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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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What's your take on or the news on the pink mafia? Long ago, people often discussed it and but I've not heard anything in over 5 years. Googling, I found articles from 10+ years ago. Is the church full of such things? http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-pink-mafia.html

Well, a lot of them are dead, senile, or purged. There really were gay lobbies(or corruption networks) going on, but it seems like mostly at the level of individual dioceses or regions. And there’s also a lot less of them these days. Many of these ran through individual seminaries, which are important in establishing an old boy’s network that runs most of the smoke filled rooms for entire regions. But seminary disciplinary standards improved massively as part of the response to the sex abuse crisis, and it’s not altogether clear how much of the gay stuff was ever separate from the seminary party crowd networking later. An increase in ideological polarization has also played a role as church politics became less about who you went to seminary with, as well.

Vatican corruption tends to revolve around money and patronage games, not sex. Even the regional stuff may not have always been gay in the sense that we would recognize, even if there was some gay stuff bundled in with it. It was as much about booze(and alcoholism is rampant among the Catholic clergy) as sex.