Your rephrasing is much better. Thank you.
But is it still extremely American-centric? IIRC, RedFury is not an American.
Cite what, the English language? “Who am I to judge?” is simply not the same as “I judge you.”
If your understanding of English leads you to conclude those are the same, I can’t help you. I’m not an English teacher.
Just to back up tomndeb, this has been my observation as well. I’ve been a churchgoing Catholic for more than 50 years, and for as long as I can remember (and for as long as I’ve been old enough to understand what “gay” means), I’ve known priests who were understood to be gay by their parishioners.
Look, it’s always been pretty clear to Catholics that a celibate priesthood will attract men who have no atraction to women. In my experience, nobody had a problem with this.
It is a fairly recent phenomenon that some in the hierarchy have decided that gay men should not be admitted to seminaries.
RedFury says:
Please. This is nonsense. Practicing Catholics have been going to Masses celebrated by gay men since time immemorial. While most of those Catholics would certainly have been put off by a priest openly having a relationship with a man, that’s hardly the same thing. Catholics (at least in the US) expect their priests to be celibate.
And:
It is true that Mass attendance is falling. But (in my experience) it is not true that those attending Mass are mostly comprised of a “fading generation of conservative Catholics.” While there is obviously a considerable amount of regional variation, of the several parishes in my part of Brooklyn, that might describe one of them. One parish in particular (strictly speaking, it’s an oratory, not a parish) has, as far as I can tell, no conservative Catholics (although it has plenty of older Catholics), and its Sunday Masses are packed. That’s a bit of an outlier, since the congregation at an oratory is pretty much an affinity-based community rather than a geographic community, like a regular parish, but still, it tells you something about who’s attending Mass. My own parish, while not filling the house like the oratory, is hardly a hotbed of conservatism, and younger (by which I mean younger than me;)) Catholics are a majority.
And, by the way, keep in mind that more than 3 million showed up for Word Youth day just a few days ago.
To me, the most significant thing about the Pope’s words was that he used the word “gay” (in English, so it’s not a translator’s interpretation of what he said). This is a departure from the way in which gays have been spoken of before. He didn’t say “homosexual persons” (which isn’t actually that offensive a phrase, I guess) or “those afflicted with ‘deep-seated homosexual tendencies’” (the phrase in the English version of the Catechism), or as suffering from an objective disorder, or the repellent “same sex attraction disorder (SSAD).” He said “gay”.
I do take this as a sign of change to come. Certainly very, very slowly, but it is a sign.
Hurting members, on the other hand…