A few items caught my eye…
First, I’ve been reading the explanations of what Francis really meant to say when he explicitly complained that in Italian seminaries there was excessive “fa*ggotry” and that “fa*gs/queers” (checche) shouldn’t be in seminary, even those who are “semi inclinati”.
For those of you who read Italian, here is a shot of a newspaper page today. The article at the bottom quotes bishops doing cartwheels to explain what Francis really meant. Right click and open in a new tab for larger.
It’s predictable, but still clever. One guy blames his brother bishop for telling what had been said. Another, he’s from South America and doesn’t know what words mean. Another, he’s just worried about the happiness of future priests. Aboutchecchein seminaries, to which Francis has in the past said “no”: “Non c’è un ‘no’ a priori…. There is no a priori ‘no'”. So, it all depends on what “no” means. Ask 60 Minutes. Another guy, it was a confidential conversation and personal observations were mixed with general considerations. Whatever that means. Another, we ought to pay attention to what he does not only what he says. I remind everyone that speaking is doing something too. Another, he simply used “un linguaggio più scherzoso… a playful tone”. Yeah, he was just kidding around. The same fellow offered this as well: “One part of the Church is, instead, convinced that there exist sinners and non-sinners.” The issue here is not whether anyone out there is or isn’t a sinner. That’s been answered already. The issue is a particular kind of sin and inclination toward that sin. However, I am mindful of old descriptions of the characteristics a man should have when considering entering the seminary. One of them was/is: Can you live for extended periods of time in the state of grace? So, I guess sin might matter.
At Jesuit run Amerika there is a piece that reassumes much of this in English.
Then there are the usual suspects.
At Fishwrap we find Michael Sean Winters (aka Madame Defarge) went to the zoo and found the most exotic of excuses.
The fact that the pope may have used a vulgar Italian word,frociaggine— translated as “queerness” in most media accounts but I suspect “campiness” is closer to what was meant — when discussing the subject suggests he might have had in mind precisely such a situation.
This elicited gales of laughter from my Italian friends. No: frociaggine is “fa*ggotry”. That’s what Francis was talking about, not only a penchant for show tunes, sibilants, and pink high top sneakers (as one guy had in our day in St. Paul).
He goes on to tie this gaffe control with spaghetti against the wall: into how the Church treats women and how we have to listen to the Holy Spirit and get into the “synodal (walking together) process”.
As the many negative reactions toFiducia Supplicansdemonstrated, the church has not reached any kind of consensus on issues related to ministry to gay men and women. Here is where the promise of synodality emerges. It aims to attune everyone in the church to listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, to relativize what I want or you want with what God wants. Discerning God’s will is something the church must do together. The whole must judge the parts.
You knew that Jesuit hom*osexualist James Martin would have to pipe up. I was sent a piece from Breitbart with his quotes.
“In my 25 years as a priest and almost 40 as a Jesuit, I’ve known hundreds of holy, faithful and celibate gay priests,” Father Martinwroteon X. “They’ve been my superiors, my teachers, my confessors, my mentors, my spiritual directors and my friends.”
The Jesuit order, in fact, is known to have a remarkably high percentage of hom*osexual members, making it unsurprising that Father Martin has had gay priests as superiors, confessors, mentors, teachers, and spiritual directors.
According to the estimates of one of Martin’s Jesuit brothers, some 50 percent of the members of the Jesuit order are hom*osexual.
“Roughly half of the Society under the age of fifty shuffles on the borderline between declared and undeclared gayness,”wroteJesuit Father Paul Shaughnessy in a 2002 essay in theWeekly Standard, titled, “Are the Jesuits Catholic?”
In his piece, Father Shaughnessy added that “the majority of Jesuitformatores, Jesuits in charge of training, are hom*osexual as well.”
For Catholics, Father Martin continued, gay priests have “celebrated Masses for you, baptized your children, heard your confessions, visited you in hospitals, presided at your weddings and buried your parents.”
“The church would be immeasurably poorer without them,” he concluded.
How wonderful the Jesuits are! However, this begs us to ask: If they are so great this way, how much greater would they be if they were all straight?
