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HOT TOPICS: Homosexuality and the Clergy  Atila Sinke Guimarães Bird's Eye View of the News, December 31, 2000  The book The Changing Face of the Priesthood, by Donald B. Cozzens (The Liturgical Press, 2000, 148 pp.), was released last November. I am basing my notes here on a book review by Larry Stammer (Los Angeles Times, November 25, 2000, p. B2). According to Cozzens, the hot-button issue of the day is homosexuality. There appears to be a disproportionate number of gay men among seminarians and priests. No one really knows what the percentage is, but Cozzens cites sociologist James Wolf’s 1989 estimate that 48.5% of priests and 55.1% of seminarians have a homosexual orientation.
The author contends that no one can doubt that priests who are gay make an enormous, helpful, and healthy contribution to the Church. Indeed, Cozzens states that their sensibility may be a special strength and quality required of one who seeks to minister to others. The Church should not waste time wrestling with how well parishioners appear to accept a gay priest in their individual parishes, according to the author. Instead, she should be grapping with the concrete fact that the Catholic priesthood overall may be heavily populated by men with a homosexual orientation. Therefore – and here I make my commentary – we are heading toward an admission of a kind of third sex, neither man nor woman, which would depict the normal way to be a representative of Our Lord. This would be a de facto acceptance of an aberration against nature that can only contribute to the demoralization of the priesthood and the attempt to destroy the Mystical Body of Christ. I really don’t know which is worst, the progressivist plan to impose women priests or its attempt to make Catholic public opinion accept these anti-natural “third-sex” priests.  Homosexuality and Clergy Index | Hot Topics Main Page | Home Page Books | Tapes | Contact Us |
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