Andrew Sullivan on the Pope and Father Reese (via Amy Welborn)

The magazine never campaigned against church doctrine; it merely aired serious, scholarly articles that raised both sides of many issues. But, according to this petty, prissy tyrant now running the Church, Catholics are not allowed to think through both sides of any issue. This is a signal that not even moderate, calm, balanced and respectful examination of Church doctrine or Church government will be allowed in future. The measures Ratzinger used as prefect will actually be intensified as Pope, until all free thought is extinguished. We were fed p.r. that the new Pope was humble, would be conciliatory, would be a pastor not a dictator. I never believed it. We have had the first sign. It's as dangerous as it is predictable. Message to Catholics: remove your minds. Message to Catholic thinkers: obey on everything - or we will fire you. One silver lining: If I were a Jesuit, I would take the hostility of this clerical tyrant as a badge of honor. Firing this moderate, quiet, modest man is really a call to arms for those of us who need to save our church from this disastrous choice for the papacy.

I followed the link on that page to the account given by Cathleen Kaveny of her encounter with Cardinal Ratzinger and found the this paragraph quite amusing:

During the first break, Lindbeck introduced me to Cardinal Ratzinger. The conversation went something like this: Lindbeck said, “Your eminence, I would like to introduce to you Cathleen Kaveny, a Catholic studying moral theology at Yale.” I smiled and said hello. Ratzinger smiled at me and responded, “A Catholic studying moral theology at Yale? You’d better be careful or you’ll have the Congregation after you.” I couldn’t believe my ears. After all, I had just heard, while wide awake, what Cardinal Ratzinger--the Grand Inquisitor--would say to me in a nightmare, which naturally would also include a stake, a match, a heap of kindling, and a long, flowing white dress (à la Cecil B. De Mille’s The Story of Joan of Arc). He was joking, of course, as I realized almost immediately. Nonetheless, my face must have turned as pale as Joan’s dress. The cardinal quickly understood the problem: “With whom are you studying?” he asked. And not quite able to speak again, I pointed mutely to Lindbeck. Ratzinger said, “Well, then, that’s all right...you’re in good hands.”

I am not a Catholic, but I am really puzzled at how anyone--anyone, claiming to adhere to any Biblically based Faith--can possibly suggest that it is merely a matter of "thinking through both sides" of an issue, to advocate theological toleration for homosexual advocacy. Certainly the application of the term "abomination," must be clear to any theologian. Where is there any even slight deviation from the concept that deliberate homosexual conduct is an "abomination," in either the Old or New Testament?

Frankly, treating such a concept as debatable, can only prolong the agony that religious Catholics--including good friends of mine--have had to endure over the sometimes slow response to the abuse of young boys by Homosexual Priests. No one who wishes the Catholic communities of the world, well, would want to see any doubt as to what is right, here, prolonged. Indeed, to try to turn this into a debate, would be much like a State Legislature debating, whether to repeal the laws against rape, theft and burglary. Unless you actually believe that there is no such thing as right and wrong, and no need to protect the decent among us, the debates over such questions should be directed at how to prevent, how to punish, not whether to tolerate.

This does not mean, of course, that religion should not consider the possibility of people abandoning wrong conduct, and seeking redemption. But that is quite another question.

You might not be Catholic, but you sure think like one! Your post basically reflects what orthodox Catholics and Christians believe.

It does really boggle the mind how these people can claim that there is any room for discussion on this topic. But they still try. You wouldn't believe some of the nutty pseudo-scholarship they cite to back up their claims that homosexual sodomy is perfectly alright.

"What about Sodom & Gomorrah," you ask. They say, Oh, the city was being punished because of the sin of inhospitality, not sodomy. "But wait a minute," you say, "what about that text in Jude re: the sin of Sodom & Gomorrah as 'going after strange flesh'. Don't you think that's about homosexuality?" Oh no, you see, that refers to sex between humans and angels.

And on and on their stupid arguments go. Here, let me quote one nutbar's argument defending the "biblical" justification of homosexual sodomy:

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 condemns lying with a man as with a woman as 'an abomination'. Abomination is an unfortunate translation for the Hebrew word, which means 'something which is unclean under the Purity Law.' Like eating shellfish, or touching a dead pig, it made a person ritually unclean. Since, under Grace, Christians have been released from the requirements of the Law, this does not apply to us.
Romans 1:19-32 equally refers to homosexuality as 'unclean' *not* as a sin. Paul's gist in this passage is that Gentile Idolatry leads to ritual uncleanness and it leads to real sin (such as envy, murder, strife, deceit etc). Paul then goes on to attack the notion that anything is unclean, and to maintain that it is only real sin which matters. In saying this, he actually places homosexuality in the category of 'things which are OK for Christians - like eating non kosher food.'
1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 are difficult to interpret because the greek words used are uncommon, and modern scholarship isn't entirely sure what they mean. But the consensus seems to be that they condemn male prostitutes (or just men who are lazy and self-obsessed) and men who prey sexually on other men, using power or money to force others to have sex with them. (Possibly they may be the clients of the prostitutes...but no one really knows.)
To assume that this is a blanket condemnation of gays is the same as assuming that a condemnation of pimps is a condemnation of all heterosexual sex.

Most of these "arguments," such as they are, come from Daniel A. Helminiak's book 'What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality'. Read it for a good howl.

Most of these "arguments," such as they are, come from Daniel A. Helminiak's book 'What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality'.
Here's what John Boswell was writing back in 1979 (from "The Church and the Homosexual: An Historical Perspective, 1979"):

Most serious biblical scholars now recognize that the story of Sodom was probably not intended as any sort of comment on homosexuality. It certainly was not interpreted as a prohibition of homosexuality by most early Christian writers. In the modern world, the idea that the story refers to the sin of inhospitality rather than to sexual failing was first popularized in 1955 in Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition' by D.S. Bailey, and since then has increasingly gained the acceptance of scholars. Modern scholars are a little late: almost all medieval scholars felt the story of Sodom was a story about hospitality. This is indeed, not only the most obvious interpretation of it but also the one given to it in most other biblical passages. It is striking, for example, that although Sodom and Gomorrah are mentioned in about two dozen different places in the Bible (other than Genesis 19 where the story is first told), in none of these places is homosexuality associated with the Sodomites.
The only other places that might be adduced from the Old Testament against homosexuality are Deuteronomy 23:17 and Kings 14:24, and-doubtless the best know n places Leviticus 18:20 and 20: 13, where a man's sleeping the asleep of women" with men is labelled ritual impurity for Jews. None of these was cited by early Christians against homosexual behavior. Early Christians had no desire to impose the levitical law on themselves or anyone else. Most nonJewish Christians were in fact appalled by most of the strictures of the Jewish law and were not about to put themselves under what they considered the bondage of the old law. St. Paul says again and again that we must not fall back on the bondage of the old law, and in fact goes so far as to claim that if we are circumcised (the cornerstone of the old law), Christ will profit us nothing. The early Christians were not to bind themselves to the strictures of the old law. The Council of Jerusalem, held around 50 A.D. and recorded in Acts 15, in fact took up this issue specifically and decided that Christians would not be bound by any of the strictures of the old law except for which they list - none of which is related to homosexuality.
In the New Testament we find no citations of Old Testament strictures. We do, however, find three places-I Corinthians 6:9, I Timothy 1:10 and Romans 1:2627which might be relevant. Again, I'll be brief in dealing with these. The Greek word malakos in I Cor. 6:9 and I Tim. 1 :10, which Scholars in the 20th century have deemed to refer to some sort of homosexual behavior, was universally used by Christian writers to refer to masturbation until about the 15th or 16th century. Beginning in the 15th century many people were bothered by the idea that masturbators were excluded from the kingdom of heaven. They did not, however, seem to be too upset by the idea of excluding homosexuals from the kingdom of heaven, so malakos was retranslated to refer to homosexuality instead of masturbation. The texts and words remained the same, but translators just changed their ideas about who should be excluded from the kingdom of heaven.
The remaining passage - Romans 1:26-7 - does not suffer by and large from mistranslation, although you can easily be misled by the phrase "against nature." This phrase was also interpreted differently by the early church. St. John Chrysostom says that St. Paul deprives the people he is discussing of any excuse. observing of their women that "they changed the natural use. No one can claim, Paul points out, that she came to this because she was precluded from lawful intercourse or that because she was unable to satisfy her desire....Only those possessing something can change it. Again he points the same thing out about men but in a different way? saying they 'left the natural use of women.' Likewise, he casts aside with these words every excuse, charging that they not only had legitimate enjoyment and abandoned it, going after another but that spurning the natural, they pursued the unnatural." What Chrysostom is getting at, and he expounds on it at great length, is the idea that St. Paul was not writing about gay people but about heterosexual people, probably married who abandoned the pleasure they were entitled to by virtue of their own natures for one to which they were not entitled. This is reflected in the canons imposing penances for homosexual activity, which through the 16th century were chiefly directed toward married persons. Little is said of single people.

BTW, the links are to webpages at fordham.edu. For this alone, the Archdioces of New York should strip Fordham of its status as a Catholic university.

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