Why I'm not Catholic, among other reasons
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From Andrew Sullivan comes this...
- IS THE PURGE IMMINENT? The usually reliable Catholic Reporter's John Allen reports that a long-awaited (and long-feared) document is now in Pope Benedict's hands. The document would put the Vatican's full authority behind banning all gay men from seminaries and the priesthood, regardless of their commitment to celibacy or faithfulness to Church teachings. Their very existence as involuntary homosexuals would make them ineligible for the priesthood. Money quote:
[T]he document will reject a solution that some seminaries, religious communities and bishops have tended to adopt in recent years - that it doesn't matter if a candidate is gay, as long as he's capable of remaining celibate. "I suspect some people, in good will, have gravitated to this idea," one bishop said. "But that's not what the church is saying, and this document will make that clear." To date, there's been no indication of what the pope intends to do.Just ponder what this might mean. The Church concedes that gay people are involuntarily gay; the Church asks them to commit to a life without sex or physical or emotional intimacy; if they are priests, the conundrum is resolved anyway: celibacy is mandatory for gays and straights alike, and, so the very distinction becomes moot.
THE TURN TOWARD BIGOTRY: But now the policy could become something much, much different: even if gay priests live up to all their responsibilities, even if they embrace celibacy wholly, even if they faithfully serve the Church, they would still be deemed beneath being priests, serving God, or entering seminaries. Why? Because, in pope Benedict's own words, they are "objectively disordered," indelibly morally sick in some undefined way, and so unfit, regardless of their actions, to serve God or His people. It is no longer a matter of what they do or not do that qualifies or disqualifies them for the priesthood; it is who they are. Not since the Jesuits' ban on ethnic Jews, regardless of their conversion or Christian faith, has the Church entertained such pure discrimination. The insult to gay Catholics is, of course, immeasurable. It is also an outrageous attack on the good, great and holy work so many gay men and lesbians have performed in the Church from its very beginnings. Father Mychal Judge, for example, the fire-fighters' priest who died in the ruins of the World Trade Center ministering sacraments to fire-men, would retroactively be deemed unfit for the priesthood. So would literally thousands and thousands of gay priests, bishops, cardinals and popes over the centuries. The old doctrine, however cruel and inhumane, at least concentrated on moral acts and made no distinctions between who committed them. It laid out clear rules and insisted that gays and straights abide by them equally. The proposed policy would instead focus on a human being's very core - and exclude him or her as a result. That kind of discrimination is the definition of bigotry. This is the Church? This is God's voice for human dignity and equality in the world? This is an institution that says all are welcome at the Lord's table? I can only hope and pray that pope Benedict doesn't go there. And if he does, I hope that heterosexual Catholics will rise up and defend their gay priests and friends and family members against this unconscionable attack.
(P.S. I am leaving aside, of course, the long history of discrimination and subordination of heterosexual women in the Church. It is equally indefensible, in my view, but the arguments for and against women priests has a different lineage and history that, for now, is best discussed in a different context.)
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