Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Many abusers were "Latin-only, cassocks-only" priests

So states Cardinal Mahony...one of the questions posed to him was this:

What about the charge that the problem is a lack of discipline and orthodoxy in the seminaries?

His response:

Well, first of all that's one of the things that we still are studying. As you know, the bishops are conducting a study of causes.... In our case, many of the priests came out of the "good old days" -- Latin-only, cassocks-only.... Most of our cases did not come out of post-Vatican II, they came out of pre-Vatican II. (my emphasis)

Of course today, our screening process, our evaluation process, the fact that we take in older men, we don't take in guys out of high school or even grammar school -- it's a whole different frame of reference for the process of choosing seminarians. There's psychological evaluation, constant monitoring. We do everything we can to make sure that the people being ordained don't have a problem.
Perhaps a followup could have been:
Should there be a raising of concern, especially now, when we see more and more priests adopting a cassock or learning Latin? or,

How much time studying is needed to determine that the causes of the problems are really homosexualty and dissent, as proposed by Bishop Bruskewitz in 2002?

More here.

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