Dear sinkspur,
You presume far too much.
I don't care if Ms. Helmueller is Archbishop Burke's friend or not. That doesn't mean she knows the whole story. In fact, she may have overheard snippets of things and badly mangled the truth by badly putting together individual facts in ways that they don't actually relate one to the other.
"One can always repent over anything. But the fact that this is 'confidential' and there 'is more here than meets the eye' simply confirms the story to me."
Then you have made leaps of logic not justified by the facts. I don't care to speculate, but I can think of at least one or two circumstances that could have given rise to this story, but nonetheless wouldn't support the view that this is a "transgendered" person.
As to "accepting transgendered persons into religious orders," there is an inherent difficulty related to the priesthood that don't present in mere admittance to religious orders. An individual born a woman who has surgery to "become" a man is not ontologically a man, and thus cannot be validly ordained.
This is an insuperable difficulty not present in merely accepting someone into a religious order.
sitetest
Well, I can't. How does Joel Green become Julie Green without a nip here and a tuck there?
This is really that important, sitetest, and we've spent far too much time on it already.
I'm not as big a fan of Burke as everybody else is around here, but that's probably obvious. I'm not wild about $25 million shrines, or Cathedral refurbishments, or $200 million Cathedrals. They are extravagances that are usually monuments to the bishops who build them.