More on the Vatican's Stance against Gays

William Saletan has a particularly informative article in Slate today, and Andrew Sullivan has some particularly insightful comments on it.

Saletan argues that it has been Ratzinger's mission to broaden and expand the Church's position from "hate the sin, love the sinner" to "damn 'em both." Sullivan sums it up beautifully:

In the past, the gay individual who remained chaste could attain Christian perfection, his orientation was not in itself sinful, gay men and women were worthy of respect and made in the image of God. Under Benedict, homosexuality itself is morally disordered; even chaste homosexuals are a threat to "priestly life"; homosexuals, whatever they do, are threats to society and the Church; the great gay priests of the past, including Mychal Judge or Henri Nouwen, have "no social value." This is not about hating sin and loving the sinner any more; it's about hating a segment of humankind, segregating them out for moral censure, and banishing them from moral discourse. It's about taking the fundamental message of the Gospels and inverting it.

I originally thought that this was a public relations thing, a tacit bait and switch, equating homosexual priests with child molesters, and therefore it might be rectified in a few years when the ridiculousness of the actual doctrine proved itself in even lower seminary classes and even more severe priest shortages. (A far better way of addressing the real problem would have been a thorough house-cleaning of all the Cardinals who shielded pedophile priests, but like that was going to happen--Boston's Cardinal Law has an important post in the Vatican itself now, I hear.) But Saletan's article shows definitively that this has been a personal crusade of Ratzinger's throughout his rise to power.



Creepy huh? It's sad, but I miss the kinder, gentler conservatism of JPII already.