UNITED STATES
Concord Monitor
September 23. 2005 8:00AM
Given the pope's history of backward thinking on questions of human sexuality and open debate, word that the Catholic Church will try to root out gay students and dissident professors in its seminaries comes as no surprise. But that doesn't make the news any less troubling.
As part of a review prompted by the clerical sex abuse scandal, the Vatican will dispatch a team of investigators to search for "evidence of homosexuality" and identify faculty members who question church teachings in its 229 American seminaries, The New York Times recently reported.
As Catholics await a ruling on whether gays should be barred from the priesthood, a Vatican document obtained by the Timesand an interview with the archbishop overseeing the seminary review suggest that the church wants to eliminate gays from the dwindling ranks of priests. Edwin O'Brien, the archbishop for the U.S. military, said that "anyone who has engaged in homosexual activity or has strong homosexual inclinations" should not be admitted to the seminary. That prohibition should even apply to those who have not been sexually active for a decade or better, O'Brien told theAbuse Tracker Catholic Register.
The purge is a misguided reaction to a scandal in which it was revealed that priests had abused an alarming number of children, an estimated 80 percent of them boys. Rather than addressing the real problem - a church culture that denied healthy sexuality and then covered up the ugly consequences - the Vatican of Pope Benedict XVI took aim at a familiar target: sexual orientation.