The homosexual nature of the Church’s ongoing abuse crisis...

The Catholic bishops of Spain released a clerical sex abuse report at the beginning of the month, based on testimony from nearly a thousand abuse victims and revealing a staggering 728 predators, over 99 percent of whom were male. The report also revealed that nearly 82 percent of victims were male.

This statistic shouldn’t be shocking, as it is consistent with clerical sex abuse reports across the globe, demonstrating that the chief and even the root issue behind clerical sex abuse is homosexuality.

In 2004, the U.S. Catholic bishops commissioned a now-infamous report from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which reported that 81 percent of clerical sex abuse victims were male. In France, a landmark clerical sex abuse report released in 2021 reported that over 330,000 children were abused by priests and other diocesan employees and noting that 80 percent of victims were male. In Ireland, stories are emerging of widespread clerical sex abuse in all-boys schools. An as-yet-incomplete clerical abuse investigation in Portugal likewise found that the majority of victims were male and that the most common site of abuse was in seminaries.

The homosexual nature of the Church’s ongoing abuse crisis is also manifest in members of the hierarchy. Perhaps the most notable example is that of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick. The one-time-archbishop of Washington, D.C., was exposed in 2018 as a serial sex abuser, molesting and raping children and adults, all male. McCarrick’s favorite hunting ground was the seminary.

Another prominent example of the homosexual infestation of the Church was Marcial Maciel, a Mexican priest who founded the Legionaries of Christ and its lay branch, Regnum Christi. Maciel was accused of abusing at least 60 children, almost all of them boys, as well as abusing young men at the seminary he ran. He illicitly fathered six children and abused them, too.

A more recent illustration is the case of Argentine bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, who was sentenced last year to 4 ½ years in prison for sexually abusing seminarians. A secretary reported Zanchetta to the Vatican as early as 2015 after she found gay porn on his cell phone. Shockingly, the bishop’s claim that his phone had been hacked was believed.

The homosexual infestation of the Church’s hierarchy isn’t relegated merely to abusers, though. The late archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, retired in 2002 after it was revealed that he had paid nearly half a million dollars in hush money to a seminarian with whom he had carried on a homosexual relationship. Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, former secretary-general for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, resigned from that post in 2021 after it was revealed he had been habitually using the gay hookup app Grindr, including at bath houses and gay bars. Polish priest Krzysztof Charamsa, who taught at pontifical universities before working for the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, came out as gay in 2015.

A Los Angeles Times poll published as early as 2002 estimated 15 percent of Catholic priests were openly gay. In his book The Changing Face of the Priesthood, the late Fr. Donald Cozzens estimated that 20-60 percent of Catholic priests are gay. And in 2013, a Vanity Fair report claimed that the percentage of homosexual Catholic priests is significantly higher than in the general population.

French writer and researcher Frédéric Martel estimated in his 2019 book In The Closet of The Vatican that nearly 80 percent of Vatican clergy were gay, and he confirmed that the late cardinal Angelo Sodano, once the Vatican Secretariat of State, was gay.

Martel, himself openly gay, explicitly linked the hidden homosexuality of Catholic prelates to the ongoing clerical sex abuse crisis in the Church. He wrote that “behind the majority of cases of sexual abuse, there are priests and bishops who have protected the aggressors because of their own homosexuality and out of fear that it might be revealed in the event of a scandal.” He further explained, “The culture of secrecy that was needed to maintain silence about the high prevalence of homosexuality in the Church has allowed sexual abuse to be hidden and prelates to act.”

As much of the Western world celebrates sodomy during “pride month,” it is worthwhile to examine the damage homosexuality has wrought on the Catholic Church, leaving hundreds of thousands of little boys and young men wounded, confused, and ashamed. The great Doctor of the Church St. Augustine once wrote, “It was pride that changed angels into devils.” As the Western world celebrates sodomy during “pride month,” it is worthwhile to examine the damage homosexuality has wrought on the Catholic Church, leaving hundreds of thousands of little boys and young men wounded, confused, and ashamed.Tweet This

It is also pride that has changed priests into predators. But Augustine offers a solution, too: “It is humility that makes men as angels.” As the rest of the world goes gaga over “pride,” Catholics would do well to emulate pride’s divine antithesis, humility. And there is no greater exemplar of this noble virtue than Christ Himself.

While the modern-minded Christian prefers to think of Christ as a sort of placating hippie with superpowers, Christ Himself tells us otherwise. Warlike, Christ proclaims, “I have come to bring not peace but the sword” (Matthew 10:34). Shortly before His crucifixion, Christ cleanses the Temple by violence, driving out those who are corrupting this holy place. 

So, too, St. Augustine tells us, are we to cleanse Holy Mother Church. When we see our fellow Catholics—and most especially the clergy—committing grave sin, we are to call them out. St. Augustine wrote, “Stop those whom you can, restrain whom you can, frighten whom you can, allure gently whom you can, do not, however, rest silent.”

To rid the Church of the homosexual infestation, the homosexual infestation itself must be condemned. The homosexual rot isn’t a novel development. But the sexual revolution and the resulting social normalization of sexual deviancy and degeneracy have worsened it and even led some, like Jesuit Fr. James Martin, to accept, embrace, and even promote it. 

Thankfully, we have the examples of saints to look to in dealing with it. As early as the 11th century, St. Peter Damian railed against homosexuality in the clergy, begging the question, “For God’s sake, why do you damnable sodomites pursue the heights of ecclesiastical dignity with such fiery ambition?” In 1049, the saint wrote a letter to Pope Leo IX, alerting the pontiff to the debauchery taking place among the clergy and issuing an altogether fiery condemnation.

While some (like the aforementioned Fr. James Martin, S.J.) complain orthodox Catholics can be too harsh in their rebukes of gay clergy, the example of St. Peter Damian says otherwise. He wrote that homosexuality 

pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the mind, expels the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart, and gives entrance to the devil, the stimulator of lust.… It defiles all things, sullies all things, pollutes all things. 

He has harsher words still for bishops who engage in homosexual acts with their priests:

Who can expect the flock to prosper when its shepherd has sunk so deep into the bowels of the devil who will make a mistress of a cleric, or a woman of a man? Who, by his lust, will consign a son whom he spiritually begotten for God to slavery under the iron law of Satanic tyranny.

Looking to Christ and His saints for guidance, we see that the antidote to the homosexual infestation, what St. Peter Damian called a “destructive plague” and a “festering disease,” is twofold: humility and courage.

Humility is the virtue which counters pride. Pride is the vice which enables bad bishops to sodomize their priests and the very next morning issue platitudes from the pulpit—and it is the vicious banner under which today’s “damnable sodomites” march. Courage is the antithesis of the cowardice with which homosexual priests and bishops hide their sins with one another and even with children.

This June, let’s cleanse the Temple.