Behavior no longer considered deviant, equates with no more power. The RCC is pulling out all the stops to prevent the legalization of homosexual marriages because its future depends on it. If it doesn't succeed, it is doomed to atrophy. Their recent bid to attract Anglican priests upset by the ordination of homosexuals is nothing more than attempt to shore up their dwindling clerical numbers. Without homosexual priests, the church will deteriorate at an even faster pace spurred on by an extremely critical shortage of priests.
Portends for the Future
Someone once said, "Hope springs eternal." In the case of the RCC, we have to have serious doubts. Despite fifteen hundred years of evidence to the contrary, celibacy and chastity are still required as means of assuring control of the priesthood. The inhumanity that it has created has been catastrophic. The following is your assurance that nothing will change in the near future.
The pope was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith for some twenty odd years and during those years maintained the culture's status quo. He says he was horrified by the stories he read as head of the CDF. As pope, he has assured the maintenance of the status quo by appointing Archbishop Levada to his former post. Jesus predicted this well when he said, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves."
Since past behavior is pretty much indicative of future behavior, we need to look at Levada's record regarding sexual abuse to determine if he is a party to the culture that has dominated and perverted the Catholic Church over the past thousand years. Let's start and end with the case of Bishop Ziemann which defines the depths to which Cardinal Levada will sink. Ziemann combines the elitist culture with the lack of humanity we've been discussing. Bishop Ziemann was arrested while receiving oral sex from a priest in his own car. To make matters worse, Ziemann forced this priest wear a pager so that he could be summoned for sex at the Ziemann's whim. According to the priest's testimony, Bishop Ziemann had twice given him Venereal Disease infections. When Ziemann left the diocese of Santa Rosa, he left it sixteen million dollars in the red. Consider the following from the San Francisco Weekly.
"He has been protected by and remains intimately connected with three influential fellow hierarchs, including San Francisco Archbishop William J. Levada. It was Levada who presided over Ziemann's skipping away from Santa Rosa with criminal impunity after church officials refused to fully cooperate with authorities. Ziemann's mentor and chief patron is Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, whose problems with pedophile priests rival the scandal-plagued Boston archdiocese's. The other member of the troika is Manuel Moreno, who until his surprise resignation this month for health reasons, was bishop of Tucson, Ariz., and in whose diocese Ziemann was given refuge at the Holy Trinity Monastery... Moreno has a long and tawdry record in covering up for pedophile priests"
At a time when someone else might have tossed him to the wolves, Levada lauded Ziemann to the bitter end in Santa Rosa. The day Ziemann resigned, shortly after a lurid audiotape surfaced exposing the bishop's illicit relationship with the priest, Levada extolled his friend as someone who had done much to help the diocese. It didn't seem to matter that, right up until the revelation of the bishop's tape-recorded apology to Father Jorge Hume Salas for forcing him to engage in sex, Ziemann's personal attorney proclaimed him to be "a very holy man" and the bishop steadfastly denied any misconduct."20
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