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To: NKP_Vet
There is a saint from the midieval period -- due to age I can't remember his name -- who was the abbot of a monastery. He took this monastery full of fat, lazy monks who had fallen down on the job and their spiritual practice, and he jacked them up, turning the monastery into a profitable concern full of busy monks who knew their duties and did them with discipline, piety and even joy. No poor person was ever turned away from his monastery, and his death produced a genuine outpouring of grief from the region.

Several centuries after his death, his personal journal turned up in the scriptorium of the monastery. It turned out that this abbot had spent his entire priestly life tortured by homosexual desires. But through prayer, fasting, "mortification of the flesh" -- which I suspect meant flagellation -- by using all the spiritual tools of his era, he put his homosexual desires under the most absolute iron control. He was canonized shortly after.

There is a difference between having those desires and keeping them under iron control -- and acting on them. I've run across a lot of priests who struck me as being somewhat gay, but I doubt they ever acted on those inclinations.

15 posted on 02/27/2013 2:13:02 PM PST by Publius
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To: Publius

Your comment makes me wish FR had a LIKE button.


16 posted on 02/27/2013 2:56:29 PM PST by heylady (“Sometimes I wish I could be a Democrat and then I remember I have a soul.”( Deb))
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