FATHER ALBERTO CUTIÉ SCANDAL

May 29, 2009

SEX SCANDAL MIAMI PRIEST

QUITS CATHOLIC CHURCH

A popular priest known as "Father Oprah" has left the Roman Catholic Church and joined the Episcopal Church less than a month after a tabloid published photos of him cavorting on the beach with his girlfriend in a scandal that rocked South Florida's Spanish-speaking community.

MIAMI (Reuters) - A popular U.S. Roman Catholic priest photographed frolicking with a woman on a Florida beach announced Thursday he had joined the Episcopal Church to pursue the priesthood in a faith that allows married clergy.

The charismatic 40-year-old is a well-known religious leader in Miami who dispensed relationship advice on Spanish-language television shows, church radio programs and newspaper columns. He was relieved of his duties at St. Francis de Sales parish in Miami Beach earlier this month after the entertainment magazine TVnotas published photos of him in swim trunks, snuggling and kissing a woman on the sands of a beach in Florida. Cutie later said he had fallen in love with the woman and broken his vow of celibacy. He apologized for his behavior, but told the Univision Spanish-language television network, "I didn't stop being a man just because I put on a cassock. There are trousers under this cassock."

The Episcopalian church is part of the Anglican Communion, which traces its roots to the Church of England, formed when King Henry VIII split from the Roman Catholic Church in order to divorce and remarry. The Episcopal church ordains men and women as priests, married or single, and has seen controversy within its own ranks for ordaining gay priests.

Father Alberto Cutié's scandal arises again the debate and the confusion in Catholic Church about clerical celibacy, the promise never to marry, and chastity, which is the vow taken by nuns and priests who belong to religious orders, and also the public debate implies other topics as sexual purity and sexual deviation of members of the Catholic clergy.

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US?

"Great vows of austerity are undertaken by sages to achieve success in self-realization. Human life is meant for such tapasya, with the great vow of celibacy, or brahmacarya"

The Lord, being the source of everything that be, is the origin of all austerities and penances also. Great vows of austerity are undertaken by sages to achieve success in self-realization. Human life is meant for such tapasya, with the great vow of celibacy, or brahmacarya. In the rigid life of tapasya, there is no place for the association of women. And because human life is meant for tapasya, for self-realization, factual human civilization, as conceived by the system of sanātana-dharma or the school of four castes and four orders of life, prescribes rigid dissociation from woman in three stages of life. In the order of gradual cultural development, one's life may be divided into four divisions: celibacy, household life, retirement, and renunciation. During the first stage of life, up to twenty-five years of age, a man may be trained as a brahmacārī under the guidance of a bona fide spiritual master just to understand that woman is the real binding force in material existence. If one wants to get freedom from the material bondage of conditional life, he must get free from the attraction for the form of woman. Woman, or the fair sex, is the enchanting principle for the living entities, and the male form, especially in the human being, is meant for self-realization. The whole world is moving under the spell of womanly attraction, and as soon as a man becomes united with a woman, he at once becomes a victim of material bondage under a tight knot. The desires for lording it over the material world, under the intoxication of a false sense of lordship, specifically begin just after the man's unification with a woman. The desires for acquiring a house, possessing land, having children and becoming prominent in society, the affection for community and the place of birth, and the hankering for wealth, which are all like phantasmagoria or illusory dreams, encumber a human being, and he is thus impeded in his progress toward self-realization, the real aim of life.

Srila A.C. BV Swami Prabhupada:
"El Srimad Bhagavatam - Purport in Canto 2 - Chapter 6 . 20"