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POPSA Mother, a Sick Son and His Father, the Priest With little to lose, they are eager to tell their stories: the mother, a once-faithful Catholic who says the church protected a philandering priest and treated her as a legal adversary, and the son, about what it was like to grow up knowing his absentee father was a priest. “I’ve always called him Father Henry — never Father, never Dad,” said Nathan, at home between hospital visits. “I always felt he picked religion over me.” The relationship between Ms. Bond and the priest is hardly unique. While the recent scandals involving the Roman Catholic Church have focused on the sexual abuse of children, experts say that incidences of priests who have violated sexual and emotional boundaries with adult women are far more common.
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POPS The Object at Hand: His Majesty King Mongkut of Siam
It was there that royal emissaries found him one steamy April morning in 1851, when they brought the news that his half brother, King Rama III, was dead. Within days, the 47-year-old monk stepped from monastic life into the rich temptations and intricacies of the palace, with its inner city thronging with hundreds of women, its precincts patrolled by female guards and its life revolving entirely around his royal person. The holy man was now officially the "Lord of Life," the fourth ruler in Siam's Chakri dynasty, able to exert life-or-death control over some 5.5 million subjects. (As king, he banned the death penalty for monks who broke their vows of celibacy, putting them to work, instead, cutting grass for the royal elephants.) A spectacular coronation inaugurated the reign with great pomp. Brahmin priests sounded ceremonial conch shells. The new monarch, clad in golden robes, was carried off in a gilded palanquin. Even in that moment of glory, though,
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POPSPope Quits: Says One Billion Catholics Are Wrong Jesuit priest Hal Head heads up a group of former priests and nuns who made similar decisions to marry. "I'm very happy the Pope has decided to lead from the front in this issue," he said. "There are too many back door men among us," he concluded. Rank and file Catholics are uncertain how the Pope's resignation will affect local congregations, but many are certain the change was long overdue. Bill Phaser, chief of the Marmet, West Virginia Knights of Columbus group, told me, "Priests are real men, just like us. It's high time for all men to be real men, and altar boys to be terrified."
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POPSAPA Repudiates Gay-to-Straight Therapy The American Psychological Association might be breaking new ground and this is a welcome development, but, still, questions should be raised about what took them so long. Obviously, a latent social conservatism held back the association from conclusions long considered obvious by other thinking people.
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POPSFrolicking Father Cutie quits Roman Catholics to join Episcopalians Four times as many priests involve themselves sexually with adult women than with children, says A.W. Richard Sipe. Sipe, a former Benedictine monk and author of Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis, has studied celibacy and sexuality within the priesthood for more than 30 years. At any time, he says, 20 percent of priests in good standing are involved in sexual relationships with women. Moreover, he estimates only 2 percent of those vowed to celibacy achieve it. Some Catholics expressed sympathy for Cutie and said it was time to end the celibacy rule. Others said that, given the recent scandals involving U.S. priests sexually abusing young boys, and Irish priests raping, flogging and enslaving children in Catholic schools, they were relieved that Cutie had merely become involved with an adult woman.
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POPSEtiquette lessons for gay & transgender monks continues: Thailand has a very large and visible population of transgender men, and Phra Vajiramedhi acknowledged that it was difficult to exclude them from the monkhood but he hoped his course could at least persuade them to curb their more extrovert habits.
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POPSDarwin Quote Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: "The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts- and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal 'struggle for existence,' it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed- and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults."
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POPSFathers Without Borders “We experience the priest shortage, and rather than ask the question, ‘Why do we have a priest shortage?’ we just import some and act like we don’t have a priest shortage,” Father Holly said. “Until we face the issue of mandatory celibacy and the ordination of women, we can’t deal with the lack of response to the invitation to priesthood.”
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POPSPurity rings Why do some feel the need to put their personal choice on display? Who cares?
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POPSHistoric Figures That Were Celibate He spent years inventing things he never got credit for, like the light bulb and radio, and even believed he could control the weather. He also felt that sex was a drain on creativity and completely pushed aside any woman that was interested in him. Sarah Bernhardt, a famous actress, tried her hardest to woo him but he considered her to be little more than a distraction from inventing a death ray. When asked about marriage, he replied: “I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.”
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POPSFormer Catholic Priest: Dean elect of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. "The Venerable Dermot Dunne (49) is the current archdeacon of Ferns, and will succeed the late Very Rev Desmond Harman, who died in December." "So therefore there is no rejection, there is actually a celebration of life, a celebration of movement in the Christian faith because after all I'm not moving out of faith, it's the same Christian spirituality. It's just that I've chosen a different expression of it." He added that the task facing him in his new role was one of "integration" in relation to a cathedral that is "the beating spiritual heart of Dublin". Archdeacon Dunne will become the 35th dean of Christ Church Cathedral since 1539 when he is installed in May." ...IrishTimes
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POPSAsexuality Wow! It just gets more and more complicated, doesn't it? :)
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POPSCatholic Candid Camera Snares a Helpful Father I give this lecherous priest an A for effort and originality. Claiming that he was on camera, seducing a young boy for sexual purposes, was merely his way of learning more about homosexual behaviour is a valiant effort at self preservation. But a lie is a lie is a damned lie. The Catholic church, with its demands for celibacy is a breeding ground for frustrated, gay and straight men, who need to find some manner of satisfying their normal, human, sexual needs.
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