"I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery."
- The Major General in The Pirates of Penzance

“You see, Black Adder, I am a colossal pervert. No form of human depravity is too low for me. Animal, vegetable, or mineral, I’ll do anything to anything.”
“Well, it’s always nice to see the church taking a stand on social issues."
- The Baby Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells to Lord Edmund Blackadder in Blackadder I

September 22nd, 2005

Wearing a pink triangle and a cross is very gauche in the Vatican.

This is the latest from the theatre of the bloody obvious as released from the Vatican. Pope Benedict XVI, has gone into the vault and come back out with a document that homosexuals should not be ordained priests. So, any of you young men out there that think you have had “the calling” you’d best be sure where you’re subconscious behavior lies. You could lose a sweet deal which involves a great black wardrobe and all the sex in the world you’ll never be able to have… again?

Well, guys I wouldn’t worry too much. We married guys promised the church to not have sex unless we planned to procreate. Yet my stock in the Trojan Condoms Magnum line just continues to grow. No pun intended. People lie to the church all of the time whether they mean to or not. Were people to seriously consider the guidelines of the church in their marriage the union wouldn’t last a year. Marriage without sex, or sex toys, or filthy dirty talk, or a hot tub… full of pudding… with a trapeze…

Oh, sorry, I was just having a moment.

Well, just have a read from this article from the Associated Press to see the latest.

Vatican document reaffirms policy on gays
Homosexuals shouldn’t be ordained as priests, Catholic Church says

Sept. 22, 2005
ROME - A Vatican document will be released in the coming weeks that reaffirms the Catholic Church’s belief that homosexuals shouldn’t be ordained priests, a Vatican official said Thursday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the document has not been released, said the “instruction” from the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education would contain “some new things and some old things” and would be released well before the end of the year.

That timeframe means the document will be released just as a Vatican-mandated evaluation of all U.S. seminaries, ordered in the wake of the U.S. clergy sex abuse scandal, gets under way.

Several Vatican documents and letters over the years have said gays or men with homosexual tendencies should not be ordained, regardless of whether they can remain celibate.

A Feb. 2, 1961, Vatican document, “Instruction on the Careful Selection and Training of Candidates for the States of Perfection and Sacred Orders,” made clear homosexuals should be barred from the priesthood.

“(Advancement) to religious vows and ordination should be barred to those who are afflicted with evil tendencies to homosexuality or pederasty, since for them the common life and the priestly ministry would constitute serious dangers,” said the document from the then-Vatican’s congregation for religious.

A 1997 letter from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments says “admission may not take place if there exists a prudent doubt regarding the candidate’s suitability.” It does not specify that homosexuality constitutes a “prudent doubt,” but an American official at the Vatican, the Rev. Andrew Baker, has suggested in an article in the Jesuit magazine America that it does.

‘Absolutely inadvisable and imprudent’
In 2002, Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina Estevez, then-prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, advised against allowing gays in the priesthood in a letter that was published in the congregation’s publication Notitiae. He said their ordination would be “absolutely inadvisable and imprudent, and from the pastoral point of view, very risky.”

The Vatican press office announced in November 2002, at the height of the U.S. clergy sex abuse scandal, that the Congregation for Catholic Education was drawing up guidelines for accepting candidates for the priesthood that would address the question of whether gays should be barred.

Catholic World News, a conservative news agency, reported earlier this week that the document had actually been in the works since 1994.

The agency said the new document would indicate that men with homosexual tendencies shouldn’t be ordained even if they are celibate “because their condition suggests a serious personality disorder which detracts from their ability to serve as ministers.”

In an apparently new element, the agency said the document would also say that already ordained priests, if they have homosexual tendencies, would be “strongly urged to renew their dedication to chastity and a manner of life appropriate to the priesthood.”

The American prelate overseeing the evaluations, Archbishop Edwin O’Brien, said earlier this month that most gay candidates for the priesthood struggle to remain celibate and the church must “stay on the safe side” by restricting their enrollment. He stressed that the church was not “hounding” gays out of the priesthood, but wants to enroll seminarians who can maintain their vows of celibacy.

The document has been controversial from the start, and there had been speculation that it may never be released because of its sensitive nature. Some priests have said the document is sorely needed. Others say it will do more harm than good, antagonizing existing homosexual priests and driving others underground.

 

Yeah, the church has a huge hard on against the homosexual community because of the idiocy mentioned in Leviticus. The saying goes as follows “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” - Leviticus 18:22.

Not only does this institution that exists to apparently save souls, invest in real estate, and perpetuate itself through the brainwashing of children, suggest that homosexuality is evil, it is also a mental illness. Or as the article puts it, “a serious personality disorder which detracts from their ability to serve as ministers.”

Nice, huh?

Such Byzantine logic existed before the latest scientific experimentation on gay men. You’ll love this one. Recently it has been found that homosexual men do not respond to female pheromones. Not only that, they respond to male ones. This suggests that homosexuality is a biological and not a psychological condition.

Yup, God made Adam and Steve. Apparently, God doesn’t hate fags as the idiot Pastor Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church proclaims. For more on this, you can read this article.

What the church has yet to do is define what a homosexual is. Is it a person who has actually engaged in same sex sex or is it a person inclined to perform same sex sex. OR is it a person who engages (present tense) in same sex sex while he is a priest.

If this is defined as a person inclined to perform same sex sex, as a priest should be abstaining from all manner of sex whatsoever, he is taking vows to celibacy anyway and it is a moot point. I can’t see how a homosexual can possibly exist and be a priest at the same time. You can’t not have sex and have sex at the same time. It’s a logistical impossibility. So people who say they won’t have sex and then do have sex should not be priests.

And if you’re having sex with another guy they’ll just also have to say, “No! No! Bad priest!”

However. If a homosexual is defined as a person who has a biological preference to the same sex then that’s just impossible to prove. Also, why should it make any difference? If the temptation to lay down with a man is the same as a heterosexual is to lay down with a woman then that would mean that no one should become a priest.

This also leads to the issue of present day homosexual priests, who have never had a same sexual encounter and have failed to act on that impulse, and THEIR excommunication from the priesthood. After all, according to the Catholic faith, every decision the Pope makes is apparently God’s word. So out they go.

Not for nothing, that’s going to probably leave a whole lot of vacancies in the priesthood.

And how about priests who have had a same sex encounter before taking their vows? What does that mean? I would assume that a good candidate for priesthood has gone to penance before taking his vows. What if that man had a homosexual relationship and then went to do his act of contrition and was absolved of that sin? I mean, isn’t that what absolution means? Doesn’t absolution mean forgiveness and that a person’s soul is wiped clean of that sin BY GOD? How and why should that make any difference?

So, let us review. What has the Pope actually said? He seems to have said that a person who says that they won’t have sex should not have sex and remain a priest. Or maybe he has said that a person who has had sex who says they won’t have sex should not have sex and remain a priest. Or maybe he has said that a person who would want to have sex who says that they won’t have sex should not have sex and remain a priest. Or maybe he has said that a person who has sex and wants to have sex who says he won’t have sex should not have sex and remain a priest.

I think you’ll need an abacus, a rosetta stone, and a slide rule to figure that one out.

But let us remember that this comes from a religion that dedicates itself to decades of study of a book that has been translated several times from several different languages written by several different people and edited by several other people hundreds of years after some of the events already happened.

In essense, I believe that Pope Benedict XVI has said nothing that isn’t bloody obvious. The message should be “If a priest screws a little boy or girl, or anyone for that matter, he shouldn’t be a priest. If his crime should be a felony in the country he is preaching in, not only should he be defrocked, he should go to jail.” It should not be, “If a man is a biological homosexual and wants to become a priest, he should be forced to live a lie (another sin) to dedicate himself to God.”

That’s said plain enough for anyone to understand.