Tuesday, June 15, 2004 - Apache Junction, Arizona, USA
GAYS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
One has to be a bit amazed at the current activities of the Catholic Church. In Boston, they’re selling off churches in order to pay legal debts accrued during the recent sex scandals. On top of this, their bishops are touting punishing Catholic politicians that don’t toe the line concerning the Church’s stance on abortion and gay rights by withholding the right to communion. In Phoenix, they’re going back to the Latin mass in order to encourage long time Catholics to forgive the Church of its recent sins and to come back on Sunday. It isn’t working.
People being people, they can’t help but notice the hypocrisy of the Church’s activities. The separation of church and state is a very important issue in this country and when the same church that fought so hard to cover up its guilt and withhold punishment of its clergy in the sex scandals comes out against politicians to influence their leadership, well, it’s just too much for most American Catholics to stomach. It will take more than masses being held in Latin to smooth this over.
The other issue is the Catholic leadership’s embracing of the bigotry of the religious right concerning gay marriage. The Catholic point of view is, gay people are God’s children and are not evil but they should abstain from sex as God calls their sexual acts an abomination. According to the Church, being gay is “curable,” although millions of gays who KNOW they are born gay would disagree. Marriage for gays and lesbians is out of the question, period.
On May 23rd, Pope John Paul in an address to visiting US bishops had this to say: "Family life is sanctified in the joining of man and woman in the sacramental institution of holy matrimony. The Church teaches that the love of man and woman made holy in the sacrament of marriage is a mirror of God's everlasting love for his creation."
People can see the hypocrisy of an organization which continues to insipidly force its own clergy to remain single, even in the face of that clergy’s sexual violation of young people, yet tries to imply that there is something wrong with homosexual men and women who have been together for 5, 10, 20, 40 and over 50 years who desire to bind their loving commitment in marriage. It just doesn’t make any sense. In Massachusetts, gays may legally marry now. According to the Catholic Church, they’re not supposed to have sex? “Abstain,” the church says. What are they supposed to do, masturbate? The Church's view is absurd.
Even the apostle Paul understood that people could not control their sexual drives. He said, “Now to the unmarrieds and widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry.” Of course Paul also said the leader of a congregation should be "a man with one wife" but the Church refuses to follow that as well. The really telling remark to Timothy that Paul made is as follows: “Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. They forbid people to marry...”
It’s time for the Catholic Church to get out of American politics and straighten out the problems in their own church or a lot more properties will be flooding the real estate market.
©2004 Marcia Ellen "Happy" Beevre
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