[Backpage News] . . . During the height of the priest sex abuse scandal, world-wide mainstream media avoided reporting the homosexual root of the problem, but now, while no one's paying attention, the truth is reported.
-- From "Vatican: Gay `behavior' in seminaries declines" by Rachel Zoll, Associated Press 1/15/09
A Vatican evaluation of U.S. Roman Catholic seminaries in response to the clergy sex abuse scandal concluded that administrators have largely been effective in rooting out "homosexual behavior" in the schools, although the agency said it persists.
In a report U.S. bishops released this week, the Vatican agency noted past "difficulties in the area of morality" within seminaries that "usually but not exclusively" involved "homosexual behavior." The evaluators said the appointment of better administrators in diocesan seminaries "has ensured that such difficulties have been overcome."
The evaluators had no such praise for schools run by religious orders, which critics consistently condemn as too liberal on celibacy, homosexuality and church teaching in general. The report said "ambiguity vis-a-vis homosexuality persists" within institutes run by religious orders. The report also cites those schools for failing to fully adhere to Catholic theology.
Nearly one-third of the 40,580 U.S. priests belong to religious orders.
Past studies commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have found that the majority of known victims of abuse by priests in the last 50 years were adolescent boys.
The scandal added fuel to long-simmering debates within the U.S. church about whether seminary faculty truly adhered to Catholic teaching and whether the priesthood was becoming a predominantly gay vocation. There is no exact figure of the number of gay clergy. Estimates vary from 25 percent to 50 percent, according to a review of research on the issue by the Rev. Donald Cozzens, author of "The Changing Face of the Priesthood."
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