Gay City News
By ANDY HUMM
Cardinal Josef Ratzinger was the author of some of the most vicious, anti-gay documents to come out of the Vatican in the 1980s, labeling even the status of being homosexual “an intrinsic disorder” and suggesting that gay victims of violence bring it upon themselves by claiming civil rights protections for behavior “to which no one has any conceivable right.”
Now, as Pope Benedict XVI, he has made an attack on gay people his first major act, ordering Catholic seminaries to expel men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies,” even going so far as to encourage their confessors to “dissuade” these men in the sacrament of Penance from “proceeding toward Ordination.”
The document is widely viewed as a response to the priest sex abuse scandals, though it makes no mention of men already ordained. It is being condemned by gay priests and their allies as scapegoating, an insult to their ministry, and unsound psychologically and theologically. Some seminary directors have preemptively rejected the document, others welcome it. At least one American priest has resigned over it.