Saw this on the AP wire:
Episcopal Bishop Criticizes Pope on Gays
By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer
The first openly gay Episcopal bishop insisted Wednesday he was not encouraging Roman Catholics to leave their church when he criticized its view of homosexuals during a recent speech in London.
May I ask why not? I mean, if he really believes he’s in the right church, then why would he disavow encouraging people to join it? Or if he doesn’t think it’s worth joining, how come he’s a bishop? Just wondering.
“Pope Ratzinger may be the best thing that ever happened to the Episcopal Church,” Robinson said, referring to former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI.
“Pope Ratzinger”? I guess Robinson doesn’t read the papers.
But Robinson said in a phone interview Wednesday from New Hampshire that he was recounting what a Catholic woman told him about why she was joining the Protestant denomination — not expressing his own opinion. He said the woman was disappointed that the successor to Pope John Paul II would probably not make any significant changes in Catholic teaching.
If she was expecting “significant changes in Catholic teaching,” she most certainly will be more at home in a Protestant denomination.
Robinson said he had commented on Catholic issues in response to a question from a gay Catholic struggling with his place in his church. Catholic teaching considers gay sex “intrinsically disordered.” Robinson said he told the man that it was an “act of violence against gay folk” that the Vatican was considering instructing its seminaries to bar homosexuals and viewed it as an attempt by Catholic leaders to blame gays for the clergy sex abuse crisis.
Pederasty with the altar boys is a “crisis,” but declining to ordain gays is “violence”? Did he get his note cards mixed up, or what?
But Robinson said he told the young man that he should live “such that the light of Christ so shone through him that no one in his church could doubt his full membership in the body of Christ.”
Ouch. There’s a visual I could have done without.