The Catholic Church is an aged institution. Though 2,000 years old, it is always developing, adjusting to an ever-changing world-a world which, it seems, changes faster than the Church can keep up.
The Vatican has set out to evaluate the Church’s relationship with the modern world by instructing apostolic visits to all of the United States’ 229 seminaries, an action spurred by the conference of American bishops in 2002 in response to the child-abuse scandals. Through these visits, the Vatican hopes to discern the way that seminary culture has changed over the years and the role that this culture plays in the development of priests.
Priests, the Vatican understands, watch television and use computers and every other amenity of the modern age. They’re also part of the modern social psyche-a psyche that has, in many ways, grown open to moral relativism and sexual expression and closed to religious dogmatism. Growing up in a modern society, seminarians are apt to integrate popular beliefs, including those not in line with Church teaching, into both their private lives and public ministries. The Church must take care to preserve the integrity of its belief system, especially in instructing the future teachers of those beliefs.
A belief on which the Church seems especially focused, as is evident in the flurry of recent media exposure, is homosexuality.
In news separate from the apostolic visits, though often associated with them in recent media coverage, the Church is reported to be considering passing measures that would bar homosexuals from entering the seminary.
The mere rumor of such a policy, which would run contrary to popular culture and beliefs, has caught our, as well as the entire public’s, attention.
At Saint Louis University, this affects us as a Jesuit Catholic institution. It’s part of our identity; this affects many of those teaching, maintaining and attending class here. More, our own Aquinas Institute has been in the media recently because it will be the first seminary to receive an apostolic visit.
More importantly though, these decisions in the Catholic Church affect us as part of a greater society, a society in which the Catholic Church is a major entity. Regardless of your religious beliefs, you will be affected by these decisions in the Church as they define the Church’s role in our culture and, in turn, define that culture.
Much of popular culture, as well as science, has changed in recent years to accept homosexuality as a normal part of our society. While homosexuals are not accepted in all communities in the United States (for instance, the recent debates on gay marriage or the Boy Scouts of America lawsuits), many have become open about their sexual preferences. Where homosexuality was once taboo, it is now widely visible in movies, television shows and other media.
But what if the man behind the pulpit expressed his homosexual preference? Would there be outrage?
Catholic priests take a vow of celibacy. But what if a heterosexual priest spoke out about his sexual preference from the pulpit?
Many in the church and elsewhere have related the Church’s potential ban of homosexual seminarians to the Church’s needed reforms to remove pedophiles and other criminals from the priesthood. In the Catechism, the Church refers to homosexual acts as “intrinsically disordered.” Many have taken these recent acts in the Church to build on the associations of the homosexual with the pedophile-to observe, for instance, that homosexuality is a “personality disorder” (a quote from Pope Benedict himself) or that it is equivalent to, say, epilepsy.
This is not only offensive, but also wrong.
Where the Church, through its teachings, affects popular culture, no one should believe that homosexuals are in any way impaired or craven. Such misinformed beliefs, beliefs even antithetical to previous Church teachings, are the worst these religious teachers could teach their congregations and society as a whole.
