. . . how often we were told that the Catholic Church sex scandals had nothing to do with homosexuality?
Yeah, there was an endless parade of former altar boys coming forward to say they’d been molested by priests, but this was in no way related to the accused priests being gay, you see, and anyone who dared suggest such a thing was a homophobic hater.
We await similar lectures from the same people, telling us that the boy-buggering priest problem is completely unrelated to this latest news:
Kevin Gray, a priest at Sacred Heart Church in Waterbury, Connecticut, is expected to turn himself in after being charged with siphoning $1.3 million from church coffers to pay for his secret gay lifestyle. . . .
Details from the Waterbury (Conn.) American-Republican:
[P]olice say a months-long criminal investigation has revealed the 64-year-old Gray was leading an extravagant double life that his parishioners never knew about.
That secret life included male escorts hired in New York, $200,000 in restaurant bills — including dinners at Tavern on the Green — and hotel stays in the lap of Manhattan luxury, expenses amassed by Gray and paid for with the church’s money, police say. . . .
Police say for the past seven years he cut checks from the church bank account to pay for designer clothes by Armani and overnight stays at Madison Avenue hotels, among a list of other expenses.
Although police believe Gray told his congregation he was battling cancer, detectives have determined Gray has never had cancer.
“I think that’s how he explained his absence from the parish,” said Capt. Christopher Corbett, a police spokesman.
So, Father Gray was actually Father Gay. Evidently finding the Waterbury altar boys insufficiently attractive, Padre Poofter instead decked himself out in an Armani wardrobe, jaunting off to the big city where he wined and dined and snuggled up with rented gay lovers in Manhattan hotels.
And this, we will be told by our enlightened betters, is completely unrelated to anything else that might cross our minds in response to the terms “gay” and “priest” and “scandal.”
Just checked over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog to see if the lecturing had begun. He’s made himself the most famous Catholic gay man in the world and his reaction? Crickets chirping.
By the way, I understand that certain “progressive” Catholics are now organizing a summer program for teenage girls, to be supervised by Joren Van Der Sloot.