Neanderthal Catholics React to Pope Francis' Apology to Gays

While I give no credence to Pope Francis' recent remarks that Christianity and the Catholic Church owe gays an apology for the mistreatment that has been inflicted on us by Christianity, because when given the opportunity to change Church doctrine on gays, Francis has yielded the field to the gay haters within the Church hierarchy.  However, while Francis'  remarks are meaningless in terms of marking any change in the Church, they have nonetheless sent right wing Catholics into conniption fits - even as they have targeted other senior members of the hierarchy rather than Francis himself. Supporting their raging anti-gay animus, these Neanderthals reach back to writings from the 11th century for justification.  Indeed, they rely on some of the same mentally disturbed "church fathers" who laid out the Church's bizarre obsession with all things sexual.   Lifesite carries one such diatribe directed against Cardinal Reinhard Marx.   Here are samples of the spittle flecked batshitery that passes as thoughtful argument in this world of ignorance and sexual obsession:

[Cardinal] Marx’s statements seem to fly in the face of repeated affirmations by some of the Catholic Church’s most authoritative documents, including the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which calls homosexual sexual acts “acts of grave depravity” which are “intrinsically disordered,” and “can never be approved.” They also contradict the Vatican’s 2003 instruction on homosexual unions, which forbids support for legal recognition for homosexual unions of any kind.

St. Peter Damian, a cardinal who wrote the most extensive treatment of the issue of homosexual unions in the Church’s history, also had a very different understanding of the value of homosexual relations from that of Cardinal Marx. 

According to Damian’s work on the subject, the Book of Gomorrah, written in the 11^th century in response to a plague of homosexual vice among priests and clergy, homosexual unions are in no way beneficial to their participants; to the contrary, they are utterly destructive to them, spiritually, psychologically and even physically, throwing them into an emotional and spiritual confusion that makes them subject to demonic manipulation.  

Damian writes that “this vice, which surpasses the savagery of all other vices, is to be compared to no other. For this vice is the death of bodies, the destruction of souls, pollutes the flesh, extinguishes the light of the intellect, expels the Holy Spirit from the temple of the human heart, introduces the diabolical inciter of lust, throws into confusion, and removes the truth completely from the deceived mind.”

Damian recognizes that the logic of homosexual vice leads to ever-more degrading and self-destructive acts, a reality confirmed by those who have come out of the gay lifestyle. The homosexual relationship “violates sobriety, kills modesty, slays chastity,” writes Damian. “It butchers virginity with the sword of a most filthy contagion. It befouls everything, it stains everything, it pollutes everything, and for itself it permits nothing pure, nothing foreign to filth, nothing clean.”

In contrast to Cardinal Marx and other Catholic prelates who have recently advocated affirming homosexual relationships or tolerating them, Peter Damian writes that we must avoid the “cruel mercy” of staying silent in the face of evil, and even warns that we become the “murderer of another’s soul” if we do not speak against the immorality of their behavior.

There's more, but the take away is that these folks are seriously mentally disturbed and in need of a serious mental health intervention.  I truly find it remarkable as to just how srcewed up these people are and how desperate they are to have others to condemn.  If there is an evil to be defeated, it is they themselves.

UPDATED: Here's what Damian and his fellow nutjobs thought about sex in general:

". . . .the reformers as a group considered sex and other pleasurable experiences tainted by evil and a potent source of sin.  They were not merely suspicious of sex, but hostile to any sexual activity at all save for marital relations undertaken expressly and consciously to conceive a child.  . . . . were determined to limit marital sex to the absolute minimum, and on penalizing extra-marital sex as harshly as possible."

" . . .  married couples were allowed sexual intercourse under only three conditions: 1) for the explicit purpose of conceiving a child; 2) to prevent the temptation of marital infidelity; and 3) to yield to the unrelenting demands -  most likely sinful - of their partner. Even then the sexual intercourse could not be performed in the daytime, had to be in the "missionary position', could not be performed on Sundays, Wednesdays or Fridays - removing the equivalent of five months of the year - and was not to be performed during Lent or other forbidden times. . . All other sexual activity was categorically condemned."

In short, these men were seriously mentally disturbed.