should be. so it s been a very positive experience for you? yes. i m going to get to some tough questions, and you be as candid as you can be with me. a lot of these allegations coming forward. these boys saying they went through a covenant ceremony, marriage ceremony where eddie long became their father and they were given gifts and special blessings and material things. is that true? is that what happens with each one of you as you become a part of his youth ministry squa. i have never experienced that since i have been there, and i frankly don t know about that, but being a member of the church you never heard about that? no. that came out of the blue to you? yes. but being a member of the church, what type of relationship did he build with you? did he give you one on one attention? yes, i met him on two different occasions but i never had a one on one encounter as
of the congregation before he was pope did receive letters from various bishops in the united states and early 80s, they wrote to him pleading, we have molester priests in our diocese. please defrock them and get rid of them. what they got back from cardinal ratzinger is delays. we are not doing anything and sometimes for years. priests who in some case were in jail and didn t want to be priests anymore but nothing was done out of the vatican or very little done or delayed and now we have talked to these victims in our documentary that didn t know they were molested as children. miserable lives an just found out when we told them that we saw the documents that the chief people in the vatican knew all about this. what was the motivation of the cardinal not to defrock molesting priests? critics say is that cardinal ratzinger and other top officials in the vatican were more concerned about the reputation of the church than the children of the church.
we re going to see how it plays out. as a believer, we don t want to believe it s true. we don t want to. let me ask you, what if he comes forward and says, i m gay? how will that strike you? well have you thought about that, and is that in the back of your mind that it s very possible he may have a confession? yes, and very well so. and i think i believe that this is a time where the church needs to have that conversation as a whole. so often we shy away from it, and now i think it s time for us to address it. when jesus came on the earth, jesus included everybody within salvation. and it goes back to the question of whether homosexuality is right or wrong and i m not going to get into that, but the fact is no matter where we come from in life or who we are we are to deliver the gospel in a way to
is this something that in the black church because i ve heard it from a number of people obviously within a number of mega churches that this is an issue that black men don t want to talk about. it is on the down low. is that true and why do you think it needs to be talked about more? and i think is comes down to the fact that we must be, number one, comfortable with our own sexuality, and the reason we don t want to talk about it is it s an uncomfortable conversation to have, and the uncomfortability of it is we don t want to view it as condoning homosexuality or i m homophobic. the church takes a careful stance within that. but i do think as we have that conversation, we can put those things in the forefront, and you would be surprised at what can happen if you address the issue at hand.
through as children and what s more heartbreaking, gary, so many of the kids didn t have parents, they were orphans. they depended on the catholic church for sanctuary. you know, do you think that the church finally realizes the seriousness of this problem? because there are a lot of catholic that is are kind of many that are giving up on the church. the polls are out there that there s so much doubt that this is a religion they want to stay with. that s what s amazing. there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who catholicism is their faith and inspiration. the institution is wonderful. the idea, sustains so many people. there are priests who come up to me saying it s so sad. i got into this for the right reasons and i cannot hug children because of what the other priests have done and they re mad, too. what really offends us is that just a few years ago we had bishops and archbishops blaming the news media, blaming the victims, americans.