Karl Keating's E-Letter for Feb 3, 2004

TOPICS:
SURVEY OF BRITISH PRIESTS
SHOULD WE SAY HOMOSEXUALS ARE "DISORDERED"?
SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF HOMOSEXUAL PRIESTS
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:

I have been interviewed enough times to know that it is the rare reporter who will quote you accurately. That leads me to suspect that what I read in a news report was not really said by the man quoted. If it had been, he might make a good successor to Mrs. Malaprop.

Gateway Computers is buying out eMachines, which has been more successful recently than has Gateway in making money from the sale of PCs. The news report quotes an industry analyst as saying, "This is at least a taciturn admission by Gateway that they haven't been able to transform themselves as they would like."

What a delightful typo: "a taciturn admission." I'm sure the analyst said "tacit," which means implied, rather than "taciturn," which means disinclined to talk. But, in a way, "taciturn" seems to fit: When your business isn't doing very well, you aren't too inclined to want to talk about it.

THINGS MAY BE WORSE ACROSS THE POND

A survey of priests in England and Wales has caused an episcopal uproar. According to a story in the January issue of "The Catholic World Report," the bishops have focused more on alleged shortcomings of the survey's methodology than on the story told by the survey, and the story is not a pretty one.

A third of the priests said they think women should be ordained. Half said that priests who left the ministry to marry should be readmitted. Most of the priests oppose the Church's teaching on the immorality of contraception, and a majority say that Catholics who are divorced and remarried should be able to receive Communion. Only a quarter of the priests say that a practicing homosexual should be banned from the priesthood.

I am saddened to learn of such opinions, but I am not surprised--or in despair.

As I repeatedly have said in the E-Letter, younger priests are much more solid, on the whole, than are priests ordained in the 1960s and 1970s. With new recruits entering at one end of the priestly spectrum and attrition handling the other end, things will improve.

In twenty years such a survey will have markedly different (and encouraging) results. This is not to say that there will be no priests who hold wrong opinions, but things will look much brighter. Just be patient.

ARE HOMOSEXUALS DISORDERED?

I read the report on the survey about the time I read a letter in the "National Catholic Reporter." The letter was written by Fr. Ken Lohrmeyer, who lives in Kansas.

He said that "gay priests have a burden heterosexual priests never even dream about--namely, the fact that the church they have devoted their lives to officially declares them to be 'objectively disordered' along with all other homosexual persons. The absurd implication is that God made a mistake in creating them gay (I believe it is not a freely chosen lifestyle)."

There are at least two problems here:

1. The Church does not say that homosexual persons are "objectively disordered." It says that homosexual persons have a disorder, and it says that homosexual acts (not homosexual persons) are "intrinsically disordered" (CCC 2357).

Consider an analogy. You may remember thalidomide. Four decades ago this then-new sedative was widely prescribed. Some pregnant women who used it gave birth to infants who were malformed, and thalidomide quickly fell out of use.

A "thalidomide child" who was born with, say, only one arm has had, all his life, a physical disorder. Human beings are supposed to have two arms, and he does not. Does this mean that this now middle-aged person is "disordered"? No, because that uses the term in the wrong way. He has a disorder, but that does not mean he is wholly disordered.

Or consider the case of the alcoholic. He has a psychological disorder that has a physical component to it. We do not say that the alcoholic is disordered so much as that he suffers from a disorder. To say the first would be to suggest that everything about him is wrong, and that is not the case.

There are many kinds of disorders--physical, psychological, emotional, mental, social. Many of them have no moral consequences.

The "thalidomide child" who has but one arm is not induced by that fact to engage in actions that are immoral.

It is a different situation with the alcoholic. If he starts with a social drink, he will find himself falling into drunkenness. Social drinking is not a sin, but drunkenness is, so there is a moral component to the alcoholic's disorder. His disorder entices him to do something morally innocent (having a social drink) but greases the way for him to go beyond that into something morally improper (drunkenness).

Homosexuality is a step beyond that. The homosexual's desire is for something that, in its nature, is immoral: sexual union with someone of the same sex. In his case, there is no analogue to the first social drink.

2. Fr. Lohrmeyer says that homosexuality is "not a freely chosen lifestyle." While one can say that the condition of homosexuality is not freely chosen (CCC 2358), one cannot say that about the homosexual lifestyle.

When we talk about a lifestyle, we are talking about how someone acts, and acts are freely chosen. No homosexual is compelled to engage in homosexual acts. He may not have chosen to be a homosexual, but he has the freedom to choose not to perform homosexual acts.

Fr. Lohrmeyer seems to have missed this simple distinction, and his misperception leads him to say that the homosexual priest wakes up "every day of his life knowing that his church really doesn't like him all that much and basically wishes he would just go away."

ONE SCENARIO

Frankly, I can think of a few homosexual priests who should "just go away." I mean men who persist in and who advocate immoral acts and who cause much scandal by doing so.

I also know of homosexual priests who live chastely; they know they have a disorder, and they have succeeded in working around it, somewhat like the alcoholic who, through a support group, has been able to stay sober.

No one, on any side of the theological divide, denies that we have a remarkably high proportion of homosexuals in the priesthood in this country, and many of those homosexual priests are "gays"--that is, they have chosen the homosexual lifestyle.

Nearly all of the clerical sexual abuse problems we have been reading about have had their origin in homosexuality. This is almost universally known and, among bishops and clergy, almost universally not talked about (at least not publicly). Still, it's a fact.

Even if the abuse scandal had not arisen, there still would have been a problem with "gay" priests--I refer to those homosexual priests who engage in homosexual acts with adults rather than with minors.

Many people have wondered what can be done to solve the problem. Here is one possible scheme:

1. If a priest is "gay"--that is, living a homosexual lifestyle--he should be removed from ministry immediately and quietly. He should have no position of authority or responsibility in the Church and should seek secular employment instead. (Will some dioceses be understaffed? Yes, but too bad. Just squeeze more people into fewer pews until new priests are trained.)

2. If a priest is homosexual but not "gay"--that is, if he is living chastely--let him continue in ministry until normal retirement.

3. Exclude from seminary formation and ordination any homosexual, whether "gay" or chaste. The former brings with him too much baggage, and the latter should not sign up for "guy-only" work that will have him living with other men (thus putting him into near occasions of sin). Even if the chaste homosexual thinks he has a call to the priesthood, it would be uncharitable to him to admit him to ordination. He should be encouraged to serve the Church in other ways.

This three-step process would solve the abuse scandal almost overnight, and it would heal the priesthood in America over the next two decades or so. It would cause inconvenience in those dioceses with a high proportion of "gay" priests, but that inconvenience will pass soon enough and, in any case, is more palatable than the existing situation.

Until next time,

Karl

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Catholic Answers' third annual apologetics cruise sails from Montreal to Boston. The dates are October 2-9, 2004. Join Karl Keating, Jimmy Akin, Rosalind Moss, Tim Staples, Thomas Howard, and Bishop Colin Campbell for a week of beautiful fall scenery and invigorating large- and small-group events, including daily Mass, rosaries, and fun on-shore excursions.

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