Priests to marry?

Brutal hate crime on video – tell the Senate to pass the bill!

Last week, the brutal beating of a gay man was caught on tape in New York. As the Senate prepares for its final vote on the hate crimes bill, make sure your senators watch this shocking video – understanding that it could just as easily have happened to any LGBT constituent – and send the bill to the President without delay.

Catholic Church radical announcement

It is a step closer to accept priests to get married. Not only was it long overdue, but the Catholic Church has traditionally been 200 years behind societ in making the necessary changes to accept social changes. This one however was a very hard sell and an even more difficult pill for the Vatican to swallow. Just like birth control is still not acceptable…birth control pills are a little bit harder to swallow and abortion is just totally out of the question, perhaps for the next 200 years.

"It's a stunning turn of events," says Lawrence Cunningham, theology professor at Notre Dame University. "This decision will allow for many more married clergy in Western churches, and that's going to raise anew the question, 'If they can do it, why can't the priests of Rome?,'" says Cunningham. "I can already picture the electronic slugfest on the Internet in coming days and weeks."

The Catholic Church already allows clergymen who convert from Protestant denominations to remain married on a case by case basis, and married priests are common in the Eastern Rite, a group that uses Orthodox traditions but is loyal to Rome.

Perhaps now they will come to terms with the other sensitive issue: homosexuality. It has long been a thorn on the side of the Catholic Church in view of the fact that so many clergymen are gay although not engaging in sexual activities. I think that it won’t be long before these too will be accepted into the church.

The obvious next step is to perform same sex matrimonial ceremonies. After all, they used to do it before Constantine. All they have to do is put their seal of approval and stop the nonsense that they have embraced for so long.

It is a matter of convenience and survival. If the Church is to remain a powerful entity, then it is going to have to adjust to the growing concerns and changes in society; for to do any different it would render the whole institution irrelevant. They already have trouble with attendance and have closed so many churches, particularly in the United States.

Then the pedophile priests that have been involved in scandals in the recent past has not helped any. It would be preferable that a Catholic priest goes home to the rectory where his male spouse is awaiting him instead of sexually abusing the little altar boys.

The move comes after years of discord within the Anglican Communion, which unites 77 million Anglicans and Episcopalians under the loose authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The church has been racked by schisms over the ordination of women and its stance towards homosexuality.

Indeed, two prominent British priests who publicly broke from Anglicanism years ago stated today that after this ruling from Rome, some Anglicans "will begin to form a caravan, rather like the People of Israel crossing the desert in search of the Promised Land."

Whether that happens or not, today's decision marks a milestone in the relations between the Vatican and the Church of England, which King Henry VIII established in 1534 after the Pope refused to grant him a marriage annulment. Since then, religious and social battles have often marked relations between Catholics and Anglicans. Says Cunningham: "This would have been unthinkable 200 years ago, and barely imaginable in the 19th century."

But don’t hold your breath though, change comes very slowly in the Catholic Church, remember that these are the same folks that regaled humanity with the Inquisition; they took several hundred years to admit that the world wasn’t flat and a couple of hundred more to recognize that the sun didn’t orbit around the earth.

The Catholic Church gave birth to a dissenting group we now call “Protestants” and today some of these still cling on to some pretty fucking weird concepts and ideas, for example that the world is only 6,000 years old.

SOURCE: http://news.aol.com/article/vatican-creates-new-structure-to-ease/728295