CANADA
LifeSite
TORONTO, September 9, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In 2002, the US bishops were hearing evidence from victims of homosexual priestly sexual abuse.
Michael Bland, formerly a priest in the Friar Servants of Mary or “Servite” order, without naming him, told them about the spiritual and psychological damage done to him by a priest of the Servites. Bland is now a clinical psychologist helping abuse victims for the Archdiocese of Chicago and the man who molested him when he was a teenager, Dr. John M. Huels, is scheduled to give a lecture to the Canadian Canon Law Society at their annual meeting in Saskatoon, September 27th.
“The priesthood lost me, but kept the perpetrator,” Bland told the bishops.
Indeed, Huels, who now lives in Chicago, far from being censured is still, in the Catholic Church in Canada at least, an honored speaker. Huels’ September lecture is titled, “Recent Roman Documents - exception of Instruction Dignitas Connubii,” (the recent Vatican document criticising the runaway rate of marriage annulments in the western Church.)
Huels history could perhaps be taken as an illustration of why the Church in Canada has a reputation of being especially tolerant of active homosexuals in the priesthood. Canadian Catholics complain frequently of Canadian church leadership toleration, if not approval, of priestly dissent on moral and doctrinal issues and of the generally acknowledged state of disarray in the liturgy, a problem that Pope Benedict XVI has identified as the first cause of the huge loss of faith in the Church since the 1960’s.