Sunday, May 01, 2005

This ought to be interesting....

The Vatican is going to evaluate American Catholic seminaries in response to the clergy sex abuse crisis. In particular, they will focus on the question of whether homosexuals should be priests, even if celibate homosexuals should be priests.

From the article:

Church officials conducting the review will inevitably take up complaints that gays are enrolling in large numbers in the seminaries and their sexual activity is tolerated at the schools, experts on Catholicism said. Some Catholics contend an atmosphere of sexual permissiveness - for straight and gay seminarians - was a factor in the crisis, which has led to more than 11,000 abuse claims in the last five decades.

This could be interesting to us as ELCA Lutherans because our leadership seems to fancy ourselves in communion to some degree with the Roman Catholic church, or at least on our way to being in communion (that has a technical meaning - that we share pulpit and altar fellowship, which we definitely do not at this point. I don't mean to imply that at all.) Yet, they just selected a conservative pope who seems likely to continue the policies of Pope John Paul II, meaning no women priests, no approval of homosexuality, no abortion whatsoever, no birth control, for Pete's sake; I have trouble understanding this desire amongst our leadership to align with the RC church. They don't agree with us at all on our many liberal leanings. Then our leadership condemns Protestant churches for their stands on moral issues that are quite similar to the RC church. Makes no sense to me....

Anyway, you can read the entire article by clicking on the title.

---Katie

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