Papal rat zingers gays

Before the aptly named Cardinal Ratzinger got elevated to the position of the imaginary earthly voice of an imaginary god he was known as the pit bull of the Vatican.

He ran the modern equivalent of the Holy Inquisition. In fact his office was the direct descendent of the Inquisition.

And he’s off on another Inquisition. This time he’s imposing new antigay attitudes on the Catholic Church. It’s his church. He leads it, not god. So I guess he has the right to do with his con what he wants to do with it. But it will cause some real problems for Catholics.

Ratzinger, now going under the pseudonym of “Pope Benedict XVI” (the sixteenth! he sure wasn’t very original in picking a new name was he?) has decided that anyone who is gay, whether celibate or not, is not allowed to be a priest.

The New York Times says that the document issuing this order is finished and will be released by this Ratzinger fellow in the next few weeks.

The document will reverse a previous tradition which said that celibates of any sexual orientation could be priests. That’s not good enough for the Rat Zinger. He’s out to purify the church.

But the new rule will only apply to anyone entering the priesthood not to those currently in the priesthood. That is necessary since the church doesn’t want to be priestless or reveal the extent of gay priests. Church inquisitors have been instructed to visit all 229 Catholic seminaries in the US to enforce the rule.

Actually the rule should save the church a lot of money. If fully implemented they certainly won’t need 229 seminaries anymore. They could probably cut the number in half.

The president of the American National Federation of Priests’ Councils, Robert Silva, said that he believes “some men will choose to leave, because if they don’t, it would be like living a lie.” I would think all Catholics do a bit of that just by being Catholic. But I do know what he means.

The grand inquisitors will be searching the seminaries for “evidence of homosexuality”. Some things they might consider looking out for are:

1. Priests with decent haircuts.
2. Any priest who gyms at least 2 a week.
3. Barbra Streisand records.
4. Priests who love to be priests because they like the frocks.
5. Priests who know show tunes.
6. Any priest who recognizes the name: Jeff Stryker.
7. Any priest that the women in the congregation feel safe being around.


That’s a good beginning. Of course the church is doing this to scapegoat homosexuals for the church’s crisis with covering up for child molesters. It’s harder to pick them out so they pick on homosexuals instead. This also buys into the popular prejudice of religious paranoids that the two groups are one in the same.

But one priest said that the priests being charged as molesters are not mainly the priests who entered the priesthood before the 1980s but after when it was more open to accepting gay priests. He said: “These were people from the old closeted days.”

Nor is it true that all Catholic seminaries around the world became more open to gay priests. This was mainly a US phenomenon. Yet these scandals have erupted in country after country even in those where no such loosening up took place. And the priest is right. If you look at the cases that are coming to light they are not so much cases of men arrested for molestations that took place in the last few years. Many of these go back 30, 40 or 50 years.