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Chanceries and Seminaries

Homosexuality: Rebellion against fatherhood, dissolving priestly fraternity, demeaning the feminine, and the culture of deceit

Pope John Paul II described original sin as a rebellion against fatherhood. Ryan Erickson was trained in seminaries that fostered a web of lies about patriarchy and cultivated personalities that denigrated the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of the priesthood. This rebellion against patriarchy, like the first original sin, has spawned its murderer. Christ created an apostolic brotherhood of love. He ordered the apostles to love one another as the Father loved Him. This new affective bond shapes the public bond of Christian brotherhood and animates a wide-radius fraternal charity in Christian civic life. To eroticize this bond in affection or action is a blasphemous and polluting crime against the Father. Such a perversion of manly love has the same devastating effect on the public communion of the priesthood as incest does on the corporate identity of a family. The disordered affection does not have to be acted upon to destroy the emotional life of a brotherhood in service to the Father. Outside attacks strengthen brothers linked in arms. Sweet talk in the ranks confuses the men as individuals and dissolves the corps as a body. The Vatican has written an unambiguous document insisting that the priesthood is based on an affectional maturity necessary for spiritual fatherhood which is incompatible with those who are active homosexuals or have deep seated homosexual tendencies. The official commentary of November 30 in L’Osservato Romano by French Monsignor Tony Anatrella comes from Rome a year after the suicide of Ryan Erickson. And yet from across the ocean, the Catholic churchman who explains human nature and exposes sexual pathology sounds like an eyewitness reporter describing both Ryan Erickson and the Winona and St. Paul Seminary cultures that formed him.

"Candidates who present 'deep-seated homosexual tendencies,' that is, an exclusive attraction with regard to persons of the same sex (a structural orientation) - independently of whether or not they've had erotic experiences - may not be admitted to seminaries and to sacred orders," Anatrella wrote.

Anatrella criticizes the "permissive attitude" that says as long as a candidate is capable of celibacy, he may be ordained. In fact, Anatrella asserts that gay priests experience a whole host of other difficulties.

He offered these examples: "Closing oneself off in a clan of persons of the same type; exaggerated affective choices; [becoming] a narcissistic position in front of a community that [the gay priest] disturbs even to the point of dividing it; a mode of vocational discernment that seeks candidates in his own image; relations with authority based on seduction and rejection; … an often limited vision of truth and a selective way of presenting the gospel message; particularly in the areas of sexual and conjugal morality, these are habitually zones of relational and intellectual confusion and ideological combat, disapproved by a correct search for truth and the wisdom of God." (From The Word from Rome by John Allen)

On a more theological level, Anatrella argues that gay priests cannot effectively incarnate a "spousal tie" between God and the church, nor the "spiritual paternity" a priest is supposed to exhibit.

The lavender network in the church is closely linked to ideological feminism, which Pope Benedict has called “another religion.” Both the feminists and the homosexuals decry the Fatherhood of God, the all-male priesthood, the male-female character of marriage and a Marian femininity centered on obedience, virginity, and motherhood. Catholic teaching and Catholic living form an organic whole. When the fundamental categories of sexual roles are called oppressive, the patriarchal system loses its coherence. That is exactly the goal of the feminists and homosexuals who have had such an inordinate influence in the paid staff positions of our church, our seminaries, and the educational system. They have betrayed our faith but retained their livelihood. Replacing the Marian ideal with the feminist mantra has been disastrous for virgins, mothers, and wives.

Patriarchy is defined as the enemy, while abortion is winked at as an unfortunate consequence of the sexist nature of biology. We have denigrated feminine submissiveness and obedience. And yet the whole Catholic story – from Abraham’s offering of Isaac, to Mary’s assent at the Annunciation, to Christ’s crucifixion on Calvary – is the formation of a people by acts of submissive obedience. We have dethroned Mary as our personal Queen and revered instead a ruthless day-to-day feminist ideology that renders Catholic culture incomprehensible. While male homosexual priests decry masculinity and the all male nature of the clergy, those same males hold top administrative positions in a well placed clique that frustrates a true brotherhood in Christ. Feminists serve as their ideological partners and hold many staff positions in the bureaucracy, often clashing with the masculine parish priest who expects to exercise a spiritual fatherhood in his parish. The dissenting staff can object to fundamental Catholic truths with no fear of censure, but if an old-fashioned father criticizes his sullen feminist staff member, he is convicted of the ultimate bureaucratic sin–inability to collaborate in ministry.

In a very bad trade, the chancery’s clique has fired the old Martha (the housekeeper who would work) and given eternal tenure to the new Mary (the ecclesial minister who will not listen). In the seminaries, a deep anti masculine bias transformed the life of prayer. The war against patriarchy erases our Judaic roots and erodes the confidence we pray for every day in the Eucharist-to be able to call God “Our Father”. This denigration of the fatherhood of God as one metaphor among many radically depersonalizes God. Prayer life becomes an exercise of human invention rather than an ongoing incorporation with the Son in his filial personal relationship with the Father. For a man who cannot pray to the personal God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, celibacy becomes a law against love rather than a narrow expedited path to the Father. The seminary culture apologizing for the “closed all male structure” has produced frightened males protective of their own “careers” but ignorant of spiritual paternity and the masculine duty to protect the social group. Broken males wrote best sellers like The Wounded Healer that became the tattered banner of arrested male development. In Superior long before Bishop Fliss visited the O’Connell family or St. Patrick’s parish, the diocese offered psychological counseling to all the priests of the diocese to help with their anger and sense of betrayal. But weep not for those broken vessels.

The wounded healers have lifetime jobs. What they don’t have is a healthy sense of righteous anger at their Vicar General—presumably one of Ryan Erickson’s psychologists is helping them get over that. The clerical homosexual cult creates a life of deceit. The heart of priestly life-loving and obeying God in apostolic communion- is dissolved into cliques of who knows what and who loves whom. Christ’s image is disfigured. In the 50’s and 60’s clerical homosexuals gravitated toward secretarial and chancery jobs to move up the ecclesial ladder. In the 70’s and 80’s they played the social justice prophet and sensitive anti male. In the new century they will be dressed in cassocks with rosary beads prominent and eyes covered with designer sunglasses. The poses vary. What is never present is the magnanimous masculine soul of brotherly love and fatherly protection. What remains constant is the clique, the intrigue, and the deceit.

The Church is always the person of Christ – and we human members are always a kind of veil, but some forms of corruption render the veil impenetrable. Christ is still there, but the eclipse conceals Him from the world we are called to evangelize. It is no betrayal of the Church to lift the shade of deceit so the Light may shine.

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