… I’ve heard about people hiding behind (or in) a circle of like minded individuals for such purposes, mostly in bars that officially do not condone that sort of thing. Not that I was being serious – the idea of a surreptitious blow job in the Sistine Chapel was meant to be merely amusing.

“At #23 JARVISBEARCUB – 50% of Catholic priests are gay? Are you high? There’s a whole S**t load of them to be sure, but not 1 in 2.” I saw once saw an article with that number, attributing it to a gay psychoanalyst who had treated quite a few priests. It was meant as a historical number, and may not be current. In Catholic-influenced cultures where men are expected to get married, the only excuse for not getting married was to become a priest. So, closeted gay guys looking for an excuse jumped from the frying pan into the fire. I think the “1 in 2″ figure included closeted gays – many so deeply closeted that they were fooling themselves. There’s probably less pressure to get married today than in the past.

Also, St Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel are consecrated churches where kissing of any sort, hetero or homosexual, would be inappropriate.

That said, the bathrooms are said to be active and the guy this article about is a complete and utter fool. Talk about intrinsically evil! This guy fits that bill completely.

Rudy, you missed the point – we weren’t talking about the Roman Catholic Church but rather one particular bishop who (it seems) was interviewed in English, a language that he quite obviously was not very good at. The interviewer seemed to think he didn’t understand but (being as lazy as most reporters) gave up after asking twice rather than rescheduling the interview after hiring a translator.

I didn’t take what the bishop said all that seriously because the language barrier made the quote an unreliable indicator of what he actually meant, and the comment about bigotry was a response to someone who was not willing to make allowances for language barriers. It’s no different than making fun of an immigrant who is still learning English.

As to your “fighting back”, you should remember that “military strategy 101″ includes trying to figure out what the enemy is actually trying to do. In the first Iraq war, U.S. casualties were incredibly low because the Iraqis had their artillery pointed in the wrong direction (the U.S. managed to fool them about which direction the invasion was coming from), so the Iraqis were clobbered because they couldn’t turn the guns around before they were overrun. It’s the same thing here – if you want to fight the Catholic Church, you have to do it efficiently and treating broken English as reliable intelligence is not the way to do that.

“Given all they have done to us and all they are trying to do, there is absolutely no reason for a gay person to imagine anything the Vatican says is motivated by goodness or a sense of justice.”

Who said anything about them being motivitated by “goodness or a sense of justice”? It was simply a case of noting that someone with very limited English could easily get things garbled. We weren’t talking about the Vatican but rather the statement of a single individual in a language he was not comfortable using.

Try http://foundintranslation.berkeley.edu/?p=4338 and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tra.....umour.html if you are having trouble understanding the point.

What probably happened is that the cardinals were more or less deadlocked so they put in a guy they knew wouldn’t last very long as a compromise, and he ended up lasting for a much shorter time than they expected. (Some nut will probably complain that this is some pro-catholic excuse, but the model is really that the Vatican is not much different internally than any political party).

I thought the numbers were pretty funny – expected time of 25000 years for an openly gay pope! No wonder they are into eternity.

The flipping off pic is Andy Towle from Towleroad
http://www.towleroad.com/
I wish I looked that good….that boat sailed decades ago

@ Rudy: Good point about “self defense.”

@ B: Interesting numbers crunching, but I think historically the instances of “inconvenient” popes dying an unnatural death is fairly substantial. Can’t remember his name, but wasn’t there a pope in there about 30 years ago that only lasted for a month or so? Remember thinking it looked suspicious when I read about it. The catholic church has got to be the largest privately held corporation in the world. Those guys are into power, not Jesus.

Spent many a night in Rome trying to get some decent tunes on the radio. Station after station is some old priest droning on and on. Town had a great past (LOL) but boring as shit now. If you go to a little square in the old part called Campo de Fiori, you see a great statue in the middle. It’s the philosopher, and major swinger, Giordano Bruno. He’s in a hooded cape glowering toward the Vatican. Even the Italians know, it’s just that the church is such a habit there, especially among old peasant women — who are the church’s power base. LOL The Church chained him to an iron cross and burned him alive on that spot, just for voicing a few doubts about their bullshit. They’d be doing that still if they could get away with it.

The main question is whether the first openly gay pope will come out before or after he becomes the pope. Once a pope, always a pope unless said pope resigns. There is no mechanism to impeach one – it would not be consistent with their “infallibility” doctrine.

If a closeted gay cleric rises through the ranks and becomes the pope, with no way to kick him out, he can come out, make an “ex cathedra” statement that “Gay is OK”, and there is nothing they can do about it except cringe. Well, I guess they could kill him off, but that option is more in the realm of conspiracy theories and Hollywood movies.

If one in a hundred gay popes would be willing to rock the boat and come out after being elected, figure on about 25000 years before it happens (unless attitudes change before that). If that sounds like a long time, remember that it took them nearly 400 years to admit their mistake about Galileo.

BTW – The Pope wears diapers and likes boiled eggs rolled down the red carpet into his open fork-tongued mouth! God (who doesn’t exist) told me!

BTW: Venice does stink, but it’s so beautiful. LOL

Well, http://www.qdomine.com/Morality_pages/MHR.htm (if you scroll down a bit) has a video of an October 7, 2007 mass presided over by an archbishop in San Francisco. Draw your own conclusions (the web site belongs to a ‘traditional’ group not at all pleased with what transpired). The archbishop “apologized” to traditional groups after the fact. During the service, having gone through the ritual who knows how many thousands of time, he was probably running on autopilot, as distracted as those two airline pilots who overshot their destination by 150 miles.

In any case, the whole group was as gay as can be, as befits a church located in the Castro. There’s some ‘peck on the cheek’ kissing on the video.

It has nothing to do with him being a bishop – I’d have raised the same issue for anyone with such fractured English who said something that sounded way off – its plausible that either what he tried to say or how he understood the question was very garbled.

This is really equivalent to the cliched elementary school “No girls/boys allowed” clubs, formed on the basis of “cooties.” Except in this case the club is some so-called holy, magical land, and cooties are “sins.” Come to think of it, the elementary school kids seem a little mature compared to these people…

Saying some guy who can only manage very broken English just might have gotten things a bit scrambled, is not “apologizing for Catholics”.

If you want to criticize them, do it for what they are really doing – it is bad enough that you do not have to exaggerate. You can start with the money they helped raise to support Proposition Eight, attempts to prevent gays from adopting children, etc. Those are real issues. Some guy from an obscure country whose name ends in “stan” and who probably speaks like that character Borat is not worth getting upset over – unless he actually means what his garbled English suggests.

Well, one possibility is that it is a case of someone with a limited understanding of English not being able distinguish the use of “homosexual” to refer to sexual activity versus its use to refer to a sexual orientation. Given the Catholic Church’s beliefs on the subject, it might be a tad rude or disrespectful to hide behind something in the Sistine Chapel and give your boyfriend a blow job.

Read the article QUEERTY linked to. There’s more of the conversation there. What QUEERTY quoted was a very short snippet that sounded the closest to normal English. His abilities to understand or speak English weren’t quite down there with “Me Tarzan, you Jane”, but were bad enough for one to be just a tad suspicious of any assumption of what he said was actually what he meant to say.

If you look at the article QUEERTY linked to, which has much more of the conversation, his limited English skills would be much more obvious. Even the interviewer was suspicious and tried to ask in two separate ways (whether the second sank in is not clear). So, maybe this guy is a bigoted idiot, but just possibly he didn’t understand the question or maybe it came out wrong. Given the language issue, you simply should not jump to conclusions.

“Go put your alter-boy costume back on and do what you’re told.”

Try acting like an adult. It might be a new experience for you.

google : Monsignor Georg Ganswein

http://www.bestweekever.tv/200.....-ganswein/

Romans already know that Vatican City is already as gay as it gets.

Love those sexy priest calendars they put out over there.

Go put your alter-boy costume back on and do what you’re told.