I’m a lifelong catholic, spent 12 years in catholic schools as a kid, regular attendee at mass. I have never, not a single time, never heard any priest say one thing about homosexuality. This is not an issue the church in America chooses to deal with, frankly, at least in my own experience. So how come the gays are always piling on the catholic church?
Wake up!
How can you be above 16 years old and be so ignorant of the Truth - maybe you should ponder reading about your faith or ponder becoming Unitarian.
You think if your priest doesn’t say it you needn’t know it? Invincibly igniorant or just incredibly ignorant?
Shame on you! I toss your table in Jesus’ name!
Wake up!
How can you be above 16 years old and be so ignorant of the Truth - maybe you should ponder reading about your faith or ponder becoming Unitarian.
You think if your priest doesn’t say it you needn’t know it? Invincibly igniorant or just incredibly ignorant?
Shame on you! I toss your table in Jesus’ name!
You are right, I’ve only heard a priest speak about homosexualism once, in the context of what can be and what can’t be marriage.
But the homosexualists know what the Church teaches even if many priests don’t explain this teaching as much as they should. That’s why they go after the Church, which isn’t ever going to change its teaching on the subject, and that frustrates and terrifies them.
Freegards
So how come the gays are always piling on the catholic church?
Two reasons:
1) Intimidation
2) Political Correctness to Scapegoat said group
3) Attack through the leadership, especially one who is spiritually so high up in authority.
4) Past power of the Catholic Church in Spain
1) The intimidation part is to get the publicity and interpretation monopolized on your own about your opponent. The strategy here is to discourage anyone from bothering to investigate what the Catholic Church teaches, or to make practicing members feel bad, either way, this is an attempt at intimidating the Catholic Church to change its policy with the said threat being that it can’t get people to join it or decline in membership from not being inclusive enough. This is also important in a strategy to scare leadership within the religion from speaking out about it. They mention the religion and the leaders as so hateful and advocating violence against them, how inclined are the leaders to speak up in the first place?
2) The political correctness part is simple. There’s a group that isn’t under some sort of special protected hate crimes status. Don’t bother looking bad to racial minorities or other groups commonly portrayed as persecuted minorities in the political sense, because supposedly they can become your allies, or at least part of your supporting voting bloc to get desirable candidates elected. Pick on the Catholics, in this case, because politics and common history teachings teach of them as the ones who are the hateful and bigoted crowd throughout history. Catholicism is not a class considered in hate crimes legislation, if I remember correctly, as well.
3) The Pope is a leader who is divinely inspired, and as such, some like to attack a religion with the assumption that a said leader is infallible (The Pope is not, though he does claim inspiration from God, he is not a totally sinless man himself) and figure that if they can provoke a response which they can videotape and edit, they can just show the world that a said religion is wrong because said leader is not sinless or perfect under said circumstances. Religious leadership, if one looks at either Bible nor history, has never comprised of sinless or perfect people. Peter denied knowing Jesus three times before the Cock crew, yet he became the first great Pope, or whatever other great leadership titles other churches refer to Saint Peter with, for that matter. Isaiah confessed to the Lord that he was a sinner, before the Lord asked him to prophesy to Israel. There are more, but then one understands perhaps a little why some people remain true to their religious beliefs. Even true principles exist when those who lead or who are members can do the wrong thing.
4) Catholicism, or at least Christianity, was a tool of power at its peak under the rule of the Spanish Monarchy. The Spanish monarchy spent loads of gold from the Americas to take its part in trying to prevent the rise of Protestantism in Europe, Ferdinand and Isabella had an Inquisition of their own, in which they could try people in Spain for heresy without needing to send them over to the Vatican. The rulers supposedly ruled for some time with the justification of Catholicism, though event the monarchy and the government of Spain threw Christianity out the window during the late 1700s, and declared itself a secular government. My best advice to the Spaniards is to move on past what was terminated over 200 years ago, and come to grips with life right now, because Frankly, communism (Civil War) and Fascism (Franco) were the dominant causes of messing up life for the Spanish since they became the secular state.
Knowing the Pope, as far as I can tell, from what Benedict had proven so far, he’ll probably not mind the gay community’s response, and give them the deserved attention. He’ll keep on going.
“I’m a lifelong catholic, spent 12 years in catholic schools as a kid, regular attendee at mass. I have never, not a single time, never heard any priest say one thing about homosexuality.”
Two things: it depends on the matters of the day, and who your priest is. I have heard a priest make a reference to same-sex marriage, in contrast to the marriage he performed, where he mentioned his marriage as the one “truly ordained of God”, in contrast to what was going on over on the Golden Coast (California pre-proposition 8).
I have also heard a priest mention marriage between a man and a woman as something that was meant to be under God. In this case, by mentioning one-man, and one woman, he explicitly was excluding polygamy and same-sex marriage by making a one man and one woman marriage the only matter.
As far as homosexuality is concerned, its also simply not the only issue to be concerned about concerning Christian morality nowadays. There are a motherlode of issues that have been dumped on a great deal of us nowadays, and that is only one. However, with the importance of marriage being between one man and one woman, that I feel, is pretty much a statement made against homosexuality right there.