Many decades ago, priests were my psychotherapists, whose empathy supported me through adolescence and at ND. None ever remotely hit on me. Of course I naively never ever considered their sexuality. In retrospect.......... I don't care. However, as an apostate, I have no standing to comment on these issues in today's world.
(no message)
(no message)
(no message)
(no message)
(no message)
(no message)
(no message)
demands that they be asexual.
given by God.
It’s also not a doctrinal or scriptural requirement of the Church. Rather it’s only a discipline imposed well after the beginnings of the faith that can also be removed.
Again, if you want to make the Catholic Church like most of the rest to pacify the secular elites who demand these changes, then do it, but be honest about why you're doing it.
I am saying that celibacy was not practiced for centuries until it was imposed on the priesthood.
I am also saying that there is no scriptural or dogmatic basis that mandates it. It’s a discipline of the Church that can be imposed or removed.
In other words the question is whether or not it’s wise policy. I wouldn’t change it to placate any elites, but I also wouldn’t maintain it just to maintain tradition, if it was no longer working. It’s not essential to the Catholic faith or doctrine. That Is the honest truth of the situation. By the way, there are quite certainly married priests who operate under the jurisdiction of the Pope, and have for hundreds of years.
(no message)
(no message)
The Church knows this, but they prefer that silence is golden.
It would seem that in the same manner that a heterosexual priest must put aside his sexual urges, so can a homosexual priest. [And in either case, I am not talking about a sexual predator seeking to molest children].
The bigger question is whether the quality of the pool of priests would improve if the Church allows married priests and/or female priests?
(no message)
(no message)
(no message)
That way you can delete all the things that are unfortunate and unhelpful to your secular ideology. Just adapt your "Living Constitution" model to the Holy Word.
Naturally, I would start with the "problematic" pronouns.
The "study after study shows that homosexuality is not a predictor of child molestation" line is the biggest deception underlying this entire issue. The root of this deception can be seen on page 36 of the referenced John Jay College study. Here is the game that is played to achieve the end goal of demonstrating that gay men are not disproportionately represented among child molesters: if the perpetrator refuses to identify himself as a homosexual, the crime is not labeled a case of homosexual molestation. Did you catch that? You have cases of men who penetrate boys, but many of them refuse to call themselves homosexual, therefore the crime stats get distorted because the molestation is counted as a heterosexual sexual crime. Just to be clear: if you penetrate little boys, you are a homosexual pedophile and your crime should be regarded as a homosexual incident, regardless how you choose to identify yourself. It's doubly remarkable in that the folks who propagate this deception would ordinarily be more than happy to defend the notion that gay folks, even in 2019, are apt to hide their sexuality, given the repercussions they may face.
It's an uncomfortable truth. For as long as time, there has been a proclivity among a large segment of gay men towards sex with boys. As late as the 1990s, the mainstream gay magazine, The Advocate, was still running classified ads in which gay men openly trolled for underage boys. It's always been widespread within that community and you can go online and find gay men who will openly discuss this large segment of the gay male population.
So, this author can attempt to blame the Catholic Church's stance on homosexuality for all of this, but fact is that if you have a lot of homosexual men acting as priests, you're going to have a disproportionate amount of child molestation of boys, as we see in the larger population, when you erase the creative counting method of calculating sexual crimes against children. In addition, pedophiles target professions where they'll have more victims from which to choose, like teaching, coaching, the priesthood. It's estimated that 5% of American males are gay. Do you believe that only 5% of the total number of child molestation cases involved adult males molesting boys?
The bit about gay priests being "traumatized" by the Church's age-old stance on homosexuality is just silly, but typical of these times. They chose the priesthood. They understood the dogma. They clearly don't understand what "trauma" entails.
(no message)
The angle of folks like the author and all the others is transparent and they rely on a false premise, which I just explained. This article was phoned in and could've been written from a fill-in-the-blank template: the Church is bad and archaic, it's victimizing this poor group over here, here's our enlightened secular position on this issue, the Church must meet our demands. Mind you, I'm not even Catholic. But I have to say, it is nice to have an institution in society that refuses to buckle to the demands of the secular elite who threaten everyone and everything who don't get in line with their fashionable dogma. If you want to see numbers take a nosedive, go with all the things you listed. People go to the Catholic Churchprecisely because it stands strong on its traditions. If they want the sort of Church that these folks demand, they'll go to some of the liberal Protestant churches that most of us can reel off our tongues quite quickly.
Doing it in the Catholic Church would decrease participation even further.
it.
When you find that a cleric, be it priest or cardinal is involved with that activity you remove them. This includes those conservatives in the Curia that publicly rail about the issue, yet hire male prostitutes for themselves. What do you think the % of all cardinals, libs, moderates and conservatives in the Vatican that are practicing homosexuals is? I would imagine that % is significant. Unless you are willing to root it out with a purge, don’t complain about those who say drop the hypocrisy and let in both practicing heterosexuals and homosexuals into the priesthood.
(no message)
Things inevitably decay over time, be they cultures or institutions.
(no message)
Also, Arogoto will be angry with you for posting this article.