Gay Priests and the Church that Tolerates Them Part Two

Gay Priests and the Church that Tolerates Them Part Two

In my own experience as an active Catholic, altar boy, and choir boy, I never experienced, witnessed, or heard of any untoward, sexual advances by any priest toward anyone, male or female, adult or child. That is not to say that it never happened but is mentioned only to emphasize that such occurrences had to have been rare or virtually non-existent.

The rarity seems to have ended coincidental with Vatican Council II in 1962 which not only re-introduced the vernacular to Church services and declared that marriage is of equal value to virginity. It opened the floodgates of greater secularization of the clergy–and of nuns–and eventually led to lax requisites for seminarians to fill the gaps created by a virtual collapse of religious vocations.

Today, according to The Changing Face of the Priesthood, estimates of gays in American seminaries range from 25 to 50%. As for active, gay priests, the numbers are probably similar.

All of the above is preface to the influx of homosexuals into the priesthood in the past 50 years and, specifically, to what happened recently in Rome when three gay priests were discovered, and videotaped, indulging in la dolce vita,homosexual-style, at night while acting as priests during the day. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1802)

Gay Priests and the Church that Tolerates Them Part One

Gay Priests and the Church that Tolerates Them

Political comebacks are one thing. Institutional, religious comebacks are quite another.

Corruption in the Catholic Church in the fifteenth century led to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, the effects of which are still profoundly felt by the Church five centuries later.

The Church is again moving on down that slippery slope, that thorn-filled path, in the twenty-first century due to a wholly different type of corruption: the continuing presence of gay priests.

Just as today’s lenient atmosphere allows tainted pols to worm their way back into the society’s graces, many people today are ambivalent about homosexuals even if they consider homosexual practices and lifestyles to be repugnant, even sinful.

The reason for that ambivalence, I believe, is that so many gays have exited their closets in recent years that many people now know admitted homosexuals as acquaintances, friends, even family members and so are hesitant to condemn or even criticize them.

That’s unfortunate for many reasons, chief of which for the purpose of this article is that the Catholic Church seems to have adopted a comparable collegial or familial attitude toward gay priests and refuses to expel them from the priesthood, refuses, that is, until a major, public scandal hits the tabloids. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1801)