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In my defense I would say that half the Catholics here don't understand what the Church teaches.

LOL! Well-parried, and too true!

I have enough on my plate to figure out the dogma. Policy is too much for me.

The phrase that sticks in my head is "disorder". There is a fine little article in the latest First Things about a young man who has homosexual tendencies but is working with prayer and the help of the rarest (these days) of therapists, namely one who will agree the homosexual urges are disordered. And the main point that stuck with me is that the young man refuses to let his urges define him or to get caught up in the "gay pride" and "gay identity" culture.

Every Catholic-For Dummies that I've found is inadequate one way or another. I think that's inevitable. Not every Catholic has the capacity, inclination, or vocation to be a theologian. For them to resolve to know nothing but Christ and Him crucified is a good course.

But if you're going to ascend the intellectual heights, you've got to expect intellectual distinctions, nuances, and all. And that will mean, at the least, reading ALL the paragraphs.

So, let's play:
- Passions are not culpable.
- Passions can be "disordered". A passion to eat filth would be disordered because what hunger is about it nutrition. A passion to eat 25 lbs of chocolate would be disordered for the same reason.
- Disordered passions can have many causes, some of them culpable.
- So, you may think your neighbor's wife is a hottie. No blame, (but there are some interesting conclusions to be drawn about the weakness of fallen humans and the disordered relationship between reason and passion and all like that.
- If you entertain fantasies of making it with your neighbor's wife, now you've sinned. There was a choice, there was an act, there is culpability.
To sum up, with the neighbor's wife, the passion is morally neutral, the fantasies, which are actions though internal ones, are culpable. With, however the neighbors husband (assuming you are of the guy persuasion) the passion is not culpable, but it is disordered. Any subsequent fantasies are culpable. SO, I can IMAGINE (while I busily thank God for not making me a bishop) a situation where someone with homosexual passions could be trusted in some pastoral situations, if the person was otherwise of average sanity and all. I never met anybody who wasn't a little out of kilter. BUT If I came to that guy's house and saw a stack of, ah, muscle magazines, that would suggest to me that he was deliberately entertaining fantasies, thereby weakening his resolve and harming his temperance and self-control, I'd remove him from any pastoral responsibility. Does that make sense?

As to your last paragraph, there's a "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" in the term "Protestant". There are a bunch of different ecclesial assemblies which are not in communion with Rome and don't want to be. Sometimes it seems that's the only characteristic shared by all these assemblies. A few of those assemblies, e.g.: Metropolitan Church and now the Episcopal Church, consider homosexual activity no bar to pastoral responsibility or to ordination. I'd bet that a vast majority are ag'in it.

There. I did my best.