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Friday, 2 September 2011

How the Catholic Church buggers up people’s lives: Part 963

A lesson in how to mess up the lives not only of those you persecute and hate but the people they care about comes in a moving story in the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

Ron Bates tells us how he felt he had to get married because of the guilt forced on him by the Catholic Church.

When Mr Bates was Master Bates, he was growing up in rural Minnesota as part of a devout Catholic family.

While attending St. John’s Prep School in Collegeville [he writes], I confessed to a priest that I was attracted to another boy who slept across from me. The priest responded that if I ever acted on that, I would go to hell.

As a sincere Catholic teen, I did not act on my attraction but started a harmful journey of self-loathing and personal destruction. I didn’t know what “homosexual” or “gay” were, but I understand “queer” and thought it was evil and perverted.

And so he eventually got married, but the sexual part of the marriage was repulsive to him, “and that was communicated indirectly to my ex-wife. That is the most unfair part. She was one of the innocent victims in the masquerade of ‘I'm straight.’ ”

You can read the story here.
Posted

1 comment:

  1. AnonymousFri Sept 02, 07:21:00 pm BST

    One of the things about the Catholic Church, specifically the Roman Catholic Church is their insistence upon being the arbiters of morality.

    If we sum up the churches past actions, along with the more recent actions we come up with this short list:

    1) The church persecuted Galileo for even daring to suggest that El Mundo wasn't the center of the universe.

    2) The concept of Limbo. The Catholic church has backed away from that too.

    3) The tug of war between liberalizing members of the clergy and the evangelistic members. I got to experience Catholicism in what could have been it's heyday. But then they elected that mutt JP II and all bets were off.

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