ART_&_CULTURE
FLASHBACK
Witch-Hunting Season
I Nikada
t was shaping up as a dark autumn for gay Catholics. In September 2005, seven years ago this month, word surfaced that the Vatican was essentially putting its stamp on a witch-hunt of gay seminarians. The document in question would instruct senior clergy to avoid the ordination of men believed to be gay. It left some wiggle room for men who had, in effect, abandoned their homosexuality for several years. The directive might have been remotely understandable—if not necessarily justifiable—if it had been based on pure religious doctrine. But some in the Catholic Church, dealing with a veritable epidemic of child abuse by priests, saw the purge as a way to address its pedophilia outbreak. That view burnished the antiquated stereotype of gays as child molesters. The Vatican directive was widely condemned, even from within the church: As one gay priest bluntly put it in a newspaper article at the time, “I feel like a Jew in Berlin in the 1930s.”
46 OUTLOOKS SEPTEMBER 2012