Looks like a St. Louis seminary wants to be an early test of the new apostolic visitation of seminaries and a rumored ban on gay seminarians. The Aquinas Institute of Theology is directly challenging the contention that gays shouldn’t be priests and has some very strange allies in doing so: Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).
First, Fr. Charles Bouchard, president of the seminary, comes right out and says that homosexuality would not disqualify a student. This is the same priest who said: “Homosexuality involves attraction to adult persons of the same sex and is not in itself sinful or sick.” As Diogenes correctly points out Bouchard is wrong:
The Church teaches that the homosexual inclination itself is an intrinsic disorder—not necessarily sinful, but necessarily sick. Whether this particular disorder (or sickness) is curable, transient, gradated, etc., is a matter for debate, but to deny the teaching is to take a position of dissent.
But moving on to the strange bedfellows category, notice the linkage, or anti-linkage, Bouchard expresses between homosexuality and the Scandal.
“I think it might be relevant in as much as that it answers some people’s question that possibly there is a link between homosexuality and pedophilea [sic]. I don’t think that link exists, so I’m not afraid of that question.”