No gay priests, part 8: They really mean it!

Well, I thought I was done with this, but in the news today is the cover letter that accompanied the Vatican instruction forbidding gays from the priesthood, which directs that gay priests should not teach or head Roman Catholic seminaries. This despite the assurance that the new directives do not apply to those already ordained.

The content here is not what's creepy; it's the logical extension of the policy. If you don't want gay seminarians, it's likely you don't gay priests teaching seminarians either. What's really disturbing though is the attachment of this kind of extra directive as a cover letter, which is basically an attempt to give the cover letter the authority of the actual instruction. But a cover letter is just that: a letter. It doesn't have any binding power of its own.

And so the big question: Who is pulling the strings? This cover letter is a dirty trick by someone trying to sneak something else in on the coattails of an already bad document. Is that how we want our church to operate?