
Openly homosexual candidates seeking admission to Catholic seminaries will no longer be officially discriminated against based on their sexual orientation as long as they remain celibate, a new Vatican-approved document has ruled.
The guidelines by the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) which came into force last Thursday, sparked headlines around the world, with the Italian bishops swiftly rebutting media claims that the Church had changed its rules by lifting the ban on admitting gays to the priesthood.
While faithful Catholics slammed the document as a “fudge” which was merely endorsing the Church’s centuries-old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of admitting gay men to the priesthood with “a wink and a nod,” pro-LGBT Catholics welcomed the guidelines as a “big step forward.”
Campaigners battling against sex abuse expressed concern that eight in 10 of victims abused by Catholic priests have been boys, and the guidelines would trigger a flood of homosexuals into a profession that is already dominated by the “lavender mafia” — a term coined by sociologist Fr. Andrew Greeley to described the hegemony of homosexuals in the Latin-rite priesthood.
Cancelling “Straight” Priests
“It won’t be any big change because most of faculty members and seminarians today are closeted gays, most of whom had sex before entering the seminary; while they are in the seminary; and after they get ordained,” Monsignor Gene Gomulka, a clerical sex abuse investigator and former naval chaplain, told The Stream.
“Such a policy will only exacerbate the shortage of straight candidates. No healthy straight guy can function in that environment any more than straight guys can feel comfortable in gay bars.”
Gomulka, who on his Substack channel is revealing the consequences of gay men dominating the priesthood, elaborated:
Just as military recruiters may have to lower their standards and accept less qualified recruits when their quotas are not being met, the lack of heterosexually oriented seminarians has moved the Vatican to approve a provisional document allowing for the ordination of openly gay men to the priesthood, while maintaining the normal requirement of chastity.
“Curable” Homosexuality
The directives, which were formulated in November 2023 by the CEI general assembly in Assisi and published under the title The formation of priests in the Churches in Italy: Guidelines and norms for seminaries, state that the candidate’s sexuality should be only one of several considerations for seminary admission:
In the formative process, when reference is made to homosexual tendencies, it is also appropriate not to reduce discernment only to this aspect, but, as for every candidate, to grasp its meaning in the global framework of the young person’s personality, so that, by knowing himself and integrating the objectives proper to the human and priestly vocation, he may arrive at a general harmony.
The guidelines also explain that celibacy “does not only mean controlling one’s sexual impulses, but growing in a quality of evangelical relationships that overcomes the forms of possessiveness, that does not allow itself to be seized by competition and comparison with others and knows how to guard with respect the boundaries of one’s own and others’ intimacy.”
Based on an earlier Vatican ruling, the directives distinguish between homosexuals whose condition “is transitory or, at least, not incurable,” since it stems from false education, lack of normal sexual evolution, acquired habit, or bad examples, and “homosexuals who are definitively such by a kind of innate instinct or pathological constitution, judged incurable.”
No Change?
A day after the guidelines came into force, the Italian bishops insisted that the the media had misinterpreted the document and the rules banning gay men from the priesthood had not changed.
Rather, the Church would continue to follow the 2005 instruction from the Congregation for Catholic Education and exclude those who “practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture,'” the bishops said.
But Gomulka considers the discussion to be a “fudge,” arguing that “insofar as candidates are required not to have engaged in sexual relations three years prior to (diaconate) ordination, one can literally have sex with any number of men or women the day before beginning theological studies and still be accepted.”
“It’s like telling a drug addict all of a sudden to stop using drugs,” he said, “or like a daughter telling her parents that the man she wants to marry promised her that he would begin being faithful and stop abusing drugs and alcohol once they get married.”
Despite the bishops’ insistence that “nothing has changed,” Catholic activists campaigning for a change in Church teaching on homosexuality hailed the new guidelines.
Gay Activists Rejoice
“This development is a big step forward,” said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of the pro-LGBT New Ways Ministry. “This new clarification treats gay candidates in the same way that heterosexual candidates are treated. That type of equal treatment is what the Church should be aiming for in regards to all LGBTQ+ issues.”
Fr. James Martin, a high-profile Jesuit and LGBTQ advocate, agreed. “This is the first time I’ve seen in a Vatican-approved document the suggestion that discernment about whether a gay man may enter the seminary cannot be determined simply by his sexual orientation,” he told The New York Times.
“My reading of this — and it is only my reading — is that if a gay man is able to lead an emotionally healthy, chaste, and celibate life, he may be considered for admission to the seminary.”
Last June, Pope Francis apologized for using the Italian word “frociaggine” (faggotry) to acknowledge the dominance of homosexuals in seminaries. “Look, there is already an air of too much faggotry around that is not good,” he told a closed door-meeting of some 200 Italian bishops in May.
However, La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana reporter Luisella Scrosati explained that Francis’s “faggotry” barb should be seen
not as a fight against the Vatican gay lobby: he is not interested in the moral behavior of priests, but in the gossip that this could raise. In fact, since the beginning of his pontificate, he has done nothing but protect active homosexual prelates.
The pope is therefore not worried that certain moral problems exist among the clergy, but that they come to light.
Homosexual Hegemony
Multiple academics and journalists, including high-profile Catholic priests, have explored the widespread presence of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood.
Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi revealed that up to 70% of priests in multiple Italian dioceses, including the prominent diocese of Milan, are homosexual.
The 1989 book Gay Priests, edited by James G. Wolf with essays from four openly gay priests, reports that at the time of publication, 48.5% of priests and 55.1% of seminarians in the U.S. were homosexual.
“The share of homosexual men in the priesthood rose from twice that of the general
population in the 1950s to eight times the general population in the 1980s,” writes Fr. Paul Sullins — a sociologist — in an academic study titled “Is Catholic clergy sex abuse related to homosexual priests?“
“This trend was strongly correlated with increasing child sex abuse. My findings showed that the increase or decrease in the percent of male victims correlated almost perfectly (.98) with the increase or decrease of homosexual men in the priesthood.”
In 2020, Polish scholar Fr. Dariusz Oko exposed extensive homosexual clergy networks in his book The Lavender Mafia: With the Popes and Bishops Against Homosexual Clans in the Church.
Social historians have established a correlation between imposing mandatory celibacy on Latin-rite Catholic priests and the rise of clerical homosexuality, noting that the Church was warned that eliminating clerical marriage as permitted by St. Paul (1 Timothy 3:2, Titus 1:6) would open the floodgates of clerical homosexuality.
Celibate Priesthood Attracts Homosexuals
John Boswell’s book, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, documents the extensive clerical homoerotic subculture of the high Middle Ages and the correlation between “the apparent indifference to homosexual behavior of the institutional church” and how “the most strenuous efforts [were] made to enforce clerical celibacy.”
He notes that Pope Alexander II even suppressed the Liber Gomorrhianus, a work by St. Peter Damian published around 1049 AD that describes the shocking extent of homosexuality in the priesthood.
Peter the Chanter and his student Robert of Courson (1219) considered homosexuality in the priesthood to be so “pernicious and ubiquitous” that Chanter was in favor of the Fourth Lateran Council abolishing clerical celibacy altogether, writes Dyan Elliott in The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy.
Documents from this period show “traditionalist” clergy arguing for clerical marriage against pro-celibacy “reformist” monks who prefer sex with men to the love of a wife.
Around 1060 AD, Bishop Ulric of Imola wrote to Pope Nicolas II urging him not to prohibit marriage for clergy since priests will seek sexual release by “forcing themselves on their fathers’ wives, not abhorring the embraces of other men or even of animals.”
A Treatise on Grace (ca. 1075 AD) predicted that by forbidding the “naturalness of marriage to one woman,” priests will be tempted to engage in “unnatural” practices, including “cursed sodomitical fornication.”
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.
The post Vatican Opens Seminaries to Homosexuals Despite ‘Lavender Mafia’ Dominating Priesthood appeared first on The Stream.
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