In the first half of the 20th century, Soviet agent Bella Dodd, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), was tasked with grooming and preparing young homosexual men to infiltrate and subvert Catholic seminaries. After renouncing communism and converting to Catholocism under the guidance of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Dodd lamented that she had been personally responsible for placing hundreds of young homosexuals in seminaries, many of whom were ordained priests and went on to become seminary professors or even bishops.
This posed a problem, as the Catholic Church holds that same-sex attraction (SSA) is a grave disorder. While SSA itself is not necessarily a sin, the Church holds that heterosexual attraction is the natural state of both men and women, and that SSA is a departure from what is natural and ordained by God, and therefore disordered. “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,’” the Catechism of the Catholic Church stipulates. “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.”
When the communist Soviet Union and its agents infiltrated Catholic seminaries and the Catholic priesthood with young radicals with DS-SSA, they did so in an explicit effort to subvert … the Catholic Church.
According to a new study, however, America’s Catholic bishops may be taking over Bella Dodd’s old job, nearly a century after she abandoned communism and embraced the fullness of Truth in the Catholic Church.
The University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life published a new report this month, revealing that an alarming share of U.S. Catholic bishops are comfortable placing men with “deep-seated” SSA (DS-SSA) in seminaries and ordaining them as priests. The report found that vocation directors (9 percent) were the least likely to approve men with DS-SSA for seminary and priesthood, while seminary spiritual directors and formators (12 percent), seminary rectors (16 percent), and seminary mental health professionals (17 percent) were also largely opposed to ordaining men with DS-SSA. However, nearly one quarter (22 percent) of bishops said that they would be happy to ordain men with DS-SSA as priests.
The report draws a distinction between DS-SSA and “transitory same-sex attraction” (T-SSA), based on the Congregation for Catholic Education’s 2005 instruction, “Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders.” T-SSA would refer to homosexual interests or actions which were linked to a “transitory” period, such as sexual confusion in adolescence or early adulthood, while DS-SSA refers to stable, persistent homosexual tendencies and acts.
There are a number of reasons that men with DS-SSA should be unequivocally barred from priesthood. First and foremost, as the Congregation for Catholic Education stipulated in 2005, DS-SSA “gravely hinders [the men in question] from relating correctly to men and women.” A priest is a spiritual father and, as such, must be equipped to rightly form the souls under his care. Catechesis, spiritual direction, marriage preparation, and leadership of a parish (not to mention a diocese!) will all suffer under the hand of a priest struggling with DS-SSA.
Nor is this a purely pastoral matter. Human sexuality and an understanding of the divinely-ordered complementarity of men and women is a core component of both Catholic moral teaching and even theology. Pope St. John Paul II, in his seminal The Theology of the Body, explicated that Christ had to be male because it is the male who “enters in” in the sexual relationship, which, properly ordered and properly understood, is the culmination and physical expression of self-giving love in the sacrament of marriage. The woman is the one who receives the gift of the male in that sexual relationship. The relationship of mankind to Christ, then, is the relationship of the woman in a marriage to her husband; understanding this biological and (dare I say) sexual dynamic is key to understanding one’s personal relationship with Christ, as well as His relationship to the Catholic Church.
Additionally, statistics have demonstrated over the past several decades that the vast majority of clerical sexual abuse has been homosexual in nature. In 2004, in the wake of the Boston Globe’s damning investigation into the clerical sex abuse crisis in the Archdiocese of Boston, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) commissioned a report from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which ultimately found that 81 percent of clerical sex abuse victims were male — in other words, the vast majority of clerical sex abuse was homosexual in nature. This was not an isolated finding. A landmark clerical sex abuse report from France in 2021 similarly reported that 80 percent of clerical sex abuse victims for decades had been male, and 2023 reports from Spain and Portugal likewise found that a majority of clerical sex abuse victims were male.
When the communist Soviet Union and its agents infiltrated Catholic seminaries and the Catholic priesthood with young radicals with DS-SSA, they did so in an explicit effort to subvert and eventually destroy the Catholic Church, diluting the moral and social doctrines of the Church, obscuring theological clarity and embracing godless secularism, promoting left-wing and progressive ideals from seminary classrooms and pulpits, and causing scandal among the lay faithful and driving them out into the spiritual wilderness. Do America’s bishops realize that by ordaining men with DS-SSA to the priesthood, they are achieving the goals of atheistic communism — not to mention putting children at higher risk for the rape and sexual abuse. For the sake of their souls, I certainly hope they are merely stupid and lacking in foresight — and for the sake of the Catholic Church, I hope that the bishops in question retire as quickly as possible.
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