Posted on 12/01/2005 1:21:43 AM PST by fabrizio
[...]the Instruction issues a ringing condemnation of tactical subterfuge -- i.e., lying about one's sexual disorder: "It would be gravely dishonest for a candidate to hide his homosexuality in order to proceed, despite everything, towards Ordination. Such a deceitful attitude does not correspond to the spirit of truth, loyalty, and openness that must characterize the man called to serve Christ and his Church as a priest."
Granted, these words are formally directed at men who are only aspirants to the priesthood, but undeniably they cut much deeper. Those bishops who have "deeply-rooted homosexual tendencies" are not few in number, and they must be rattled by the Church's judgment that their own priesthood -- while canonically valid -- is spiritually flawed. Bishops who are not themselves homosexual but who have welcomed homosexual priests are likewise in a bind: if they've advised homosexual priests not to speak about their libido they fall afoul of the demand for authenticity; if they've encouraged priests to acknowledge themselves as gay they must admit the Church regards the priest as unfit and the bishop as flat wrong.
Both sets of bishops -- those gay and those gay-friendly -- have been caught out by the Instruction and will be struggling frantically to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Pay attention to their use of the phrase affective maturity, because this is the key term in the Instruction, and the Holy See and gay-positive clergy employ the phrase with radically contrary meanings.[...]
(Excerpt) Read more at cwnews.com ...
The Catholic Church has stepped up to the plate with this courageously honest position. This is exactly the problem with sexual indulgence in general (and certainly with homosexuality). Recognizing what the Church is saying and embracing it (with the Lord's strength) is sure to heal many troubled souls. IMHO.
I have noticed in a couple of statements lately that the Pope has challenged our whole ultra-sexualized culture. I think this sexualized society is actually one of the things that has produced the homosexual "identity" that is discussed in the document.
Fruedianism, which regarded sex as the fundamental ground of society and being (and explicitly rejected what Freud referred to as the "mud-tide of mysticism," IIRC, meaning anything that was not related to physical sex), is actually the basis for our modern view of man. Granted, it has probably gone further than Freud's wildest dreams for it, and I will say that even Freud regarded homosexuality as the evidence of an immature personality.
But I think it's about time that somebody challenged this view of man, which has been so generally accepted that it is no longer even identified as Freudianism, but simply accepted as the truth. It is, however, a truth that is profoundly in conflict with Christian truth, even though many supposedly Christian churches seem to have adopted it and it is obviously widely accepted by the "Catholic" bishops of the US.
I often wonder if that wasn't (at first) merely a dig against Jung.
I'm sure it probably was. But in general, it was true that Freud thought that he was expressing the new, improved and entirely materialistic view of man, something that unfortunately seems to have been adopted in a completely unexamined way by most of our culture.
Because it gives them the excuse to do and be what they want, without thinking of the consequences...until the consequences come home to roost and then they are lost in their existential nausea...
Spot on.
The reaction we've been hearing in reacent days from Skylstad, Clark, McCarrick and over the pond, Murphy-O'Connor and Martin is exactly what Diogenes is talking about. It is so reminiscent of the equivocating and evasiveness which greeted Humanae Vitae.
LOL! True. Strangely enough, I thinking just the other day of how we had all been quietly indoctrinated in this stupid way of thinking from a very early age. I remember we had to read La Nausée in high school French class and discuss it, but not as if it were simply a literary work by a person who had a peculiar view of the universe, but as if it were revealed truth. This was at a New York City public high school in the 1960's.
Satre, king of the self-indulgent doomed anti-heros, almost a parody of the Norse or Japanese hero figure....and he ended up copping out...became a communist, so he would have SOMETHING to believe in.
Story of the 20th century. Posturing, tasting the bile, but choosing dead ends over God's grace.
* I prefer to call it acting like juvenile girls. We need male Bishops joyfully praising virtue and LOUDLY denouncing and condemning vice. I am almost sick to death of hearing wimpy Bishops temporizing and equivocating on this issue; Hell, every issue, except when it comes to them insisting I must suspend Supsidiarity and agit/propo for national health care, or insist my local congresscritter raise my taxes or telling me I ain't a Christian if I don't go and hug the next invader from the south or put up a Menorah on my house or eat a Ramadan meal or...
...or insist I receive Communion in the hand, or tell me I've got to be angry about deforestation in Central America...
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