CBC Radio: Vatican expert says homophobia in Catholic Church due in part to high numbers of gay priests

The ban on gay men from entering the seminary came as a surprise to no one close to the Vatican.  First introduced in 2005 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (before he became Pope Benedict XVI), it was part of his attempt to purge the priesthood of homosexuality (both the act and the orientation), in part, as a misguided response to the sex abuse crisis.

Yet many Vatican observers, such as Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and National Catholic Reporter columnist, did not hide their dismay it remains in the manual. [...]

Yet longtime Vatican expert Robert Mickens says euphemisms such as "homosexual tendencies" are just one of the many ways the Catholic Church avoids facing the issue of gayness in its midst. [...]

"The church wants to keep this issue a taboo so that those pious young men will continue to think of the priesthood as the noble way, rather than, 'I'm gay and maybe that's how I should lead my life as a gay man.' If we allow people to live openly their homosexuality, we lose a great pool of our resources for ministry."

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CBC Radio: Poland's proposed ban on abortion part of broader push to turn back history

In considering the ban, the government has the firm backing of the Catholic Church, which now rejects the compromise it accepted in 1993 when the current restrictive abortion regime was adopted.

It ignores polls showing that 74 per cent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with the present law and don't want it changed. And it dismisses estimates that suggest that more than 100,000 women annually get an illegal abortion in Poland or go to neighbouring countries for terminations. [...]

"The Law and Justice party questions the very foundation of liberal democracy which is the reciprocal limitation of power," said Jaroslaw Kurski. "The party wants to create a new sort of citizen — a nationalist-patriot type — who is ready to renounce his or her civil liberties." [...]

The new government insists that Poles didn't kill Jews, only German Nazis did.  Anyone who uses the banned phrase may be liable to prosecution.

A Polish historian, Jan Gross, who has written about the killing of Jews in Poland by Poles, notably in his book Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne — the story of a massacre in 1941 in which several hundred Jews were murdered by fellow townspeople — has been denounced by this government. It wants to try him for libel and to strip him of the Polish Order of Merit.

All of this, particularly the attacks on the constitutional court and the takeover of public broadcasting, have been severely criticized by the leaders of the European Union. Ironically, the new public broadcasting boss, Jacek Kurski, will soon lose his job. The ratings of the public channels have dropped sharply — propaganda isn't necessarily great entertainment. But tight government control will remain.

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