It would appear that my worst fears about Cardinal Ratzinger’s papacy are going to be realized and it has not taken that long. It looks almost certain now that there is going to be an organized and Vatican lead persecution of gay people in the Catholic Church which is about as un-catholic a thing as one can imagine.

This blog post has been threatening to be written since the news broke
a few weeks ago that the Vatican may officially ban gays from entering the
priest hood and has now been accelerated by the anti-gay witch hunt
that has been announced in the US today.

Up to now the Church’s (and that of dear Joe Ratzinger) position has been that there is nothing wrong with BEING gay, only with taking part in gay sexual acts, which are, according to the church, inherently sinful. I don’t believe that to be true and that is an issue that myself and the church disagree on quite strongly but for the purpose of this blog entry I am not going to argue with that view.

So what am I arguing with? Well, I am arguing with the churches move away from this apparently "compassionate" position to outright anti-gay witch hunting.

Catholic priests HAVE to be celibate so they cannot have ANY sex and are in fact supposed to be completely asexual beings. Hence their sexual orientation is irrelevant because they give up all sex. This is why there has been no problem with gay clerics in the past and this is a very sensible position. However, reports recently indicated that the Vatican was about to issue a policy that gays will be banned from the priest hood.

That would be bad and simply wrong. It would totally undermine the churches own position on homosexuality and would lead to increased discrimination against gays and would make the lives of gay people that little bit harder. However, what is MUCH worse is what has been announced in the American Catholic Church today. As part of their "apostolic visitations" to all seminaries they will try to find and remove all homosexuality. Literally a witch hunt. What makes this MUCH MUCH more dangerous is the apparent motivation for this, a claimed link between homosexuality and pedophilia.

This link is not supported by science or by observation but is being pushed by the church so it can wash it’s hands of the child sex abuse scandal by blaming it on the gays and not on the Bishops under who’s noses this all went on and was allowed continue. The church is trying to scapegoat all gays and that WILL result in direct hostility towards gays as well as an increase in discrimination and hate crimes against innocent gay people. The good honest people of the world can’t simply stand back and let this happen, they have to speak out against this for two reasons, firstly to protect innocent gay people from unfair and undeserved discrimination and secondly and more importantly to force the church to deal with the real causes of child sex abuse so that more innocent children are not hurt in the future!

Thankfully there are already some within the church speaking out against this, let us hope they are listened to! For example Planet Out reports Francis DeBernardo, director of a ministry which serves LGBT Catholics as saying that "the investigation US seminaries for ‘evidence of homosexuality’ continues the pattern of smoke-screening the church leaders have employed since the clergy child sex abuse crisis began" he went on to ask "why not look instead for evidence of cowardice, secrecy and dishonesty — the traits displayed by so many bishops who magnified the crisis into a public scandal?". All I can say is lets hope there are more catholics like Francis out there and less like Joe and his gay-bashing cronies.