Caught in the Backwash?

Lest anyone think that only the LSD Church is open to change, read this post from Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin. It seems the American bishops commissioned a study on the causes of the child-abuse scandal. Burroway summarizes:

It looks like the report’s authors are coming to the same conclusions I did when I tackled the question in our report, “Testing the Premise: Are Gays A Threat To Our Children?” I poured [sic] through the professional literature and found no connection between homosexuality and child molestation. The Catholic Bishops commissioned a $2 million study in response to the clerical sexual abuse scandals which came to the same conclusion.

If you'll remember, one of the authorities Burroway studied pointed out that there appeared to be an inverse correlation between homosexual orientation and likelihood to molest children.

What leads me to the conclusion that the Church is feeling some pain because of public reaction to its anti-gay stance is largely that I have little confidence in its willingness to open itself to fact, in spite of its history. (Of course, taking the full history into account, I'm not really willing to wait four hundred years for the Church to come around to the fact that I'm normal.) Pain seems a much more likely motivator here. The Mormons have the possibility of new revelations, so changing direction is a bit easier for them. The Catholic Church is a little more rigid about doctrine, by necessity. But the hierarchy has been backtracking for a bit now -- I remember hearing about this some while ago:

Last year, Pope Benedict XVI drew a distinction between homosexuality and pedophelia, saying “I would not speak at this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia which is another thing."

This is the man who was the first to point at gays as the root of the child abuse in the Church. Of course, this shift hasn't changed any of the Church's limitations on gay priests, but the Church moves glacially when it moves at all.

But it appears that the hierarchy is going to lose one more prop for its anti-gay position. Wonder what we can expect after that?