“What’s it like to be a seminarian?” It’s a question I heard often enough before my ordination. A complete answer was always difficult and now, given the present state of the Church, it’s only become more challenging. Like many others who closely followed last year’s USCCB meetings, I felt powerless in the face of these [...]

There is no homosexuality. Of course, there are homosexuals, but there is no one thing, no one condition or syndrome that is homosexuality. If we are to address the “homosexual problem” in the Church, then we must first understand what we are talking about, and whatever that is, it is not a thing called homosexuality. [...]

The orthodox Catholic blogosphere has duly noted the mostly same-sex nature of the scandals plaguing the Catholic Church. Writing for the Catholic Thing, David Carlin expressed the thoughts and pleas of many scandalized Catholics when he declared an “urgent need” for a papal encyclical specifically addressing homosexuality. An affirmative response to these pleas, however, would [...]

The recently concluded Vatican summit on clerical sexual abuse did not prove disappointing to the many Catholics who had no expectation that it would address the main source of the problem: active homosexuality among clerics. There were a few uncomfortable moments for the summit’s organizers, however, when a journalist or two boldly ignored the embargo [...]

I am now three days into a wild and woolly debate, of sorts, on Twitter about the creation of homosexuality as a new category of being. When last I checked, there are almost 1,000 comments, many of them vulgar, some of them threatening, and hardly any demonstrating real knowledge about the issue, only Tourette’s-like grunts, [...]

The gaying of the Church is perhaps the most diabolical attack the Devil has ever launched against the Catholic Faith. First, there is the massive damage done to the Church: the thousands of victims, the hundreds of millions in payouts, the bankruptcy of dioceses, and the cratering of ecclesial credibility. And yet, in our society [...]

“Therefore, since we have this ministry through the mercy shown us, we are not discouraged. Rather, we have renounced shameful, hidden things; not acting deceitfully or falsifying the word of God, but by the open declaration of the truth we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.” (2 Cor. 4: 1-2) It [...]

It was a shocking photo. There was Jesuit James Martin with his arm around Professor Robert George of Princeton, both of them grinning ear to ear. Professor George published the photo on his Twitter feed and it appeared this beacon of orthodoxy had given his imprimatur to the heterodoxy of James Martin, who has quite [...]

According to a gay victim of the clerical sex scandal in Chile, Pope Francis told him, “You have to be happy with who you are. God made you this way.” It’s the conclusion reached by many Christians with same-sex attraction, whose stories share telling similarities. They knew they were different at a young age. Throughout [...]

Editor’s note: The following essay by Dennis Prager first appeared in the September 1993 print edition of Crisis Magazine. When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into marriage, it changed the world. The Torah's prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible. Societies that did not place boundaries [...]

Father James G. Martin, S.J., is either a cruel or a foolish man. It does not seem to be the first. But if it is not that, it must be the second, because that alone can explain how a Catholic priest can live in the midst of massive and unprecedented family breakdown, and the chaos, [...]

Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego wrote a column about James Martin SJ that said Martin’s critics are a cancer on the Church, that criticism of his work is driven by homophobia, a distortion of Catholic moral theology, and is an attack on Pope Francis. This shameful column was applauded by a chorus including Elizabeth [...]

As a deacon, only once have I had the privilege of sitting around a table with one priest and one bishop, effectively forming a trio representing the three degrees of Holy Orders during a stimulating conversation about the Catholic faith. I have such an exchange in mind as I write this essay—I see what follows [...]

Just before Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, a group of Evangelicals issued a statement reaffirming the ancient teachings of Christianity about homosexual practice, the definition of marriage, and transgenderism. Calling it “The Nashville Statement,” churchmen from a variety of evangelical traditions drafted a document aimed at catechizing the people of God. Hurricane Harvey quickly overwhelmed this [...]

James Martin SJ gallivants around the country telling young men and women that their sexual lifestyles are acceptable to the Church, which is not true; that the Church welcomes them no matter what they may be doing, which is certainly true. James Martin SJ tells them that the teachings of the Church will probably change [...]

When I think of a holy hero who speaks with authority, who reflects my beliefs and values, I think of Pope St. John Paul II, worthy of canonization. When Fr. James Martin, S.J., who was out hawking his new book Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship [...]

Sometimes I think I must be the one in error. In a very high percentage of Catholic media I encounter, I see terms like “gay,” “lesbian,” and “LGBTQ” used without reservation or qualification. Just a day before writing this piece, I saw a major Catholic news source use the term “gay” in this way in [...]

One of the great truths lost in the zealotry of gender politics is that unlike animal sexuality, which is purely instinctive, human sexuality is a combination of instinct and socialization. We are not just “born this way.” Human sexual desire is cultivated. It can be channeled toward beauty, love, and even sublime self-sacrifice, culminating in [...]

There was always something Disneyesque about the 1980s preachers of the prosperity gospel. Of course there was no corpus on their cross, but that sacrilege had been achieved by earlier versions of Protestantism. What was really galling about the perpetually smiling televangelists was their soft-lens obliteration of the cross, which had at least remained a [...]