This reminds me of a comment made by a vestry member when a celibate gay man was entering the priesthood, "I'd rather have a fornicating heterosexual priest than a celibate gay priest." After the church had both I wanted to ask if the opinion was the same.

[Greta: Great to have your comment. Please include your full name next time you comment at the Cafe. - eds.]

We may as well have the rest of what the pope said,

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/page/speeches

Homosexuality is incompatible with the priestly vocation. Otherwise, celibacy itself would lose its meaning as a renunciation. It would be extremely dangerous if celibacy became a sort of pretext for bringing people into the priesthood who don’t want to get married anyway. For, in the end, their attitude toward man and woman is somehow distorted, off centre, and, in any case, is not within the direction of creation of which we have spoken. The Congregation for Education issued a decision a few years ago to the effect that homosexual candidates cannot become priests because their sexual orientation estranges them from the proper sense of paternity, from the intrinsic nature of priestly being… The greatest attention is needed here in order to prevent the intrusion of this kind of ambiguity and to head off a situation where the celibacy of priests would practically end up being identified with the tendency to homosexuality.

B16 says "For, in the end, their attitude toward man and woman is somehow distorted, off center, and, in any case, is not within the direction of creation of which we have spoken." Now let me get this straight ( as it were), priests must be heterosexual otherwise their attitude toward man and woman is distorted. So priests must have a natural sexual attraction to women that they are willing to suppress in order to uphold the proper attitude toward man and woman? Good grief, when did they stop teaching logic at the Gregorian?

"Heterosexuals w/ a priestly vocation" (blah-blah-blah).

So they tell him. >;-/

While there's ALWAYS an element of asceticism in the call to the priesthood, and there's ALWAYS an element of asceticism in a call to celibacy...

...it seems to me that B16 is lifting up the ascetical element in a way, over everything else, that is positively fetishistic. I honestly believe this is NOT, when he said "Come, Follow Me", Jesus had in mind.

JC Fisher

John Chilton, thanks for the entire quote, which gave me my best laugh of the day. I'm not kidding. But the pope's statement is not funny at all, except in the absurdity of his ideas.

I ask whose "attitude toward man and woman is somehow distorted, off centre..."? The Vatican as the Bizarro World.

June Butler

For an insider view see the interview in the Nov 22 issue of Der Spiegel with David Berger:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,730520,00.html
David Berger, 42, was Professor of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. He resigned from all his offices after outing himself as a gay man in April of 2010. His book "Der heilige Schein. Als schwuler Theologe in der katholischen Kirche" (The Holy Illusion: A Gay Theologian in the Catholic Church), was recently published by Germany's Ullstein Verlag.

There was research done in the late 1990's that indicated gay RC priests respected their professional sexual boundaries while their straight priest counterparts sexually exploited parishioners.

Don Hands

[Name added. Don, please remember to include your full name at the end of your posts. - ed.]

I've been fasting from posting on this blog but this one was just too much. This man does not speak for the God I have known from my youth any more than Pat Robertson does. (How'd you like to be on that list?) I wish we could just move on, knowing that we are doing what our hearts say is good and just and right, with God's blessing on our recklessness.