Mainline christian denominations–Catholics and Protestants alike–are bitterly divided over the question of homosexuality. But what does the New Testament really say about this controversial issue? Most people assume the New Testament expresses strong opposition to homosexuality. 
William O. Walker, Jr., a member of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, and professor emeritus of religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, developed six propositions that, considered together, lead to the conclusion the New Testament does not provide any direct guidance for understanding and making judgements about homosexuality in the modern world.
Proposition 1: Strictly speaking, the New Testament says nothing at all about homosexuality. The paucity of references to homosexuality in the New Testament suggests that it was not a matter of major concern either for Jesus or for the early Christian movement.
Proposition 2: At most, there are only three passages in the entire New Testament that refer to what we today would call homosexual activity.
Proposition 3: Two of the three passages that possibly refer to homosexuality are simply more-or-less miscellaneous cataloges of behaviors that are regarded as unacceptable, with no particular emphasis placed on any individual item in the list.
Proposition 4: It may well be that the two lists of unacceptable behaviors - 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:8-11 do not refer to homosexuality at all.
Proposition 5: Even if 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:8-11 do refer to homosexuality, what they likely have in mind is not homosexuality per se but rather one particular form of homosexuality that was regarded as especially exploitive and degrading.
Proposition 6: The one passage in the New Testament that almost certainly does refer to homosexuality is based on some highly debatable presuppositions about its nature and causes.
The Catholic group, Informed Conscience, also presents homosexuality and the New Testament in depth.
In her new book, Being Catholic Now, Kerry Kennedy interviewed famous Catholics from far left to far right; including Susan Saradon, Martin Sheen, Bill O’Reilly, speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, Gabriel Byrne, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Maher. “I was struck by their raw honesty,” Kennedy said. 
She cried when Byrne told her his story about being abused by a priest as a boy, and spotting the abuser at a football game decades later. “I called him and asked if he remembered me,” said the actor. “He said,”No’– He didn’t make the connection, but I, of course, did.” Byrne blames the vows of celibacy, “which I regard as a sin against human life.”
Susan Saradon strikes a lighter note with a story of praying with rosary beads at age seven and not knowing they were glow in the dark. “I looked down and they were glowing and I thought, “Oh, my God, I’m about to have a vision! The Blessed Virgin is about to come in the door!”
Church officials have not yet seen the book, but a spokeswoman for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, said in response to a description of the book, “A lot of Catholics are having lovers’ quarrels with the church.”
The Deacon’s Bench has a good post on this story.
Kerry Kennedy will discuss the book during a program at the Museum of the City of New York on Wednesday, October 22nd at 6:30 pm. 
Cardinal Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice, celebrated a Mass to mark the 30th anniversary of the election of John Paul I, “the smiling Pope.” Cardinal Albino Luciani was elected Pope on August 26, 1978. Acclaimed for his refreshing candor, spontaneity and wit, he was described by Cardinal Basil Hume as “God’s candidate.” 
John Paul I was the first Pope to have a composite name, a gesture to honor his two predecessors - John XXIII and Paul VI.
The “smiling Pope” died on September 28, 1978, 33 days after his election to the papacy, allegedly of a heart attack.
Many people, myself included, believe he was murdered for changes he planned to implement in the Vatican.
Most conspiracy theorists believe John Paul I was the victime of a plot involving powerful men linked to the Mafia, the Vatican Bank, and P2, an illegal Masonic Lodge whose membership included senior Italian politicians. One of these men was Bishop Paul Marcinkus, then head of the Vatican Bank.
According to some investigators, John Paul I was murdered not only because he was planning to purge the Vatican Bank, but also because he was planning to demote or dismiss powerful figures in the Curia, the Vatica bureacracy.
There were several other rumors that may also have contributed to his assassination: the belief he was planning to proceed with the ordination of women; and continue to push the reforms of Vatican II, particularly with the bureacracy.
The late Cardinal Aloisio Lorscheider of Brazil, a strong supporter of John Paul I, decided to speak out 20 years later. He had to “record with sorrow” that the official version of John Paul I’ death was open to question. The cardinal noted that Cardinal Jean Villot, the then Secretary of State, had refused to allow a post mortem examination. 
“I have to say that a suspicion remains in our hearts,” Cardinal Lorscheider said.
Three well-known books about the death of Pope John Paul I include: In God’s Name by David Yallop; Murder in the Vatican by Lucien Gregoire; and A Thief in the Night: The Mysterious Death of Pope John Paul I by John Cornwell.
Silent screen actor Ramon Novarro (1899-1968) was one of early Hollywood’s leading actors. He got his big break in the 1923 movie Scaramouche, and went on to play the title role in 1925’s Ben Hur and later appear with Greta Gardo in Mata Hari. 
Novarro was gay. Even under pressure from MGM studio head, Louis B. Mayer, Novarro refused to contract a “lavendar marriage”–something most homosexual stars did to keep their contracts and stay out of gossip columns.
He was also a devout Roman Catholic all his life, and at one time considered becoming a priest.
Ramon Novarro was murdered by two brothers, Tom and Paul Ferguson, whom he paid to come to his Laurel Canyon home for sex. Tom was 17 and Paul was 22. Novarro had slept with Paul a number of times before. On this night he brought along his brother to help him rob Novarro. The two young men believed that a large sum of money was hidden in Novarro’s house.
Paul had sex with Novarro, and then the brothers beat and tortured him looking for the money. After they left the house, he suffocated in his own blood.
To avoid Novarro’s slipping into unconsciousness, the brothers dragged him into the bathroom, slapping him awake with cold water. Novarro staggered into the bedroom. Collapsing on his knees, he sobbed: “Hail Mary full of grace.”
Tom’s defense attorney, Richard Walton, placed the blame for the murder on Novarro. “Back in the days of Valentino, this man who set female hearts aflutter, was nothing but a queer. There’s no way of calculating how many felonies this man committed over the years, for all his piety.”
Paul Ferguson blamed his Catholic background: “When he kissed me, I reacted like a Catholic, what they call homosexual panic. Some old guy in the desert says, ‘Kill homosexuals.’ It’s inbred…I was too drunk to be civilized. Whatever my most primitive moral standings were, I reacted. It had nothing to do with Novarro, nothing to do with his being homosexual. It all had to do with how I saw myself. And the fact that my brother was there. And that he could see me in that homosexual act. It all had to do with my Catholic upbringing, with my five thousand years of Moses. And that’s the only reason why this whole thing happened. Because that’s what society teaches you…I think after I hit Mr. Novarro…I turned around and sat down on the sofa. I got up and went to find (Novarro) in the bedroom. ‘This guy’s dead’…We didn’t go there to rob him.”
Novarro was interred in Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles. His killers were released from prison after a few years.
Author John Rechy describes the murder in his blog, Speaking Out. The events he describes are drawn from the book, Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro. 
A 3′ tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus has ramifications for Christianity–mostly positive–but with plenty of room left for debate. 
It speaks of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. Jesus’ predictions of a suffering messiah, one who would bring salvation to the people of Israel, were not new. They were circulating years before his ministry, and can be found in the Book of Isaiah.
Ada Yardeni, who analyzed the stone together with Binyamin Elitzur, is an expert on Hebrew script, especially of the era of King Herod, who died in 4 B.C. The two of them published a long analysis of the stone tablet, dubbed “Gabriel’s Revelation,” more than a year ago in Cathedra, a Hebrew-language quarterly devoted to the history and the archaeology of Israel. Yardeni and Elitzur said that based on the shape of the script and the language, the text dated from the late first century B.C.
Israel Knohl, a professor of Bible Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalypic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In Knohl’s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the stone was a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian army, according to first-century historian Josephus. The slaying of Simon, or any suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation.
Knohl focuses on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in three days.” The next word of the line was deemed illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative.
It was less important, Mr. Knohl said, whether a man named Simon was the messiah of the stone than the fact it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus.
“His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come,” Mr. Knohl said. “This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of the people but to bring redemption to Israel.”
Is Catholic art getting too excremental?
In recent years we’ve been treated to “Senation,” a Virgin Mary pelted with elephant dung; and ”Piss Christ”- a crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine.
Now it’s “Zuerst dei Fuesse” (Feet First). A green frog is nailed to a cross holding a beer mug in one outstretched hand and an egg in the other. The frog wears a green loincloth and is pinned to the cross in the manner of Jesus Christ. Its green tongue hangs out of its mouth. 
The 4′ wood sculpture was made by the late German artist Martin Kippenberger.
Franz Pahl, an official from the Trentino-Alto Adige region in northern Italy, said the pope had written to him to complain about the frog, which was installed in May at Museion, the modern art museum in Bolzano.
In a letter dated August 7, 2008, Pope Benedict said that the sculpture “injured the religious feeling of many people who see the Cross the symbol of the love of God and of our salvation, which deserves recognition and religious devotion.”
The board of the Museion museum decided by a majority vote that the frog was a work of art and would stay in place for the remainder of the exhibit.
Museum officials said the artist, who died in 1997, considered the sculpture to be a self-portrait illustrating human angst. “Fred the Frog” was Kippenberger’s alter-ego.
An art critic exclaimed: “In this work Kippenberger represents a society that appears perfect but is actually hypocritical…the frog on the cross represents men reduced to animals, that drink to the point of demeaning themselves, that cannot free themselves from the cross of alcohol lived as a plague. And Kippenberger condemns a society that, one the one hand claims to be Christian and on the other, right under and before Christ that it reckons to venerate, can only express its worst side.”
“A crucifixion is always an invitation to reflect on suffering,” said another critic. “In any event of contemporary art you will find more or less strong works on religion. It is part of people’s life, it is normal for it to become an ingredient of art. Society is getting used to being hypersensitive about certain themes but nobody can feel offended by a work of art.”
Well, Pope Benedict, who is German himself, obviously doesn’t agree.
I like my current pastor, Fr. Tom, very much. I appreciate his style: his earnestness, sincerity, and good humor set the tone for the parish. He gracefully navigates the shoals of small-town life. He impressed me when he spoke up against anti-Catholic bias when our creche was vandalized.
Fr. Tom makes everyone welcome–North Fork natives, retirees, weekenders, immigrants, visiting family members and returnees. He is a good priest and a good man. We could ask for none better.
As much as I appreciate and respect Fr. Tom, and would be happy to have him as my pastor for the rest of my life, I would also miss not being able to experience the Eucharist with a woman priest.
So I decided to seek one out.
I will be attending a home church with a Roman Catholic Womenpriest presiding at Mass later this fall. She was ordained in Boston this summer. I have no idea what kind of emotions I will feel, but I suspect they will include pride, wholeness, a degree of fear, and a feeling of connection with the women of early Christianity. 
I will also have an out-pouring of gratitude. First, to all the women who felt the call to ordination and stuck it out in the Catholic Church, not leaving for MCC, or the Episcopalians, another denomination or ending up as an aching or sour agnostic. For people like Sr. Louise Lears and Maryknoll priest Fr. Roy Bourgeois who put their principles on the line and paid the price; and finally for the founders and leadership of Women’s Ordination Conference, who breathed life into the dearest hope of women. Thank you all.
The bishop of Limburg, Germany, Franz Peter Tebartz van Elst, has removed a priest from office for “blessing” the partnership of two gay men. Their marriage took place on Friday, August 15th. 
Fr. Peter Kollas, a dean of priests in the city of Wetzlar, participated in the blessing of the two men during a civil wedding ceremony witnessed by a Protestant minister and 150 guests.
The bishop, appointed to the Diocese of Limburg by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007, said Catholics “have a duty to protest the legal recognition of homosexual partnerships.”
In a statement appearing on the diocese’s website, Bishop Tebartz van Elst said he had removed Fr. Kollas as dean of priests to avoid further “damage” to the Church’s reputation.
The bishop met with Fr. Kollas, who said hat he would promise to “omit” such blessings in the future and said that he had never done them before.
A new dean of priests will be chosen who has the “confidence of the bishop.”
The statement from the bishop’s office came after protests over the event, not only from Catholics, but also area Protestants.
Fr. Kollas must have been disciplined within days of the event. The bishop’s reaction was much swifter than what we usually see for other transgressions–like pedophilia accusations or financial improprieties.
Obviously, gay men and lesbians in love are a much greater threat to the church–and merit a much harsher response-than serial child abusers and priests who help themselves to the parish bank accounts.
I am grateful to Fr. Kollas the sacrifice he made to bless a loving relationship.
“As a director, my goal is to be completely open. Just look at how I portray sex in my films. They’re considered shocking and obscene because I like to carefully examine human sexuality. It has to be realistic.”
Paul Verhoeven’s biography of Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait, will be published next month by J. M. Meulenhoff, an Amsterdam publishing house. It will be translated into English in 2009. 
Verhoeven, 69, is best known as the director of a number of blockbuster films, including Basic Instinct, Robo Cop, and Total Recall.
Over the years, Vehoeven, who is Catholic and holds a doctorate in mathematics and physics from the University of Leiden, was a regular attendee of the Jesus Seminar, which was co-founded by the late religious scholar Robert W. Funk. The Jesus Seminar is a group of scholars and authors that seeks to establish historical facts about Jesus, and examines miracles and statements attributed to him.
Verhoeven’s new book makes the suggestion that Jesus may have been the son of Mary and a Roman soldier who raped her during a Jewish uprising against Roman rule in 4 B.C. The book also makes the claim that Judas Iscariot was not responsible for Jesus’ betrayal.
William Porter, a professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, said the Jesus Seminar was known for making provacative claims, but “they are real scholars–you have to deal with them.”
However, he said Verhoeven’s ideas sounded “pretty out there.”
John Dominic Crossan, a Jesus Seminar founder, agreed. He said that while Verhoeven was a member in good standing, there was little evidence for the view Jesus was illegitimate.
Crossan said the claim was first reported in a polemic written in the 2nd century against the Book of Matthew, intended for a Jewish audience.
“It’s an obvious first retort to claims that Mary was a virgin,” Crossan said. “If you wanted to do a hatchet job on Jesus’ reputation, this would be the way.”
Cartoons are wonderful venues for religious satire. One of the best is Slap Upside the Head by “Mark,” a 28-year-old Canadian.
Mark’s August 20th post was about a story reported by LifeSite, conservative website that oozes sex in the same type of sensational reporting as the average supermarket tabloid.
One of their recent stories had all the elements guaranteed to whip their readers up into a frenzy: sexual perversion and demonic possession!
The article quoted an English Roman Catholic priest who is also a self-styled exorcist. He completed a 4 month course of training offered at the Vatican (details were a little fuzzy).
“Promiscuity, as well as homosexuality and pornography, says 73 year old Fr. Jeremy Davis, is a form of sexual perversion and can lead to demonic possession. Offering what may be an explanation for the explosion of homosexuality in recent years, Fr. Davis said, ‘Among the causes of homosexuality is a contagious demonic factor.’”
“Fr. Davis’ comments come in conjunction with the publication of his new book, Exorcism: Understanding Exorcism in Scripture and Practice published earlier this year by the Catholic Truth Society (CTS).”
“He also said that Satan is responsible for having blinded most secular humanists to the ‘dehumanising effects of contraception and abortion and IVF, of homosexual ‘marriages’, of human cloning and the vivisection of human embryos in scientific research.”
“Fr. Davis also warns in his book against so-called New Age and occult practices, as well as trendy exercise and ’spiritual healing’ regimens derived from eastern religions.”
“‘The thin end of the wedge (soft drugs, yoga for relaxation, horoscopes just for fun and so on) is more dangerous than the thick end because it is more deceptive–an evil spirit tries to make his entry as unobtrusively as possible.’”
