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The NCCB is part of the whole problem. This bureaucratic BS, playing to TV cameras, the swarming cabals of liberal dissenting clerics, pressure groups, and lib journalists who follow the NCCB buffet events - all of this nonsense has very little to do with the spiritual/sacramental mission of the Church. You end up with a lot of bureaucratic double-speak jargon, loaded with hyphenated, conditionally qualified, hypothetical gobbledygook - which really means nothing in the final analysis. Ridiculous documents which result in further study of revised, bureaucratic position papers by bureaucratic committee just legitimize the PC dissent. And then you have "further study" of "further study" and more "prayerful reflection" on "prayerful reflection" ad infinitum. All this to wiggle around NOT saying directly and emphatically that homosexual behavior is wrong and that there is no place for it among the clergy, that liberal heretical dissent is wrong and that there is no place for it in the faculty dining rooms or lecture halls of Catholic institutions. Overblown, hypothetical, and casuitical, jargon-laden parsing of Ex corde leads nowhere. Does anyone really need one hundred footnotes to figure out that "Catholic" colleges should be "Catholic" and run by "Catholics" (and not by socialist or homosexual activists)? You don't have to be a canon lawyer or an expert in canonical ecclesiastical Latin legalisms to figure out that Richard McBrien types have jumped off the ship or that Fr. Shanley types should be thrown off.

I agree completely.

What's amazing is that this bureaucratic parsing by committee and "further study" of further study by committee is exactly what is likely to happen after the Rome meeting with the U.S. cardinals. Odds are that Nightline will have on Richard McBrien, and Alan Keyes will drag Monsignor McSweeney on as commentators for their commentary on the commentary. Greta van Sustren (of all people) actually had two wild-eyed nuns in street clothes on last night. Do we really need all of these people parsing footnotes to figure out that homosexuals don't belong in the priesthood? No, obviously.