The Holy See Cracking Down On Homosexuality In The Priesthood

I hate what the Lavender Mafia has done to the Church. As we read in Michael Rose' Goodbye, Good Men, gays discreetly took over a number of Catholic seminaries in the wake of Vatican II, turned away orthodox applicants, and converted swathes of the American priesthood into agents of The Homintern. Way too many of these caused widespread anguish by seducing or otherwise sexually molesting parishioners' teenage boys. Not children, and not teenage girls. Teenage boys. At least one boy killed himself as a result of his sexual misuse by his priest. George Weigel, in The Courage To Be Catholic, called for nothing less than the spiritual cauterization of the Church. The problem is not one of management or oversight, but of fidelity, he said.

Liberals of course blamed the Church itself and its teachings for the mess, as if church doctrine and not the flouting of it by liberals had let all these people into the priesthood. And sheltered them from scrutiny.

Antiquus Bellator goes at this issue with more "hammer and tongs" than I will here. He's got a manuscript from a shipwrecked book deal about this subject, which he's posting on his blog.

Andrew Sullivan, whom I still admire quite a lot, is predictably aghast. He professes incredulity at Richard John Neuhaus's approval of the idea to let gay priests remain but to bar the admission of any more. Inconsistent? Sounds rather compassionate to me, to let inoffensive oldtimers stay out their terms of earthly service. Also commonsensical: After a third of a century, we've seen the fruit of having the American church's seminaries under liberal and gay control. To switch metaphors, the Church should now know where libs will take it when it tosses them the car keys. Pope Benedict XVI thinks he does, and he doesn't like it.

If homosexuality in the Church were a simple issue, wiser people than you or me would have sorted it out long ago. We'll probably have to hold a number of moral inconsistencies in suspension forever, in practice. But the Church badly needs to address its failings which led to the abuse scandals. Rewarding and reinforcing the gay liberation mindset that caused them isn't an option.