My point is that many men that deal with lifelong SSA, even many who struggle with sins in this area, do NOT buy into that cultural indoctrination. It is unfair to assume that “person with SSA” is overwhelmingly likely to mean “person who buys into cultural indoctrination on the gay agenda.”
But these folks are not the ONLY men with SSA seeking such entrance. I sought entry too. I had SSA. If not for certain shortcomings of mine that not every man with SSA has, I might have remained there (I didn’t realize there was any policy against it at the time), although now I see that wasn’t God’s will for me personally. But either way, I was not one of “those folks” you mention. And so I’m confident that many men with SSA who seek entrance into seminaries are also exceptions to that group, just as I was.
It is not academic to those of us who are the exceptions that you say are so rare. And from experience I would conclude that these exceptions are not nearly so rare as you might think, certainly not rare enough to make blanket statements about those of us who might aspire to the Holy Orders.
Rather, I suspect from my experience and those of others I’ve known that many of us who are orthodox have also ingrained such shame (which is unhealthy) that we find ways to avoid the revelation that we deal with this; I suspect that the reason the exceptions seem so “rare” to you is that, in our culture (by which I mean “orthodox Catholic culture”) the only ones willing to risk REVEALING their SSA are those who are willing to challenge Church doctrine, while those men who are orthodox are often too afraid to come clean. It creates the illusion that all men with SSA, especially in the clergy, have an agenda, because those who don’t are too afraid to be open… That’s how it was with me, certainly.
Again, when I speak of the culture, I mean the “orthodox Catholic culture” by which those of us with SSA but who truly love the Church and orthodoxy want so badly to be accepted, not to be encouraged to sin but to know that we are not regarded as dirty or scandalous just by our temptations. And those are the walls that many of us wish would come tumbling down. We don’t want people to applaud whenever a man says he has SSA. We don’t want to proclaim it with a megaphone. We certainly don’t want license to sin. We just want to know that our own culture, the culture we value, would not ostracize us IF they knew we had this struggle. We want all those struggling with this to know that our culture accepts them even if it discovers their struggle, so that they’re NOT tempted to go out into the gay culture where they’ll at least be embraced with open arms without secrecy and hiding. And for now, it’s possible that some people will have to be more willing to address these issues in a high profile manner in order to break those walls down.
And I too see the wisdom of his concerns in themselves. I just don’t think that a blanket policy is the answer to those concerns. I think this sort of thing needs to be judged on a case by case basis. Some men with SSA, perhaps many, are not suited to the priesthood. But that doesn’t mean this is true of all of them; it’s a simple matter of fact that his concrete concerns, such as a lack of proper sense of paternity, is not something we can universally apply to an entire group of people. Some men who bear this cross can be excellent paternal figures, for example. I fully agree that the Church needs to make sure that every admitted seminarian has all the qualities necessary to be a priest. I just don’t believe that the answer lies in assuming that certain types of people automatically lack those qualities in spite of the possibility of exceptions, and that assumption would be the only immovable reason for a permanent blanket policy.
