Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Mrs. Dorothy Cummings-McLean, author, columnist and speaker on Catholic affairs and the right ordering of the relations between ladies and gents. She has kindly agreed to blog here now and then as the mood strikes. She writes from her home in Edinburgh, Scotland. Let’s give it up for Dorothy! HJMW

Come on out of the closet… where we can see you.

Surprised? Not if you’re Catholic or have ever been to Rome or ever had a young male friend who went to Rome and had enough Italian to understand what the creepier priests were saying to him.

No, the big story about Ksiądz (priest, i.e. Father) Krzystoff Charamsa is not that he is gay, and not even that he has a lover named Eduardo, but that he decided to have a big media party and tell everyone about it.

More of the same, please. We all know there are wild, gay, acting-out, priests partying it up in Rome. We’re just not so sure who they are. Take Bruno Forte, the nimble-minded chap who inserted that stuff about the special gifts of gayness into the last Synod on the Family document. Is he? Isn’t he? Why so coy? Come on. Call the press corps. Have a party. It’s mercy time!

One of the unspoken rules in the halls of Catholic academe, media, musical theater, you name it, is that we’re not supposed to notice who seems gay. It’s considered rude, unless the guy (it’s almost always a guy) tells you himself, and then you nod and look serious and say, “Well, thanks for trusting me with that.” It’s a bit of a downer when you discover he has that conversation with every other new girl in the joint, but never mind.

Now why, you may be asking, is this such a big old deal? What is the fun of having a Lavender Mafia (which, incidently, is Iawendowa mafia in Polish…useful for Google searching…) if you know who they all are? I mean, it was such a scream here in Edinburgh when we found out about Cardinal O’Brien. He sure had us all fooled, and no wonder, since there was a lot more obvious of a candidate for Captain Closet floating about. How we all laughed, the old minx!

One thing I will say for +O’Brien, when he went down, it was in a blaze of glory, which is to say, he got it in the neck because he did his job and fought for traditional marriage, which is to say, marriage. Apparently the tender anonymous flowers who dobbed him in to the press couldn’t stand the “hypocrisy.” Well, look, I’m not sure where the hypocrisy was, ’cause whatever it was +Keith was drunkenly slurring, it wasn’t marriage proposals.

But I digress. The reason why it would be great to know who it is who is gay, not to mention gay-and-acting-out, is so we can stop going crazy trying to figure out why the Gay Agenda is front and center at the Synod. If it turns out Marx, Danneels and the whole gang are as fruity as a nutcake, life will make sense again.

So please, fathers… bishops… boyfriends of fathers… bishops… Let us know. Call the press. Form a choir. Buy champagne. You might as well, for I suspect my compatriot , a certain Mr Coren, may be outing as many of you in his next book as possible.

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