Amy Welborn makes the NYT

New York Times that is. She’s been published in the Op-Ed section. She talks about the upcoming seminary visitations down in the States. She broke the news on her own Blog today.

The whole let’s-root-out-the queers thing has been discussed quite a bit amongst the Catholic Blogs. It broke out most recently with the breaking news story on Catholic World News that the Pope would be issuing a formal ban on ordaining homosexual men. The Editor of CWN promptly broke the news on his Blog Bettnet. Nothing has been seen to date of the actual document but that hasn't stopped the talk.

The more moderate positions are somewhere between “it’s a prudential decision considering 80% of the sexual abuse cases were homosexual” to “it isn’t going to work, real died-in-the-wool queers will dissemble and get through and honest Catholic men with SSA (Same Sex Attraction) will self select themselves out of seminaries”.

And all of this noise over a document from the Vatican that hasn’t actually seen the light of day, though it’s been talked about for months, if not years. If the document is never issued, I will wonder if all this brouhaha was about nothing or if it helped persuade the Pope not to publish it. Indeed, a good deal of the MSM (Main Stream Media) coverage could be seen as precisely a pre-emptive strike to achieve just that. Amy’s article strikes a nice balance from the near hysteria coming from supposedly secular quarters.

Somehow, however, I don’t see this Pope bending to secular (and Catholic homosexual) pressure. The Zeitgeist isn’t Pope Benedict’s big concern.