OLD SCHOOL NEW BREED:

A New Breed of Priest: Marcos Gonzalez, like others ordained under Pope John Paul II, is devoutly conservative, a stark contrast with those of the Vatican II era. (Teresa Watanabe, July 31, 2004, LA Times)

It's hard to miss Father Marcos Gonzalez, who wears an ankle-length black cassock every day, a garment most priests tossed out decades ago. But it's not just his clothes that bespeak an older, more traditional era of his Roman Catholic Church.

When some priests spoke in favor of optional celibacy at a Los Angeles priest assembly last year — a position supported by most American Catholics today — Gonzalez booed in dissent. In premarital counseling, he tells couples to remain chaste until marriage, plunging into delicate territory some priests prefer to avoid. Gonzalez also believes artificial birth control and gay sex are always a sin and opposes women's ordination.

Such stances conform with Vatican teachings, he says, but are at odds with many American priests and lay people.

Yet Gonzalez, an associate pastor at St. Andrew Church in Pasadena, is hardly a relic from a fading past. At 41, he offers one glimpse of the future as a member of a new breed of younger priests ordained during the 25-year papacy of Pope John Paul II and passionately committed to the pope's orthodox teachings.

As the health of John Paul — now 84 and the third-longest serving pontiff in history — continues to falter, men like Gonzalez stand ready to guard and propagate his legacy. They represent a global trend toward Christian orthodoxy, in contrast to a generation of more liberal priests ordained during the 1960s reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

"We are very, very faithful to the Holy Father and not in any way dissenting from the teachings of the church," Gonzalez says of like-minded colleagues.

That experiment with more liberal, sexually-permissive, even known gay priests didn't work out so well, did it?

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The Catholic Reform II, etc. (Richard John Neuhaus, June/July 2004, First Things)

Nor does the report flinch from taking on the question of homosexuality in the priesthood. At the height of the epidemic, in 1975-1980, 86 percent of abuse cases involved adolescent boys. The point is not that homosexuals are more likely to be child abusers. The point is that, as heterosexual men are attracted to young women, homosexual men are attracted to young men, and homosexual priests have more opportunities to act on their attractions. One need not get into obfuscatingly complicated arguments about the nature of homosexuality. The 86 percent figure speaks for itself. Between men who want to have sex with adolescent boys and men who do not want to have sex with adolescent boys, the former are more likely to have sex with adolescent boys.

-Andrew Sullivan and Father Joe: The Demystification of Sex (Mark Gauvreau Judge, July 7, 2004, Breakpoint)

The tragic thing is that the New York Times probably isn’t even aware of it. On Sunday, May 30, the Times ran two pieces in two different sections. The first one reported on the problem of teen-age promiscuity in America in dispiriting detail. The second piece, a celebration – indeed, a sacramentalization – of sex, was an example of how that very problem of promiscuity came to pass.

The first piece, “Whatever Happened to Romance?” appeared in the New York Times magazine. Journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis spent a great deal of time with a group of American teenagers, and reports the news conservatives have been heralding for years: our children are out of control sexually. Monogamy is a joke: hook-ups, that is to say a sexual encounter without strings, are in – as is “friendship with benefits,” meaning a friend with whom you can have sex without commitment. Oral sex is common among kids as young as ten.

To anyone familiar with Bill Bennett, Chuck Colson, Richard John Neuhaus or the Christian, orthodox Jewish and Muslim faiths, none of this should come as a surprise. It should also come as no surprise to conservatives that one of the places that has gotten us to this point is the New York Times itself – that is, if a book review that appeared in the same edition of the paper as the teen sex article is any indication.

In his review of Tony Hendra’s memoir, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul, Catholic homosexual Andrew Sullivan can barely contain his joy. Father Joe is about a Dominican priest who became a mentor to Hendra. The trigger for their meeting was when Hendra was caught having an affair with a married woman. Hendra was then sent to the priest by the woman’s husband (a “hyperstrict Roman Catholic,” of course). Father Joe taught Hendra many things, but the most notable thing to Sullivan – who is obsessed with sex while claiming to be a Catholic is that sex is a sacrament and that his affair is not really a sin. To Father Joe, Hendra’s problem was no problem because the point of sex is to give pleasure as well as receive it, and as long as one does that, everything is cool.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2004 4:34 PM