Ding! ding! ding!
A few points here from someone who was raised Lutheran and converted to Orthodoxy (the Eastern Orthodox Church):
First: You have to consider the source. The New York Times, for all of it’s claims to be “the paper of record” is very liberal. I don’t have a problem with that, although I disagree with them. So it is in their interest to paint this entire issue as a witch hunt against gays, regardless of the Pope’s actual intent.
Second: The RCC requires that priests be celibate. Not married and not having sex. Period. End of story. I have heard an Orthodox priest suggest that marriage is a possible answer. For the record, a married man can be ordained as a priest, but an ordained priest cannot get married.
Third, and last: the discussion about forgiveness bothered me. In the Orthodox tradition, the requirement for forgiveness is sincere repentance. If I steal a ream of paper from work, go to confession and confess my sin, and am sincerely repentant and intend to try my best not to ever do that again, I can be forgiven. If, however, I go in and say “well, they owe me for hours of unpaid overtime anyway” I cannot be forgiven. I do not sincerely repent and I do not admit my sin. None of us on earth are perfect, although some (and I do not include myself) are striving harder to be so than others.
Homosexuality is the same as any other sin. I don’t judge homosexuals, because as I see it, I’m just as much a sinner as they are. We all fall short, and we all try to do better and live up to what G*d has intended for us. So, please don’t tell me I hate gays. I really don’t. They’re just people, different from me as we are all different from each other, not better, not worse, just different.
Can you explain why it’s in the best interest of the NYT to artifically create an anti-Catholic slant to the story? Can you offer up something that indicates the NYT’s report was factually incorrect?
Is the Kansas City Star quoting the Catholic Register sufficiently non-left for you?
According to the Catholic Church, homosexual orientation is not in and of itself, sinful.
This link doesn’t seem to require registration
Neither did mine, the first time I clicked on it. I pulled it up through Google and got right to it, and I just Googled it again and still got right to it. Odd.
OK, well, somehow clicking my link here gets one routed to the registration page. Sorry about that, I wanted to link to a source that would refute the “NYT is biased” nonsense.
Actually, my understanding is that, if a married, Episcopal priest converts to Catholicism and becomes a Catholic priest, he is officially expected to remain celibate within his marriage. I don’t know how closely they check to see if he lives up to this expectation, and it would be interesting to know what the wives of such priests think!
It’s really rather stupid, isn’t it? We have a class of men who are told their sexual desires are sinful by the Catholic Church. There is a way for them to serve God by, in part, deliberately not acting on those sinful desires, thus, perhaps providing a form of redemption. Now, even that’s not allowed to them. I can see renouncing the temptations and pleasures of the world to live a life more fully dedicated to God – I’ve considered doing so myself a few times. To be told that I was not allowed to do it because of my orientation, even though I had no intention of acting on it, even though I may never have acted on it, would be a slap in the face. Then again, as a woman, I’m in a similar situation as far as Catholicism goes, which is one reason why I’m Episcopalian.
Respectfully,
CJ
Since you dispute the veracity of the NYT’s article, read the Catholic Register article, and pay special attention to the statements made by Archbishop O’Brien, who is overseeing this inspection, who was one of the inspectors in the 1981 inspection, and who states: “I think anyone who has engaged in homosexual activity, or has strong homosexual inclinations, would be best not to apply to a seminary and not to be accepted into a seminary . . . . The Holy See should be coming out with a document about this.”
Muffin walks away whistling.
What’s the big surprise in this witch-hunt? Does nobody expect the Spanish Inquisition? It’s the RC Church, for Og’s sake!
(sigh)
Dorks like Peter and Paul thought that any concessions to human sexuality made one a lesser Christian, to the point of relegating Marriage as a fall-back plan for those who didn’t hate sex sufficiently.
And the Celibacy bit came off in Europe as a dodge to avoid leaking property to the spouses and surviving family members of deceased priests. Ditto the poverty bit: this keeps all the property in the Church.
If married priests are so bad, why do they import them from closely-related sects?
They should, perhaps, do a thorough culling of the pederasts before they crank out the old witch-hunt manuals for gays.
Of course, the straight priests never ever get caught for pederasty or doinking a parish wife, do they?
My point is not whether they have the facts correct or not. My point is that they are more likely to use emotive language about it. Since most ancient Christian sects do not share the same worldview as The New York Times they are more likely to disagree with the positions the paper takes. Therefore, the paper is more likely to use negatively connotated emotive language to advance that worldview.
In the RC’s mind I would imagine (possibly incorrectly) that, justified or not, 99% of their concern is *homosexual * pederasty and if they can weed out the gays the pederast subset will vanish. My understanding (gained mainly from this board ) is that these are generally mutually exclusive sets, and that pederasty, whether same sex or not, exists in it’s own little set distinct from both homosexuality and heterosexuality as a sexual partner preference.
Since the Church has been dealing with this issue privately for at least a decade or two now it would be interesting to see if they have reached any rationally considered diagnostic conclusions as to who is likely to be a real world child molester (or not) and how to prevent these people form being priests.
This current hunt to weed out queers seems to suggest either they know something we (including the gay members of the SDMB) don’t, or they are responding in a slow motion institutional panic with clumsy, ham handed methods that are likely to create far more damage than solution.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Sorry, I just had to do it 
OK, I’ll ask again.
Can you explain why it’s in the best interest of the NYT to artifically create an anti-Catholic slant to the story? Can you offer up something that indicates the NYT’s report was factually incorrect?
And, wow, could your logic be any more of a mess? Churches supposedly disagree with the NYT’s “worldview” so the NYT deliberately goes negative on those churches to advance its supposed “worldview”? Do you have even a single fact or piece of evidence that supports the contention that it is the editorial position of the NYT to piss off religious sects?
Would you also care to retract your demonstrably false statement that under the doctrine of the Catholic church, homosexual orientation is a sin?
Actually, you are mistaken regarding the how long celibacy has been in the church and you have the claims about wealth and power a bit confused, as noted in this post. Celibacy as a rule has never been presented as the Word of God (either with or without reverb). (Although, it should also be noted that the RCC is hardly a sola scriptura institution, anyway.) It has always been a matter of church discpline. Some of the earliest champions of celibacy (going back long before the Middle Ages and even before Nicaea,) argued that celibacy was an aid to spiritual development and service to the community. Those ideas are maintained in current church teachings, but they preceded the “wealth and power” issue by some 900 years and there is no claim that celibacy is biblically based (other than as a recognition of sacrifice).
Feel free to disagree with the church on any issue, but please get the facts straight so that any later discussion is not carried out under incorrect assumptions.
<Attempting to write carefully and politely> My impression from reading the article in question was that the NYT thought that the Catholic hierarchy was completely unreasonable in its attempt to remove from its seminaries those who do not conform to the doctrine of the church, homosexual or heterosexual. I don’t think it’s a question of anti-Catholic slant, or that they have their facts wrong, I think it’s more that they disapprove of homosexuals being caught up in the process. I do not believe that they set out to “piss off religious sects.” I believe, from the tenor of the article, that they are adamantly against the whole idea of trying to shift what is being taught in the seminaries to more closely reflect church doctrine, and have chosen the homosexual issue as the one to demonstrate that the goal is wrong.
My opinions on the bias of the main-stream media and the NYT in particular are based on what I read and see in them. I would like for them all to admit their bias so we can all see where they’re coming from - Fox is biased right, NYT is biased left, everyone understands and can read or hear the news more effectively. I have seen articles from many sources which seem to have the subtext “If you’re not out pushing my agenda <insert your cause here>, then you’re actively trying to suppress me and violate my rights.” And not just from the left. Don’t get me started on Ann Coulter. I can only read a few paragraphs of her every few months without blowing a proverbial gasket.
As for the statement that homosexual orientation is a sin, I never intended to claim that as the position of the Catholic Church. I expressed what I have been taught, and what I have been hearing from my priest about other (completely unrelated sins) which has been that when I think about committing a sin, even if I don’t do it, I am at least partially guilty of that sin. Which makes me look at my own thoughts and behaviors and try to do better.
I seem to only be making this worse by trying to express my opinions, so I will bow out. I will be perfectly happy to agree to disagree with you on these issues.
Yeah, OK, bye.
Too slow on the draw, pardner, see posts #46 and 47 on the first page…
Really?
Do they have wet dreams?
If so, do they confess to having them?
If so, are they absolved?
Do they pray for them (the dreams)?
A long ago college classmate of mine went into the semenary and he told me later that one of the entry questions was, “Do you masturbate?”
He joked (I think) that the answer was, “Is it mandatory?”
He became a Jesuit priest but left the order and went into electrical engineering after about 10 years in Southern California. He died of AIDS about 10 years later, in the early '80’s, the only acquaintance of mine to have succumbed to that.
Oops! I meant “seminary”. Really. Freudian slip, I guess.