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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   1783 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 22, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Makes you wonder how often a religious vocation was used to mask symptoms of what would now be called autism. Or homosexuality.

My post from last year sparked some discussion of this.

I’m not sure about clergy, but I’d wager a supermajority of religious (monks, nuns, deaconesses, and the like) are autistic.

Eh, my experience with the young women who become nuns is that they tend to be highly agreeable young women wanting to do something valued by the community and the main other thing they have in common is not being baby crazy.

Monks, you may sort of have a point; a lot of them didn't fit in as a layman.

BTW deaconess is not really a monastic thing(Carthusian nuns have some honors of a deacon when fully professed, but they're still just nuns)- a small number of Eastern Orthodox jurisdictions ordain female deacons who are 'in the world' as diocesan clergy, and there are no Catholic deaconesses(although the RCC now has women in minor orders, while the EOC does not). There was such a thing as a 'deaconess' in ancient Christianity but it was a term for women who assisted in certain church administrative tasks and also not a religious vocation.

BTW deaconess is not really a monastic thing

That depends entirely on your tradition. Lutheran deaconesses traditionally (and in the case of at least one deaconess house, still do) live together in community, wear habits, take the honorific “Sister,” and vow to remain celibate for as long as they remain deaconesses.

Homosexuality – I’d guess 9 out of every 10 vocations, at least.

Priests are only about 50% gay and the percentage is dropping.

How could you possibly measure this reliably?

You can't, but it is what the RCC estimates- and I know enough to say that they might be misestimating, but they're definitely not knowingly lying.

More to the point, one of the major roadblocks to addressing clerical sex scandals was that they were often covered up internally by being listed as 'disciplined for violating celibacy- heterosexual prostitute/adult girlfriend', which indicates that while there are gay priests, it's not some 9/10 supermajority.

You can't, but it is what the RCC estimates- and I know enough to say that they might be misestimating, but they're definitely not knowingly lying.

The Rabbinical Council of California?

More to the point, one of the major roadblocks to addressing clerical sex scandals was that they were often covered up internally by being listed as 'disciplined for violating celibacy- heterosexual prostitute/adult girlfriend', which indicates that while there are gay priests, it's not some 9/10 supermajority.

I don't immediately understand the connection between the coverup documentation and the rate of gay priests. Are you saying that if 9/10 priests were gay the sex scandal would be internally listed as "homosexual prostitute" instead?

I would guess that RCC = Roman Catholic Church, but that's just a guess on my part.

Definitely yes.

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