Surprise! Catholics are more Catholic than before: A closet (but not a wardrobe) is somewhere the gay community once hid. And one of those closets historically has housed priests in the Catholic Church.
A prescient piece in ARCmag.org, published by Washington University in St. Louis, by Kimberley Winston notes,” In 2000, Donald B. Cozzens, a Roman Catholic priest, wrote in The Changing Face of the Priesthood that 58 percent of clergy were gay, with the number even higher for young priests.”
But then exposes a startling turnaround. “But conservatives worried about a gay priesthood may have to reckon with the facts on the ground, which show movement in the opposite direction. A new study by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas, makes the case that the number of gay men in the American priesthood will plummet to an all-time low, just 2 to 3 per cent, by 2051. In addition, younger priests say they struggle much less with celibacy than their elders, and fewer than ever say they are aware of a “homosexual subculture” in their seminaries or dioceses.
“’If this holds, and all other things being equal, you would expect the number of homosexual priests to shrink even further,’ Regnerus said from his office in Austin. ‘It won’t disappear entirely, but it will shrink further.’”
The change in the sexual orientation of the newer cohorts of catholic priests should cause those who think that the Catholic church is headed on a liberal path to take stock. What if the young priests are more Catholic than the late pope?
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Copying Eternity: Chalking Eternity on footpaths is something for which Obadiah must plead guilty. The evidence is just too great. Following in the steps of Arthur Stace, who chalked”Eternity” half a million times on footpaths, walls and even inside Sydney’s GPO bell, Obadiah has been seized with the desire to grab a stick of chalk.
But now there is a new word on the streets. Australia’s Anglicans are being encouraged to chalk “Hope” on the streets, to promote Hope 25, a campaign that is running across the country. Let’s hope for half a million worth of hope.
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Good Friday at Bondi: Well done to those who tramped at dawn.
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Meanwhile in Collins St: Obadiah was down south on Good Friday and sought out Scots’ Church, in the Melbourne CBD. Minister Phil Campbell gave a strongly worded exposition on the words”Thy will be done.” from the Lord’s prayer.
“What are we asking for when we pray that prayer for God’s kingdom to shape our kingdoms, for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven? Because at first glance, you see it, it seems to endorse the idea of a political agenda right here, right now. ‘”‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’ and so we get on with it and we create perhaps the Australian Christian Lobby or we decide to Make America Great Again and we look for every option and opportunity to get political advantage and impose Christian-sounding laws and limits because that’s the way or so we think to bring about the answer to our own prayer of God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven.
“The risk is of course you can end up within a sense of Christian Taliban enforcing Old Testament laws, enforcing New Testament morality, imposing our own due sense of righteousness on everyone else whether they like it or not, which in a way is much the way things have played out since the Roman Empire Christianized under Constantine in the year 3 23 ad and christened them went on to become the dominant western force and after all, I reason to myself as I read Matthew six 10, isn’t that exactly what we were asking for? Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and we campaign for it, and we fight for it, and we spread fake news for it, and we vote for it because it’s really that important.
“Now here’s the thing, and it’s astonishing in a sense that it took me so many years to figure this out. I’m actually not here on this Good Friday morning talk about your politics, but I am asking you to think a little bit more deeply about these words of Jesus and a key phrase from that prayer that we hear again on the night, Jesus was betrayed in a garden, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Now this is in exactly the same gospel, the gospel of Matthew because if there’s any kind of uncertainty about what Jesus might mean by those words in the Lord’s prayer, surely the first and best place to look for an answer as to what he means is in the story as it unfolds to its good Friday climax. And so you get to this scene in the garden called Gethsemane.
“Jesus celebrates the Passover with his disciples just before and he says to them, they’re going to take me and kill me like a sacrificial lamb and my body is going to be broken on your behalf. My blood is going to be spilled like the wine in this cup as I drink from the cup of God’s wrath on the sins of the world. So you don’t have to, he’s spelling out what’s about to happen as he’s crucified. Judas after dinner slinks off in the darkness and Jesus and the others walk into the Gethsemane gardens and he tells them to wait while he goes deeper into the shadows to pray because it turns out that the cross is something he would rather not do. Now, remember again the words of the Lord’s prayer, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, as Jesus praying in the garden.”
“I want you to look at his words because if you want to know the will of God, he’s been talking about from the start, if you want to see the coming of that kingdom and God’s will being done on earth, I’d suggest we are meant to see it right here. Jesus is praying and he’s agonised.”
Campbell then tied the Lord’s Prayer and Easter by showing that J esus used the same language teaching his disciples to pray, and his own prayer in the Garden.
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Junked: Obadiah has read two meditations on whether church handouts can go in letterboxes marked “no junk mail”
One on Facebook insisted that a gospel invitation could not possibly be called junk.
The other – an answer to a query in the mind papers’ Good Weekend advice column – said that a church flier would fly into the bin.
Obadiah wonders what you do? Obadiah abides by the no junk notices on mailboxes for what it is worth. Sometimes, though, he is tempted.