there's a bar joke in here somewhere
As you may have heard, the Catholic church is going to soon be looking specifically for celibate men to ban from the priesthood. That is, if they are gay, celibate men.
I guess that, somehow, I am once again landing as a moderate on this. Which kills me.
Alot of left-leaning Christians want to assert that homosexuality is not a sin, which is nonsense. Gay sex is specifically prohibited in the bible more than once. There's alot of wiggling and parsing going on there, but if you are a strict follower of the bible, it's wrong, wrong wrong.
Notice, though, that I said "Gay sex". Boinking another man is a sin. Wanting to boink another man but not doing so is called temptation. Temptation, of course, is not a sin, else we'd all be fucked. Even Jesus was famously tempted by the devil; I certainly can't quote the scripture, but there's a passage where Jesus is looking out on a city, and the devil tells him "Come with me, and this can all be yours". Jesus thinks about it, and eventually rejects the idea, but the point is that he thinks about it. He was tempted. He chose the righteous path, but as with any human, he was tempted. The point of the story is that temptation, or wanting somehting in your head that you know is wrong, is not a sin. Acting on it is.
Which makes the whole weeding out of gay priests thing nonsense. It dosen't matter if a man is attracted to women, men, or farm animals, so long as he maintains the dedication to remain abstinante. Once he violates that oath, with man, woman, or schoolboy, he's fucked. He can think about it, be tempted by it all day long, and it's no big deal. If you think there isn't a priest out there that has never thought "Woah, look at the boobs on that one", you're sadly mistaken. That's part of the programming. Virtue is overcoming that base temptation and living a sinless life.
In a way, I would say that the priesthood is good for a serious Catholic that discovered he was gay: from a Catholic perspective, he can either have gay sex and be doomed forever, or he can have a marriage to a woman that he isn't really interested in, or he can give his life to god and humanity. If you are a Catholic, and you honestly believe that being gay is to be doomed forever, then better to dedicate your life to abstinance in the name of doing God's work.
As for the idea that gay men are more likely to violate the rules...well, there's a pretty serious basis for that, but it's still wrong. There's the alter boy problems. Also, much cited is the idea that among non-priests, gay men are, generally, more lauditudinarian toward sex. That's a statistic, not an insult, and not a surprising one, much to the lament of many gay men who do not share that view. But I doubt that that attitude is shared with men willing to join the priesthood. You're there because you know you're a sinner, as is every other human being on the planet. You join the priesthood looking to repent, not looking to get laid. If anybody with loose attitudes toward sex of any kind makes it through seminary, then there's something wrong.
What they should be looking for is not people prone to temptation, but rather, people prone to give in to their temptation. Being attracted to men, while a statistically higher risk, is not a sin. Having sex, with anyone or anything, is. And for chrissake, when somebody does do something wrong, kick him the fuck out. That, I think, is really the biggest problem: not that there wre some guys that enjoyed buggering kids working for one of the largest organized religions in the world, but rather that the power structure of that Church passed on it. Not only ignored it, but covered it. Hey, kick the guy the fuck out. Tell the world: He's not one of ours.
But banning gay men for the simple transgression of temptation is silly. Every living human deals with temptation, daily. The character, and virtue, of a man is how he deals with that temptation; and that virtue is what should be the qualification to lead others.
