Posted on 11/29/2005 8:03:37 PM PST by presidio9
The Vatican's tougher stand on homosexuality has divided American Catholics, with some welcoming it as a renewal of a Church plagued by scandal and others warning it would further alienate Catholic leaders.
Reflecting the divisions foreseen by some churchmen and scholars, a Catholic priest in Arizona announced his resignation because of "aggressive anti-gay positions" at the Vatican and the U.S. Church.
"I could no longer stay in that institution with any amount of integrity," Rev. Leonard Walker, 58, told the Arizona Republic after resigning from the Queen of Peace Church.
Apparently trying to defuse controversy over the eight-page Vatican document officially released on Tuesday, the president of the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, Bishop William S. Skylstad, said priests with "homosexual inclinations" can be good priests and should not fear discussing the issue.
Widespread leaks of the document last week already prompted criticism by gay rights advocates and liberal Catholics who said the Vatican failed to address deeper problems that led to the U.S. scandal over pedophile priests that erupted in 2002.
Some Catholic scholars said the real issue was the Church's fixation on celibacy. Daniel Maguire, a professor of moral theology at Marquette, a Jesuit university in Wisconsin, described celibacy as a "failed experiment in human control."
"It's highly unrealistic," he said.
PRIEST SCANDAL
Skylstad, who sets the tone for Vatican edicts in the United States, sought to calm angry Catholics by stressing that the first major ruling of Pope Benedict's reign would not exclude gay men who dedicated themselves to the priesthood.
"Deep respect should be shown to all people irrespective of sexual orientation," Skylstad told Reuters in an interview. "But a person has to be deeply committed," he added.
The Vatican statement said homosexuals should be barred from entering the priesthood along with men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies and those who support gay culture.
Homosexual tendencies must be clearly overcome at least three years before admission to the deaconate, a position a step short of priesthood, it said. Decisions on how to put this into practice rest in part with local Bishops, said Skylstad.
Brian Saint-Paul, senior editor of the Catholic journal CRISIS, described the document as "liberal" for allowing gays to continue to enter seminaries at all compared to a 1961 edict that barred all homosexuals outright but was poorly enforced.
"This leaves the door open for men with same-sex attractions...this is quite significant but it is one part of a larger approach to a renewal of the priesthood," he said.
He added that homosexuality and the pedophile priest scandal were clearly linked. His position is shared by other conservatives who point to a 2004 survey by John Jay College of Criminal Justice that found that, of 10,667 people abused by priests between 1950 and 2002, 81 percent were male.
The U.S-based Human Rights campaign called on U.S. Catholics to complain to their pastors and accused the Church of using homosexuals as scapegoats for the abuse scandals.
"We see it as more hypocrisy from an institution that is rapidly losing its credibility," said Marianne Duddy-Burke of gay and lesbian Catholic group Dignity USA in Boston.
In Arizona, Walker said he no longer felt comfortable "wearing the uniform" of priesthood. "It's like a Jew wearing a Nazi uniform," he said, declined to disclose his sexual orientation.
There are currently 64.8 million Catholics in the United States compared to 45.6 million in 1966 -- or 23 percent of the population compared to 24 percent in 1966, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate in Georgetown.
There are a number of reasons Latin is resurgent - first, the Universal Church needs a universal language. Second, the language needs to be certain, static and free from ambiguity. Third, the Tridentine Mass teaches via the liturgy - Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, and is not subject to the interprative nonsense of the protestantized NO Mass. If you could follow a Japanese language Mass, you could just as easily follow a Latin Mass.
Some dream of great things, some dream of a married priesthood and a sodomite priesthood. I choose the City of God.
Well, you just go out and get yourself a sassy little outfit and just be your faaaaaaaaabulous self!
You are wrong. I know personally of many men who were either disinclined to consider priesthood because of the liberal direction of the American Church and those who turned away from the seminary because of the pro-homosexual attitudes flourishing there.
These men will gladly return to a Church which stands up for its faith!
All priests accept a vow of chastity. And what ever happened to supposed Catholics who do not accept the Church's teachings on a matter of faith or morals leaving the Church and joining or founding another? It's the right thing to do if one is so exorcized (pun intended).
Homosexual orientation or tendencies are NOT sinful. Only homosexual acts are sinful.To put a finer point on your post, same-sex acts are sinful (sodomy), same-sex thoughts are sinful ('to lust in one's heart') and same-sex words are sinful ('to utter support the gay agenda'). Temptation to same-sex sin, however, is not sinful.
Having said that, I concur with your basic contention that there have always been and will always be fine priests who deal chastely with temptation to same-sex sin.
Excellent comments! Wow! I'm clicking the link. Very true and insightful. Some people talk about "celibate" homomosexuals as though if a homoesexual not having "sex" and a normal man not having sex are exactly the same. They are not; and I was trying to make that point.
But your excerpt makes the point a lot better than I did.
Someone can forcibly, by will power, prevent himself from having homosexual sex, but still want it, be attracted to men and so on. Such a man is (as stated in the Vatican doc, and obvious to anyone who isn't biased) unqualified not only for the priesthood, but many other professions and positions as well.
A man who has overcome his same sex attraction is no longer a homosexual. There are many, some are married (to women!) and fathers of children. Others decide to remain single. Same Sex Attraction can be healed.
Clear to me.
Also, if a person is identifying not as his mortal body and its attendant desires, but as an eternal soul, an eternal child of God, then all kinds of desires, whether legitimate or illegitimate, fade away. The desire to relate with God is the ultimate source of real desire, it just gets tainted with selfishness and physical identification. Example - we need to eat to stay alive, but it can kind of merge into greed. Eating to live and living to eat are two different things.
Amen, Brother. I'm so sick of so-called polls of Catholics. If you are not attending Mass on a regular basis, then you are a marginal Catholic at best, and you opinion on Church matters is essentially worthless.
Do you think when Jesus said htis he was making a reference to followers of Pan?
As the Church grows more orthodox so will the congregations.
Those that leave are most likely not those in the pews on Sunday.
The Catholic Church labels homosexuality a mental disorder. But the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association have for more than 30 years not regarded homosexuality per se as a mental disorder -- based upon substantial research (not, as falsely claimed, politics).
In reply to Sinkspur, perhaps the reason normal men aren't called to the priesthood is a) they are turned down for admission by the lavender mafias running the seminaries, or b) they don't wish to spend their lives in the company of a group of men if that group of men is homosexually dominated.
This is like saying that the solution to poverty is for the poverty stricken class to birth control and abort itself out of existence, in some ways.
I would think that at the least those admitting same sex attraction would have to admit it was wrong.
You have to watch it when you read American Catholics .
So much the worse for the APA ... if they can (by whatever means) convince themselves that the desire of one man to stick his genitals into another man's rectum is in any way, shape, or form "normal", a reasonable person can only conclude that they have taken leave of their collective senses.
They won't require the latin, but they won't supress it like it's been supressed by the homomafia since 1970 or so. People like it, people want it. They want a transcendent, authentic experience now. They don't want to go to church and hear the same crap they hear in the media all week long. There is a place for the Tridentine Mass, and I hope it will keep its place forever.
I will say this though, the people who say the Latin is not coming back should remember that officially it has never left -- it is the official liturgical language of the Latin Rite. The vernacular is the exceptional case, to be used by permission. I believe Benedict could revoke that without the permission of the College of Cardinals, though I'm not sure about that.
I have to admit, when I meet a priest these days, one of my first thoughts is, "wonder if he's a homo."
It's not easy to cross the Rubicon, especially with a lifetime of anti-papist nonsense to get over. But it's worth considering. I have. There's no more intellectually challenging or more deeply spiritual denomination, practiced properly.
See, I don't see how this still happens. I think the secular authorities need to ignore the church when it comes to sex crime investigations, push aside canon law, and run these people in. I think the Church needs to step back and remain silent on priests caught in flagrante delicto. Let them be sent to prison. Then laicize them. Seems like it would reduce the Church's liability. There's no reason that a priest should get any break a layman wouldn't get. A priest should get LESS tolerance than a layman, because he has been sanctified (in the "set apart" sense), and has broken his vows, which brings dishonor not only on himself but on the whole institution, weakening it. The Church has NO ROOM for people like that. There is no margin of error anymore for playing games with sex criminals.
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