Some e-mails from late last week; most (and many wrote in) disagreed with me (see postshere and here.). Many were along these lines: “I guess you don’t read the Bible much, eh K-Lo?”

But a longer frequent reponse:

K-Lo, I was a student at a major seminary for three years. The chaste homosexual is not necessarily a problem. The problem lies with how those with same-sex attraction view themselves and their sexual urges.
If a priest with same-sex attraction does not view acting on those urges as sinful (even if he himself does not act on them), as the Church teaches, will he uphold the Church’s teaching on the matter? Imagine a person with same-sex attraction going to confession to such a priest and being told that it is not sinful to act on such desires. The damage occurs when such priests advocate the homosexual agenda, whether overtly or not.

ME: And so the fundamental problem, it would seem, isn’t that he’s attracted to the same sex. It’s that he doesn’t buy what his church teaches.

This is what Father Joseph Fessio had to say to the Washington Post, which echoes how I was reading the media reports on a not-yet-released Vatican report:

But he said it was unlikely that the church would take an extremely aggressive or intrusive tack, particularly toward homosexuals who are already ordained.
“I think someone who is living a good, chaste life and may be fighting some temptations, but you don’t even know what they are–I don’t see how that would be a problem for that person,” he said. “But if someone is cruising gay bars and promoting a gay lifestyle, someone who is saying it’s all right, that it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got this attraction or not, those kinds of people . . . should be in a different walk of life.”

Sorry, as always, for not responding to all e-mails…trying to be better at it.