Cardinal announces shakeup at Brighton seminary over possible improprieties

It was in a book about the history of Ireland. Each chapter dealt with a different decade over 100 years and ended in 2000 and the Millenium.

It was basically the rise and fall of Catholic Ireland.

The final chapter summed up the fate of the Church in Ireland. In it, it wrote about a priest who had a heart attack at a gay bathhouse in Dublin.

I'm paraphrasing here, but the last line of the book was

"Luckily there were several other priests on hand to issue last rites".

For years, we've heard of the "pedophile priest" scandal which means priests assaulting boys before the boys reached puberty. This was almost never the case, it was gay priest predators on teen or early adult men (seminarians).

For Cardinal Sean to just be "getting around" to something known for years is ridiculous. The seminary has been a gay playhouse for years.

It was nice for once to see Cardinal Theodore McCarrick defrocked for gay sexual abuse. He was the Cardinal who buried Sen. Ted Kennedy after Kennedy spent years making a mockery of his own religion. Kennedy was a clerk/typist in the Army, to take a space at Arlington National and have a Cardinal preside, is why people don't go to Mass. McCarrick made a mockery of our religion too, apparently.

Eventually they will rent out the Boston Garden and have Uber take us to Mass. No parishes. It would be much cheaper. Meanwhile Cardinal Sean is advocating for MS-13 and illegal aliens, while his flock is strongly opposed. Glad to see him finally get around to longtime, well known seminary sex abuse. Maybe some young men will join/stay there now that it's safe. Many men that I know left due to the "gay bathouse" situation.

For bigots like Fish, life used to be pretty easy if you wanted to bash gay people.  They use to be able to say “It's unnatural. God made Adam and Eve. Gay sex is just icky.”  It even use to be okay to say a person was “mentally unbalanced” not to be sexually attracted to the opposite sex. 

But about 40 old years ago, the American Psychological Association decided after a couple decades of study, that being gay wasn't a mental illness.  Since then the courts have started listening to the psychologists and the social scientists, and more importantly, more gay people have come "out" so that their straight friends don't think of them as "icky". 

Ergo, the bigots needed something to restore the "ick" to homosexuality. In the last few years, lead particularly by the nutballs of right wing religious groups and accelerated by Trump and his followers, the association of being gay with pedophilia is the last gasp of the anti-gay minority to try and get their way back. 

It's a classic straw-man argument.  Some pedophiles are men who abuse little boys—the same sex, after all—therefore the pedophiles are gay, therefore gays are pedophiles.  Of course, it's scientifically disprovable, but science doesn't carry that much weight for the type of people who want to believe this stuff. Once you regard a group of people as beyond the pale - immoral, criminal, perverted -  then you can believe them pretty much capable of anything. 

Bigotry thrives on credulity.  One accusation leads to another.  Contradictory claims are equally accepted.  All labels stick fast.   Gay men, for example, are weak and yet fierce; hysteric but calculating; silly and vicious.  Notice the same type of logic used in their racism and misogynistic statements.

The prejudiced, like Fish, are as various as human nature itself.  On the one extreme are those with a cut-and-dried view of the world.  They're wised-up, or so they think; they've seen it all.  They know the rules; they know which ones you've broken.  For them there is no confusion of gay and pedophile. 

On the other extreme are the endlessly shockable.  The realization that people can be attracted to their own gender is like a glimpse into a chasm.  Who knows what else is down there in the darkness.  Childish themselves, they're the self-proclaimed saviors of children.  They imagine gay people as the enemies of children, destroyers of innocence; propagandists, recruiters, seducers. 

For Fish, homosexuality is a spreading disease, a conspiracy of the ill. Fish is going to spread the word…few things are more likely to achieve this than an imagined threat to children.  Some do this as fanatics and some as frauds; all in all, it scarcely matters which.  The best salespeople are the ones who believe in their spiel, or at least believe it while they say it.