by Hilary White
JOHNSTOWN, April 12, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Rev. John Nesbella of Prince of Peace parish in Northern Cambria, Pa., a crusader against homosexuality in the priesthood, has announced that he is resigning the Roman Catholic priesthood.
“This is the end of a sad tale of how wicked so-called Catholic priests and bishops drove me and a few other priests out because we dared to speak up about the corrupt brotherhood of homosexuals in the priesthood,” Nesbella told The Tribune-Democrat of Johnstown.
Nesbella had been suspended from his priestly duties for the last year in response to his work exposing the problem of homosexuality in the priesthood. The Tribune-Democrat reports that he received “venomous” mail from fellow priests for his work.
He said he discovered the problem of homosexuals entering the priesthood while he was in the seminary for the Altoona-Johnstown diocese. “It was very open. It was scandalous,” he said. “I thought maybe it’s just that way here, but I later found it was the church’s No. 1 problem, but also the No. 1 thing that you do not speak against.”
“I’ve been basically fired,” Nesbella said. “I am being punished for reporting sexual abuse.”
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In his letter to Nesbella, Bishop Joseph Adamec wrote that a lawsuit the priest had brought against the diocese for alleged sexual abuse by a priest while Nesbella was in high school represented a conflict of interest.Â
“Your public expression of intention to litigate against your own diocesan church and its bishop in civil court would lead to confusion among the majority of the faithful, if you were to remain in active service,” Adamec wrote in a March 10 letter to Nesbella. The bishop said he would discuss the possibility of Nesbella returning to active ministry once the situation had been resolved.
But Nesbella is calling it quits. The diocese maintains that Nesbella’s decision to quit had nothing to do with his work against homosexuality. Nesbella told the Tribune-Democrat that he may consider joining an Eastern rite Church.
In the last few years, Nesbella clashed with the diocese for his work opposing homosexuality including a campaign to distribute a pamphlet detailing the medical dangers and consequences of homosexual activity. In his mailings, Nesbella asked Catholics to support a federal amendment to retain the legal definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman.
The diocese of Altoona-Johnstown ordered him to cease distributing the pamphlet on the grounds that it “borders on the pornographic” and was contributing to the problem.
Bishop Adamec himself is among the many US bishops who have opposed the Vatican in the effort to halt the homosexual scandal in the priesthood. Adamec excoriated faithful Catholics of his diocese who objected, in 2002, to the invitation of a New Age proselytizer and promoter of lesbianism, Sr. Jose Hobday at a “Catholic Life Conference” sponsored by the diocese.
In September 1999, Bishop Adamec forbade a local priest, the Rev. Philip Saylor, from talking about the diocese’s track record on sexual-abuse cases. Father Saylor was given a canonical “precept of silence,” and threatened with excommunication if he disobeyed. Bishop Adamec continues to refuse public comment on the controversies surrounding his administration, including new allegations of sex abuse by priests.
In a statement, Adamec said, in opposition to recent instructions from Rome, that the problem with priestly sexual abuse of minors should not necessarily preclude men with homosexual tendencies from being ordained. Adamec has said that such matters should be handled “privately.”
He told a local paper that the diocese does not consider the “sexual orientation” of a candidate to the priesthood. “If the person is able to live a celibate life, in other words the orientation is one thing but acting it out and living it is another, then I think that we would need to take that into consideration.”
Since the beginning of the revelations of the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church in 2002, the focus of the hierarchy, as well as the secular media, has been to lay the blame on “pedophilia” and to deflect attention away from the large proportion of active homosexual men in the priesthood.
Despite hard numbers provided by the John Jay College of Law study that showed 80.9% of the priest offenders were homosexual men preying on adolescents, not children, most bishops continue to maintain that there is no problem with homosexuality in the ranks of the clergy.
Read related coverage:
Local bishop outlines sexual-abuse policy
Centre Daily Times
https://www.dioceseaj.com/docs/cdt_05072002.html
The Tribune-Democrat
https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2003_01_06/2003_03_02_Evans_DioceseMuzzles.htm