With one important difference: when were homosexuals outside the church given the power to retain or remit the sins of their victims? When did the homosexuals outside the church claim the ability to change wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ? When were homosexuals outside the church held up to be an alter christus?
I’m utterly stunned that Catholics obfuscate, make excuses, justify, and do whatever they can to take the heat off the priests and totally miss the fact that these men are supposed to be “from God” or even “vicar of Christ”. Yeah right. If that isn’t cultish activity and attitude I don’t know what is.
The Church does not ordain open-homosexuals,unlike other Christian bodies, so what you say is nonsense. We also have had priests are adulterers, fornicators, drunks, thieves, and even murders. I personally do not think that homosexual acts are necessarily worse than any of these crimes against God and the Church. One must indeed take care to avoid confessing to a priest of known bad character, but I do not believe that his sin strips away his power to absolve, for though he may have the right to withhold absolution, it is not he who actually absolves, but the Church . Confession is an act of humbling oneself, a good thing in itself, and we rest assured in believing that whatever the character of the man behind the screen, that God knows our hearts, and that the priest has been given the power to absolve.