Anger after Cardinal blames homosexuality, not Catholic church, for cleric sex abuse… A German cardinal has sought to blame homosexuality for abuse in the church even as Pope Francis urges bishops to end cover-ups
A German cardinal on Friday provoked anger and controversy when he claimed the Catholic church was not responsible for sexual abuse by its clerics, and instead sought to pin the blame on homosexuality. “What has happened in the church is no different from what is happening in society as a whole,” Cardinal Walter Brandmüller said. “The real scandal is that the Catholic church hasn’t distinguished itself from the rest of society.” A study commissioned by the German Bishops Conference and published last year found that more than 3,600 children were sexually abused by Catholic clergy in Germany between 1946 and 2014. But Cardinal Brandmüller claimed that only a “vanishingly small number” of clergy had committed abuses. He said the real problem was homosexuality and claimed it is “statistically proven” that there is a link between homosexuality and abuse. Society “forgets or covers up the fact that 80 per cent of cases of sexual assault in the church involved male youths not children,” he told Germany’s DPA news agency in an interview a few days ahead of his 90th birthday.
Cardinal Brandmüller’s outburst comes days after the Pope urged Catholic bishops in the US to confront the “sins and crimes” of sexual abuse by the clergy and “the efforts made to deny or conceal them”. “Everything we do risks being tainted by self-referentiality, self-preservation and defensiveness, and thus doomed from the start,” Pope Francis wrote in a letter to American bishops ahead of a spiritual retreat to reflect on the issue. “As we know, the mentality that would cover things up, far from helping to resolve conflicts, enabled them to fester and cause even greater harm to the network of relationships that today we are called to heal and restore.” Cardinal Brandmüller has been one of Pope Francis’ most outspoken critics within the Catholic church, and is one of four cardinals who have repeatedly challenged the Pope’s teachings on love and family life. The cardinal’s comments were swiftly condemned on social media and by leading German commentators. “What a shameful way for the Catholic Church to relativise guilt and defame homosexuals. Disgraceful,” Ulf Poschardt, the editor of Welt newspaper, wrote on Twitter.
So knowingly hiding, protecting and shuffling them around different churches is a blameless activity ? We already know homosex is a sin and leads to bad behavior…
William Ward
Done by other homosexuals
David Green
He's right tho.
Jack Fisher
Who was tolerant enough to allow them into the Church in the first place?
Who was modernist enough to not automatically defrock the sodomites and keep them in the clergy?
The Catholic Church has noone to blame but themselves for this.
Brody Jones
didn't the church allow faggot clergy in the church circa 1960s? Vat2?
Didn't the roman church recently have a little witch hunt against a priest who let his parishioners burn a LGBT flag outside his church?
Ryan Perez
Idk about that but, if true, big mistake It's better not to provoce those who are possessed by demons. The church's mission is to heal.
Landon Lopez
In defense of the church we only realised the fags we had once this scandals come to the surface. And that was too late. Every seminar in the US was already controled by gays.
Matthew Green
It never stopped them tbh as far as I know. Faggotry wasn't even a widespread thing, only the scum of society were faggots and were seen as low as prostitutes. But fags didn't realise that the world would like them, meaning they would join the priesthood having faith in Christ. Roman Church =/= Bishop involved in scandals. If you read story about that priest the Bishop was literally the head of the local mob. The guy was fearing for his life.
Michael Walker
Some clergy did, "The Church" has maintained and restated several times, Pope Francis has restated it at least twice I believe, that people with deeply seated homosexual tendencies are not to be permitted into seminary. The problem is in individual bishops or leaders who for various reasons, some well intentioned others not, are letting people slip through the cracks. It's taken decades for the ramifications to really come out and it will take decades before it can fully be healed, but reform is always slow. And it's especially slow nowadays because there is a shortage of prospective priests in many places, so some bishops are reluctant to clamp down harder on who is allowed into seminary for fear of having even less priests to work with.
