Defense of Official Church Position
Some bishops have obtained a reputation for a vocal defense of Church teaching regarding homosexuality. Notable examples include George Cardinal Pell and Francis Cardinal Arinze, who have insisted that the family as a unit is "mocked by homosexuality" and "sabotaged by irregular unions".
After Pope Benedict XVI was elected pope, the Congregation for Catholic Education issued an instruction prohibiting any individuals who "present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called 'gay culture'" from joining the priesthood.
Some Catholics who oppose gay rights and the acceptance of gay people regard the church's teaching on the matter as definitive, infallible, and unchangeable as a magisterial dogma of the Church. In an official brief called Rescriptum ex audientia of May 19, 2008 made by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone the Cardinal Secretary of State reaffirmed the norms established by the Congregation for Catholic Education in the 2005 document entitled "Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocation with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders," as being of universal value and without exceptions.
Read more about this topic: Homosexuality And Roman Catholicism
Famous quotes containing the words defense of, defense, official, church and/or position:
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)
“Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Well, on the official record you’re my son. But on this post you’re just another trooper. You heard me tell the recruits what I need from them. Twice that I will expect from you.... You’ve chosen my way of life. I hope you have the guts enough to endure it. But put outa your mind any romantic ideas that it’s a way to glory. It’s a life of suffering and of hardship and uncompromising devotion to your oath and your duty.”
—James Kevin McGuinness, and John Ford. Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke (John Wayne)
“A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“My position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat—a boat which, to revert to Neurath’s figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)