Homosexuals As "Victim Souls"

Here, at least, is an honest elaboration of what Catholic doctrine requires of gay people: intense, endless suffering and misery. But through that misery, the teaching argues, you get closer to God. Homosexuality is a cross of immense pain. The Catholic doctrine differs from the Protestant one, in as much as the Vatican doesn't hold that gays can be cured (someone should alert Ms O'Donnell). And this video seems to go even further, intimating that gay people are in fact more beloved by God than straight people because they have been chosen to suffer more. They can, this preacher argues, bring many more souls to Christ.

There are many prior arguments about this that the Dish has long presented, and which are laid out in greater detail in "The Prohibitionists" chapter of Virtually Normal and "The Theoconservative Project" chapter in The Conservative Soul. But it does strike me as odd, then, that the church demands that gay people, and gay priests, remain closeted. If, through their unique life-long suffering, they are to bring others to Christ, and if there is nothing wrong per se about homosexual orientation, then why not have the closet door burst open - especially among the clergy?

More to the point, why not celebrate and honor openly gay celibate priests or openly gay celibate lay people, whose embrace of the cross of suffering allegedly marks them as examples that will bring so many other souls to Christ, as this preacher argues? Why not celebrate gay saints, such as Cardinal Newman, rather than insist, as the current Pope does, that such a statement is offensive or irrelevant. Why not hold up a man like Gerard Manley Hopkins as emblematic of homosexual gay holiness - made all the more holy because he was gay?

And how, for that matter, can this alleged love of homosexuals as somehow spiritually superior to most straight people because of the intensity of their isolated suffering be reconciled with such terms as "intrinsically disordered" toward an "objective evil," to use the words of the current pontiff, in order to describe gay people? Or to argue that they are so sick they cannot and should not be admitted to seminaries?

At some point, these tensions within the new orthodoxy will have to be resolved. Or abandoned in favor of something more humane, more in touch with reality, and more natural, in every sense of that word.