Nolan report has led to gay `witch-hunt', claims Quest

BY SIMON CALDWELL
A GROUP of homosexual and lesbian Catholics has criticised the bishops of England and Wales for pointing "an accusatory finger at gay priests" in the wake of child sex abuse scandals in the Church.
Quest, a pastoral support group. branded the recommendations of last year's Nolan Report as "harsh and unjust", and said gay priests had been demonised in the wake of clerical sex abuse scandals around the world.
In a statement released last Friday, Professor Timothy Potts, the chairman of Quest, described the provisions of the Nolan Report as an over-reaction by the bishops to a problem which he said they themselves had "greatly aggravated" by their "mismanagement".
He said it was particularly unfair to make any priest leave his parish as soon an accusation was made. "This seems to us both harsh and unjust," said Dr Potts, a former seminarian and a retired lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds.
"The presbytery is the priest's home; a teacher in similar circumstances, by contrast. would be barred from his school, but would not be turned out of his home," he said.
"At least it should be required that a prima facie case be made out against the priest before this penalty is
applied. Bishops who are chronically short of candidates for the priesthood can hardly afford to make it still less attractive by appearing to treat their existing candidates badly."
He said: "It is not a solution to this problem to take ever harsher measures against priests accused of making sexual approaches to children and to lift an accusatory finger at gay priests in general. On the contrary, this looks like a maladroit attempt to save face.
"If the bishops wish to regain the respect and confidence of the faithful, they must commit themselves to openness and truth."
The statement, called "In Support of Our Gay Priests", represents the second attack on the bishops in as many years by the group, which was suspended from the Catholic Directory of England and Wales in 1998 after it refused to amend its constitution to support Church teaching that homosexual acts were objectively disordered.
In January 2001, Quest accused the bishops of driving gays and lesbians from the Church in order to win "Brownie points" from Rome. It accused the bishops of serving a "vicious" and "immoral" doctrine of loyalty to "Vatican tyranny".
In Friday's statement, Dr Potts said: "Some observers have asserted that the vast majority of these cases [of abuse] consist of sexual approaches to adolescent boys, not to children under the age of puberty and, hence, that the problem is not strictly one of paedophilia but of homosexuality.
"Two Vatican spokesmen, indeed, suggested that gay candidates should not be admitted to seminaries and even that the orders of existing gay priests are not valid ... even supposing the contention is correct that homosexuality rather than paedophilia is at issue, it provides no warrant for a gay witch-hunt among priests and in the seminaries."
He added: "Deplorable as these cases are, they are still rare. They have only come to light recently, but many are based upon allegations of incidents that may have occurred as long as 30 years ago.
"If we were to assign each case to the year in which the alleged incident occurred, they would be seen to be relatively infrequent. Moreover, by no means all allegations are subsequently proved; where there is aprospect of financial compensation, there is an incentive to 'remember' incidents that never occurred.
"We do not say this to minimise the gravity of sexual approaches to minors by priests, but in order to express our confidence that such behaviour is abhorrent to the vast majority of priests and that they are in no way a danger to minors. We must not forget that sexual abuse typically takes place in the home."
When the Nolan Report was launched last September, it was criticised for the use of such presumptive language as "victim" for "complainant".
It also recommended glass-fronted confessionals and the establishment of a network of parish-based child protection officers under a national umbrella organisation called the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults (COPCA).
One parish priest in the North of England, who said he did not want to be named because he feared he would come under immediate suspicion of abuse, said the Nolan Report was deeply unpopular among the clergy of England and Wales.
"It [the report] doesn't provide for a defence of the clergy," the priest said. "It is not as if an accusation is investigated then a priest is suspended, it's the other way around. As soon as a complaint is received a priest is suspended. There seems to be a presumption of guilt on the part of the priest."
But Jim Richards, director of the Catholic Children's Society (Westminster), who had helped to implement the recommendations of the Nolan Report in the Archdiocese of Westmin
ster, said in his experience priests welcomed the Nolan Report because it protected children, supported parish life and had made priests feel less vulnerable.
"The Nolan Report has been seen as a being a sound foundation on which dioceses can further build their child protection procedures." he said.
"Since Nolan has reported, the Church has made great strides in setting up a national structure through COPCA and already the fruits of COPCA can be see in the more rigorous and also sensitive way in which the Church is tackling the very difficult and serious problems that are involved in child protection."