Priests, Passion & Power
The Dynamics of Celibacy & Homosexuality in the Catholic Church
reviewed by Leon J. Podles
Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church
by Michael S. Rose
Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2002
(288 pages; $27.95, cloth)
Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits
by Peter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi
University of California Press, 2002
(388 pages; $29.95, cloth)
The Changing Face of the Priesthood: A Reflection on the Priest’s
Crisis of Soul
by Daniel B. Cozzens
Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 2000
(168 pages; $14.95, paper)
The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality
by Eugene Kennedy
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001
(214 pages; $12.95, paper)
The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism
by Mark D. Jordan
University of Chicago Press, 2000
(324 pages; $25.00, cloth)
Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis
by A. W. Richard Sipe
New York: Brunner/Mazel, Inc., 1995
(224 pages; $28.95, cloth)
At the beginning of 2002, the criminal sexual misbehavior of a small group of Roman Catholic clerics caught the public imagination. The bishops who had tolerated that criminal misbehavior also felt the full force of public condemnation. A harsh light was cast on the sexuality of a celibate clergy. Men who remain too long unmarried fall under the suspicion of homosexuality, and unmarried clerics are no exception.
Are there disproportionate numbers of homosexuals in the clergy? Does this have an adverse effect on the life of the Church? Does the presence of homosexuals in the Catholic clergy have anything to do with pedophilia?
Michael Rose in Goodbye, Good Men traces the decline in the number of priests to sexual disorders in the Church. He claims that heterosexual, orthodox candidates are discouraged by many vocation directors and have trouble surviving the gay, heterodox atmosphere of many seminaries. The clergy shortage has been deliberately created by the clergy who control recruitment and seminary education to further their agenda of homosexuality, married priests, and women priests.
Leon J. Podles holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, has worked as a teacher and a federal investigator, and is president of the Crossland Foundation. He is the author of The Church Impotent (Spence), Sacrilege (Crossland Press), and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity (St. Augustine Press). Dr. Podles and his wife have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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