The Pink Elephant in the Church

I took Catholic instruction as a teen with my mom (Father Smith Instructs Jackson). As with further exploration within Christianity however - ever more critical, yet respectful - it's one of the things that moved me towards Judaism.

I wouldn't bring any of this up, but I have privately agonized over this very thing for years and it isn't anything you can talk to ANYONE about in my real world.

I think your questions are quite valid. I am sorry that you do not have a confidant that you can talk to about these matters. I hope this forum provides some sustenance for you and I will remember you in my prayers. Pax vobiscum.

Fidelity to God's law and the Faith must always come before obedience to corrupt shepherds.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

PING

Pink Elephant ping.
:-)

I've always thought of priests as asexual. Not in thought or desire, but behavior. I am opposed to banning homosexual priests, but I support banning all priests who engage in sexual behavior. Heterosexual priests can have sex with women, should they be banned for what they could do?

Just as the posted article urges, homosexuals should not be priests. They should not be admitted to seminaries and they should be ousted from the priesthood if discovered as active homosexuals.
This is not the US DOD and a don't ask, don't tell policy. This is the Catholic Church which teaches that priests are to be celibate for life. As Fr. Fessio SJ has written, The motivation for celibacy was the closer following of Jesus Christ, who required his apostles to leave wife and family, to become “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom”. I suppose that is what you have stated in you post, that you think of priests as "asexual."
To me it is quite simple and straight forward: Priests who violate their solemn vows to God by engaging in sex (hetero or homo) should be banned from the priesthood.

The only area where we disagree is that I base it on behavior not orientation. It has nothing to do with don't ask, don't tell. It's don't ask and don't do. What is the sin of homosexuality that is not acted upon?

If yoiu think that's an offense then heterosexual priests with desires would not be suitable either.

bttt

"As a young man applying for acceptance in the local seminary ....."

I take it you mean within the Novus Ordo regime which is the root of the problem both in its philosophy to subvert the Church and its array of practices developed to ensure Catholicism no longer is the force it used to be. Unless one is an eager supporter of the Vatican II agenda, I cannot see the point in anyone entering a Novus Ordo seminary with the intention of restoring tradition; the contamination and dishonesty will be too great to bear. Better to seek out a truly traditional seminary outside the clutches of unholy dioceses and start to learn Latin!

...I base it on behavior not orientation.

I don't believe you can separate homosexual orientation from the behavior. Heterosexuality is not, in an of itself, sinful. Homosexuality is sinful, against nature and against God's law. And those who have an orientation toward sin should be held accountable. In priests, having an orientation towards heterosexuality is not wrong, but normal. Repressing that sexuality for the purpose of serving God and taking vows to only serve Him is a sacrifice and solemn commitment.
By the way, I don't believe homosexuality is an inbred gene or that a man is "born that way." But I'll leave that topic for other discussions which are plentiful around FR.

I don't believe you can separate homosexual orientation from the behavior.

You start out with an illogical statement and I disagree with the rest of your opinion.

I'm out.

For those interested -some links to documents and some excerpts. Take note of item #6 -seems self explanatory to me...

Catholic documents and teaching on subject of homosexuality:

The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality - Guidelines for Education within the Family

104. A particular problem that can appear during the process of sexual maturation is homosexuality, which is also spreading more and more in urbanized societies. This phenomenon must be presented with balanced judgement, in the light of the documents of the Church. Young people need to be helped to distinguish between the concepts of what is normal and abnormal, between subjective guilt and objective disorder, avoiding what would arouse hostility. On the other hand, the structural and complementary orientation of sexuality must be well clarified in relation to marriage, procreation and Christian chastity. "Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained". A distinction must be made between a tendency that can be innate and acts of homosexuality that "are intrinsically disordered" and contrary to Natural Law.
Especially when the practice of homosexual acts has not become a habit, many cases can benefit from appropriate therapy. In any case, persons in this situation must be accepted with respect, dignity and delicacy, and all forms of unjust discrimination must be avoided. If parents notice the appearance of this tendency or of related behaviour in their children, during childhood or adolescence, they should seek help from expert qualified persons in order to obtain all possible assistance.
For most homosexual persons, this condition constitutes a trial. "They must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfil God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition". "Homosexual persons are called to chastity".

Persona Humana - Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics

VIII At the present time there are those who, basing themselves on observations in the psychological order, have begun to judge indulgently, and even to excuse completely, homosexual relations between certain people. This they do in opposition to the constant teaching of the Magisterium and to the moral sense of the Christian people.
A distinction is drawn, and it seems with some reason, between homosexuals whose tendency comes from a false education, from a lack of normal sexual development, from habit, from bad example, or from other similar causes, and is transitory or at least not incurable; and homosexuals who are definitively such because of some kind of innate instinct or a pathological constitution judged to be incurable.
In regard to this second category of subjects, some people conclude that their tendency is so natural that it justifies in their case homosexual relations within a sincere communion of life and love analogous to marriage, in so far as such homosexuals feel incapable of enduring a solitary life.
In the pastoral field, these homosexuals must certainly be treated with understanding and sustained in the hope of overcoming their personal difficulties and their inability to fit into society. Their culpability will be judged with prudence. But no pastoral method can be employed which would give moral justification to these acts on the grounds that they would be consonant with the condition of such people. For according to the objective moral order, homosexual relations are acts which lack an essential and indispensable finality. In Sacred Scripture they are condemned as a serious depravity and even presented as the sad consequence of rejecting God. This judgment of Scripture does not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it, but it does attest to the fact that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of.

Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons

10. It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.
But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.
11. It has been argued that the homosexual orientation in certain cases is not the result of deliberate choice; and so the homosexual person would then have no choice but to behave in a homosexual fashion. Lacking freedom, such a person, even if engaged in homosexual activity, would not be culpable.
Here, the Church's wise moral tradition is necessary since it warns against generalizations in judging individual cases. In fact, circumstances may exist, or may have existed in the past, which would reduce or remove the culpability of the individual in a given instance; or other circumstances may increase it. What is at all costs to be avoided is the unfounded and demeaning assumption that the sexual behaviour of homosexual persons is always and totally compulsive and therefore inculpable. What is essential is that the fundamental liberty which characterizes the human person and gives him his dignity be recognized as belonging to the homosexual person as well. As in every conversion from evil, the abandonment of homosexual activity will require a profound collaboration of the individual with God's liberating grace.

Some Considerations Concerning the Response to Legislative Proposals on Non-discrimination of Homosexual Persons

II. Applications
10. "Sexual orientation" does not constitute a quality comparable to race, ethnic background, etc. in respect to non-discrimination. Unlike these, homosexual orientation is an objective disorder (cf. "Letter," No. 3) and evokes moral concern.
11. There are areas in which it is not unjust discrimination to take sexual orientation into account, for example, in the placement of children for adoption or foster care, in employment of teachers or athletic coaches, and in military recruitment.
13. Including "homosexual orientation" among the considerations on the basis of which it is illegal to discriminate can easily lead to regarding homosexuality as a positive source of human rights, for example, in respect to so-called affirmative action or preferential treatment in hiring practices. This is all the more deleterious since there is no right to homosexuality (cf. No. 10) which therefore should not form the basis for judicial claims. The passage from the recognition of homosexuality as a factor on which basis it is illegal to discriminate can easily lead, if not automatically, to the legislative protection and promotion of homosexuality. A person's homosexuality would be invoked in opposition to alleged discrimination, and thus the exercise of rights would be defended precisely via the affirmation of the homosexual condition instead of in terms of a violation of basic human rights.

Considerations Regarding Proposals To Give Legal Recognition To Unions Between Homosexual Persons

4. There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God's plan for marriage and family. Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law. Homosexual acts “close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved”.
7. Homosexual unions are totally lacking in the biological and anthropological elements of marriage and family which would be the basis, on the level of reason, for granting them legal recognition. Such unions are not able to contribute in a proper way to the procreation and survival of the human race. The possibility of using recently discovered methods of artificial reproduction, beyond involving a grave lack of respect for human dignity, does nothing to alter this inadequacy.
Homosexual unions are also totally lacking in the conjugal dimension, which represents the human and ordered form of sexuality. Sexual relations are human when and insofar as they express and promote the mutual assistance of the sexes in marriage and are open to the transmission of new life.
As experience has shown, the absence of sexual complementarity in these unions creates obstacles in the normal development of children who would be placed in the care of such persons. They would be deprived of the experience of either fatherhood or motherhood. Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development. This is gravely immoral and in open contradiction to the principle, recognized also in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that the best interests of the child, as the weaker and more vulnerable party, are to be the paramount consideration in every case.

Religiosorum Institutio

30. Those To Be Excluded; Practical Directives
Advantage to religious vows and ordination should be barred to those who are afflicted with evil tendencies to homosexuality or pederasty, since for them the common life and the priestly ministry would constitute serious dangers.

The Pink Elephant in the Church

The Pope Francis Statement That Changed the Church on LGBT Issues