Amy Welborn is making sense on the Instruction. I may disagree with a point here and there, but overall she gets it right. (This is the nice thing about blogging. Sometimes when I’m busy I can just wait for someone else to say what needs to be said and point you there. Heh.)
But the other reason is simply that when it comes to guidelines, as reasonable as it might seem to do the “no homosexuals in the seminary thing,” it doesn’t get at the problem. The problem is not, in simple terms, the homosexual priest. The problem is priests who don’t believe what the Catholic Church teaches on sexuality, who don’t preach it, who don’t witness to it in the confessional, and who don’t live it in their private lives.
... Oh, and word to the self-identified “gay priests” who are all over NPR today. To right off the bat self-identify as “gay” is to indicate, pretty clearly, that something else other than Christ is at the center of your life. If your priest got up in the pulpit and proclaimed “I am a heterosexual priest,” wouldn’t you go, uh…okay. Wouldn’t it indicate to you that something besides devotion to Christ and His Church was the lodestar, the guiding and motivating force in that guy’s life?
I just cherry-picked a few points. Go read the whole thing.
