Discrete knowledge of the (homo)sexual lapses of its personnel somehow seems to come to the Church at just the right time. According to Berger, the Church willingly uses this knowledge as an instrument of subtle blackmail and exertion of power in order to make evildoers compliant. “The more reprehensible the misconduct, the greater the offering of obedience one can expect from the subordinate, right up to self-abandonment.”
For Berger himself the lapse was minor. The traditionalist website Kreuz.net, which proclaims without reserve its passion for the old Mass and its hatred of homosexuals, found a link to the Gay Games in Cologne in Berger’s Facebook profile and sought to play off his homosexuality against him. What the traditionalist milieu didn’t reckon with: David Berger outed himself and shined a light behind the pious façade of the Church. With the cult of the holy façade, the Church would cast a mantel over its large proportion of gay clergy, and also over its many cases of sexual abuse. According to Berger, the Latin liturgy is a symptom for the divergence between fact and facade, and consequently for the façade of holiness, that is, the hypocrisy, of the Roman Church.
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