damian thompson sees a clever compromise in the Vatican’s gay priest ruling |
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Two Roman Catholic pressure groups are trying to hide their disappointment over this week's Vatican ruling reasserting the ban on admitting practising homosexuals to seminaries: the ageing, shrill caucus of gay Catholic activists - and the even older and more querulous lobby of right-wing Catholic homophobes.
The "instruction" issued by Rome on Tuesday says that men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies should be rejected by seminaries. It repeats the official view that homosexuality is "objectively disordered" and notes that there have been "negative consequences" of admitting gay men to the priesthood in the past.
This sounds, on the face of it,
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pretty offensive to modern ears. What is meant by deep-seated? The answer is that it represents an attempt to distinguish between predatory gay men (whose behaviour has caused the Church negative consequences, to put it mildly) and those committed to celibacy. And remember: the Vatican also wants to weed out prospective priests with deep-seated heterosexual tendencies - it is horrified by the number of African clergy who have unofficial wives (sometimes more than one at a time).
Note, too, what is missing from the document: the phrase "intrinsically evil", until recently routinely applied by the Church to homosexuals.
In short, the document is an intelligent compromise that bears all the fingerprints of Benedict XVI, a subtle politician as well as a man of prayer. In the words of one gay
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priest: "There has been a lot of horse-trading over this ruling, and the result falls far short of a blanket ban on gays.
"That will dismay the poisonous homophobes, who were licking their lips at the prospect of seminary witch-hunts," he adds. "And it will also dismay the rainbow sash-wearing gay activists, who will still shriek their tits off about the 'Rottweiler' Ratzinger, but know deep down that their martyrdom has been snatched from them." 
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