{"id":1816,"date":"2005-09-29T22:46:13","date_gmt":"2005-09-29T22:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/those-soutanes.html"},"modified":"2005-09-29T22:46:13","modified_gmt":"2005-09-29T22:46:13","slug":"those-soutanes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/those-soutanes.html","title":{"rendered":"Those soutanes"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Damian Thompson at the UK Spectator<\/a>. The reader who passed it on remarked: typically glib and gossipy piece from Damien Thompson in the spectator. contains enough sweeping generalisations to carpet vatican city.<\/em><\/p>\n

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For the time being, therefore, you can believe what you want to believe. Left-leaning media outlets such as the New York Times and the BBC, which have so far been starved of evidence that Pope Benedict is a wicked reactionary, are quite certain \u2014 one might almost say optimistic \u2014 that a total ban is in the works. For them, the story presents a stark contrast between the tolerance of ordinary Western Catholics and the anti-gay bigotry of the Vatican. To which one can only reply that their Rome correspondents must have been wandering around with their eyes closed, shutting out the sight of \u2018conservative\u2019 curial officials sashaying through Bernini\u2019s colonnades in Gammarelli\u2019s latest figure-hugging soutane. <\/p>\n

In addition to being Europe\u2019s smallest state, the Vatican also boasts the highest proportion of homosexuals per square foot. To be sure, they are overwhelmingly chaste, but that is precisely the point. A blanket ban on homosexuals would mean that the Church would be saying to some of its most senior and obedient prelates: if you were to present yourself for ordination today, you would be told to go away and become a social worker or something. To put it another way, if the ban were retroactive, many of those Catholics who have been agitating for it would have to sit back and watch their favourite traditionalist cardinals resign their orders. So this is not a simple issue of Left versus Right. There are plenty of homophobes among the older generation of \u2018progressives\u2019: only the other day I heard a leader of the quasi-Marxist pressure group Pax Christi compare homosexuality to bestiality. And there are ritualist Catholic churches all over the Western world whose priests are mostly celibate homosexuals (though they have not necessarily been so in the past). Again, unless you are exceptionally naive, you would have to close your eyes \u2014 and block your ears \u2014 not to realise this. <\/p>\n

[snip]<\/em><\/p>\n

Second, the epicentre of clerical abuse is in Africa, not Europe or America, and it involves young women. If the Church wants to root out misbehaviour, it might start with the East African teachers\u2019 training college where dirt-poor girl students routinely sell their bodies to (by local standards) well-off seminarians. But it won\u2019t, because Third World vocations are regarded as a gift of the Almighty, and many African priests are allowed to do pretty much what they like, including entering into polygamous \u2018tribal marriages\u2019. <\/p>\n

It goes without saying that any formal exclusion of celibate gay seminarians will shock liberal public opinion; but, for once, the shock will be justified. An automatic ban of this sort is built on the assumption that bishops and seminary rectors lack the God-given power of discernment, and that gay seminarians and priests will be unable to observe their vows of celibacy; in other words, it is predicated on a pretty comprehensive failure of the power of the Holy Spirit. If enforced, it will deprive a struggling Church of the ministry of future priests, bishops, cardinals, popes and saints, while leaving untouched the predatory womanisers of the developing world. Genuine paedophiles, meanwhile, will regard it as just another obstacle to be tiptoed round on their way to little Johnny\u2019s bedroom. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Damian Thompson at the UK Spectator. The reader who passed it on remarked: typically glib and gossipy piece from Damien Thompson in the spectator. contains enough sweeping generalisations to carpet vatican city. For the time being, therefore, you can believe what you want to believe. Left-leaning media outlets such as the New York Times…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThose soutanes - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/those-soutanes.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Those soutanes - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From Damian Thompson at the UK Spectator. The reader who passed it on remarked: typically glib and gossipy piece from Damien Thompson in the spectator. contains enough sweeping generalisations to carpet vatican city. For the time being, therefore, you can believe what you want to believe. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}