A PRIEST CAUGHT MASTURBATING IN A MASS!!!

The video above is a priest caught in the act masturbating while a mass is going on. Watch carefully and see for yourself a very disgusting behaviour of a so called Father?

Self Abuse?

Question
Could you send me some info about the topic of masturbation? I am interested in the biblical approaches to this subject as well as in practical guidance for pastors and Christian workers.

Answer
In fact, the Bible never directly addresses the issue of masturbation. Throughout history, most Christians have condemned masturbation on one of several bases, including but not limited to: 1) the sin of Onan; 2) nature; and/or 3) lust. I'll treat each one of these approaches below. 

1. The sin of Onan 
In Genesis 38:7-10 we learn that Judah had a son named Er and a son named Onan. Er was married to Tamar. Because Er was evil, God killed him. Judah then commanded Onan to impregnate Tamar in order to raise up an heir for Er. Onan slept with Tamar, but every time he had sex with her, he spilled his seed on the ground. For this sin, God killed him. 

Many have interpreted this to mean that spilling one's seed in a manner not designed to result in pregnancy is a sin. This is the same argument used against contraception. However, the Bible does not teach that Onan's sin was spilling his seed in and of itself. It was simply the means by which he prevented Tamar's insemination. 

Some (such as the Roman Catholic Church) argue that spilling his seed was the crime for which God killed Onan. They base this on the following facts: 1) God killed Onan for his crime; 2) the punishment for failing to have a child by one's brother's widow was far less than death; 3) the punishment for failing to obey one's father was likewise not death; and 4) death was the appropriate punishment for many other sexual sins which were not designed to inseminate (homosexuality, bestiality, etc.). Based on these facts, many conclude that Onan's sin was not failing to raise up a child to his brother, but rather was engaging in a sexual act not designed to inseminate. Masturbation, sexual intercourse with contraception, oral sex, homosexuality, bestiality, and many other sexual practices fall into this category. The problem with this argument is that it does not sufficiently account for the data. 

First, in the levirate situation, the purpose of sex was specifically to raise up a child to one's brother. In fact, Genesis 38 does not even say that Tamar was Onan's wife, but rather that she was his brother's wife. The only reason that Onan was permitted to lie with her was to get her pregnant. The fact that Onan eagerly engaged in sex with Tamar but refused to give his seed to her indicates that he was in effect committing adultery with her. When the Law was later instituted, adultery was a crime punishable by death (Lev. 20:10). 

Second, the Law contains no statutes condemning or even concerning contraception, masturbation, oral sex, or many other sexual acts not designed to inseminate. If these acts were really so heinous to God that they were punishable by death, it would seem that this should have been important enough to find its way into the Law. 

Third, there is no biblical evidence that the Israelites ever put anyone to death for masturbation, contraception, oral sex, or similar non-adulterous and non-bestial acts not designed to inseminate. In fact, there is no evidence (putting aside the disputed Onan incident) that the Israelites considered these acts wrong at all. 

Fourth, the Law does mention times when a man's seed might be wasted, but never attributes anything worse than ceremonial uncleanness to it (Lev. 15:16-17,32; Deut. 23:10). It even mentions that when a man has a seminal emission he must bathe and wash his clothes (if necessary), and that he is unclean until evening (Lev. 15:16-17). There is no mention of death or punishment, and even no clear description of "seminal emission." Often this is understood to refer to noctural emissions that occur while a man sleeps, but it is possible that it also refers to emissions that occur when a man is awake. If the latter is the case, then the passage would seem to place masturbation on the level of a woman's period, not on the level of sin.

2. Nature 
Some argue that masturbation is wrong on the basis of nature. That is, in a fashion similar to the argument based on Onan's sin, they argue that God did not design the human body and reproductive system to work in this manner, that God's general revelation in nature condemns the practice. This is a tenuous argument at best. In fact, there is some evidence to the contrary. For example, many human beings learn to masturbate without ever having been taught it or having heard about it. It would seem to be their "natural" impulse. Moreover, human beings are naturally equipped with the necessary body parts to accomplish masturbation (unlike most animals). It could be argued on these bases that it is natural. Moreover, most Protestants reject the idea that what is natural is necessarily what is good -- especially in light of our "sin nature." This is simply a poor ground on which to base the argument against masturbation. 

3. Lust 
This is the argument that has the most going for it. It can generally be argued that acts of masturbation involve the sin of lust. 

Now, we have to be careful to recognize that the sin of lust does not include every instance of sexual arousal or attraction. It is not a sin to be sexually aroused, even by someone to whom you are not yet married (Deut. 21:10-13; Sol. 1:1ff.); it is a sin to revel in being sexually aroused by someone who is married to another, or with whom you only desire fornication (Matt. 5:28). 
So, if an act of masturbation expresses the sin of lust, then that act of masturbation can be condemned as sinful. But this argument cannot condemn acts of masturbation that do not give expression to the sin of lust. For example, a man or woman who masturbates while thinking about his or her spouse would not involve the sin of lust. An act of masturbation motivated by thoughts of one whom a person could rightly hope to marry might also escape the condemnation of this argument. Acts of masturbation performed for physical pleasure apart from any particular thoughts of lust would also escape condemnation by this argument. 

In conclusion, there are some acts of masturbation for which the Bible has no real condemnation. Now, in saying this, we should not downplay the real evil of the sin of lust that is involved in many acts of masturbation. Nevertheless, we should also refrain from condemning what the Bible does not condemn. I would say as gently as possible that while our social inclination and tradition might be to condemn all acts of masturbation, our inclination and tradition might not be entirely biblical on this point. 

I believe that masturbation is probably a near-universal practice, especially among younger males. Many have probably been made to feel that they are in constant sin as a result of their failure to control their behavior by their own will power. This can be very damaging to their understanding of their relationship to God. Rather than rejoicing in him, they feel oppressed, guilty, hypocritical, and dirty. Some even doubt their salvation because God has not freed them from what they consider to be a "besetting sin." Certainly, some of their guilty feelings are based on a proper understanding of the sin of lust, but not all. I think we need to be careful not to damage those individuals who are not caught up in the sin of lust, especially so that we do not drive them to despair and shame that tempt them into real sins of lust. 

Answer by Ra McLaughlin

Source:  Thirdmill.org

Is Oral Sex a Sin?

Question
Is oral sex a sin?

Answer
Actually, the Bible doesn't specifically address the issue of oral sex. It does differentiate between marriage, heterosexuality, male and female homosexuality, bestiality, and incest, but it really doesn't get into the specific acts that take place within those relationships. 

The Bible literally speaks in terms of "knowing," "uncovering nakedness," "lying with," "adultery," and "immorality" when it refers to sexual relations. It does not describe what particular acts fall into these categories, though it is clear from some of the cases in which these concepts are used that they cannot be limited to vaginal intercourse (e.g. Gen. 19:5; Judg. 19:22; Rom. 1:26-27). Sexual relations are acceptable within the context of marriage, and unacceptable outside that context. 

The Bible seems to assume that people know what it means when it prohibits these types of activities in relationships other than marriage, much like the American public assumed that President Clinton should have known when testifying under oath that "sexual relations" included oral sex (in the fairly recent Monica Lewinski matter). The language in the Bible is flexible, and is intended to cover all types of sexual conduct, not just vaginal intercourse. 

One way to determine what is and what is not appropriate behavior is by looking at the people who are forbidden to engage in acts of "knowing," "uncovering nakedness," "lying with," "adultery," and "immorality." If these terms are limited to vaginal intercourse (and by necessity to sodomy) but allow oral sex, then the Bible does not prohibit oral sex with anyone under any circumstance. If these terms do not cover oral sex, then the Bible does not forbid a father and daughter to engage in oral sex together. If these terms to not cover oral sex, then the Bible does not forbid a son and mother to engage in oral sex together. If these terms do not cover oral sex, then the Bible does not forbid a man to perform oral sex on another man, or a woman to perform oral sex on another woman. 

I would suggest that a rather objective way to tell if something counts as "sexual relations" is to determine whether or not it tends to stimulate the sexual response of orgasm. This is not to say that sexual activity does not take place unless someone has an orgasm. Rather, it is simply to assert that if the activity (such as oral sex) is the sort that tends to bring people to sexual climax, then that activity is clearly sexual in nature. Therefore, the activity falls into the category of sexual relations and is forbidden outside marriage. 

Answer by Ra McLaughlin
Ra McLaughlin is Vice President of Creative Delivery Systems at Third Millennium Ministries.

Source: ReformedAnswers.org

FORNICATION

Question

Is the Bible clear in its teaching on premarital sex? It seems very specific in terms of homosexuality, incest, bestiality, etc. But what about premarital sex?

Answer

The Bible commonly uses terms such as "knowing," "lying with," "uncovering nakedness," "immorality," and "adultery" to refer to a variety of sexual sins (e.g. Matt. 15:19; Acts 15:20,29; Rom. 13:13; 1 Cor. 6:13,18; 7:2; 10:8; Gal. 5:19; Eph. 5:3; Col. 3:5; 1 Thess. 4:3; Rev. 9:21). These broad terms tend to include all sorts of different types of sexual activity, including premarital sex, sex between people who are married to others, rape, etc. That fornication is included in these terms is illustrated in many translations which actually use words like "fornication" rather than "immorality" in many passages. For the most part, the biblical writers and their original audiences understood what these terms included, and that premarital sex was prohibited when these broader categories were condemned.

For the sake of comparison, you may recall former U.S. president Bill Clinton claiming that he did not have "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky. Most people in the U.S. believed that Clinton should have known that "oral sex" (in which Clinton and Lewinski engaged) was included in "sexual relations." To be fair, Clinton later admitted that he had "misled" his country by this denial. In the same way that "sexual relations" includes "oral sex" in modern English, "fornication" (a.k.a. premarital sex) was included in the Hebrew and Greek terms for "immorality" and other sexual sin.

There are also explicit teachings in Scripture that indicate to us that premarital sex is a sin. Perhaps the passage that deals with this subject in the most depth is Deuteronomy 22. In Deuteronomy 22:13-21, we find the statutes regarding women who lose their virginity before marriage. When they marry and it is discovered that they are not virgins, they are liable unto death. In verse 21 we are told that the non-virgin's sin is zanah, sometimes translated with the force of committing harlotry, sometimes with the force of being promiscuous. From the context, this law applies to all premarital sex regardless whether or not it involves prostitution. It is possible, however, that in the Israelite mindset prostitution would have been the most likely way for them to have lost their virginity. The verse offers no alternative by which such women might be exonerated, indicating that under no circumstances were they permitted to engage in premarital sex.

Scripture does not explicitly prohibit men from all premarital sex, at least not in statutes that describing fornication specifically. However, it implicitly condemns all male fornication in its other specific prohibitions, and it generally condemns it in all its general condemnations of immorality. Scripture explicitly prohibits married and unmarried men from having sex with anyone else's wife (Lev. 18:20), with betrothed virgins (Deut. 22:23-24), with other men (Lev. 18:22; 20:13; 1 Cor. 6:9), and with prostitutes (1 Cor. 6:15-18). The only ones left with whom to have sex are single women who are neither prostitutes nor betrothed. But these women cannot have premarital sex (Deut. 22:13-21); by implication men are forbidden to have sex with them (Matt. 18:7; Luke 17:1-2). 

So, whereas we have no single verse that explicitly says, "All forms of premarital sex are forbidden," we do have many verses that, taken together, demonstrate rather clearly that the Bible teaches precisely this idea. We also have many verses that condemn all sexual immorality in general, and we know from the rest of Scripture that these refer to fornication as well as to other sexual sins.

Answer by Ra McLaughlin

Source:  Thirdmill.org

John Paul's Legacy Stained by Sex Abuse Scandal

Pope John Paul II is rightly credited with having helped bring down communism, of inspiring a new generation of Catholics with a globe-trotting papacy and of explaining church teaching on a range of hot-button issues as Christianity entered its third millennium.

But the sexual abuse scandal that festered under his watch remains a stain on his legacy.

John Paul and his top advisers failed to grasp the severity of the abuse problem until very late in his 26-year papacy, even though U.S. bishops had been petitioning the Holy See since the late-1980s for a faster way to defrock pedophile priests.

The experience of John Paul in Poland under communist and Nazi rule, where innocent priests were often discredited by trumped-up accusations, is believed to have influenced his general defensiveness of the clergy. The exodus of clergy after the turbulent 1960s similarly made him want to hold onto the priests he still had.

Pope Francis has inherited John Paul's most notorious failure on the sex abuse front — the Legion of Christ order that John Paul and his top advisers held up as a model. Francis, who will canonize John Paul on Sunday, must decide whether to sign off on the Vatican's three-year reform project, imposed after the Legion admitted that its late founder sexually abused his seminarians and fathered three children.

Yet the Legion's 2009 admission about the Rev. Marcial Maciel's double life was by no means news to the Vatican.

Documents from the archives of the Vatican's then-Sacred Congregation for Religious show how a succession of papacies — including that of John XXIII, also to be canonized Sunday — simply turned a blind eye to credible reports that Maciel was a con artist, drug addict, pedophile and religious fraud.

By 1948, seven years after Maciel founded the order, the Holy See had documents from Vatican-appointed envoys and bishops in Mexico and Spain questioning the legitimacy of Maciel's ordination (by his uncle, after Maciel was expelled by a series of seminaries), noting the questionable legal foundation of his order and flagging his "totalitarian" behavior and spiritual violations of his young seminarians.

The documents show the Holy See was well aware of Maciel's drug abuse, sexual abuse and financial improprieties as early as 1956, when it ordered an initial investigation and suspended him for two years to kick a morphine habit.

Yet for decades, thanks to Maciel's ability to keep his own priests quiet, his foresight to place trusted Legion priests in key Vatican offices and his careful cultivation of Vatican cardinals, Mexican bishops and wealthy, powerful lay Catholics, Rome looked the other way. Vatican officials were impressed instead by the orthodoxy of his priests and Maciel's ability to attract new vocations and donations.

John Paul, who in 1994 praised Maciel as an "efficacious guide to youth," wasn't alone in being duped. His top advisers were some of Maciel's fiercest supporters, convinced that the accusations against him were the typical "calumnies" hurled at the greatest of saints. They were swayed instead by numerous testimonies from bishops and others of his greatness — documentation which also features in the Vatican archives.

Two years after the Vatican sentenced Maciel to a lifetime of penance and prayer for sexually abusing his seminarians, John Paul's No. 2, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, in 2008 was still praising the spirit of Maciel and his "humility" in stepping aside after the Vatican finally confronted him with the accusations.

John Paul's prefect of the Congregation for Religious, Cardinal Franc Rode, told Legion priests that same year he had absolved Maciel and praised the good "fruits" that Maciel's Legion had given the church.

"The fruit is good. The fruit is extraordinarily good. It is excellent," Rode said, according to his November 2008 speech made public online by Mexico's El Zocalo newspaper. "Can we say the tree is bad then? Purely from a logical standpoint, I would say no. I absolve Father Maciel. I do not judge him."

Maciel's fraud, one of the greatest scandals of the 20th-century Catholic Church, raises uncomfortable questions for today's Vatican about how so many people could have been duped for so long. It also brings into question how the church's own structure, values and priorities enabled a cult-like order to grow from within and how far accountability for all the harm done should go.

Finally, it begs the question of whether the order has really been purged of the abuses that allowed generations of priests to subject themselves to blind obedience to a false prophet.

In his 2013 book "I Lived With a Saint," John Paul's longtime Polish aide, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, said his pope knew "nothing, absolutely nothing" about Maciel's misdeeds.

"For him, he was still the founder of a great religious order and that's it. No one had told him anything, not even about the rumors going around," wrote Dziwisz, the leading force behind John Paul's remarkably fast canonization.

He blamed the Vatican's "extremely bureaucratic structure" for preventing such information from reaching John Paul and denied that his pope was slow to react to the abuse scandal.

Juan Vaca begs to differ.

Vaca was the Legion's superior in the U.S. from 1971-1976, when he left the order and joined the diocese of Rockville Center, New York. In 1979, a year after John Paul was elected, Vaca's bishop sent the Congregation for Religious a bombshell set of documents in which Vaca and another ex-Legion priest detailed the sexual abuse they and some 19 other priests and seminarians had endured at Maciel's hands.

He later was one of a half-dozen former Legionaries who brought a canonical case against Maciel at the Vatican in 1998. It took eight years — and the death of John Paul — for Pope Benedict XVI to sanction Maciel.

"I feel once more outraged, furious with feelings of deception and rebellion at the circus process to make 'saint' a pope who did nothing to preserve the Catholic Church and society from the horrendous crisis inflicted upon them by the Catholic clergy sexual abuse," Vaca told The Associated Press in an email.

Vaca questioned why Francis was "following the same dubious decision — initiated by Benedict XVI — to make a saint with such an urgency a personality who was involved either in a voluntary complicity or in responsible ignorance in reference to Maciel."

Source: Naharnet.com