Quote of the Day: Andrew Sullivan on the Catholic Church Hierarchy

While he remains at least nominally a Catholic, Andrew Sullivan has not been reluctant to condemn the hypocrisy and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy. Similarly, Sullivan has not hesitated to challenge the Catholic Church leadership on its increasingly shrill and extreme anti-gay jihad. Today, in a post that looked at the huge numbers of closeted gays - many of whom suffer from self-hate and self-loathing not to mention contempt for gays who have come to terms with their sexual orientation - within the ranks of the Catholic clergy, Sullivan once again hit the nail on the head. Here are some highlights:

This is a church now intent on erasing from visibility a small minority of human beings, while waging a campaign to keep them as second class citizens in their own countries and as subhuman "objectively disordered" beings in their own church. They cannot even speak our name. Because were they to see us as the human beings we are, if they had to confront the actual experienced reality of our lives, if they actually had a conversation with us, and engaged the problem rather than dismissing it as "madness", their pretense would be exposed.

The leaders of the current Catholic hierarchy are the Pharisees of our time. They are the people Jesus came to liberate us from.

Andrew summed it up well. In a subsequent post in response to the comments of a reader who is a former Catholic priest - who believes the majority of Catholic priests are gay - Andrew added this:

I used to think that homosexuality was a relatively minor issue for the church, and that the natural law arguments for allowing an eternal part of God's creation some dignity and respect, along with all others who for unchosen reasons cannot partake in procreative heterosexual marriage, were strong. I have come to realize that the homosexual issue is at the very heart of the church's current crisis - and that the cruelty we see is the kind of cruelty inflicted by closeted gay men on those who have sought an honest life. This goes all the way to the very top of the church. Its secrecy and hypocrisy and self-hatred all played a part in the cover-up of mass child-rape for decades.