The Society Speaks Out

A few days old here, but thank God for the Jesuits. It's about time someone within the Church spoke out against the ridiculous idea that homosexuals are unfit for priesthood. But what else could we have expected from Pope Benedict XVI? Deep down, I knew this would happen. My initial reaction to Ratzie's election to the papacy was utter disbelief that such an angry, judgmental, backwards-looking individual was actually going to be the next pope. I wanted to believe that he'd resist the urge to spread hatred and division. But I suppose that even though the Holy Spirit is supposed to work through the Church, this is still the real world and even popes have real free will and make real mistakes. So here we are. No African pope. No South American pope. No spirit-of-love pope. Instead, we get a pope who makes it a special point to single out gays, a group of people Jesus never even mentions once, as a inferior class of human. They used to call Ratzy God's Rottweiler, and I guess that made a lot of people feel good that the Church was now going to bare its teeth and kick some ass. Sorry to say, though, that God does not own or need a Rottweiler and needs no one to assist him in doling out judgment. Some may applaud Benedict for remaining true to what some people like to call moral absolutes. But this isn't about eternal and immutable truths. The Church does indeed change with the times and it is good that it does so. They used to force Jews to wear yellow back in the day. Long ago, the pope told Christian knights that they would go immediately to heaven if they joined the Crusades and killed as many Muslims as they could. Thankfully, they grew out of those shameful policies of hate. I was hoping for more of the same good sense when it came to their treatment of gays. After all, it was only recently that Pope Paul(?) wrote that gays were not inherently evil. Too bad Benedict seems to disagree. The Gospel of Jesus is, in a nutshell, "love everyone, unconditionally, all the time." Talk about an eternal and immutable truth. Not to pass out uniforms, nor to punch membership cards, nor to create excuses for hate-filled people to slip into violence, but to spread this message of love alone is the reason why the Church was established. Unfortunately, my Church seems to have lost sight of that.