To appreciate fully the sweep and depth of the Vatican’s attack on the dignity and integrity of all homosexual persons – our alleged psychological sickness, our inability to relate to men and women, our affective “immaturity,” our clannishness, our selfishness, our insufficiently “masculine sexual identity,” and on and on – you can read this story. The sheer accumulation of unfounded slurs, malicious smears and unsubstantiated prejudice should remove from any reasonable person’s mind the notion that the Vatican is not now a repository for bigotry and hatred of the clearest kind. The new policy is a betrayal of charity, of faith and of truth. Kathryn Lopez makes the following point:
Andrew Sullivan’s post on the life of Fr. Mychal Judge is heartbreaking – that anyone would conclude that the Catholic Church thinks that if Fr. Judge (the priest who died ministering at the World Trade Center on 9/11) was a gay man his life had “no social value.” The Catholic Church says no such thing.
I refer her to the Vatican’s official gloss on its new ban on even celibate gay priests here. I quote:
The article by Monsignor Tony Anatrella, a French Jesuit and psychologist, said homosexuality could not be considered an acceptable moral alternative to heterosexuality.
“During these past years, homosexuality has become a phenomenon that is always increasingly worrying and in many countries is considered a quality that is normal,” the article in L’Osservatore Romano said. The article was specifically approved by the Vatican’s secretariat of state.
“It (homosexuality) does not represent a social value and even less so a moral virtue that could add to the civilization of sexuality,” Anatrella said.
Yes, homosexuals, in so far as they are homosexual, have no “social value.” Our commitments and loves and relationships, moreover, have no “moral virtue.” We are moral Untermenschen, a class of human beings inherently incapable of serving God in any religious orders. I hope that Lopez will correct herself. She is, sadly, mistaken.
The Dish 