Church’s stance is elitist and uncaring
We have been reading the recent Vatican document on homosexuality and the priesthood and noting the reactions to it on the airwaves and in the print media.
Without going into detail, the tone of this document is aggressive, elitist, uncaring and, in places, inaccurate.
It fudges the fact that paedophilia and homosexuality are two distinctly different issues.
As the Catholic Church is having such difficulty accepting the consequences of paedophilia within the Church, one could believe this might be deliberate.
However, we are more concerned with the lack of humanity in this document.
The child who tells his parents that he is gay has not changed since the telling of it (and since this issue is about men, we’ll stick to ‘he’).
The fact is that he is as he always was - a young man whose sexual orientation is towards loving other men, but is otherwise still a man.
Gay men are as intelligent, kind, caring, and as capable of good relationships with men and women as their sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles. Gay men have fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, family, friends, partners and colleagues, a large group of people who love them, care for them and do not see them as “objectively disordered”.
A heterosexual man has to be celibate to be part of the priesthood - which is no different to a homosexual man having to be celibate to enter the priesthood - and to say otherwise is to deny him part of his humanity and full potential.
Louise O’Donovan
Secretary
Parents’ Support
3A Lr George’s Street
Dún Laoghaire
Co Dublin
