{"id":9839,"date":"2019-02-28T15:05:24","date_gmt":"2019-02-28T20:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=9839"},"modified":"2019-02-28T15:05:24","modified_gmt":"2019-02-28T20:05:24","slug":"quote-for-the-day-160","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=9839","title":{"rendered":"Quote for the day"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Moving in a milieu that considered homosexuality to be intrinsically bad, and reading theology books that defined it as a sin, for a long time I experienced it as guilt. The path that I chose to leave that guilt was to deny that sexual attraction by transferring it to religious attraction: I made the choice of chastity and the seminary. For me, becoming a priest was a kind of solution to expiate an error that I had not committed.<\/p>\n

In the Closet of the Vatican<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This quote is from a just-published work of journalism taking-up the gay culture in the Vatican.<\/p>\n

I imagine most people have forgotten about it by now, but a bit more than a decade ago there was a Colorado pastor named Ted Haggard whose career spectacularly incinerated when a male prostitute stepped forward to say that he and his buddy Ted regularly did drugs together, and … business. The self-immolation followed the usual course: stout-hearted denials, then acknowledgement that there might<\/i> have been some kind of misunderstanding, and then Haggard was caught in his driveway by a camera crew and looked straight into the camera and said (I approximate, it’s been a long time), “I’ve struggled against this all my life.”<\/p>\n

I was watching and said aloud, “So why did you become a preacher?”<\/p>\n

It was, literally, one of those smack-your-forehead moments for me. I knew the answer immediately: Because<\/u><\/i> he had struggled against it all his life.<\/p>\n

For almost 2-millennia, for an extraordinary number of men, a career in the clergy has been a form of self-therapy: the unauthorized desire might be made to go away or, if not, he would at least be surrounded by good people and unable to indulge his wickedness. Whew! Hell avoided!<\/p>\n

Vocations are down because the public acceptance of homosexuality is steadily trending up. What a grand irony it is that the church’s condemnation of being gay was its best recruitment tool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moving in a milieu that considered homosexuality to be intrinsically bad, and reading theology books that defined it as a sin, for a long time I experienced it as guilt. The path that I chose to leave that guilt was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9839"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9839"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9843,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9839\/revisions\/9843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}