For years the Catholic Church has been telling Catholics that it’s okay to love the homosexual sinner. They just have to hate the sin.
Given what the church is up to these days, it’s time to rephrase the thought.
For centuries, the people of the Catholic church have struggled to fight poverty, oppression, and bigotry. History is filled with examples of ordinary Catholics who have achieved the extraordinary, in the name of self-sacrifice, love, or altruism.
On the other hand, there’s the Catholic Church itself.
According to almost every reputable news source in the world, Pope Benedict XVI is about to declare that gay men can no longer be ordained as Roman Catholic priests. He will also call on bishops to bar even celibate gay men from seminaries, and is demanding that all American seminaries look for “evidence of homosexuality” and if found, exorcise it. According to this week’s cover story in PBS’s Religion & Ethics, the church is actually hiring the FBI to help them do background checks and look for evidence of homosexuality.
Hello. Earth to the Vatican. Does any of this remind you of your past history? A history that includes brutal and cruel persecution against anything the Vatican has found threatening, whether that means Jews, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Protestants, or any other group of people the Vatican has set its sights on.
And that’s not just religious rivals either. This is a Vatican that has fought knowledge and science as well. Remember Galileo? It took the Vatican, which brutally persecuted and tormented the astronomer throughout his life, over 350 years to acknowledge that the earth revolves around the sun. Earth to the Vatican....
This is a Vatican that has also a history of fighting democracy. For example, in 1929 they signed a treaty with the Italian fascist leader Mussolini in order to reestablish their political power. Never mind that they were now allied with the fascist Axis countries. (The current Pope Benedict Pope Benedict XVI joined Hitler Youth and, later,the Nazi Army. Vatican publicists have frantically scrambled to say he was required to do so, but omit the fact that other young Germans managed to avoid such service).
Now the Vatican is about to mount its new crusade. And just as ignorantly. Experts on sex offenders say gays are no more likely than heterosexuals to abuse children. The vast majority of gays aren’t interested in young boys. “There is no evidence that a male homosexual is any more risk to a boy than a male heterosexual is to a girl, and one of the problems within the church is that they are confusing the issue of homosexuality with the issues of child abuse and pedophilia," said Dr. Fred S. Berlin, an associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medicine. (For more information, check out the Gay and Lesbian Task Force at www.thetaskforce.org/media/release.cfm?releaseID=868)
And, of course, while persecuting gays (who make up an estimated 25 to 50 percent out of all the priests in America), the Vatican is ignoring the fact that priests who prey on women will be allowed to remain in the church. Or that some of the best priests in the church will be forced to leave.
European Catholics have longed known how to be good Catholics while ignoring the Vatican. Americans are just starting to learn as well. Two excellent books on the subject are Garry Wills’ Why I am Still a Catholic, and James Carroll’s Toward a New Catholic Church; both books give guidance to practicing Catholics who wish to stay sane in the face of a fanatical Vatican.
In the meantime, just as the Catholic church tells its members to love the sinner and hate the sin, it’s time for the rest of us to do the same in return--love the Catholic, hate the Church.