FLORIDA
Naples Daily News
By TERRY MATTINGLY, Scripps Howard News Service
June 11, 2005
If a Catholic child steals a candy bar, church doctrine calls this a small sin.
But if a priest embezzles a large amount of money, this act is much more serious — a sin that severely corrupts and threatens the soul.
Both of these acts involve theft, but Catholicism does not believe they have equal weight. They do not have the same "parvity of matter," noted the Rev. Donald Cozzens of John Carroll University, who once led a seminary in Ohio.
"It doesn't help to look that up in a dictionary," said Cozzens, whose recent books on the modern priesthood have generated both heat and light. "That's a theological term that describes the relative gravity of immoral thoughts, acts or behaviors. There are different levels of honesty and dishonesty. There are levels of language and cursing."
But when it comes to sex, there are no misdemeanors. Every "deliberate, willful sexual sin is, from the church's perspective, a felony — a mortal sin," he said.
This may sound trivial, but it isn't for Catholics who worry about their church in an age of turmoil, tragedy and scandal. Cozzens is convinced that this basic question about the relative nature and consequences of sins must be discussed soon, before Vatican officials begin a long-awaited "apostolic visitation" of American seminaries.
Cozzens is known for asking questions that fray nerves on the left and the right. In the past five years, he has described what he calls a thriving "gay subculture" in some seminaries. He noted that most cases of clergy sex abuse have involved "ephebophilia" with under-aged boys, not "pedophilia" with prepubescent children. He has detailed the impact of plunging Catholic birth rates — below two children per family — on parental attitudes about their children taking holy vows.
Now he is convinced that teachings about the "parvity of matter" are making it harder to tell the healthy seminarians from the dangerous ones. It is almost impossible to have candid conversations about sexuality, he said.
Posted by kshaw at June 11, 2005 07:05 AM