May (Web-only) 2002

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The clergy abuse scandal continues to be not just the top religion story of 2002, but one of the year's top stories overall. There are far too many articles published each day for Weblog to keep up with all the details, but we'll keep highlighting major developments and trend stories. (For more in-depth coverage of the scandal, check out Yahoo's full coverage and the Poynter Institute's news tracker.) Weblog earlier notedNewsweek's recent cover story, "What Would Jesus Do," which suggested that he'd ordain women, married people, and homosexuals to the priesthood. Discussions on women and married priests continue, but the theme for this week's news coverage is undeniable: gays in the priesthood.

"Now that the transgressions of clerical abuse and official cover-up have been exposed, the church's second biggest secret is coming out of the closet: an institution that denounces homosexuality is kept afloat by a disproportionately gay work force," says this week's Time. "This irony is old news among most priests. … Estimates of the percentage of gay priests range from 15 percent to more than 50 percent."

Time's Amanda Ripley says the attention to gay priests has been brought by the church hierarchy. "Since many of the victims are teenage boys, the thinking goes, the perpetrators must be gay — and that must be the problem, not sexual repression, not leaders who ignore serious criminal allegations." Now, she writes, church officials are persecuting gay clergymen and may "question the validity of even celibate gay priests." They may even engage in "a witch hunt" by asking seminaries to (gasp!) "uphold orthodox moral doctrine in their applications process and in their classrooms."

The problem with that approach, Ripley says, is that ...