let gays marry... and preach!

[fourseat]

seem to have lost an update. that's sad. There were a whole lot of awesome random questions on there. anyway, now you all don't have to be bothered with reading all my answers. The most pertinent part was definitely the Times article on the argument over gay priests, which quotes some raging psychopath: "It's the same way if there's a shortage

Comments

[katancelt]

That whole thing pisses me off so much, but I don't think there's much to worry about because it's impossible to inforce, especially since a lot of American priests think it's bullshit (which it is). The Jesuits in particlar are pissed off about this, and since for this to work the clergy has to cooperate, yeah, I don't think there's much to worry about. I feel that the NYT is making a bigger deal of it than it actually is (which doesn't surprise me very much because it's fun and easy to bash the Catholic Church). I haven't even heard of this outside the Times, and if it were really such a big deal (at least in this part of the US, where most Catholics aren't even anti-abortion), I would have heard something by now. And one of the reasonable people quoted is from my parish, yay.

And they're not called ministers, they're priests. Ministers are different, and I nitpick.

[fourseat]

Edited and fixed. And glad to hear that there are reasonable people out there. I didn't want to guess how many were on each side since the Times just presented both sides, but it is a comfort to know that "a lot" don't agree with it.

[eeka13]

think that being gay has a direct correlation to pedophilia

Mmhmm, and you can't even use facts to disprove this with these people, because when you tell them that 97% of sex offenders are straight men, they then start going off about how clinicians are delusional and "activists," (love how this is used as an insult by these people) because a straight-identifying male who offends a male is clearly gay.

[fourseat]

"Similarly, some Catholics said that because the majority of victims in the scandals involving sexually abusive priests were boys, barring gay men from the priesthood would reduce the likelihood of such abuse in the future. But others said there was no link between homosexuality and pedophilia, especially many parishioners in Boston, an archdiocese profoundly affected by the sexual abuse scandal."

Right. So the scandals involve boys... rather than girls? I didn't think that altar girls existed.
Involve boys rather than men? That's just connecting homosexuality with pedophilia, which I think was the intent. Which is stupid, as discussed.

"Most supporters of the directive said they believed there was a link between homosexuality and the sexual abuse by clergy members that has recently rocked the church, and they said the initiative would make such scandals less likely in the future."

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[katancelt]

I would really like to see statistics abuse over the course of the past ten or fifteen years, because that's when altar serving opened up to girls at most parishes (I was one of the first female altar servers in my parish). Obviously more boys have been abused because they've been much more accessible to priests than girls have been, but I really wonder how that's changed now that girls are equally accessible. People need to understand that celibacy is a bigger issue than homosexuality, but nobody wants to come out and say it because that's not anything the Church wants to address (which I don't blame the Church for because there is no easy way of handling it). And they need to understand that some guys will do anything. Men in prisons aren't all gay! This whole thing is really a case of "let's sit down and think about this for about thirty seconds," but people are afraid to do that. I don't think it's because of homophobia (which isn't that much of a problem in the American Church, especially when you look at the doctrine and