This mirrors much of my early experience in the Catholic Church to which I, also, no longer attend. I'm a fair bit older than you so I dealt with it in the 70's and 80's... And the adults around me knew enough to tell the boys not to be found alone with Father McCreepy and to tell the girls (and wives) not to be found alone with Father McHandsy.

I too, have had the experience — more than once — of a priest suddenly up and vanishing from the parish with only flimsy rationale and hushed admonishments to not discuss it in the wake of the disappearance.

The Catholic Church views homosexual acts as morally reprehensible.Priests (up to 60 percent of whom are gay) preach about homosexuality being an illness to cure.

Spare some kindness for the broken. I don’t think this is hypocrisy. I think it is something far far worse and even perhaps beyond individual control: My feeling is that it was — is — repression redounding on itself; Many gay men and pedophiles¹, some of whom were victims themselves, entered into the seminary and the clerisy in the hopes that they would find a network of supportive celibates who would, at best, help them exorcise their demons and, at least, maintain the suppressive energy needed to keep their demons under wraps. When, in fact, the majority of them are repressing in this way the notion gets turned on its head… Or, put another way, hurt begets hurt.

A far larger number of heterosexual priests entered into the seminary in similar hopes of curing, or at least curbing, their lusts. Vows were broken and marriages upset. They had an escape hatch, however, and may have been freed their vows to live their sexuality. Up until very very recently this was simply not permissible for gay men and remains (I say rightly) impermissible for pedophiles.

1: I know that you did not mean to… but you came dangerously close to equating gay men and pedophiles. This is not new and many have made that elision. There is not a lot of study on pedophilia so we don’t really know its cause, but we do know it differs from homosexuality. The most popular theory suggests some form of arrested development (an actual term and not the TV show) in psycho-sexual growth in early childhood. This fits with the knowledge that those who are abused may go on to abuse…