NYT Article rails Against Vatican Document On Gay Priests

The NYT published an article today impugning the pending Vatican document that would bar homosexuals from the priesthood.

Hermetically sealed in its Manhattan biosphere, the NYT predictably reports on this as a "gay rights" issue, rather than the Vatican taking action to heal a wounded priesthood. The denizens of vigorously secular institutions like the NYT sneer at Roman Catholic doctrine and traditions, yet still insist on lecturing the Vatican on what the proper criteria should be for admittance to the priesthood. The worldview is such that they are reflexively see this is as a gay rights issue, that there somehow exists an "right" to be a priest.

Astounding claims are put forward in the article:

Many of the gay priests said that the expected Vatican policy and the seminary visits would drive gay priests more deeply underground and create the same unhealthy, sexually repressed climate that prevailed in seminaries before reforms in the 1980's and 90's.

Some priests say they fear that by rejecting homosexual candidates the church will only worsen its shortage of priests. "It's like they have this plan to empty the church," said a gay priest on the East Coast.

Prediction: in the next few months, liberal legislators and prosecutors will begin bringing civil rights actions against seminaries for barring homosexuals.

UPDATE: Carl Olson at Ignatius Insight Scoop shares this insight on the NYT piece:

And so the hyperbole begins (or continues), this time in the pages of the New York Times:

"I feel like a Jew in Berlin in the 1930's," said a 48-year-old gay priest who has spent 18 years in a religious order. He said he was considering donning a pink triangle - the symbol used by the Nazis - and getting heterosexual priests and members of the laity to wear the triangles as a protest.

Well, this simply demonstrates what part of the problem is: a militant attitude from men who are far more interested in being known as "gay" and being seen as victims than they are in being holy priests set on obeying the Church.

Comments

[T. Shaw]

" . . . a 48-year-old gay priest . . . said he was considering donning a pink triangle . . ."

You know he will not. Because if he did, we would be able to identify and avoid such an anti-priest.

If the alternative were no priests, we will be better served were there no priests such as that thing.

Edwin Faust: “But one thing puzzles me. Why do men pledge their lives to love that which they hate? Why do priests who reject the Church's teachings pretend a loyalty to them? Why do they become priests at all? I cannot understand this. It is as though a man took for his wife a woman he despised, so that he might spend his marriage insulting, demeaning and destroying her. I can furnish plausible psychological explanations for such confounding behavior, but the ontological explanation -- the reason for its very existence -- appears to rest in the dark impenetrable heart of evil, what St. Paul calls the mystery of iniquity."

[Paul]

No fear - any "civil rights" lawsuit would fail, a la the Boy Scouts precedent...