Religion the United Kingdom (UK): Banning Franklin Graham from the UK; Two examples of the Golden Rule trumping a religious tradition; Gay marriage in Australia: Part DEC: The first "intent to marry" forms issued. The first same-sex marriage; An essay donated by: Gabriel Gherasim: "The Final Solution, or Am I worth living?" Sep 08, · Naturally, the specific issue Warren was responding to in this context was gay marriage. In , the popular evangelical blogger Jen Hatmaker let her readers know that her views on LGBTQ-rights had changed, and that she was now a supporter of same-sex marriage and believed that such marriages can be holy The relationship between religion and homosexuality has varied greatly across time and place, within and between different religions and denominations, with regard to different forms of homosexuality and blogger.com present-day doctrines of the world's major religions and their denominations vary vastly in their attitudes toward these sexual orientations
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Things you buy through our links may earn New York a commission. We have no reliable figures on just how many priests in the Catholic Church are gay. The Vatican has conducted many studies on its own clergy but never on this subject. The consensus in my own research over the past few months converged on around 30 to 40 percent among parish priests and considerably more than that — as many as 60 percent or higher — among religious orders like the Franciscans or the Gay marriage and religion essay. This fact hangs in the air as a giant, unsustainable paradox.
The massive cognitive dissonance this requires is becoming harder to sustain. The collapse of the closet in public and private life in the past three decades has made the disproportionate homosexuality of the Catholic priesthood much less easy to hide, ignore, or deny.
This cultural and moral shift has not only changed the consciousness of most American Catholics 67 percent of whom support civil marriage for gay couples and gay priests many of whom are close to quitting but also broken the silence that long shrouded the subject. Here we enter into the mystery of the human being.
They also triggered near panic on the Catholic right. In increasingly gay marriage and religion essay ways, they have argued that the root of the scandal was not abuse of power, or pedophilia, or clericalism, or the distortive psychological effects of gay marriage and religion essay and institutional homophobia, but gayness itself, gay marriage and religion essay.
Bishop Robert Morlino of Wisconsin agreed. The unseemly fall this past summer of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, one of the most powerful American cardinals of his time, provided a cause célèbre for this faction. It emerged that McCarrick had abused at least two children and then sexually harassed generations of adult seminarians with impunity.
Here, it seemed, was a pedophile and an abusive gay man, at the very apex of the church, known to be sexually active with seminarians, protected by his peers, and tolerated for decades by many in the hierarchy, including the last three popes.
McCarrick gave the right an opening. New online media organizations — led by Breitbart-style websites such as LifeSite News and Church Militant — now routinely pounce on any incidents involving gay priests and have an influential audience in the Vatican. At the center of this struggle, of course, are gay priests, bishops, and cardinals themselves. They are caught in a whiplash of relative toleration embodied by Francis and hostility exemplified by his conservative predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, gay marriage and religion essay.
The ban on gay priests and seminarians is still in force and, in fact, was affirmed by Francis in As a result, almost all gay priests are closeted, for fear of being targeted or terminated, which makes them uniquely barred from entering the discussion.
Hospital chapels, like those in airports, can be strange places. But on a recent Sunday at noon, in a sprawling hospital on the edges of a midwestern city, the congregation spilled out down the hallways for Mass.
The Mass itself was unremarkable apart from a striking homily when the priest talked of the joys of having nothing as the Christmas gifting season loomed. He told of a moment when he was returning from a field hospital along an unlit path in the early hours of the morning, surrounded by intense suffering on top of brutal poverty, yet he was buoyed by the faith and tenacity of the poorest of the poor, gay marriage and religion essay, the sickest of the sick.
He stopped and looked up into the starlit sky, he said, and felt not despair but hope. They come from all over. At one point as we spoke the next day in the hospital, he was greeted by a woman who asked for an on-the-spot confession and he shooed me aside; later I met an anguished gay man from an ultra-Catholic family he was counseling; and for a few hours on Sunday morning, he was with the wife and teenage sons of a dying man.
Father Mike was the bandage on all of those open wounds. He has witnessed a couple hundred deaths in his career. One night, he told me, he sat with three patients at the hour of their deaths in quick succession. Mike came from a troubled family, and his abusive parents converted to Catholicism when he was entering his teens. He agreed to go to Sunday Mass because they promised him brunch at his favorite spot afterward, until, at the age of 15, he formally became a Catholic himself.
At 17, he was sent to visit a priest for a one-on-one counseling retreat. But his own priest backed the minister, and, gay marriage and religion essay, despite testimony from three other boys, the abuser was acquitted.
Despite all this, in the mids he entered seminary after graduating from college. He found himself constantly subjected to psychological evaluations and denied the usual summer assignments.
Fearing his teenage testimony against an abuser was blocking his ordination, he quit to become a critical-care nurse. But he still felt called to the church and eventually tried seminary again. He was ordained three years later. I told him most people would find this story bizarre, masochistic even. It is in that context of nurse to patient, pastor to flock, that today he manages his conflicts as a gay priest. Most of the gay priests I spoke with have never experienced abuse in the church.
Many had already come to terms with their sexual orientation before they entered the priesthood, but some wrestled with it in the seminary, and others later in life.
But I had people in charge of me who challenged me to ask myself if this were authentic, and I felt that this was the life and work that God was calling me to. You need to accept yourself. In college, Andrew sought out more treatment, and then, suddenly, his father died. It threw him. I had started praying again and attending Mass. It was there that Andrew had his first adult sexual experience. I came out as bisexual. The breakthrough came suddenly, gay marriage and religion essay.
It has become a double stigma: targeted by the hierarchy for being gay and by the general public for being pedophiles. Many of the people I spoke to, Catholics and non-Catholics, about the subject of gay priests rolled their eyes and asked about the abuse of children.
The news environment is saturated with stories about sex abuse — and rightly so — yet there are hardly any public examples of the overwhelming number of gay priests gay marriage and religion essay would never dream of preying upon the powerless. Many good gay priests, of course, fail from time to time, breaking celibacy in consensual adult affairs or trysts. They are not saints. But this is true of straight priests as well.
These men are still sexual beings, flesh and blood. In these crises, they tend to do one of two things: either fall so deeply in love that they cannot sustain a life without physical intimacy and so leave the church or, more often, recalibrate, confess, and recommit to the celibate life. Father Joe spoke poignantly of falling in love. It was my last relationship. I asked if we could have a friendship that was also sexual, and he said no. My lapses these days are watching porn in my bedroom.
How do you live a healthy sexuality in a context where gay marriage and religion essay sexuality is stigmatized? The preponderance of gay men in the priesthood is, in fact, nothing new in the history of the church. For well over a millennium, it was commonplace, and though there were occasional denunciations of it, these were usually followed by papal inaction or indifference, gay marriage and religion essay.
Even Saint Augustine had one particularly intense love affair with another young man, gay marriage and religion essay. As was the case in convents as well. The gifts that lesbians have brought to the church are just as extraordinary, but because the priesthood is exclusively male and women are kept from positions of real power, lesbian nuns are, for better or worse, not caught up in this specific crisis.
He had had sexual relationships with men in his younger years, but, vowing chastity as a monk, he sublimated these desires into an idea of intense celibate love for another man. Francis and Leo IX would agree across the centuries. Damian was a leading reformer of the church in his day, far beyond the gay-priest issue, and a synod in responded to all of his many proposals — except the one against gay clergy. Pope Alexander II even asked Damian for his only manuscript of The Book of Gomorrah in order to copy it.
Instead, gay marriage and religion essay, Alexander locked it up! Homosexuals, in the new gay marriage and religion essay, were part of nature — many had noticed homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom, particularly among hares and hyenas — but they were also somehow contrary to nature. Aquinas never resolved this paradox. Neither has the church. As the taboo deepened in the succeeding centuries, there is little reason to believe that gay priests disappeared, but most went more fully underground.
Still, same-sex love remained a profound part of Catholic Christianity. The friendship that grew between Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier, for example, created the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, in the 16th century. Ignatius sent Francis to evangelize Asia, and their long separation was a source of suffering for both. God knows the profound impression that those words of great love made on my soul. The greatest Catholic theologian of the 19th century, Cardinal John Henry Newman, devoted his personal life to another man, Ambrose St.
This does not mean the two had a sexual relationship although they might havebut it does suggest that deep same-sex love was still alive in the highest echelons of the Catholic priesthood, even at the apex of Victorian repression and even in someone about to be celebrated as a saint. When St. Newman famously converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism and was part of the reformist and aesthetic Oxford Movement, which was strongly influenced by homosexual men.
The greatest Catholic poet of the 19th century, the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, was gay; one of the deepest theologian-priests of the gay marriage and religion essay century, Henri Nouwen, was as well. Both suffered bouts of deep depression. But why is the priesthood so gay? It is worth noting that the connection between homosexuality and spirituality is by no means restricted to Catholicism. Some evolutionary psychologists have found an ancient link between gay men and tribal shamanism.
Among gay priests themselves, I heard a variety of explanations. Others explained that they were drawn to the ritual of the church. Catholicism is a faith centered on the Mass, where the body and the soul and the gay marriage and religion essay are as important as the mind. The Mass is, in some ways, a performance. These types — also found in the arts and scholarship — are sticklers for detail, ruthless about rules, gay marriage and religion essay, and attuned to tradition and beauty.
In many ways, the old, elaborate High Mass, with its incense and processions, color-coded vestments, liturgical complexity, musical precision, choirs, organs, and sheer drama, is obviouslyin part, a creation of the gay priesthood. Their sexuality was sublimated in a way that became integral and essential to Catholic worship.
Arguments for and against same-sex marriage
, time: 4:41Supreme Court's landmark ruling legalizes gay marriage nationwide
Importance of Same-Sex Marriage. All of us are human beings at the end of the day. Before labeling each other with the religion we follow or the people we choose to love. Everyone must realize this fact and act like it. Same-sex marriage is more than important in today’s time as the world is progressing Jan 21, · The Catholic Church is an almost unique institution — shunning homosexuality but having so many gay men in its ranks, writes Andrew Sullivan. The Vatican’s failure to Religion the United Kingdom (UK): Banning Franklin Graham from the UK; Two examples of the Golden Rule trumping a religious tradition; Gay marriage in Australia: Part DEC: The first "intent to marry" forms issued. The first same-sex marriage; An essay donated by: Gabriel Gherasim: "The Final Solution, or Am I worth living?"
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