| A Little Paper Boat Launched on a Stormy Sea
The Vatican's Instruction Regarding Persons With Homosexual Tendencies In View of Their Admission to Seminaries and Holy Orders
In this age where every lie is accepted and every truth is rejected, among rejected truths is this: Seventy percent of doing something right is keeping the wrong people out of it.
That there are "wrong people" is, of course, another rejected truth. That anyone is entitled to go where he or she wants is an accepted lie.
The Vatican's recently released Instruction Regarding Persons With Homosexual Tendencies In View of Their Admission to Seminaries and Holy Orders is certainly and to be expected, crazy in the eyes of the world. This is the document that recently had the meat puppets on news shows indignantly or incredulously proclaiming that the Catholic Church is banning homosexuals from the seminaries! Can you imagine that?!
Yet this authentic church instruction--calm, rational, reasonable, compassionate, drawn from 20 centuries of wisdom--must also seem crazy to the American Catholic Establishment. It stands out like an alien substance, a bright red dye when cast into the muddy flow that has been issuing from that establishment for the past few decades. The theme of that effluence can be summed up in these words that Jesus never spoke: Include everyone. Offend no one.
One can easily guess how the instruction will be received by those who have been preaching by word and example that:
a) the worst of all sins--far worse than not preventing evil--is not forgiving someone (that is, not letting them get away with it.)
b) we are all sinners (while leaving out the other half of that truth which is: but some of us are sinners who are sorry and want God's help to be better. The enervating implication of the half-truth is that none have the right to correct others or to stand over others as a moral authorities.)
c) the priesthood and other religious vocations are--even when celibacy is observed and virginity consecrated--careers with free education and plenty of opportunities to be bigshot directors of something and plenty of time for golf, theatre and dance lessons and if you're a bishop, your own beachhouse and semi-annual meetings at posh resorts or 5-star hotels.
The easy guess is that the Establishment won't listen to the instruction, just as it didn't listen to Pope John Paul II. But the up and coming youngsters who will be running the church in a couple decades will listen. In fact, I think that when some of the young traditional priests that are coming along now become seminary directors and bishops, gays will be much safer in the United States Marine Corps.
In the meantime, the sad truth is that we are far from the end of the matter of sexual miscreance and we haven't even gotten to all the other problems caused by sociopaths who should never have been admitted to religious life. Yet to pass by is a whole rich pageant of habitual liars, embezzlers, petty tyrants and just plain bums entitled "Father," "Sister," "Brother" or "Reverend Mister" who don't give a damn about the church or its mission.
Believe it or not, moral failure in the Catholic sisterhood is probably far more widespread than it is in the priesthood. For decades, the sisterhood was a dumping ground for daughters unlikely to catch husbands because they were short on comeliness or long on wackiness. A lot of women who had no interest in giving all for Christ got into the orders and we have been living with the results. Among nuns, the sins are not sexual, but sins of vanity and lust for power. Convents were not closed because there weren't enough nuns. Convents were closed because nuns wanted to have their own pads, their own cars and professional careers that didn't involve teaching kids, keeping churches and otherwise supporting priests.
It would be nice if the pope issued an instruction bidding nuns to scrub floors with their M.B.A.'s, use their Ph.D.s as dishrags and sleep on their jewelry.
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Here's what the Instruction has to say to:
People who think that the Roman Catholic priesthood is just a career or a dumping ground for men who can't get dates:
"Through the sacrament of Orders the Holy Spirit configures the candidate, with a new and specific designation, to Jesus Christ: the priest, in fact, sacramentally represents Christ, Head, Shepherd, and Spouse of the Church. Because of this configuration to Christ, the entire life of the sacred minister must be animated by the gift of his entire person to the Church and by authentic pastoral charity."
People who think the Catholic Church condemns those with homosexual tendencies and denies them a place in the church:
"The Catechism distinguishes between homosexual acts and homosexual tendencies.
Regarding acts, it teaches that, in Sacred Scripture, these are presented grave sins. Tradition has always considered them as intrinsically immoral and contrary to the natural law. As a consequence, they can never be approved under any circumstance.
As regards to deep-seated homosexual tendencies, which are present in a certain number of men and women, these also are objectively disordered and are often a trial for such people. They must be accepted with respect 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 to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter."
Thoughts About Placing The Blame...
Those with orthodox/traditionalist leanings blame the homosexual-ephebophile scandals and other current ecclesiastical shortcomings on Vatican II and its ensuing influx of worldly-minded permissive liberals who are hell-bent on radically remaking the church and its morality. No doubt such hijackers, who now make up the Catholic Establishment, caused much of the trouble, but the ortho-traditionalist indictments don't explain the older ephebophiles who were ordained before Vatican II and when the Tridentine Mass was still being intoned in every church.
Such was one of the most notorious and prodigious ephebophiles, Lawrence F.X. Brett (aka Laurence F.X. Brett) who was ordained in 1962. He bit a boy's member in 1964, while the council was still in session. Brett was a creature of a church now viewed by some as an ideal. However the truth is: that church had become so ossified that all it called for were priests who were outwardly proper functionaries. Sincere devotion and fitness, the interior life, didn't matter because church life, the Mass, sacraments and other spiritual exercises had become mechanical processes. One exception with an exceptional priest was Karol Wojtyla's parish near Krakow. Some queer birds flew in when John XXIII opened that window, but it was a window that had to be opened.
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