- Resistance Is Futile!
Posted on 10/16/2005 5:49:19 PM PDT by DBeers
Michael S. Rose: Are gay priests the problem?
In recent weeks much ink has been spilt over the ramifications of two significant developments in the Roman Catholic Church. Both the announcement of a new wave of seminary evaluations and a forthcoming Vatican document reportedly barring gays from the priesthood have been met with a torrent of criticism, much of it shrill.
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It is not enough to point to the recent John Jay College study that found most of the victims of clergy abuse since 1950 were adolescent boys. Revelations concerning seminary life in recent decades have given sufficient impetus to pursue an extensive evaluation of the institutions that train and educate future priests, especially when it comes to the issue of homosexuality.
~~ snip ~~
The Church's Lavender Mafia is ultimately at war with its own religion. Its proponents want to be accommodated, and to be accommodated they want nothing short of a sea change in the Church's teaching on human sexuality, which is based on the natural law – not merely an opinion that fluctuates with the fashion of the times.
The Vatican realizes that an underlying problem facing the church in the United States is tied up with homosexual activism and gay cronyism. The forthcoming seminary evaluations and the new Vatican document barring or limiting homosexuals from the priesthood will not solve all current woes, but both developments ought to be welcome, especially to those who have been clamoring for action from the top.
Michael S. Rose is the author of "Goodbye, Good Men," (Regnery), an exposé of Catholic seminary life in the United States. His latest book is "Benedict XVI: The Man Who Was Ratzinger" (Spence). e-mail msrose@newoxfordreview.org.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
Catholic documents and teaching on subject of homosexuality:
- The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality - Guidelines for Education within the Family
104. A particular problem that can appear during the process of sexual maturation is homosexuality, which is also spreading more and more in urbanized societies. This phenomenon must be presented with balanced judgement, in the light of the documents of the Church. Young people need to be helped to distinguish between the concepts of what is normal and abnormal, between subjective guilt and objective disorder, avoiding what would arouse hostility. On the other hand, the structural and complementary orientation of sexuality must be well clarified in relation to marriage, procreation and Christian chastity. "Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained". A distinction must be made between a tendency that can be innate and acts of homosexuality that "are intrinsically disordered" and contrary to Natural Law.Especially when the practice of homosexual acts has not become a habit, many cases can benefit from appropriate therapy. In any case, persons in this situation must be accepted with respect, dignity and delicacy, and all forms of unjust discrimination must be avoided. If parents notice the appearance of this tendency or of related behaviour in their children, during childhood or adolescence, they should seek help from expert qualified persons in order to obtain all possible assistance.
For most homosexual persons, this condition constitutes a trial. "They must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfil God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition". "Homosexual persons are called to chastity".
- Persona Humana - Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics
VIII At the present time there are those who, basing themselves on observations in the psychological order, have begun to judge indulgently, and even to excuse completely, homosexual relations between certain people. This they do in opposition to the constant teaching of the Magisterium and to the moral sense of the Christian people.A distinction is drawn, and it seems with some reason, between homosexuals whose tendency comes from a false education, from a lack of normal sexual development, from habit, from bad example, or from other similar causes, and is transitory or at least not incurable; and homosexuals who are definitively such because of some kind of innate instinct or a pathological constitution judged to be incurable.
In regard to this second category of subjects, some people conclude that their tendency is so natural that it justifies in their case homosexual relations within a sincere communion of life and love analogous to marriage, in so far as such homosexuals feel incapable of enduring a solitary life.
In the pastoral field, these homosexuals must certainly be treated with understanding and sustained in the hope of overcoming their personal difficulties and their inability to fit into society. Their culpability will be judged with prudence. But no pastoral method can be employed which would give moral justification to these acts on the grounds that they would be consonant with the condition of such people. For according to the objective moral order, homosexual relations are acts which lack an essential and indispensable finality. In Sacred Scripture they are condemned as a serious depravity and even presented as the sad consequence of rejecting God. This judgment of Scripture does not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it, but it does attest to the fact that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of.
- Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons
10. It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.
11. It has been argued that the homosexual orientation in certain cases is not the result of deliberate choice; and so the homosexual person would then have no choice but to behave in a homosexual fashion. Lacking freedom, such a person, even if engaged in homosexual activity, would not be culpable.
Here, the Church's wise moral tradition is necessary since it warns against generalizations in judging individual cases. In fact, circumstances may exist, or may have existed in the past, which would reduce or remove the culpability of the individual in a given instance; or other circumstances may increase it. What is at all costs to be avoided is the unfounded and demeaning assumption that the sexual behaviour of homosexual persons is always and totally compulsive and therefore inculpable. What is essential is that the fundamental liberty which characterizes the human person and gives him his dignity be recognized as belonging to the homosexual person as well. As in every conversion from evil, the abandonment of homosexual activity will require a profound collaboration of the individual with God's liberating grace.
- Some Considerations Concerning the Response to Legislative Proposals on Non-discrimination of Homosexual Persons
II. Applications10. "Sexual orientation" does not constitute a quality comparable to race, ethnic background, etc. in respect to non-discrimination. Unlike these, homosexual orientation is an objective disorder (cf. "Letter," No. 3) and evokes moral concern.
11. There are areas in which it is not unjust discrimination to take sexual orientation into account, for example, in the placement of children for adoption or foster care, in employment of teachers or athletic coaches, and in military recruitment.
13. Including "homosexual orientation" among the considerations on the basis of which it is illegal to discriminate can easily lead to regarding homosexuality as a positive source of human rights, for example, in respect to so-called affirmative action or preferential treatment in hiring practices. This is all the more deleterious since there is no right to homosexuality (cf. No. 10) which therefore should not form the basis for judicial claims. The passage from the recognition of homosexuality as a factor on which basis it is illegal to discriminate can easily lead, if not automatically, to the legislative protection and promotion of homosexuality. A person's homosexuality would be invoked in opposition to alleged discrimination, and thus the exercise of rights would be defended precisely via the affirmation of the homosexual condition instead of in terms of a violation of basic human rights.
- Third World Meeting of Families: Conclusions of the Pastoral Theological Congress
Mention should also be made of recent attempts to legalize adoptions by homosexual persons, and this must be strongly rejected. It is obvious that this is not the situation for authentic up-bringing and personalizing growth. “The bond between two men or two women cannot constitute a real family, nor much less can the right be attributed to a union of this kind to adopt children without a family”. With regard to foster care and adoption, the great principle to be applied is always the child’s higher interests which much prevail over other considerations.
- Fourth World Meeting of Families: Conclusions of the Pastoral Theological Congress
We reaffirm the rights and dignity of all children. They should never be neglected and abandoned on the streets. They should be protected, especially when threatened by exploitation through prostitution, pornography, child-labor, drug trafficking, homosexual adoption and immoral "sex education". A new threat to children is posed by the misuse of the Internet, when this intrudes into family life and undermines the rights and duties of parents.Children are the "crown of marriage", the real wealth of humanity. The natural place for their education is the family. It is here, in the community of life and love, that they are formed as members of Christ's Church. It is here that, honoring and loving their parents, they can enrich the lives of all members of the wider family.
- Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition To Unions Between Homosexual Persons
4. There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God's plan for marriage and family. Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law. Homosexual acts “close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved”.7. Homosexual unions are totally lacking in the biological and anthropological elements of marriage and family which would be the basis, on the level of reason, for granting them legal recognition. Such unions are not able to contribute in a proper way to the procreation and survival of the human race. The possibility of using recently discovered methods of artificial reproduction, beyond involving a grave lack of respect for human dignity, does nothing to alter this inadequacy.
Homosexual unions are also totally lacking in the conjugal dimension, which represents the human and ordered form of sexuality. Sexual relations are human when and insofar as they express and promote the mutual assistance of the sexes in marriage and are open to the transmission of new life.
As experience has shown, the absence of sexual complementarity in these unions creates obstacles in the normal development of children who would be placed in the care of such persons. They would be deprived of the experience of either fatherhood or motherhood. Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development. This is gravely immoral and in open contradiction to the principle, recognized also in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that the best interests of the child, as the weaker and more vulnerable party, are to be the paramount consideration in every case.
- Religiosorum Institutio
30. Those To Be Excluded; Practical DirectivesAdvantage to religious vows and ordination should be barred to those who are afflicted with evil tendencies to homosexuality or pederasty, since for them the common life and the priestly ministry would constitute serious dangers.
Jesus said: "And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore, they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." -from THE BIBLE: Matthew 19:4-6
Celibacy trumps homosexuality. If you don't do it, it doesn't matter what it is you don't do.
Ummm.... Yes.
The MSM does everything it can to hide the fact that homosexual priests are such a problem. MSM simply calls it "sex abuse" not "homosexual priests praying on boys." Then again, it's not the job of the MSM to report the news. It's their job to influence opinion.
"If you don't do it, it doesn't matter what it is you don't do."
Actually, it does. The desire to engage in perversions with members of one's own sex is a symptom of a mental disorder. Mental disorders cannot be compartmentalized; they affect every facet of one's thinking and spirituality.
I think one thing that the Church seems to be missing here is that, because of the Celibacy rule, the Caltholic Preisthood has historically attracted gay men to it. If this is strictly enforced will they be able to get enough Preists to fill the bill? My hunch is, the number of gay priests who actually preyed on boys is only a small percentage of the total number of priests with homosexual inclinations.
I am not saying they should get rid of the Celibacy requirement...but it does seem to put them in a pickle.
If you want on/off the ping list let me and little jeremiah know.
"Actually, it does. The desire to engage in perversions with members of one's own sex is a symptom of a mental disorder. Mental disorders cannot be compartmentalized; they affect every facet of one's thinking and spirituality."
That also holds true for those with a desire to engage in perversions with the opposite sex....perversions historically condemned by the church such as oral and anal sex, and of course, pre and extramarital sex.
I don't know for sure but I would guess that the Church has also historically condemned masturbation as a perversion too.
Ummm, looks like we are covering most of the human population here.
No you miss the vital difference -homosexuality is a disorder -heterosexuality is not. Read the linked documents I provided they should get you up to speed..
You're probably right. What a way to try and take down the church.
Duh. The one who doesn't like girls.
"I think one thing that the Church seems to be missing here is that, because of the Celibacy rule, the Caltholic Preisthood has historically attracted gay men to it."
They're overlooking it because it ain't so. The priesthood has generally been a hostile environment for sodomites.
Duh. The one who doesn't like girls.
Moms do not choose -regardless, homosexuals are disordered -even those that like girls...
I've done quite a lot of reading on Church teachings about sexual disorders over the centuries, especially confessional practices, penances, and penalties, in connection with one of my recent books, and what you say reveals no acquaintance with the actual history of the Catholic Church or Catholic teachings.
Incidentally, sexual aberrations were also condemned by most Protestant churches, at least until the rise of religious modernism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
"Ummm, looks like we are covering most of the human population here."
I take it you're not a Catholic. That would explain why you don't already know the answer to the questions you raise.
If a man has a disordered compulsion to engage in any form of sexual activity, that would of course unfit him for the priesthood.
The guidelines for selection of seminarians call for the exclusion not just of men who suffer from SSAD, but of heterosexuals who are likely to suffer extreme hardship from celibacy, including those whose sex drive is very strong, or who cannot seem to refrain from masturbation.
With regard to oral and anal sex, the Church holds that every act of sexual congress should be open to life, and these are not. At the same time, if a man is doing it with a woman, it is not, by definition, symptomatic of SSAD.
People often quote Oscar Wilde's quip that celibacy is the most unusual of perversions, but we must not overlook two facts: 1. Oscar Wilde was a limey poofter, and 2. He converted to Catholicism on his deathbed.
Take a look at the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. What do you see?
Naked men.
"But there are women there too." you protest.
Look again. The women are men with breasts grafted on.
Looks to me like just the kind of place a gay guy would want to hang out.
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