Catholic inqueersition

Halloween's just a month away, and the pope is going on a witch hunt.\nBenedict XVI will soon ban all gay men, celibate or otherwise, from becoming priests, according to a Sept. 21 story in The New York Times. Moreover, the Vatican will send "investigators" to American seminaries to make sure homosexuals are rooted out.\nRome's antipathy toward all things gay is nothing new. But by teaching that celibacy is the only way to be simultaneously gay and godly, the Church has long funneled devout gay men into the priesthood. This made sense: If you weren't having any sex, then whoever you weren't having it with was a moot point.\nBut the pope is going on the offensive, discarding a de facto "don't ask, don't tell" policy for an all-out assault on priestly privacy. Vatican investigators will literally go from seminary to seminary, student to student, looking for "evidence of homosexuality." (Uh-huh. Maybe evasive answers will result in five demerits, and Judy Garland records will warrant immediate expulsion.)\nUnderpinning this renewed homophobic zeal is the flawed and bigoted assumption that homosexuality leads to pedophilia; by some estimates, more than 80 percent of priests in the recent sex-abuse scandal were gay. But hey, 100 percent of the molesting priests were Catholic. Why isn't anyone arguing that Catholicism leads to pedophilia?\nI'm not Catholic, though I have seriously considered converting for the past five years. I'm a gay man, so I guess you could say I have a few minor reservations about taking the plunge. But I love the Church and the priesthood, and I believe what the pope is doing is wrong.\nThese gay seminary students are the boys who were ostracized for being sissies. Terrible fears of hell haunted their childhood dreams. They're the boys who always knew they were different, who Sunday after Sunday clasped their hands together and begged the Everlasting, "Only say the word, and I shall be healed."\nAnd now, when they've finally found peace by dedicating their lives completely to God and his Church, their pope wants to expel them from the priesthood, the only place they could ever truly call home. When the vast majority of gay priests are faithful, loving shepherds, this is beyond wrong; it is evil. \nThere are so many great things about the Catholic Church. It stands squarely against war and capital punishment. It feeds the hungry and clothes the poor, and each week, the pageantry of the Eucharist proclaims the mystery of faith to people thirsting for something to believe in.\nBut I'm over the hatred. I'm over my people being the scapegoats for everything from decaying heterosexual marriages to low troop morale to Hurricane Katrina. With all due respect to the Holy Father, I'm just not interested in receiving moral instruction from a man who used to be a Nazi.\nI'm sorry. That was unfair. As a little German boy, the pope had no choice but to follow the Nazis' orders, and no one should be condemned for something he can't help. Surely everybody knows that.