New instructions from Bennie XVI about gay priests.
“The criteria of the Instruction are also entirely consistent with the teaching of the church for the past 2,000 years. To portray the Instruction as ‘gay bashing’ or ‘gay banning’ is to misrepresent it,” [Cardinal Francis George] said at the conclusion of his statement. (Chicago Tribune)
Read: the Church has been homophobic for 2,000 years, so this is nothing new.
Is the Catholic Church trying to make itself a sociological relic, or does it come naturally?
And what about claims that the Church is doing this to try to head off the kind of bad publicity it suffered from the sexual abuse scandals or recent years?
“At best, it’s a distraction; at worst, it’s damaging,” said David Clohessy, national director of the advocacy and support group Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests. “It will feed the mistaken notion that [the abuse scandal] is about the behavior of priests and not the behavior of bishops. Gay seminarians didn’t hire and transfer and cover for child-molesting priests. It was bishops who did that.” (ibid)
Cardinals’ archbishops’ blindness to this simple fact is a sure guarantee that this “solution” will not work.
I wonder if left-handed seminarians are beginning to feel the heat…