30 October 2008

Future Priests to Undergo Psych Screening

Couldn't help but laugh at the article's headline.

The Vatican issued new psychological screening guidelines for priesthood candidates on Thursday designed to screen out men with strong homosexual tendencies or an inability to control strong sexual urges...

"In all too many cases, psychological defects, sometimes of a pathological kind, reveal themselves only after ordination to the priesthood," the guidelines said.


Must confess that I consider a candidate who believes that his pope-ishness is the successor of a mythical Peter, who was mythically a disciple of a mythical messiah, who was mythically the son of a mythical man in the sky is himself a candidate for the loony bin.

Hmm, but then, the Catholic church IS a refuge for the irrational.

"Detecting defects earlier would help avoid many tragic experiences" ... [and] problems like "confused or not yet well-defined" sexual identities need to be addressed...

Priests must have a "positive and stable sense of one's masculine identity" and the capacity to "integrate his sexuality in accordance" with the obligation of celibacy...

Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, head of the Vatican department that prepared the document, said Thursday that homosexuality was "a deviation, an irregularity and a wound" in response to a question about why a man with deep-seated homosexual tendencies could not become a priest, while a man with deep-seated heterosexual urges faced no such restriction.

Homosexuality would not allow priests to carry out their mission properly, he said at a news conference in Vatican City...

The church is struggling to provide enough priests for parishes in many parts of the West because of waning vocations.


Yea, well, good luck with that program.

Methinks the Catholic church is goin' down in flames and it can't be soon enough for me.

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