Our HBCU correspondent we keep on retainer wired in the following email recently, with supplied links [Warning: reader advisory for explicit content]:
Somehow this focuses things far too uncomfortably clearly for me.
You can be a priest who is quite obviously gay, as long as you can parse words carefully when necessary if called on the carpet.
You can support the Democratic platform and ambiguously gay speakers and material fairly safely.
BUT if you say Satan is behind homosexuality, you get FIRED?
The reference is to Matt C. Abbot's column, "
More 'gay' Catholic controversies" (RenewAmerica, November 23, 2011). Our correspondent continues:
That is all that I should say, but [to] lessen the pressure between my ears...
Mirus' referenced column is helpful, but also cringe-inducing since even he -- writing to conservatives -- has to tiptoe so delicately through the tulips in navigating political sensibilities connected with the practice if anal sex. Does anyone think we will make any headway if we are always apologizing before we even begin? We really need to stop and think: Flip Wilson got laughs for saying the Devil made him do it. In a Church setting today someone uses that line about a perversion, and gets fired?! The hierarchy is doing double-back flips over sensitivity issues when over half of their flock probably do not even now understand why gay sex IS a grave sin? It has been ALL OVER THE NEWS non-stop for two years. When is the last time we heard a clear talk on homosexuality as a sin, period, versus why gay marriage is a problem because, technically at least, marriage is between a man and a woman? The marriage issue pulls on people's "rights" buttons. I would fall off my chair if, in a session on gay marriage, someone just said,"I am against gay marriage because I am against gay sex. It is unhealthy, immoral (yes!), and obv[iously] and on the face of it wildly against natural law. Just because someone has an urge does not mean they should or must fulfill it."
The zillion stories about men with several kids who later "come out" proves that lifestyle IS of course a choice as well as a mere inclination. People can and should control who they sleep with. Have we really gotten so sex-saturated we cannot even see *that*? Codifying homosex in marriage is wrong because it is a formalization and blessing of a behavior we should discourage, not institutionalize. And all the Oprahs, Ellens and Andersons in the world can't change that no matter how nice the may be.
That deafening silence of the Church on this is a pointed example of why the Vatican II mantra of "proposing, not imposing" -- when applied indiscriminately -- is disastrous and an example of saying "Peace, peace" when there is no peace. You have to wonder if folks like Bea, Sheed and company would have been so pleased with the openness and collegiality of the new Church or could have imagined, in their wildest dreams, where we are now in the Church and in the World.
[Hat tip to J.M.]
4 comments:
Any comment on Mrs Clinton's speech?
Clinton lobbies the UN for gay rights. Wow. Rather amazing. I wonder when the US will cut off diplomatic ties with the Vatican?
Actually found this reply to Ms. Ckinton:
Father Perozich wrote:
'While President Obama and Secretary Clinton have a forum for speaking and some power to influence with their opinions, these politicians promote, in part, an agenda developed from adults trapped in childhood experiences that have deformed their sexual desires. The president and secretary hold the upper hand when they condemn forced rape of lesbians and imprisonment of those who have the homosexual disorder. The president and secretary show arrogance and sink to the depths when they try to dictate or impose their unfounded opinions on other cultures and on the American people regarding sexual deviance from married relations between a man and a woman.
'Every false opinion that is proposed needs to be countered by the truth, lest the false opinion that is unchallenged be thought to be a truth. Secretary Clinton speaks an unfounded opinion when she says gay rights are human rights; and while rightly acknowledging homosexuality as unchosen desire, she wrongly declares it as irremediable and deceives people with same-sex attraction, her audience, and herself.
'The new mantra of rights, freedoms, justice, equality and fairness and the demonization of others as bigots are subversions of truth holding a person in ignorance. Bringing this to other countries is imposing one's own ignorance in a way that presupposes the other nations are inferior.
'Biologically, man and woman are made one for the other and for procreation. Psychologically, each person has a history of experiences that form or deform desires, including sexual ones. Emotionally, each person's life work is to develop a full set of emotions that correspond to the situations that confront them. Ethically, people need the guidance of faith and reason to form their choices. Morally, exercise of these choices form a mature individual who does not try to misuse the aforementioned mantra to promote behaviors counter to nature. Spiritually, people need religion based in truth rather than reinventing their own.
'In this way, people come to peace with the struggles of imperfection each one of us has, promoting objectively good behaviors for happiness, dealing with inner struggles, saying 'yes' to that which forms them into adults in truth and 'no' to those desires which hold them bound in ignorance to their limitations formed from childhood.'
In relation to the above, I just tonight came across this from Frank Sheed in 1948. I appropriate set-up to the good Fr's coments:
"A kind-hearted falsity will destroy a social order as surely as a blood-thirsty falsity. You may be as kind as you please, but if you are wrong about what a man is, you cannot construct a healthy society, because society is made of men. Kind as you are, you would be in the position of treating something as what it is not…
Reality must always be the test. You cannot “buck” reality. To handle men, to arrange the affairs of men, we must know the acts about man. We must not be satisfied to think that the facts are what we would like them to be: this is childish. Nor must we ever say that such questions do not matter because we have to get on with the job. This is the reasoning [that has] done more than an[thing] else to bring the world into its present state."
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