AUSTRALIA
The Australian
November 25, 2005
AT a time when a significant group of thinkers in the Catholic Church are seriously searching for ways to make priestly vocations more user friendly, others are on a witch-hunt to make them less attractive to a core group ideally suited to the lifestyle: gay men.
Indeed, there must certainly be a significant group of Australian priests and brothers busily praying for divine protection from the church's latest crusade to rid its parish of the hordes of homosexuals its own princes only recently encouraged.
For it is only 10 years or so since some Sydney seminarians were being told not to worry about their homosexuality. Like married and even women priests, the progressives asserted, homosexuality would be overtly, rather than covertly, accepted as an optional priestly lifestyle. I understand that policy relaxation has recently been abandoned, in Sydney seminaries at least.
In the meantime, the wise men at the Vatican who ordered, and are carrying out a purge of homosexual - celibate and active - men appear to have confused homosexuality with pedophilia and sexual abuse. In their zeal to correct and avoid the sins of their past, they have set upon a group particularly well suited to the extraordinary counter-culture that the priesthood is. That is to say, a life without women and children.