Homosexuality and Catholic Decline, by David Carlin

By David Carlin, The Catholic Thing, Sept. 4, 2019

Many factors have contributed to the 50- or 60-year decline of Catholicism in America, but one of the most important – and in recent decades THE most important – is the sympathy felt for homosexuality among many priests, bishops, and laypeople, especially liberal or progressive laypersons.

I’m not talking only about those who are homosexual in their orientation or have been homosexual in their conduct.  I’m talking also about a more general sympathy, the sympathy felt by those who say something like this to themselves: “Well, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not really horrible – at least not when they refrain from molesting underage boys, a dreadful thing that has little to do with homosexuality.  It’s hard not to sympathize with gay priests when one remembers that they are in all probability born that way.”

“Born that way.” The LGBTQ movement, one of the great manifestations of present-day atheism, has had no more effective propaganda slogan than this.  It has played a major role in persuading most Americans, including Catholic Americans, to drop their traditional moral (and aesthetic) antipathy to homosexual conduct. Among Americans in their late teens and twenties, there is now something close to universal approval of homosexual sodomy.  Only homophobes, it is held, could possibly disapprove of that kind of love. ….