Mike's musings

The Vatican - and not

Two stories make a couple of inches in the Guardian today:

• the Vatican won't ordain gay men as priests. That's "practicing homosexuals, men whose gay tendencies are "deeply rooted," or who openly espouse a gay culture".
• US tele-evangelist Pat Robertson tells a town in Pennsylvania that "God might forsake the town" for voting out their school board for pushing "Intelligent Design".

I've talked before in this blog about my views on Creationism (dressed up as pseudo-science with the term "Intelligent Design"), but I'm not sure how forthright I've been about the issues around Christianity and homosexuality. Today's not going to be the day that I go into this area in detail, but suffice it to say that even an extremely "robust" reading of the Bible doesn't seem to me to preclude from the Body of Christ - the church - someone who has "gay tendencies". Nor to bar them from leadership. It's not clear from the report above, but it may be that celibate gay men will not be barred from ordination, and there's a section which says that:

no-one has a "right to receive ordination" and that rectors of seminaries should not allow men to proceed to the priesthood if there was "a serious doubt" about their ability to live by the rules.

I'd certainly agree that no-one has such a right, and I note that, in selecting candidates for ordination in the Church of England, one of the criteria states something like "you should be able to respect the teachings of the Church on sexuality". If the Roman Catholic Church requires priests to be celibate - whether gay or not - then I'd say that this sits within that framework. To be fair, I have other problems with the Roman Catholic Church above and beyond this.