Boy, it really gets me steamed when the heads of other religions feel it necessary to weigh in on the Church's scandals... especially Rowan Williams (who is currently overseeing the dissolution of his own Protestant sect).
Unlike many traditional Catholics, I welcome the scrutiny that the Church has come under as a result of the homosexual infiltration of the priesthood and the subsequent sexual scandals. I do not believe that Truth can be wrong and it is certainly True that there have been truly horrendous lapses in judgment that allowed sexually unstable individuals into positions of authority and responsibility. I only wish that the media were using this as an opportunity for constructive criticism as opposed to a justification for smearing the Pope and the Church as a whole.
With all this in mind, however, I find it fairly ridiculous that Rowan Williams ('head' of the Anglican Communion) would deign to criticize the Catholic Church for it's handling of homosexuals (and other sexual deviants) in the priesthood, when the Anglican Communion is currently tearing itself apart over the legitimization of homosexual clergy and the promotion of homosexual marriage.
Where the Catholic Church was shamed by it's homosexual problems (reacting iwith botched cover-ups), the Anglican Communion is actively INVITING the exact same problems into their own Church! They are actual CELEBRATING the inclusion of sexually unstable individual into positions of authority in their hierarchy!
So I say to Archbishop Williams, look to the plank in your own eye, before condemning the mote in the eyes of others.
It is an interesting historical phenomenon that, for many years, homosexual desires were seen specifically as a calling to the Priesthood, on the grounds that God clearly did not intend for you to marry, so He must mean for you to be a priest.
ReplyDeleteMore broadly, the Catholic church's problems are not homosexual problems, but pedophilia problems. Regardless of whether both are, in your view, sinful sexual perversions, they are at least distinct ones.
Actually, this is not true. Homosexuals have been consistently excluded from the priesthood precisely for this reason... disordered sexuality begets further disordered behavior.
ReplyDeleteIt is true that in the mid-twentieth century, that certain elements within the Church began actively recruiting homosexuals to the priesthood, believing that their disordered sexuality would work within the confines of celibacy (not really understanding that celibacy requires a rigorously ordered sexuality).
This resulted in the sexual scandals that plagued the Church between the 1950s and the 1980s. The problems that we are talking about were, in fact, homosexual problems and not pedophile problems. Certainly, there were pedophiles involved in a small minority of the cases, but the majority of the cases had nothing to do with pre-pubescent children (i.e. the definition of pedophilia).
The vast majority of these cases involved adolescent males. In the same way that straight men find adolescent females attractive, homosexual men often find those same characteristics attractive in adolescent males.
One cannot claim that these crimes were not homosexual in nature. Of course, I do understand that there is a distinction between 'gay' and homosexual (gay being one who embraces homosexual activity as an identity); however, both are homosexuals and homosexuality is the core disorder regardless of how it is expressed.
Pedophilia is generally taken to mean an attraction to children under the age of consent, not merely pre-pubescent children.
ReplyDeleteThat said, it seems as though you are in fact going further than the Church in this context, treating homosexual inclination as a weakness and problem as opposed to action.
I think that you need to look at the actual defininitions of these terms. Pedophilia is attraction to pre-pubescent children, while ephebophilia is the attraction to adolescents.
ReplyDeleteThe Church, actually, has bee fairly consistent in treating homosexuality as a disordered expression of natural sexuality. There are, of course, homosexual acts and homosexual inclinations. Homosexual inclinations are not inherently sinful, but they are inherently disordered and a sign of a disordered sexuality. Inclinations are only sinful with one wilfully assents to them. Homosexual acts are sinful because they are a sign of the assent to the disordered inclinations.
The Church has now specifically banned anyone from the seminaries with homosexual inclinations, because the disorder is a sign of deeper problem. So, I would say that I am fairly in line with the Church with regards to sexuality and sexual morality.
This is not to say that we should hate homosexuals or that homosexuals are evil (however, homosexual inclination IS an intrinsic evil), but that we should be more careful with who is put into positions of pastoral authority.
It is a sign of changed practice, perhaps. The rejection of homosexual inclinations from the seminaries, however, seems to me, if not in outright contradiction, certainly ill at ease with the relevant portion of the catechism, which notes both the unchangeability of homosexual inclinations and the potential for Christian perfection through chastity.
ReplyDeleteI am hard-pressed to see much daylight between the call for chastity on the part of homosexuals and the larger virtue of chastity. Indeed, the similarity in description reminds me more of the description of Christ the physician than anything else.