Philadelphia Inquirer
Tom Teepen
is a columnist for Cox News Service
If you are of a mischievous mind, you could have good sport with parts of the recently leaked Vatican policy on homosexuality and the priesthood.
The policy is still officially only pending but, by common account, it apparently is settled and inevitable, along the lines of a recently leaked document.
To no one's surprise - key points had been publicly bandied about at least for months - the Roman Catholic Church will forbid ordination to all but the small number of putatively gay applicants who can convince church authorities that any homosexual occasion in their life was at least three years in the past and only a muddled, fleeting attraction and that the candidate can live a celibate life henceforth indifferent, if not outright antagonistic, to "gay culture," whatever that may be.
Together, these points build a very high bar indeed, as plainly was meant to be the case. In erecting that bar, the church effectively buys into the hoary canard - discredited in experience and in research - that links homosexuality and pedophilia.