Those Crazy Catholics Are At It Again

The Vatican, in its infinite wisdom, has issued a training document that all but forbids gay men from entering the priesthood. And your response would be a big yawn, right? Well, so would mine, except for the quirky nature of what the document says. For details, see this CNN article.

In essence, it says that if you are an unabashedly gay man, you can't become a priest. But if your "gayness" was temporary in nature, and you have somehow moved past your gayness for over three years, then you CAN become a priest. Now, the only part of being gay that I know of that's different from being a heterosexual is the fact that you are physically and emotionally attracted to members of the same gender. But since you can't discern a man's attractions from the outside, the only way to determine if he has, in the words of the Vatican, "clearly overcome" his homosexual tendencies is to see if he has had sex with another man within the last three years.

But wait! If you're trying to become a priest, aren't you supposed to be abstaining from sex anyway? I know that to achieve diaconate ordination (the step on the path to priesthood that is denied to homosexuals by this document), you have to take a vow of celibacy, so what's the big deal? I understand that the Catholic Church believes that homosexuality is a psychological problem, a so-called psychosexual disorder, but still, this seems kind of silly to me.