Bishop Assails Gay Witch Hunt

[davidinalameda]

http://www.365gay.com/newscon05/10/102705catholics.htm

leading Catholic bishop has declared that "witch hunts and gay bashing have no place in the church."

"There are many wonderful and excellent priests in the church who have a gay orientation, are chaste and celibate and are very effective ministers of the Gospel," wrote Spokane Bishop William Skylstad in his diocesan newspaper last week.

Skylstad, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was addressing concerns about an upcoming Vatican document that will address whether homosexuals should be ordained.


wonder how long it will be before he's called to Rome

[Bellamia]

1. Good for him! Way to go, Bishop

[TallahasseeGrannie]

2. Explain something to me

The Church (or at least some evangelicals) claim that homosexuality is a learned behavior, not biological.

Therefore, if you are not actively behaving in a homosexual manner, you are not homosexual. As in Ex-Gay. Ex-gays are no longer gay. They have "changed."

However, if you are a priest or seminarian who once engaged in homosexual acts but are now chaste, you are still gay and can't be ordained.

It doesn't make sense. If every man who has had a homosexual experience is ineligible for the priesthood, I do believe that leaves about 100 percent of men out of the pool.

[kweerwolf]

3. The Catholic Church considered homosexuality ...

... an immutable characteristic. Evangelicals, on the other hand, consider it a "choice" (which is why they claim someone is an "ex-gay" if he chooses not to act on his "unnatural" impulses).

Same bigotry ... the two groups just use different paths to get there.

[closeupready]

4. probably.

end of mes

[Peace Patriot]

5. When I was young, the anti-female fetish of the Catholic Church was so

strong that women were not permitted into the "sanctuary" area of the church during Mass; the priest--all dressed up in white lace trimmed garments with lavish gold designs--would turn his back to the congregation, whisper his voodoo over the bread and wine turning it into the "body and blood of Jesus Christ," and then turn around and begin distributing bits of the bread (the "body"), which we were forbidden to touch with our hands, onto our tongues, as we knelt outside the sanctified area, heads tilted back, tongues sticking out. The fetishism around the "tabernacle," where this bread and wine were housed (a little gold "doll house" house set back on the altar) was also extraordinary.

Anyone looking at this ceremony with objective eyes--especially the banning of women from any physical contact with the sacred objects--can see straightaway that it is the product of a profoundly disturbed male brotherhood, and, one that has ancient roots going back at least to the 3rd-4th centuries A.D., when male writers began loathing the egalitarian Gnostic Christians, who held communal masses in which anyone--women, children--could preside, by drawing lots; and in which the move to cleanse the stories of Jesus of any leadership role by Mary Magdalen began: the creation of the Synoptic, or "authorized," gospels; the purging of the earlier stories; and the editings that made Peter "the rock" upon which "to build my Church" (nothing Jesus would ever have said--if ever there was an anti-institutional religious leader, it was him).

Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, was the first to call himself a "patriarch." And, in 415 AD, he directed a mob of Nitrian monks under his control to kill a woman named Hypatia, a mathematician and scientist, a famous teacher, neo-platonic philosopher, and head of the Alexandria Library, who was undoubtedly a bridge between the wisdom and culture of the ancient Greeks (Paganism) and the egalitarian early Christians, in the multicultural city of Alexandria (with its love of learning). One of the main sources on Hypatia was another Christian bishop, Sinesius of Ptolemais, who was her pupil. (His letters to her survive.) He represented a far different strain of Christianity than Cyril's--one that was open-minded, tolerant, and ecumenical.

Cyril's monks dragged her through the streets of Alexandria, and skinned her alive (a method of death possibly intended to prevent her soul from going to heaven). He was never punished for his crime, even though she was a Roman citizen, and a beloved figure in Alexandria. It was the end of the Roman Empire, which had long ago ceased to be a Republic, and, by the end of Hypatia's life, was unable to enforce civil law.

Graeco-Roman civilization was thereafter plunged into a thousand years of darkness and into the endless theobabble of male authorities who could never quite fit their "god" into the body of a woman, and ended up arguing and killing each other over "how many angels fit on the head of a pin." (The Alexandria Library--seat of learning, scholarship, science and the arts--had also been looted and burned in Hypatia's era.)

I tend to think that the fetishism of the Mass is based upon this initial crime of the early "Fathers"--that it is the "body and blood" of Hypatia, not of Jesus, that they are trying to reconstitute, to somehow wipe away their sin. The sin is very deep, and has to do with the transformation of Jesus' pure message of love--for everyone, at all times--into a tool of personal ambition, selfishness, violence and greed.

Think of how a creative writer's pure inspiration--a gift of the gods--can be turned into a bad Hollywood movie, for profit. ("Out of Africa" comes to mind--I don't know why. Maybe because I love the book so much; it taught me how to write.) The inspiration doesn't disappear, exactly; it is subsumed and exploited.

Cyril went on to become a "Father of the Church," who instigated violence at the Council of Ephesus (430 A.D.), over doctrines related to Jesus' true nature (man? god? which part was which?). He is to this day an "anointed saint." Churches are named after him. (The accounts of Cyril's behavior at Ephesus remind you of Karl Rove or Tom Delay--mean, vengeful, conniving, power-hungry dirtbags.) (If you want to check out an ancient version of Fox News, google the "Council of Ephesus.")

Some of the Gnostic Gospels survived that great purge, to be found, 1,500 years later, sealed into jars in a cave in Nag Hammadi (near Alexandria). One of them, a fragment ("The Gospel of Mary"--the oldest known gospel) has Mary Magdalen as head of the Apostles, considered by the others to be closest to Jesus and the wisest among them. (Dan Brown's book, "The Da Vinci Code," taps into this story, but is another example of how something true--an inspired thing--can be turned into crap, for profit.)

So, the Vatican now wants to go on a witch-hunt against gays. It shouldn't surprise us that these sinners, who insist on a lineage back to Peter, and thus inherit that original, spiritual and physical crime--the exclusion of women from the sacred, of which the horrible death of Hypatia was the first expression--are still basing their weird interpretation of Christianity, and their dictates about who is acceptable and who is not acceptable into the voodoo brotherhood, on the basis sex. Got a hangup there, guys?