Just the facts, ma'am.

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Mar 17, 2005

Gay-partisan Jesuit Father James Martin gave a deeply dishonest address to the LA Religious Ed Congress, duly foregrounded in this week's Archdiocesan newspaper. Using the conventional jargon of gay agit-prop, he takes aim at Catholic fears and assumptions (ours, not his).

"Today there are hundreds, if not thousands, of celibate gay priests ministering to Catholics in parishes, schools, hospitals, high schools, colleges, retreat houses, soup kitchens, nursing homes and chanceries," said Jesuit Father James Martin."

"Celibate" is a weasel-word in the gay lexicon, capable of meaning either "unmarried" or "sexually chaste." Few would dispute the claim that most gay priests are bachelors. But are they chaste? Martin claims hundreds or thousands of them are. Yet he can't possibly know this. He can only speak with authority about the chastity of one priest, namely, Fr. James Martin. Can't he extrapolate from the seen to the unseen? Sure. But that means he's just another guy with a hunch -- like the folks he claims to refute.

Among the prejudices that (Martin says) hinder an honest discussion is the "assumption that being a gay priest means that one is, by definition, sexually active and incapable of chastity." I take "gay" to refer to a subset of persons with same-sex attraction, viz., those who have said Yes to their homosexual libido and ceased the struggle to rid themselves of it. Are such persons necessarily sexually active? No. Is it bigotry to believe that, in the aggregate, they are promiscuous? On the contrary, the empirical evidence for gay unchastity is so overwhelming that only a man demented by ideology can deny it.

Are gay priests an exception? The objective data proves beyond question they aren't. More than 400 U.S. priests (including one bishop and a Jesuit university president) have died of AIDS; they didn't get it from a drinking fountain. Nearly 80% of priest abusers targeted post-pubertal males. Three dioceses have already been buggered into bankruptcy -- they're not going broke paying child support, folks -- with another dozen on the brink.

Many Catholics in the U.S. have lost their parish churches and have no Catholic school in which to put their children precisely because their bishops gambled properties not their own on the wildly improbable chance that gays were good priests -- and lost. Far from being a myth generated by "prejudice" (in the sense of a judgment made in advance of the facts), the sexual anarchy of gay clergy is so obvious a truth that it's all but impossible to see how it's still an open question for the bishops whether to admit gays to the priesthood. Blackmail, of course, is the likeliest explanation -- and, thanks to the excruciatingly empirical data provided by Archbishop Weakland and his lover Paul Marcoux, that's not a hypothetical either.

Yet the chief objection to gay clergy is one that Martin never touches. Dr. Joseph Nicolosi put it well: "To speak of a gay Catholic is a contradiction in terms, like calling someone a pro-abortion Catholic." It's that simple. We're not talking about generic homosexuals here, not about appetites, we're talking about convictions and decisions -- specifically, the conviction that the Church is in error in her sexual teaching, and the decision to shape one's own life on the belief that this teaching is false, irrelevant, or changeable. Gay priests aren't sexually active by definition; they're dissenters by definition. Gay priests are subversives. Even if, contrary to fact, they were universally and perfectly chaste, even if they outshone straight priests in every behavioral respect, their contempt for Catholic doctrine would disqualify them outright. It's not a question of what outstandingly talented players gay priests are; the problem is they're fighting for the other guys. They want the wrong team to win.