Disturbing behavior. (last word).

The numbers keep rolling in: 12 priests in Southern California have been forced to retire because of accusations of pedophilia, 14 have been incriminated in New Hampshire, 35 in Philadelphia, with scores of others scurrying for cover everywhere from Texas to Maine. And almost every week, new evidence surfaces that Cardinal Bernard Law, the archbishop of Boston, ignored a massive pyramid of evidence against accused child molester Father Paul Shanley. Shanley was allowed to come in contact with young boys for years after the church knew he had been abusing them. Church officials even knew that Shanley had attended a meeting of the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

At times the scandals have seemed almost like a burlesque, particularly when it was revealed that the Boston diocese continued to pay Shanley's living expenses and medical bills in the early '90s after he had become co-owner of the Cabana Club Resort, a clothing-optional hotel catering to gay tourists in Palm Springs, Calif.

Thousands of decent priests are now living under a cloud because of their supervisors' appalling behavior. It would be wrong to suggest that the scandals impugn the character of millions of devoted Catholics. But these sordid events have demonstrated the utter moral bankruptcy of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy.

The defensive explanations of Catholic spokesmen have been nothing short of surreal. Monsignor Frank Maniscalco, a spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, had the temerity to tell The New York Times that he was disappointed that the media hadn't focused more on what the church had done to curb the abuses of its priests, rather than concentrating on its myriad failures. "No one is looking at how we've fixed things over the last 15 years," the monsignor declared. And in a prepared statement, the president of the U.S. bishops conference noted the "attention to those cases in which a priest was reassigned to ministry after having abused a child. We see now that many of those decisions were tragic, and there is a very high reluctance on the part of the bishops today to continue that practice." A very high reluctance to continue what many describe as a policy of criminal dereliction? Is that what passes for moral outrage among senior Catholic clergymen in the year 2002?

Thinking gay people--including millions of gay Catholics--will perhaps be less shocked by these lapses than the general population. That's because these statements are coming from spokesmen for an institution that, in the name of morality, has done more than any other to impede equality for millions of lesbians and gay men since the dawn of gay liberation. To take a large example, the gay movement in New York City had to wage an 18-year-long battle to overcome the constant lobbying of the Catholic Church before finally forcing the passage of a civil rights law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in 1986. To take a small example, in December a Michigan diocese banned a performance of the play Breaking the Code in one of its school auditoriums because "the theme of the play and the content are contrary to Catholic teachings," according to diocese spokesman Michael Diebold.

And what was the offending theme of this diabolical production? Breaking the Code is the story of how a brilliant British scientist named Alan Turing made a crucial contribution to the winning of World War II by breaking the Enigma machine codes Germany used to communicate with submarines, only to be driven to suicide after being arrested for making love to another man after the war was over.

So forgive me if I for one see an undeniable benefit from this burgeoning scandal: the inevitable diminution of the moral authority of an archaic and bigoted religious bureaucracy.