Opinion: Shaming the right people

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Pope Benedict XVI’s comment on his flight to the United States that “we are deeply ashamed� of pedophile priests may not appease Catholics in Boston who are upset that his American tour will bypass their archdiocese.

But the pope’s full remarks also may discomfit conservative Catholics who argue that a supposed tolerance of gays by the “liberal� post-Vatican II church somehow played a role in the scandal. (The preferred liberal Catholic meta-explanation is that the celibacy requirement contributed to priestly abuse.)

In response to a question about the scandal, the pope said: ‘I would not speak in this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia, [which] is another thing. We will absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry, this is absolutely incompatible. And who is really guilty of being a pedophile cannot be a priest.�

The pope’s common-sense refusal to equate pedophilia with homosexuality raises the question of why he would support restrictions on even chaste gays becoming priests. Yet it was during his pontificate that the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education issued a directive saying that seminaries should not accept candidates with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies� even if they don’t act on them.
In justifying the directive, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski offered this out-of-this-world analogy: ‘It’s not discrimination, for example, if one does not admit a person who suffers from vertigo to a school for astronauts.’ But wouldn’t celibacy be just as dizzying an experience for priests with heterosexual ‘tendencies’?