Catholic Bishop Robert C. Morlino said it is time to recognize that a “homosexual subculture” among clerics causes harm to the Catholic Church, according to a letter Saturday.
Morlino, the bishop of the Diocese of Madison in Wisconsin, said that both homosexual acts and pedophilia must be recognized as a sin in the Catholic Church, the Catholic News Agency reported. The bishop noted that homosexuality is a causing a “devastation” to the well-being of the church.
“It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord,” Morlino wrote in a pastoral letter.
“There has been a great deal of effort to keep separate acts which fall under the category of now-culturally-acceptable acts of homosexuality from the publically-deplorable acts of pedophilia. That is to say, until recently the problems of the Church have been painted purely as problems of pedophilia — this despite clear evidence to the contrary,” he added.
The bishop also claimed that former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who allegedly sexually abused teenage boys, used his power for the “sake of homosexual gratification.” (RELATED: Grand Jury Report Details Decades Of Child Abuse By Hundreds Of Accused ‘Predator Priests’)
“It is time to be honest that the problems are both and they are more,” Morlino also noted. “To fall into the trap of parsing problems according to what society might find acceptable or unacceptable is ignoring the fact that the Church has never held ANY of it to be acceptable — neither the abuse of children, nor any use of one’s sexuality outside of the marital relationship, nor the sin of sodomy, nor the entering of clerics into intimate sexual relationships at all, nor the abuse and coercion by those with authority.”
The bishop added that Catholics should join him in offering redemption to Catholic deacons, priests and bishops who sinned with sexual immorality.
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