Moral instruction from whom now?

A pretty clear-eyed critique of the newest public figure to accuse the church of having got it wrong on sexual morality...

http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/05/rembert-the-gutless.html

There is much to comment on regarding this article. I had to laugh at the Bishop's quote, "have to pass your whole life without any physical, genital expression of that love?" Does this guy even know what love is?

Here is the tough thing. The cleregy is the Magistrum. What does the laity do when a substantial number of the cleregy are in error? The way our Faith is set up, the laity is not in positon to question "our teachers" .

I guess you use your feet. If you have a priest that wants to promote the gay sub-culture, you go to a different parish.

I particularly likes this passage:
"I have so little patience for this kind of thing. I concede that it's an extremely difficult thing to face the prospect of living your whole life without the possibility of sexual love. Any heterosexual Christian who is unlikely to marry lives with this too. Up until the day before yesterday, all Christian churches everywhere have taught since the beginning that the only licit form of sexual expression is between a man and woman bound in holy matrimony. Period. Hetero or homo, anything outside of that is sin. Period. Some innovative churches have talked themselves into believing otherwise. But the teaching of Scripture, and of the Catholic Church (which is not, of course, binding on non-Catholics, but is binding on Rembert), is quite clear. It is the height of arrogance to presume that only we Americans, in the late 20th and early 21st century, have finally figured out what God must have meant about sexual ethics." (My emphasis).

I also have to say I'm so troubled by the second part about priests and the gay subculture. I would so very much like for this not to be true, for so many reasons, I have a hard time even reading about it. I think a main reason is because so often I've argued against the notion that gay men are more likely to abuse kids as a bunch of homophobic nonsense. But when you start to unpack to church scandal, something very ugly emerges. And it's also such a sterotype--the kind of thing Voltaire skewered priests for in Candide.

though the magisterium, as I understand it, is the bishops as a corporate body, not just one sassy gay bishop with a string of male lovers. But it's certainly scandalous, in the technical sense of causing other people to err because of one's own actions. I'm reminded of the exhortation that anyone who misleads children, it would be better for that man never to have been born.

That, too, was the phrase that caught my eye. How curious to describe expressing one's love genitally. I wasn't aware it was an especially expressive organ.

Perhaps he meant express in this sense (from Webster's): "To press or squeeze out; as, to express the juice of grapes, or of apples."

stihl wrote:
Here is the tough thing. The cleregy is the Magistrum. What does the laity do when a substantial number of the cleregy are in error? The way our Faith is set up, the laity is not in positon to question "our teachers" .

I guess you use your feet. If you have a priest that wants to promote the gay sub-culture, you go to a different parish.

I still have to wonder how common this is in terms of overall numbers, because while I've had priests who give rather wishy-washy sermons about how we should all be nice people, I don't think I've run across this one, at least not from the pulpit.

But also, remember that the church is protected from error in matters of doctrine, but there can still be wacked-out priests and bishops with whom we're free to disagree. I think we need to be careful when we do it, but we still have a responsibility to our church--the clergy are our shepherds and hopefully our teachers, but they're not our masters. If they're wrong and in conflict with authoritative church teaching, then they need to be called on it by the laity. We can't forget that priests have been called by God for special reasons, perhaps reasons having to do with that man's own need for sanctification in a particular way--they're far from perfect.

That's awful.