The Pope vs. Jesus

January 2006

Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI, has directed that gay men, or any men with “homosexual tendencies,” are unfit to provide pastoral care to Catholic parishioners. They are, according to the new Pope, “objectively disordered”; therefore, he has ordered that seminaries scrutinize men studying to become priests and throw out those tainted with homosexuality.

Many Roman Catholics have reacted with horror. “If [this] is not a witch hunt,” Rev. Richard Prendergast, pastor of Josaphat Church in Chicago, told the New York Times, “I don’t know what is.”

Of course, Ratzinger should know a thing or two about witch hunts. His job before becoming Pope was as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the former Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition– more concisely just “the Inquisition.” As such, he urged the Church to abandon its “love the sinner, hate the sin” attitude towards homosexuality. “An overly benign interpretation [has been] given to the homosexual condition” he wrote in a 1986 letter to Catholic bishops. “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin,” Ratzinger continued, “it is a more or less strong tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”

Of course, the Pope, as autocratic head of the Roman Catholic church, is free to set whatever employment standards he wants. His and many other Christian churches bar women as full members, just as Mormons and others have prohibited non-white people from their priesthood.

For many Christians, though, the question is not the Pope’s right to ban gay (or female or black) priests, but rather whether such a ban is in accord with the teachings of Jesus. By this measure, Benedict XVI fails miserably.

The essence of Jesus’s message is love. And love begins with abandoning judgment and condemnation. Rules designed to designate some people as “other” or “unclean” or “heretical,” Jesus teaches, are the products of flawed humans, not divine love. Such rules are themselves what stand in the way of a deeper understanding of a real, meaningful, humane ethic: love your neighbor as you love yourself. Denunciations and damnations like those issuing from today’s Vatican (and remember, the Pope asserts that God will condemn gay people to everlasting Hell) are themselves blasphemous.

For non-Catholics and non-believers, it is tempting to dismiss the Pope’s anti-gay screed as merely the self-interested machinations of a corporate entity recently stung by financially costly sex scandals. Who cares if gay men are thrown out of so craven a political institution?

But flawed though it may be, the Church has provided many people– irrespective of their sexual predilections– the opportunity to express their better natures. This most recent installment of the Inquisition will turn talented pastors and seminarians into cast-aside pariahs, their potential good works within the Church sacrificed to Joseph Ratzinger’s bigotry.

Condemnation from Rome, whether from two thousand years ago or today, cannot, however, silence Jesus’s liberating message of love. And you certainly don’t have to be a Roman Catholic priest to spread that good news.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=256773CD-DE6F-4279-97FD8C4B3B128681>