Some people get extraordinarily upset with a Catholic Priest, Bishop, or layman for that matter, who dares to speak like a Catholic; most recent case in point, the good new Bishop of Elphin Ireland – Kevin Doran; he had this say:
“What the church asks of people who are homosexual by orientation is exactly the same as what the church asks of people who are heterosexual, that they reserve sexual relationships to marriage. Now, it’s a completely different question to say that we believe marriage is between a man and a woman…Everyone above a certain age has the right to marry but I can’t marry my mother and I can’t marry my sister, and by the same token, I can’t marry someone of the same sex.”
Nothing shocking here, in fact, it’s right in line with Catholic teaching as stated in the official “Catechism of the Catholic Church:”
“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved…Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.” (CCC #2357, 2359)
Why the furor? Partially it’s the fault of the Church herself: for too long, especially during the 1970s and 80s, those entrusted with the Faith did very little to proselytize it. As for myself, I grew up in the post-Vatican II era of the flower-power huggable Jesus from the Summer of Love; he looked good on a tie-dye t-shirt, but made a terrible God. In the intervening years since then, people have gotten used to being rudderless and unguided; they have made up their own personal cosmology; now, more than ever, they don’t want anyone to upset their universal inner stability.