For years, Father Joseph F. Wilson studied the U.S. Catholic clergy register, following the career of the priest who once delivered an unforgettable sexuality lecture at the Dallas seminary.<\/p>\n\n
This mid-1980s forum was attended by all diocesan clergy and embraced by the local bishop, Wilson recalled, even though the speaker warned that the Vatican was reining in his ministry to gays. One urgent question from that talk: Did gay Catholics have only three true options \u2013 chastity, sin or suicide?<\/p>\n\n
\u201cThe issue of gay teen-agers did come up,\u201d said Wilson, now a priest in Brooklyn. \u201cHe said he would like to discuss how priests can minister to boys in this situation, but that this was not a subject that could be addressed rationally in the church. He said people got too emotional when discussing this kind of subject.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
The speaker was Father Paul R. Shanley.<\/p>\n\n
At the time, the Boston \u201cstreet priest\u201d was a trailblazer in ministry to sexual minorities. Now he stands accused of being a serial child molester and an apologist for man-boy love.<\/p>\n\n
The Shanley story is emerging in waves of legal documents and headlines from Boston to Dallas to San Diego. But, like so many other plot lines in the sex-abuse crisis, it is also unfolding on the Internet. These days, it\u2019s hard to ignore the role of email list operators, chat-room masters, \u201cweb log\u201d commentators and ordinary Catholics \u2014 with and without collars \u2014 who can click \u201cforward\u201d with a mouse.<\/p>\n\n
Wilson, for example, included his reflections on that long-ago Dallas lecture and a host of other issues in a formal letter to the organization Priests For Life. But the conservative priest also emailed it to a few friends, who sent it to some Internet lists, where it reached activists who posted it on the World Wide Web. And so it goes.<\/p>\n\n
Eventually, Wilson\u2019s essay surfaced in a media forum at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where it was quoted along with coverage from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Commonweal and mainstream sources. This is merely one example of a torrent of digital commentary that is now a normal part of Catholic life behind the scenes.<\/p>\n\n
Designated news media free-for-alls \u2014 such as this week\u2019s U.S. Catholic Bishops meeting in Dallas \u2013 will continue to produce policy statements that inspire close scrutiny and responses from Rome. Everyone pays attention when a crisis hits the global networks and newspapers.<\/p>\n\n
But is the Vatican paying attention to the digital chorus?<\/p>\n\n
During an Easter season trip to Rome, journalist and scholar George Weigel said he felt as if he had stepped into a \u201ctime warp\u201d as he met Vatican officials who were only then facing revelations and emotions that had rocked American Catholics three to four months earlier.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cPeople were not sure how much of this was real and how much of it was hype. People were unsure as to how much more was coming,\u201d said Weigel, author of \u201cWitness to Hope,\u201d the 992-page authorized biography of Pope John Paul II.<\/p>\n\n
Weigel was amazed. Clearly there was some kind of \u201cinformation gap\u201d between the U.S. Catholic establishment and Rome, he said. Also, the worldly European press had remained silent, perhaps due to a jaded view of American obsessions about sex. But something else was wrong.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cSuddenly it dawned on me that the Vatican is simply not, to this day, a part of the Internet culture,\u201d said Weigel. \u201cThere are a few people who take the trouble to go online every morning or evening. \u2026 But in the main, what we have become used to and what frames our emotional responses to these questions, namely real-time information and a constant flow of chat, commentary, argument and so forth, \u2026 none of this exists over there.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Wilson, for one, finds it hard to believe that such an \u201cinformation gap\u201d still exists.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cI know people in Rome have that attitude: We look backward over 2000 years and forward into eternity,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there are Americans over there who understand what is happening. \u2026 And this information has been sent to Rome for years, by mail, special delivery, telegram, fax, FedEx, Candy-Gram and however Americans choose to deliver information of vital importance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For years, Father Joseph F. Wilson studied the U.S. Catholic clergy register, following the career of the priest who once delivered an unforgettable sexuality lecture at the Dallas seminary. This mid-1980s forum was attended by all diocesan clergy and embraced by the local bishop, Wilson recalled, even though the speaker warned that the Vatican was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[158,439,648,903,932],"class_list":["post-1183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-catholic","tag-homosexuality","tag-pedophilia","tag-vatican","tag-world-wide-web"],"yoast_head":"\n