But not the sex scandal you normally imagine.
Xavier Novell was a Spanish bishop in the catholic cult, rabidly anti-gay and promoted the torture of “conversion therapy”. He was an extremist, even for them.
At least he’s not a pedophile.
Anti-gay bishop quit to marry author of satanic erotica
Spain’s Roman Catholic episcopal conference yesterday removed the right of anti-gay Bishop Xavier Novell to undertake any religious duties. The conference confirmed that Novell quit the church last month to marry Silvia Caballol, a writer of satanic erotica.
Xavier Novell became Spain’s youngest bishop in 2010 aged just 40, presiding over the 12th-century Solsona Cathedral. He previously endorsed conversion therapy and carried out the occasional exorcism. His strident opposition to gay rights led to battles within the Spanish Church. One well-known nun described him as ‘out of his mind’ for promoting conversion therapy.
[. . .]
Silvia Caballol is divorced, a psychologist and writes fiction, specifically satanic erotica.
Her books include The Hell of Gabriel’s Lust. She promises the reader a journey into sadism, madness and lust and a struggle between good and evil, God and Satan. She says the plot will shake your values and religious beliefs.
Well, it certainly worked for the bishop – gave his values, or something, a good shake.
I like the QNews writer’s sense of humour.
I have an old friend who was nearly a bishop, but left the church because of a bunch of reasons, mostly to do with how corrupt the entire organization is. He’s told me some gut-wrenching stories of the kind of things he had to do as part of his job, such as putting the clamp on dying old people to try to make sure that the church was in their will, etc. He told me that most priests figure out, before they are out of divinity school, that the whole thing is a scam. But, by then, they’re locked into the career and it beats working for Amazon or Tesla or the government. He spent the first part of his career doing public speaking, then quit and became a “motivational speaker” – I have to say he’s the most nihilistic person I’ve ever met; he doesn’t believe a fucking thing about anything. Whenever I wonder what priests really think, I wonder how many are like him. My guess is, a lot or even most. He said that the fight for power and position is basically all they do in the hierarchy, because there’s no actual objective basis to see what ‘a good job’ means – so a lot of the time your promotion depends on how good you are at fund-raising and (recently) keeping your hands off the choirboys.
None of this business about the corruption of the church is in any way new, either. Look at Chaucer: 10 clergy on the pilgrimage, and only one of them is a decent human being. Who is also purposefully boring.