Classified under Sacraments, because what's being discussed is Holy Orders.
Interesting discussion over at Althouse, prompted by rumors (probably true) that the Church will ban outright the ordination of males who self-identify as "homosexual."
This prompted me to wonder in the comments:
I was wondering today exactly how people can read the Church's statement "homosexual acts are intrinsically evil" and understand it to mean "people who engage in homosexual acts are intrinsically evil." It's certainly not there in the plain text. Yet so many claim they mean the same. How to explain it?
It occurred to me that such a mishearing can only (logically) come from a philosophy in which a person is wholly defined by his or her acts. Only if the person is synonymous with the act can an evil act imply an evil person.
(Of course, this doesn't rule out that those who make the mistake simply aren't thinking logically.)
I am a Catholic. It is an article of my faith that a person is more than the sum of their acts. So it isn't hard for me to see the distinction between "this act is evil" and "this person, the actor, is evil" --- or, far worse, "this person, who is merely inclined towards that evil act, is evil."
Some creative snipping of Ratzinger's writings was used to support the "gays are evil" claim. It's getting harder to get away with this sort of thing, now that we have Google.
UPDATE. Also in the comments there, I prove how dorky I am by showing that a sample of Ann's posts containing the word "gay" attract fewer comments (4.6 on average) than an identically obtained sample of Ann's posts containing the word "Catholic" (7.0 on average).
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