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Well, yes…….

The Pope has allegedly said there are too many homosexual men entering Italian seminaries and they should be kept out, claiming there is “too much faggotry” among those training for the priesthood.

Not just the Italian seminaries either. It’s a more general complaint across the Church.

Up for debate was a previous regulation issued in 2005, which banned men from entering seminaries if they practised homosexuality, had “deeply rooted” homosexual tendencies or supported “gay culture”.

Being gay isn’t a problem in the slightest. But priests are supposed to – however sensible this is or not – subsume their active sexuality. Like, you know, not have sex? Which is where the problem comes in. Not chasing the nuns around the cloister is easy enough to observe and or enforce. Wanna come to my cell in the seminary for a little “prayer” is more difficult.

23 thoughts on “Well, yes…….”

  1. Wacky molestation adventures aside, the other issue is that they network and promote each other. So if you have loads of homosexuals in your org, the gay mafia is exceedingly likely to take over.

    As we’re seeing in British politics, which is Bum Boy Central.

    In the 2019 book In the Closet of the Vatican, the French author Frédéric Martel claimed that 60 to 70 per cent of trainee priests in Italian seminaries were gay. He suggested they were conflicted over their homosexuality due to conservative upbringings and hoped to avoid the issue by starting a celibate life

    Narp. Don’t believe this for a second. In 1980 it might still have been true, but as the Pope mused, faggotry isn’t closeted anymore, there’s no social penalty for being gay in Western countries because our societies aren’t conservative in the slightest. I feel confident in saying young Italian gays aren’t joining the priesthood in 2024 so that nobody notices they don’t have girlfriends.

    Not that it’s a good idea to hire people who are trying to avoid dealing with their own sexual issues and hangups. That’s not a healthy thing.

  2. ‘Wanna come to my cell in the seminary for a little “prayer” is more difficult.’

    Also vigorously active on the Catholic wing of the C of E.

    We lived for two years in a fairly Catholic theological college about 10 years ago while my wife was training for the Anglican priesthood. Up until then, I thought I was a man of the world, but sometimes I needed things explaining to me.

  3. ‘Wanna come to my cell in the seminary for a little “prayer” is more difficult.’

    Simples. Change the spelling. “Seminary” becomes “semenary”. Problem solved.

  4. I feel confident in saying young Italian gays aren’t joining the priesthood in 2024 so that nobody notices they don’t have girlfriends.

    Maybe they are nonces?

  5. Like our host, I went to a Roman Catholic public school (a better one, natch – my parents took me to Downside but turned them down).

    There was zero homosexuality among the boys as far as I was or am aware, in fact we were all frantically and robustly heterosexual, but we had several (I think predatory) homosexuals in teaching roles at both my prep school and the main gaff.

    One chap, a prep school latin master of famous family, was the vilest and most irrationally violent psychopath I have ever encountered, and I’ve known a few.

    He had favourites – always the smallest, ‘prettiest’ boys – and he used to invite them to his rooms for extra tuition. Utter scum.

    He was laity. I am not aware of any of the clergy side being that way inclined, bar one, a Swiss-English brother who got a kick out of telling us filthy stories after lights out, and would linger, totally silent, long afterward in order to catch and thrash any boy who dared to get out of bed. We should have filled the fucker in and lobbed him out of the dormitory window.

    He is now a priest at the same school.

    We had one priest who was our discipline master and dished out floggings like sweets, and from whom every drop of human kindness appeared to have been squeezed. Horrible, horrible cunt who had no business in Christianity.

    But they were the only two across two schools, for many years, that I knew of. Most of the religious were very kind and gentle; one or two were genuinely great men in my view.

    As Steve says, I don’t think there’s much need to enter the priesthood now, and the power it once conveyed has long evaporated. I very much doubt any unwilling altarboys are predated upon these days.

    He’s right that it’s the networks they build which are important – a small cadre inextricably linked and entwined is often disproportionately powerful in a larger body see eg islamists.

    The really weird thing about this is that this pope of all popes is speaking about this. Perhaps he’s going senile.

  6. He’s simply trying to free up space for those further along the alphabet spectrum. Merely being gay is so passé nowadays that even the church has noticed.

    The day he so much as lifts a finger to stop the rainbow takeover is the day I’ll take him seriously.

  7. “He is then believed to have continued by saying in Italian that there was, in the Church, already too much of an air of frociaggine, which translates as a highly offensive slur.”

    The BBC are up in arms about this. Offensive slurs are, of course, the worst thing that can possibly befall one. Far worse than being raped by a paedophile in authority, or going to hell because one abuses holy orders for lustful purposes.

  8. Blimey, Interested. Downside must be really crap.
    At least my teachers were merely lazy and thick, with one or two exceptions.

  9. Downside did have a kiddie fiddler problem in the late 1960s. One teacher tried it on. Hmaster found out, fired him, wrote to all other (likely) schools he might try to move to and said “Don’t”. No problems for 25 years – then the later instances of problems.
    #
    It’s the one getting in which shows that it’s open season so more do.

  10. The Meissen Bison

    There was Beaumont, back in the mists of time, for left-footed learning and Stonyhurst which might have enjoyed Interested’s parents’ custom.

    For my part, I went to a CofE establishment where everyone had to attend chapel including jews, animists, buddhists and so on with only the catholics being exempted from so doing which was ace.

    Prep school was far richer in the wrong-un to pupil ratio. With Labour’s promise of VAT on private school fees you have to wonder where they will all hole up, so to speak.

  11. Off topic – On a typical wet and miserable Bank Holiday Monday I ended up with nothing better to do than watch a series of YouTube videos where extended sections of the Post Office/Horizon hearing were shown. However bad you might have thought it was from what you have seen, it’s truly far, far worse and I’d recommend watching. Some bloke called Charlie Fleming has done a pretty good job on his channel of cutting down the live transmissions (where they search for documents or pause for some reason) so, say, 70 minutes of transmission is cut to 55 minutes of ‘action’.

    Star of the show is Jason Beer, the KC for the Tribunal itself. Patient, polite, forensic and absolutely brutal. Not far behind him is the Chairman, Sir Wyn Williams whose BS detector is tuned to a fine pitch.

    You’ll need more than a few hours to really appreciate it. If nothing else, the whole of Beer v Vennells is the obvious highlight but Beer v Jarnail Singh isn’t far behind.

  12. On the subject of paedos, I liked the article on Joey Barton’s defamation of (Saint) Jeremy Vine, It also taught me new rhyming slang – ie “bacon”.

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/may/24/joey-barton-calling-jeremy-vine-a-bike-nonce-was-defamatory-judge-rules

    Lawyers acting for Vine also argued that a hypothetical reader “would appreciate that ‘bacon’ was short for the rhyming-slang expression ‘bacon bonce’ meaning ‘nonce’, referring to one of the tweets which called Vine a “bike nonce” and “raving bacon”.

    Other tweets by Barton referenced Vine’s views on the Covid vaccine, called Vine a “weasel” and “government shill” and said, “if you see this fella by a primary school call 999”.

    Upon learning he was facing legal action, Barton posted on X: “Fella who served me the papers was sound. Told me he completely agreed with me and to keep going.”

  13. @philip

    Blimey, Interested. Downside must be really crap.

    I was being a bit tongue in cheek – Downside is or was a very good school.

    My options were Downside, Ratcliffe College, Princethorpe, Stonyhurst or Ampleforth. My dad would have sent me to Rugby, but my mother was a staunch left-footer.

    I won’t say which one I chose because I guard my anonymity reasonably carefully, but it wasn’t in Somerset

  14. I drive past Ampleforth more than occasionally, it’s very nice architecturally. It used to have its own railway line, which boosts my opinion of it. 🙂

  15. Ampleforth railway station, served the village of Ampleforth, in the Northern English county of North Yorkshire. It was located on a line which ran from Pickering to the East Coast Main Line at Thirsk. The station was close to the noted Ampleforth College although passengers for the college used the station at Gilling further east as this was more convenient for onward transfer to the college.

    Gilling station further east, which was also the terminus for the Ampleforth College Tramway.

  16. The boss of the vicar in Vienna is the Bishop of Gibraltar and Europe. My missus met a past one and described him as a ‘screaming queen’.

  17. Ottokring said:
    “The boss of the vicar in Vienna is the Bishop of Gibraltar and Europe. “

    Technically the Bishop of Gibraltar ‘in’ Europe, not ‘and’, since parts of the Church of England are uncomfortable with claiming episcopal jurisdiction over anywhere that isn’t or wasn’t governed by Britain. Although in practice yes, he’s the boss of the various Anglican chaplains around Europe.

  18. The Viennese parish used to include a lot of the Eastern Bloc. Previous vicars used to smuggle bibles and prayet books across the Iron Curtain.
    I haven’t kept track, so don’t know if there are now Anglican churches in CzRep or Hungary etc.

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