A) I didn’t say he definitively WAS a Roman Catholic. I said he very well could have been. Big difference. B) I never heard the love sonnets were written to a man - what is your source for this information? (I have a degree in English Lit, by the way - so this better be a good, scholarly source....not some flamer...) And like Irish Catholic, I am also Roman Catholic, having left the Episcopal Church years ago. I also ask, what’s your point? Yes, we all know there have been gays and pedophiles in the priesthood. Doesn’t make the whole institution bad or evil - just those individuals who commit evil. Including the bishops who shielded the pedophiles.
Get a good annotated edition of Shakespeare's love sonnets. Then read them in order. I suggest the Folger Shakespeare Library edition. (The Folger Shakespeare library in Washington, D.C., is probably the world's leading center for Shakespeare studies.) If you read an isolated sonnet here and there as I did in college, you would assume the sonnet was addressed to a woman. When you read them in order, it is quite clear that the first 126 are addressed to a man.
I also ask, what’s your point?
I would think my point should have been obvious from the first post (and that anyone reading it would see the intended humor.) The argument that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic is specious.
Yes, we all know there have been gays and pedophiles in the priesthood.
I wasn't alluding to that at all. But on the one hand there are Catholics claiming the greatest English playwright as their own, and on the other there are gay groups claiming Shakespeare as their own. Both arguments are laughable. What is certain about Shakespeare is that he was not a prig.