrique Rueda, a Catholic priest then in the diocese of Rochester, New York. The book had 522 footnoted pages of text, with another 160 pages of appendices and indexes. It not only analyzed the ideology of homosexuality, but it documented the spread of that ideology through religious organizations, including the Catholic Church, and traced the funding of it. If you had read that book you would not have been surprised by the revelations that have been coming out of Boston in the recent trial of Fr. Geoghan, on whose behalf the Archdiocese of Boston by 1998 had settled 50 pederasty cases while another 84 were pending. Your jaw would not drop in disbelief when you read, as you might have in Crisis magazine last October, that every one of the 188 Catholic dioceses in the country have faced or are facing claims of child sex abuse. In the book, Fr. Rueda detailed - with meticulous footnotes - what, already then, was the growing network of "support groups", counseling referrals, newsletters, and organizations of homosexuals and pro-homosexuals in the churches of the United States, including the Catholic Church. The network was particularly effective within the Catholic Church: at one point in the late 70's, a key staffer at the Office of Public Affairs and Information of the U. S. Catholic Conference/National Conference of Catholic Bishops was a leader of the Washington, D.C., homosexual movement as well as president of Dignity, the pressure group which seeks to force the Catholic Church to relate to homosexuals according to the tenets of the homosexual ideology. The name of the fair city of Boston appears frequently in Fr. Rueda's pages, giving it the dubious distinction of being the birthplace of NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association (an interesting coincidence in light of subsequent developments). Also interesting to note is that one Fr. Paul Shanley attended the NAMBLA convention in Boston, supposedly on behalf of the then-Cardinal Archbishop, Medeiros. In the early days of "gay liberation", 1972, a National Coalition of Gay Organizations adopted a "Gay Rights Platform". This list of demands included one to repeal all laws governing the age of sexual consent - a matter of some obvious concern to pederasts. "Homosexuality is no sicker than heterosexuality," proclaimed the Third Number of the NAMBLA Journal, "What is sick is society's efforts to supress [sic] and persecute it." In those days, every type of sexual activity was considered equally deserving of "liberation". As pederast theoretician David Thorstad proclaimed it in the pages of Boston's Gay Community News in January, 1979: "We should present ourselves not merely as defenders of our own personal rights to privacy and sexual expression, but as the champions of the right of all persons - regardless of age - to engage in the sexuality of their choice. We must recognize homosexual behavior for what it is - a natural potential of the human animal." By 1998 Thorstad was blasting the gay movement because it had "retreated from its vision of sexual liberation, in favor of integration and assimilation into existing social and political structures... increasingly sought to marginalize even demonize cross-generational love." Translation: the tacticians who won the internal battles, and therefore prevailed, realized that "We are everywhere" was a slogan that could sell. Man/boy love wouldn't sell. Call it an "incremental" strategy, if you will. It is going to be a long, long struggle to re-establish in mainstream Catholic culture an understanding and acceptance of what the Catholic Catechism teaches on homosexual acts - namely, that they are intrinsically disordered, and under no circumstances can be approved, while at the same time men and women who have homosexual tendencies must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. A generation ago the first part of that was not disputed. It might be said that some of the trouble in Boston right now could be traced to successive bishops' going overboard on the second part, on behalf of one of their priests. After all, priests are in the business of forgiving and healing people. It is understandable that a bishop would err in favor of thinking the best about and being quick to forgive his priests. The homosexual movement has been very successful at removing the sensitivity and stigma formerly associated with non-heterosexual attractions. The whole sexual liberation movement, hetero as well as homo, has expertly manipulated public opinion for close to half a century. People are so afraid of "judge not, lest ye be judged" that they feel they must tolerate anything. Had these de-sensitizations not been so successful, Fr. Geoghan might not have gotten away with as much as he did for as long as he did. According to the Boston Globe Online, the rector of O'Connell Seminary made a note in 1954 that John J. Geoghan showed a "very pronounced immaturity." Nonetheless, in 1962, he was ordained. At his very first assignment, a senior priest complained that young Fr. Geoghan brought boys into his bedroom. It took until 1995 for the abuse that occurred then to be documented, and nobody really knows how much more has taken place since. Whereas in 1954 it was politically correct for seminary authorities to look hard at a young man's sexual orientation, fifteen years later it was politically correct to be "open" to "new expressions". And thirty years later, in many Catholic seminaries and dioceses, it was positively retrograde to disapprove of homosexuality or to acknowledge its ties to pederasty. It is worth remembering that the 1960's and 70's were years of total turbulence in the Roman Catholic Church, with order only gradually becoming visible in the 1980's and 90's. Part of the zeitgeist of the 60's was "don't trust anybody over 30". Well, people under 30 hadn't had much experience with priestly pederasty, thanks to the vigilance of people over 30. But inherited wisdom was out of fashion, and the cautions of older and wiser men were laughed at. Maybe the old ways weren't perfect - but was the new one? Under which system were more innocent people injured? The families of those victimized in Boston are probably wishing some things hadn't gone quite so out of fashion. Some might be wishing that somebody in the Church had been a bit more "repressive" of Fr. Geoghan a lot sooner. Some even might be wishing that the right person in the Archdiocese of Boston had read Fr. Rueda's book and heeded it. Connie Marshner is director of the Free Congress Foundation's Center for Governance. For media inquiries, call Steve Lilienthal 202.204.5304 For other questions or comments, contact Angie Wheeler awheeler@freecongress.org
TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: homosexuals
To: Slyfox
Boston was not the first. Back in the Seventies (I think) or the Eighties, the San Antonio Archdiocese was scandalized by the same problem. The Bishop was sending these creeps to a private sanitarium run by the Church for homosexual priests somewhere out in New Mexico.
To: wildbill
I think they were sent to Santa Fe, if I remember correctly.
To: Slyfox
and the cautions of older and wiser men were laughed at
To: Slyfox
Think tank writers, like other scholars, are expected to cite the publisher, especially when the book is pivotal to the essay. Also, unless Free Congress published the book or a related position paper back in 1982, it's inaccurate to claim "we told you so."
To: Slyfox
Part of the zeitgeist of the 60's was "don't trust anybody over 30". Well, people under 30 hadn't had much experience with priestly pederasty, thanks to the vigilance of people over 30. But inherited wisdom was out of fashion, and the cautions of older and wiser men were laughed at. Maybe the old ways weren't perfect - but was the new one? Under which system were more innocent people injured? I blame that older & wiser generation. I don't remember anyone from that generation actually explaining to me why their well-refined rules of behavior were the way they were. They just handed down the rules as gospel, made us obey them, and that was that. It's taken me a long time to recognize that a lot of the restrictions & standards they had made some sense after all. If I had understood them earlier, I'd have respected them more, and would've been much more able to sort out the actual good advice from the mere unthinking hidebound traditions. (Instead of rejecting it all out of hand and having to re-learn everything myself.)
To: Slyfox
I lived in a Catholic neighborhood in the early and mid 70s, pederasty by the clergy was already an open secret, anytime somebody got transfered in or out everybody started pulling their string to find out if they had done anything. To pretend that this is a recent problem is to live in complete ignorance of history. The only thing recent is that we're finding out that things weren't as bad as some had feared... they're worse.
To: Slyfox
Clearly,the hippie/militant/deviancy/"anyhing-goes" explosion and rebellion against America's traditional values and decency that began in the late 60s has bore many poisonous fruits....The infestations of generational abhorrant behavior will prove to be a wide-spread cancer upon the church and American society in general.
To: wildbill
The Diocese of Lafeyette, La., is famous for pedophile Gilbert Gauthe. He was abusing during the seventies, and his abuse became known during the late seventies, early eighties, I believe. The bishop, of course, just moved him around.
Comment #10 Removed by Moderator
To: rudeboy666
Read my post again, Sparky.
To: jennyp
When were you in school? After Vatican II there seemed to be a terminal rejection of what was tried and true. I remember that before Vatican II it was possible to go to any parish and ask the same question and get the same answer. If fact, when the Baltimore Catechism was thrown out it took at least 10 years before it was replaced with anything in hardback. So, it depends on which 'older and wiser' generation you are referring to. The late sixties and through the seventies? Or the one they mean in this article, the pre-Vatican II 'older and wiser'?
To: Slyfox
The confusion of V2 may play a role. But of course, until V2, the Syllabus of Errors was official church teaching, which held that reporting criminal acts by priests to secular authorities was grounds for excommunication. For all the ills of our age, getting rid of that nonsensical idea has been a step forward, not backward.
To: Slyfox
When you research the incredible power that Joseph Cardinal Bernardin obtained, and see the pattern that emerges from understanding his rise to power and what he did when he got there. You understand why, when you look around, the church in the US today is as emaciated spiritually, as a gay man dying from AIDS. V's wife. (there are many faithful within the church, however)
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