Posted on 09/24/2005 1:33:27 PM PDT by NYer
News reports surrounding the review of Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States that the Vatican has organized have focused on the possibility that Rome plans to bar gay men from ordination to the priesthood, regardless of their readiness to remain faithful to their pledge of celibacy.
Such a ban would have serious consequences, of course. It would reverberate far beyond the gay candidates for ordination whom it might directly affect and even beyond the celibate gay priests who would inevitably take it as a judgment on their own calling and years of service.
In fact, the Catholic Church's moral stance on same-sex attraction and sexual activity may well prove to be a touchstone issue for the next generation of Catholics' attitudes toward church authority, just as the renewed papal condemnation of contraception proved to be for Catholics in the 1970's and 80's.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Did you see any mention of what is really motivating this move to 'ban' homosexual priests?
An independent committee that investigated the sexual abuse scandal among Catholic priests concluded that the vast majority (80%) were homosexual priests engaging in sex with boys!
Why did the NY Slimes fail to mention that fact as a motivation for the possible ban?
Yes, of course. The Times words the article to bash the church. The church is simply saying that the actual act of homosexuality is not where they will stop with the ban. Homosexual activity that does not involve actually having sex is also banned (read - participating in homosexual chat rooms, teaching that God's Word is wrong in regard to homosexuality, etc.)
Advancing the gay agenda: "Same sex attraction" is the politically correct term for homosexual and gay, apparently. Next come the lawsuits suing anyone calling a homosexual a homosexual. I'll bet the ranch on it.
No doubt they have many of these diagrams on the walls of their NY Times offices already...
Watch for what you ask for :)
It's based on several different questionares sent to Priests. If gay priests were represented in the church in the same percentages as in society, it wouldn't be an issue, would it?
I thin the question is actually: Can the Church afford NOT to loose the homosexual priests. God always has a plan. It works better if we follow His Word. Will a church truly prosper is 30-50% of it's leadership actively shun God's Word?
I'm inclined to just say that's a pretty stupid question, but instead I'll ask what all these queer priests have already cost everybody - their victims, the Catholic faithful, the scandalized outsiders? Then, after all that, comes the huge sums of money these perverts have forced us to pay out.
My gut feeling is that the 25%-50% figure does not come from reliable studies, and should not be cited. But that's just a feeling. I don't pretend that it is a fact.
The upcoming "instruction" from the Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education will reaffirm the church's belief that homosexuals should not be ordained.
In recent decades, Vatican officials have stated several times that gays should not become priests because their sexual orientation is "intrinsically disordered" and makes them unsuitable for ministry.
The latest document is scheduled to be distributed within weeks, just as an evaluation of all 229 American seminaries gets under way under the direction of the same Vatican agency developing the seminary statement. The review, called an Apostolic Visitation, was ordered by Pope John Paul II in response to the U.S. clergy sex abuse crisis which erupted in 2002. Among the questions the evaluators will ask is whether "there is evidence of homosexuality in the seminary," according to the agency's guide for the inspections.
What's your source for that statistic?
Ignoring the huge non-financial costs, the dollar figure that keeps coming up is >$1 billion.
same sex attraction is a temptation, not a sin.
Homosexuality, like the tendency toward alcoholism and heterosexual promiscuity, is partly inborn, partly developed by childhood/young adulthood experiences, and so is considered an innate disorder...
people with innate disorders are usually barred from entering the priesthood or religious life (in the middle ages, if you were born out of wedlock, you needed a papal dispensation on the recommendation of your bishop if you wanted to become a priest, the idea being you might be promiscuous like your parents)...ditto for alcoholism and drugs...a person who was deeply into the drug culture should not be allowed to be a priest, because it shows immaturity or psychological problems...
So if you are tempted into same sex attraction, or into lustfulness of your eyes, you are supposed to reject the thought and ask God for help in not dwelling on the thought or not acting on it.
And you are supposed to stay away from "near occassions of sin"...if you are heterosexual, it means no Hooters or strip clubs, if you are gay, it means not living with men in monasteries, the army, or the priesthood...
a good book about how overcoming such temptations leads to holiness is Michael O'Brien's new book Sophia House...
And one more thing: Since homosexuality is an innate disorder, those who do fall into sin are less "guilty" than if a person choses to do it...to commit a mortal (serious) sin, you need to know it is wrong and then do it anyway...
So a man "hiding" homosexuality and who stays away from temptation who nevertheless falls into sin is less "guilty"(since he has an innate tendency toward that sin) than one who chooses to follow the gay lifestyle: The sin is not the sex, but the chosing of a promiscuous lifestyle that opens you to sinful actions...
All of this is true not just for sexual sins, but for anger, greed, etc...
and pride, not sexual sin, is the highest sin...saying my ideas are right and God is wrong is the highest sin...
Your Daddy was a wise man:
"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites--in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity;--in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption;--in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite is placed somewhere: and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds can not be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
-- Edmund Burke
The NY Times is clueless. The new generation of Catholics who support gay rights are for the most part do not attend mass, and havent stepped foot in a parish in years.
Check this out:
http://www.freerepublic.com/~scripter/#index
It contains links to the entire Homosexual Agenda Archives, organized by subject. If you spend a little reading time, you'll find out all you want to know and likely more than you wanted to know about the health hazards associated with same sex activity.
The percentage of gay priests will be considerably augmented in those dioceses run by liberal bishops who make the selections of candidates. This is especially true in NYS where at least two bishops were appointed by Archbishop Jadot whose agenda was to increase the number of homosexual priests and eventually see them elevated to the College of Cardinals. He also supported the ordination of women to the priesthood. Mercifully, Jadot's bishops are now aging and will some day be replaced with shepherds in full agreement with Church teachings.
The statistics you cite appear in an article from today's edition of (a NY daily), excerpted below.
"A pending Vatican instruction barring homosexual men from the Roman Catholic priesthood even if they are celibate is provoking fury and fear among some priests in New York and Long Island, who worry that good men will be scapegoated and the ranks of priests decimated." />
The instruction, which has not yet been published, is said to "grandfather" gay men who have been ordained. Nevertheless, some men who described themselves as chaste homosexual priests say they are considering speaking against the document, or even resigning.
"Do you want to work for an organization that barely tolerates your existence and says that people like you can no longer be accepted?" asked one New York priest who described himself as homosexual and chaste. "What kind of self-hatred is necessary to continue in a place like that?"
While the church has long recommended against ordaining men "affected by the perverse inclination to homosexuality or pederasty," many prelates acknowledge there is a higher percentage of gays in the priesthood in the United States than in the general population - anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent, according to some estimates - despite the church's teaching that homosexuality is an "intrinsic evil."
Conservatives have tended to blame the priestly sex-abuse crisis on a priesthood riddled with homosexuality, while liberals point to a clerical culture of secrecy. But even some conservatives expressed reservations about a blanket ban.
"For the Catholic Church not to take seriously that there has been a gay subculture in the church would be totally irresponsible," said William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. "On the other hand, I don't support a flat prohibition. I think it would demoralize those priests I know who are gay and who are celibate and who are good men.
"While it is true that most of the molesters have been gay, it is also untrue that most gay priests are molesters."
Many priests oppose the targeting of homosexuals.
"I don't think it will solve the problem," said the Rev. Andrew Connolly, pastor of St. Frances de Sales Church in Patchogue. "It seems to paint all homosexuals with the same brush and say they cannot control their sexuality, which I don't think is true."
Experts in sexual abuse also expressed skepticism.
"You can't really screen for homosexuality," said Dr. Martin P. Kafka, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Unless they're going to do visual sexual arousal testing, I suspect that all this is going to do is drive this underground."
Kafka, who was part of a panel of experts brought to the Vatican two years ago to discuss scientific findings about molesters, said that while homosexuality is a risk factor for molestation, it is not a cause. The great majority of homosexuals are not abusers, he said.
Spokesmen for the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Rockville Centre, which run seminaries, declined to comment until they have seen the document. Both of those seminaries will be inspected as part of a Vatican-ordered review of seminaries looking for evidence of homosexuality and at how seminarians are prepared for lives of celibacy.
Of course the good news is that those heterosexual men called to the priesthood, can now accept that calling. Many of these good men were either turned away by some of the bishops or preferred not to spend their seminary years amongst the gay seminarians.
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