a regrettably unthreatening threat

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Nov 19, 2009

In the wake of the Washington admonition, the Abuse Tracker informs us of an organization that wants to put misbehaving priests -- gay or straight -- back in the news. From the Village Voice:

ChurchOuting.org sets out to expose the hypocrisy of Archdiocese of Washington priests who go along with the church's routine emotional assault on gays while living lives of quiet desperation that involve them having gay sex themselves. … And they say their mission is not to drag these guys out of the closet per se, but to get them to work with the site in battling the church's hierarchical antigay stance and to fight for gay marriage equality. … So click on the site and start listing the multitude of priests YOU'VE had sex with. As their motto says, "Silence = Sin."

Remarkably, the organizers of this action claim to be bloodied by a recent pastoral letter of the USCCB on family life, which -- to pilfer a line from Fulton Sheen -- is like being stoned to death with popcorn. Judging from the site manifesto, however, their skin is preternaturally sensitive, as with the princess in the fairy tale:

As America grows closer to establishing full civil equality for LGBT citizens and our families, the Church hierarchy's attacks against the gay community have reached a breaking point. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, under the directive of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, has just passed a pastoral letter directing every parish priest in the country to work to destroy gay and lesbian families. More than the damage this will do to gay and lesbian adults who seek the rights and responsibilities of marriage, this antigay campaign will spiritually scar another generation of young LGBT Catholics.

So, will your pastor or bishop turn up in the ChurchOuting.org list and thence on the eleven o'clock news? Don't bet on it. This is yet another agit-prop bluff, whose point is to frighten the bishops into backing down from a Catholic legislative stance. The bluff doesn't consist in pretending to knowledge of sexual misbehavior they really don't have, but in threatening to use the knowledge in a public forum. We've seen this game played before, and where the churchmen hold pat the results are always nil. It seldom takes long for Lefties to realize that duplicitous priests do considerably more help than harm to advancement of the gay agenda by remaining in place and in good standing.

Look at it this way: if one of Rembert Weakland's boyfriends had torpedo'd him twenty years earlier -- in 1982 instead of 2002 -- who would have lost and who would have gained by his absence in the national media and at the bishops' meetings?

Exactly.