Monday, October 05, 2009

 
Every once in a while some good news emanates from the courts. Today the United States Supreme Court rejected a request to delay the court ordered release of thousands of documents relating to evidence and allegations of child abuse committed by priests. This particular request was made by the Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Although the cases of abuse by priests have been piling up for the past fifteen years or so, this has been the Catholic Church's worst kept secret for a very long time. When I was a student at Loyola University of Chicago in the early to mid 1970s fellow students told me of cases that they knew of where priests who had been pedophiles were routinely transferred to a different parish, free to practice in a new community. Some into boys, some into girls, all united in their interest in underage individuals, some as young as six years old.

Mostly The Church did not immediately transfer the pedophile priests, they sent them to some kind of church rehab facility first, where the offenders would be cleansed of their sins before turning them back into a blissfully ignorant society a few towns, counties, or states away.

I should point out here that pedophilia is, in my opinion (along with others who actually went to school to study psychology) a sexual identity as ingrained into a person's identity as heterosexuality or homosexuality. Pedophilia has the highest recidivism rate of all sex crimes.

At Loyola I met a small handful of former priests and nuns who left their various orders to get married, and I knew that they engaged in sexual activity before transitioning into the civilian world. One of them was one of my professors.

When I was working at Laury's Records in Evanston, IL, adjacent to the Northwestern University campus, one day I was approached by a priest, with collar, in conventional vestments. He looked around to make sure nobody else was nearby. He spoke to me just above a whisper, confessing to me that he was gay, and that he had a hot date that night. He proceeded to ask me for an album of romantic music that would set the atmosphere in the right direction. Without batting an eye I gave him "Touch" by John Klemmer. He bought the album and went away happy. I have no reason to think that this guy was into kids, but he was the first priest who disclosed sexual proclivities directly to me.

In my years in the theater I have worked with many gay, bisexual and transgendered people, male and female. Some of them have told me that they had affairs with active duty Catholic clergy.

We're all human, and we all have sex drives. The suppression of sex drive has been proved time and time again to be a very bad thing for the psyche. The Catholic Church has been at or near the top of the list of groups who have practiced suppression of human sexual nature. The chickens are coming home to roost.

The ruling does not mean that the documents will be coming out tomorrow or the next day. The Church is arguing that a shield should be put in place to hide the identities of the wrongdoers. This is out of a real fear of vigilante actions that could be perpetrated by a justifiably angry public. I do not condone frontier justice, but I do understand the desire for it.

I understand the Church's position. The need for the truth to come out however, and come out fully, outweighs the Church's position.
Comments:
"The need for the truth to come out however, and come out fully, outweighs the Church's position"

The first wholly new interpretation for 2000 years of the moral teachings of Christ is on the web. Redefining all primary elements including Faith, the Word, Baptism, the Trinity and the Resurrection, this new interpretation questions the validity and origins of all Christian tradition; focusing specifically on marriage, love and human sexuality, it overturns all natural law ethics and theory.

Using a synthesis of scriptural material from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha , The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Nag Hammadi Library, and some of the worlds great poetry, it describes and teaches a single moral LAW, a single moral principle, and offers the promise of its own proof; one in which the reality of God responds directly to an act of perfect faith with a individual intervention into the natural world; correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural evolutionary boundaries. Intended to be understood metaphorically, where 'death' is ignorance and 'Life' is knowledge, this experience, personal encounter of transcendent power and moral purpose is the 'Resurrection', and justification for faith.

Here then is the first ever viable religious conception capable of leading reason, by faith, to observable consequences which can be tested and judged. This new teaching delivers the first ever religious claim of insight into the human condition, that meets the Enlightenment criteria of verifiable and 'extraordinary evidence' based truth embodied in action. For the first time in history, however unexpected, the world must now measure for itself, the reality of a new moral tenet, offering access by faith, to absolute proof for its belief.

This is 'religion' without any of the conventional trappings of tradition. An individual, virtue-ethical conception, independent of all cultural perception, all in a single moral command, and the single Law finds it's expression of obedience within a new covenant of marriage.

It requires no institutional framework or hierarchy, no churches or priest craft, no scholastic theological rational, dogma or doctrine and ‘worship’ requires only conviction, faith and the necessary measure of self discipline to accomplish a new, single, categorical moral imperative and the integrity and fidelity to the new reality.

Trials of this new teaching are open to all and under way in many countries, colloquial evidence from discussion forums already suggest confirmations are taking place and probably increasing. For those individuals who can imagine outside the historical cultural box, who are willing to learn something new and stand against the stream of fashionable thought and spin, an intellectual and moral revolution is already in progress, where the 'impossible' becomes inevitable, with the most potent Non Violent Direct Action any human being can take to advance peace, justice, change and progress.

Published [at the moment] only on the web, a typeset manuscript of this new teaching is available as a free [1.4meg] PDF download from a variety of sites including:

http://www.energon.org.uk
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?