1) I'm amazed that the commentary by Monsignor Tony Anatrella did not get more press than it did. It spoke in very harsh terms about homosexuality, as indicated here. (Read more excerpts from it here and here).
2) Given the tone of Monsignor Anatrella's commentary, I'm amazed so many bishops seem to be willfully misreading the Vatican document.
Isn't the point that there should be no gays in the seminary? Only ex-gays with a proven record? You haven't really repented of your sin if you still identify yourself with the sin's title.
"My gift for prognostication, it should be said, is notoriously spotty"
Builds credibility. This is true of almost everyone.
Personally I find gays in the seminary to be a really queer idea.
People who use the corrupt form of a good English word have already given in to the homosexuals.
I'm actually surprised at how cautious this article by John Allen is. He and the NCR are known for their support of dissent. What this suggests is that even though Skylstadt has spoken out on this issue, NCR is afraid to go out too far on the limb.
I think Skylstadt is asking for a fall. He never should have been elected to his present position, and ought to be deposed at the next opportunity.
Removal of the editor of America evidently has made NCR a bit more cautious. It still is trying to make trouble, of course, by suggesting that favorite proposition of the liberals, that the issue is too complex to be easily sorted out. But at least it doesn't come down flat on the side of heresy, as it certainly would have done a year ago.
Ban on Homosexual Men From (Catholic) Priesthood Was Always in Place - Decision from 810 AD Cited
Quoting a portion, as follows...
A SEX-ABUSE LINK?
But why single out homosexuals, as the document does? The answer can be found, at least in part, in two studies of the clergy sex-abuse scandal in the United States released Feb. 27, 2004.
One is a survey of the problem's extent carried out by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York at the direction of the National Review Board. The U.S. bishops established the all-lay review board to monitor their implementation of the sex-abuse policy they adopted in 2002. Its members include specialists in psychiatry, psychology, law and other fields.
The survey found that 4,392 U.S. priests were accused of sexually abusing approximately 10,667 minors between 1950 and 2002, that 81 percent of the victims were male and that more than three-fourths were pubescent or adolescent. Between the 1950s and 1970s, reported acts of abuse of males between the ages of 11 and 17 increased sixfold.
In a report accompanying the survey, the National Review Board said: "We do not seek to place the blame for the sexual crisis on the presence of homosexual individuals in the priesthood as there are many chaste and holy homosexual priests who are faithful to their vows of celibacy.
"However, we must call attention to the homosexual behavior that characterized the vast majority of the cases of abuse observed in recent decades. That 81 percent of the reported victims of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy were boys shows that the crisis was characterized by homosexual behavior."
The John Jay survey and the review board report both focused on the abuse of minors -- criminal behavior. Neither dealt with sexual activity involving priests and other consenting adults -- sinful but not a crime -- although that, too, is something the church must be concerned about.
The review board said it had received reports that the large number of homosexual priests or seminarians in some places discouraged heterosexual men from seeking to become priests. "In the 1970s and 1980s, in particular," it said, "there developed at certain seminaries a 'gay subculture'.... Such subcultures existed or exist in certain dioceses or [religious] orders as well."
That echoed a comment by Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta during a news conference at the Vatican on April 23, 2002, at the height of the uproar over the clergy sex-abuse scandal.
Archbishop Gregory, at the time bishop of Belleville, Ill., and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, spoke of the ongoing struggle to ensure that "the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men" and said heterosexuals "think twice" about entering a seminary with a "homosexual atmosphere or dynamic." The new document presumably is meant to address problems like that.
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This article, along with a few other interviews I've also just read, indicates that there is to be an overt discouragement and counselling away from the Seminary, any person who represents themselves within "the gay community/culture" as identity and reference.
The difficulty in "interpreting" by some seems to suggest, to my view, that a lot of hair-splitting is being attempted, that people are making concerted effort to disqualify the instruction from the Pope in lieu of a cultural adaptation. Which returns the Church to where it was before the instruction and, in effect, disregards the instruction itself.
I'm not the Pope (!!) (by a long-shot, not so), but the struggling and arguments and complaints that I've been reading are all coming from people who want to maintain a pro-homosexual culture in the Priesthood and Seminaries and appear to be trying very hard to find a way around the instruction from Pope Benedict by way of semantics and manipulation of terms.