Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

With the imminent release of “the document” there are a lot of folks rupturing spleens over what they think that it will say. Most seem to assume that the leak to the Italian press is authentic, including the former editor of the U.S. Jesuit magazine, America.

Unfortunately Fr. Reese makes the same category mistakes as the rest of American culture and seems to think that the reductionist approach to anthropology reveals the truth about the human person. In other words, because a good portion of the medical community presumes that they can circumscribe the truth about human sexuality by assuming that sexuality and sexual attraction is simply a social construct, Fr. Reese seems to assume that this defines the truth. Thus, he makes the ironic claim that the Vatican is ignorant in reaffirming its current policy against ordaining men suffering from same sex attraction because they have not done a study to see how wide spread the problem is among the already ordained.

This absurd statement presupposes that if that if a sufficiently high percentage of SSA oriented priests are celibate and provide effective ministry that there should be no reason for them not to be ordained. This pragmatism neglects the Vatican II teaching which says that the Church is the expert on the human person. It ignores the authoritative teaching that says homosexual attraction is a disorder and the empirical evidence that disorder, left untreated, leads to further disorder.

Fr. Reese makes the further absurd claim that those with strong heterosexual attraction should not be ordained because of dangers in all female environments as if a natural inclination is equivalent to a disordered inclination. Another absurd claim is that many of the priests who abused boys were actually heterosexual. Hmmm, I guess that they were really only attracted to women but somehow mistakenly projected femininity onto their male victims . . . ??? I am not sure I can even try to make start making sense of this outlandish assertion.

Whatever the document actually says, it is certain to be the opportunity for more opprobrium hurled at the Church from without and unfortunately, from within. It is clear that those who attack the teaching, for many reasons, identify the SAA inclination with the dignity of the person suffering from it. Until this connection is broken there is little chance that the Church’s position will be understood much less accepted.