Always the Half Measure

by Thomas A. Droleskey

According to a Reuters report written by Philip Pullella, dispatched on November 11, 2005, the Vatican will indeed issue its long-awaited document concerning the admission of men afflicted with the inherent disorder of being "attracted" to other men. As has been the case with so many other measures taken by the Holy See in the past forty years or so, the forthcoming document, which will be issued by the Congregation for Catholic Education, represents a clumsy half-measure that makes an already scandalous situation infinitely worse.

Rather than simply reiterate and universalize a 1961 document, issued by the then named Sacred Congregation for the Religious and binding upon all religious communities (Jesuits, Vincentians, Dominicans, Claretians, Franciscans, Carmelites, Salesians, et al.), banning the ordination to the priesthood of all men who were in any way afflicted with unnatural attractions, the forthcoming document does nothing but blow smoke in the face of Catholics who understand the simple truth that unnatural, perverse inclinations in violation of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments are no basis for human self-identification. The priesthood will continue to be populated by effeminate men who are at war with articles contained in the Deposit of Faith because they suffer from a fundamental conflict within themselves that is neither natural or normal, one that even secular psychology used to recognize until the early 1960s in fact as a serious abnormality. An priesthood composed of effeminate men will continue to recruit like-minded men to study of the priesthood while at the same time feminist nuns and lay women are "empowered" more and more to run parish functions, including the "priest-less communion services" that have become so common since the middle-1980s.

According to the Reuters dispatch, the new document states: "The Church cannot admit to the priesthood those who practice homosexuality, have deeply rooted homosexual tendencies or those who support the so-called 'gay culture,'" but that men who are have not been "active" in perverse activities in the past three years and/or who are merely inclined to perversity while maintaining their chastity can be ordained to the priesthood. The homosexualist bias of the new document is thus quite transparent. Any right-thinking Catholic prior to the Second Vatican Council and its disastrous aftermath would have understood that the inclination itself is unnatural and represents a serious disorder that disqualifies a man from being ordained to the priesthood. Such has been the infiltration of the homosexualist mentality into the highest quarters even of the Vatican that this basic fact has been obliterated from the thought-processes of curial cardinals and functionaries, manifesting itself in the ridiculous assertion in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that a homosexual orientation is genetic, not acquired.

A man who described himself as a "recovering homosexual" wrote to me in 1993 after an article of on this topic had appeared in The Wanderer, which has been in the forefront of exposing the homosexualist agenda within the Church, to say that he had become a psychologist to help to reform his fellow homosexuals, that perverse inclinations are acquired, not inherited, and that it is indeed possible with sound therapy and the sacraments to convert a man or a woman from unnatural inclinations and/or acts to to climb the heights of sanctity as members of the Catholic Church. Sound, scholarly advice such as the one offered by this psychologist, however, has been rejected time and time again by the American bishops precisely because more than a few of them and their chancery factotums are inclined in this direction and are actually apologists for the entirety of the homosexualist agenda, which manifests itself in "AIDS awareness" programs and in such slogans as "diversity" and "tolerance" in Catholic schools and religious education programs.

For example, the Most Reverend Laurence F. Soens, the former Bishop of Sioux City, Iowa, recoiled when I met with him along with a group of home-schooling parents in April of 1993 to complain about the sodomite-friendly bent of the "AIDS awareness" program that he was mandating in Catholic schools and religious education programs. He was aghast at our description of each unnatural act against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments being an avoidable mortal sin that darkened the intellect and weakened the wills of those who committed them. He just shook his head in disbelief as we restated simple Catholic truths about the harm of unrepented mortal sins on the soul and those on the good of society-at-large.

As it turned out, Bishop Soens had a personal stake in the matter. It was revealed years later that he had engaged in perversity and thus continued to hold great sympathy for those so inclined. One of the cheapest excuses that any of us can use for our sins is the lie that we are not responsible for them, that we are simply inclined to commit them and that there is little that we do about it, dismissing our culpability by saying, "Well, that's just the way God made me." Once one accepts this bromide, you see, it is a relatively easy thing to start pointing fingers at those who are concerned about the effects of the promotion of sin under one guise or another, claiming that those who condemn the objectively evil nature of sins hate the people who commit the sins. Again, this is another cheap trick of the devil to silence people out of the fear that they will be labeled as mean or uncharitable or, in the instance at hand, of being a "homophobe" who actually wills harm to those whose behavior is being condemned.

Indeed, the former head the Order of Friars Preachers, the Dominicans, Father Timothy Radcliffe, has said that is the alleged "homophobes," not homosexuals, that should be banned from ordination to the priesthood, thus proving the points made above, namely, that there is a homosexual-friendly environment that has been created in the Catholic priesthood in the past forty years. Most of the older religious communities of men are infested with sodomites, thus predisposing those communities to every single offense to the Catholic Faith imaginable, including support offered to the New Age movement and its related mutants, women's ordination to the priesthood, "reproductive freedom" for women," and "civil rights" for their fellow practitioners and supporters of perversity. It is not at all uncommon to see priests of these older communities marching in so-called "Pride" parades in one city after another, and it is well-documented that colleges and universities run by those communities "tolerate," if not actively promote, theatrical productions and "scholarly" seminars to propagandize in behalf of the homosexualist agenda. Not one of the priests from these communities who engages in such activities loses his canonical standing. Indeed, they actually rise in rank in many instances within their orders.

Quite contrary to the gratuitous, self-serving assertion made by Father Radcliffe, it is not hate the sinner to condemn his sin. I abhor each and every single one of my sins. I despise by many sins, knowing full well that they caused Our Lord to suffer unspeakable horrors in His Sacred Humanity during His fearful Passion and Death, knowing that they have wounded the Church Militant on earth and that I have an obligation to live penitentially so as to undo the harm caused by my sins and bad example. I hope I live long enough to make reparation for each and every one of my sins. This does not mean, though, that I hate myself. It is precisely sin that is an expression of hatred and contempt for God and for one's self. As each of us has been regenerated in the baptismal font to know, to love and to serve God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church, we must recognize that sin is antithesis of authentic love of God and thus of one's self. We must seek to root out sin from our lives by our Total Consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart and our fervent cooperation with the sacraments entrusted to the Catholic Church by her Divine Son, not reaffirm ourselves and others in sins of any kind, whether venial or mortal.

Indeed, it is a fundamental act of Charity, which wills the good of others, the ultimate expression of which is to do or to say nothing that can in any way prove to be deleterious to the salvation of another's immortal soul, to remonstrate with the sinner to reform his life. Consider the Spiritual Works of Mercy:

1. To admonish the sinner.

2. To instruct the ignorant.

3. To counsel the doubtful.

4. To comfort the sorrowful.

5. To bear wrongs patiently.

6. To forgive all injuries.

7. To pray for the living and the dead.

The first of the Spiritual Works of Mercy is to "admonish the sinner." Priests such as Father Timothy Radcliffe are saying in all truth that active homosexual behavior is not sinful. For to admit that perverse activity is indeed sinful Father Radcliffe would have to admit that he is being an active accessory in the sins of others. Perhaps it would be good for him and his fellow homosexualists in the priesthood, including bishops, to review the nine ways of being an accessory to the sins of others:

1. By counsel.

2. By command.

3. By consent.

4. By provocation.

5. By praise or flattery.

6. By concealment.

7. By partaking.

8. By silence.

9. By defense of the ill done.

Father Radcliffe and his fellow travelers in the priesthood do indeed defend the ill done by one of the four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. Their very anger against anyone who points out the inherent perversity of unnatural acts against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments demonstrates their supreme allegiance to the adversary himself, who wants people to be steeped in unrepented sin and to praise those who are themselves practitioners of unrepented sin. They rail against anyone and everyone who explains in all charity that homosexual and lesbian acts are mortal sins and that the very inclination in the direction of perversity, though not itself a sin, is unnatural and abnormal. It it thus no accident that the Novus Ordo Missae, concocted synthetically by people who did not believe that it was necessary to remind man of his sinfulness (see Paragraph 15 of the General Instruction to the Roman Missal), omits this following passage from Saint Paul's Epistle to the Romans, which is very pertinent to the state of the Catholic priesthood today:

Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, to dishonour their own bodies among themselves. Who changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that one which is against nature. And, in like manner. the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have turned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error.

And as they lived not have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient; being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy.

Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things, are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them. (Romans 1: 24-32)

The new document from the Holy See, therefore, is a half-measure that satisfies no one while at the same time it resolves nothing, maintaining the status quo ante while making it appear as though "something" has been done. The document angers the homosexualists, who will never be satisfied with anything short of everyone in the whole world endorsing perversity, which is why there is such an effort in Canada and the European Union and the United Nations and even the United States Senate to silence any and all criticism of acts perversely contrary to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments as "hate" crimes. And the document will not keep perverts out of the priesthood as its terms are so fungible and subjective as to make any talk of its enforceability completely laughable. Another half-measure from the folks who believe that the Church's firm disciplinary modus vivendi of the past is no longer  an appropriate response to error and sin in the "new springtime" spawned the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath.

As I have noted in other recent commentaries, there is a difference between the fall of individual men who are perversely inclined and the promotion and/or exculpation of the perverse inclination. Yes, men in religious communities dedicated to the Immemorial Mass of Tradition have fallen into sins of perversity. With the exception of the corrupt and now suppressed Society of Saint John, which was not really "traditional" as its founder was seeking to "move" the liturgy in the direction of the 1965 Ordo Missae, those communities do not make excuses for perversity, which cannot be said of such older communities as the Paulists, whose Church of Saint Paul in Manhattan is an epicenter of support for pro-homosexualist causes. Nothing will happen to the Paulists as their priests continue to march in "Pride" parades. Nothing will happen to priests such as Father Radcliffe. The march of perversity will continue unchecked in the life of the Church in her human elements.

Many fine commentaries have been written concerning the ramifications of the Judeo-Masonic infiltration of the Church. The advances made by those steeped in perversity are some of the most visible and overt of the ramifications of this infiltration. In the midst of these advances, however, we must never be discouraged. Concerned? Yes. Discouraged? Never.

The Church is divinely founded and maintained. She will last until the end of time. The jaws of Hell will never prevail against her. This does not mean that the devil is not going to win a few battles in our own lives and thus in the larger life of the Church in her human elements. Pope Leo XIII had a vision of the devil having his way with the Church for about a hundred years. Although we do not know when that period begins and ends, it is a fairly safe thing to say that we are in the middle of that one hundred year period. We must thus have recourse to Saint Michael the Archangel to help us to remain steadfast in our own lives as we keep close to Our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament and to Our Lady, especially through her Most Holy Rosary and by our wearing of the Miraculous Medal. Our own prayers and penances can, when offered up to Our Lady's  Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, help to expedite the day on which some pope will consecrate Russia and thus fulfilling her Fatima Message, bringing an end to the spread of all of the errors of Russia, which are the errors of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the Church.

Half-measures are always worse than no measures at all. Let us pray for the day when the full measure of Catholic Truth, communicated and protected fully in the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, becomes the only standard by which our popes and bishops and priests speak and act.

Our Lady, Help of Christians, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, pray for us.

Saint Jude, pray for us.

Saint Philomena, pray for us.

Saint Rita, pray for us.

Saint Anthony of Padua, Hammer of Heretics, pray for us.

Pope Saint Martin I, pray for us.

Pope Saint Pius V, pray for us.

Pope Saint Pius X, pray for us.