It's not that you feel that so-and-so has so much to offer, it's that homosexuals are forbidden from being ordained. Father Martin's own disinformation about there not being a link between homosexuality and pederasty (which he misnames pedophilia) completely misses the fact that over 80% of the victims of priests were post-pubescent males. Father Martin ignores Church law as well and publicly disagrees with the Church's teaching.
The real question is why is this man still in the Jesuits? In America Magazine on May 31st, where he's the editor, replacing someone else who questioned Church teaching too much, he commented on the New York Times article about the same subject.
Perhaps he's sad that one Jesuit Scholastic is no longer with the Oregon Province? Of course, Father Martin's apologia for sodomy was well addressed by Father Eutener. Now we hope someone else steps in and invites Father Martin to find employment with someone whose core philosophy doesn't contradict his own misconceptions and errors.
Today’s front-page story in The New York Times, "Prospective Catholic Priests Face Sexuality Hurdles," by Paul Vitello, about the exclusion and weeding out of gay men from seminaries and religious formation houses, made for depressing reading. Why depressing? Several reasons.
First, the article laid bare the cognitive dissonance that theatens a church that relies on celibate gay priests to carry out much of its ministerial work, and yet sets into place policies which would bar those same kinds of men from future ministry. One of Vitello’s sources, Mark D. Jordan, the R. R. Niebuhr professor at Harvard Divinity School, “who has studied homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood,” and has also written extensively on it, called it an “irony” that “these new regulations are being enforced in many cases by seminary directors who are themselves gay.” Yes, irony.
Second is the notion that the sexual abuse crisis was primarily a question of gays in the priesthood. For one thing, the conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia has been disproven by almost every psychiatrist and psychologist. The studies are too numerous to mention. It was rebutted even by the U.S. bishops own study. ("At this point, we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and the increased likelihood of subsequent abuse from the data that we have right now," said Margaret Smith of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.) For another, the increasing number of gay priests entering ministry in the past few years, which critics point to as a stain on the priesthood, coincides with a diminution of sexual abuse cases in recent years. For another, the reason that you don’t see any public models of healthy, mature, celibate gay priests to counteract the stereotype of the pedophile gay priest, is that they are forbidden to speak out publicly. Or they are simply afraid.
Link to America...
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