Out to Court

Well there's been another (alleged) outing. This time a little (read: a lot) closer to home. Cardinal Egan, lord superior of the New York City archdioces, has been accused of being gay. So why's he being taken to court?

Hoatson [the accuser] claims... that, as leaders of a church requiring celibacy and condemning homosexuality, actively gay bishops are too afraid of being exposed themselves to turn in pedophile priests. The bishops' closeted homosexuality, as the lawsuit states, "has compromised defendants' ability to supervise and control predators, and has served as a reason for the retaliation."

This is a really interesting case and I'm kind of interested to see how this develops. On the one hand I'd love for him to be outted, causing a huge scandal by revealing that even higher-ups in the church can be gay, and hopefully repairing a lot of the damage the church has cause in NYC. On the other hand, I feel that if that does happen, this case could be used to justify publicly outing other individuals who don't deserve public scrutiny.

This could of course be just a huge smear campaign meant to tranish/destroy Egan's public approval. At this point, if the word "gay" preceeds the name of a priest he automatically is thrown into a huge investigation. My friend from high school a Jesuit priest whom I will affectionately refer to as Jazz has implored a number of times that people stop making priest jokes because they've gotten people in trouble, probably people he knows. He himself has never, to my knowledge, been accused.

Anyway, I don't know how recent these allegations are, but the fact that they're now being taken to court is rather odd. We'll see how this ends up. As for the evidence, they've apparently got a lot of priests willing to risk their reputations either to lie and bust this guy or tell the truth and have the same result. I honestly don't think they'd perjure themselves for something so serious (and self-incriminating.)

Now that similar allegations are written in a lawsuit, the landscape has changed. Now, Aretakis has the platform to try to prove them�and he says he's prepared to do it. He says he's accumulated a list of priests and witnesses who have agreed to provide "firsthand evidence of the sexual proclivities" of Egan, Hubbard, and Myers, if subpoenaed. Some have written statements relaying "homosexual relationships with these bishops," he maintains; others know people who have had the affairs.