Who's the Girlie-Man Now, Monsignor?

My friend bls of The Topmost Apple recently posted some of the comments of Monsignor Tony Anatrella, psychoanalyst and consultant to the Pontifical Council on the Family, in a recent article in the newspaper L'Osservatore Romano wherein he argued against the ordination of gay men. One of Msgr. Anatrella's arguments against gay priests is that, in his view, they are not "mature in their masculine identity," and thus cannot provide a model of a "bridegroom of the church" and "spiritual father" to their flocks. (Unlike that testosterone-soaked paragon of Middle Eastern machismo Jesus of Nazareth.)

Well, of course talk like this is pretty hurtful and patronizing and offensive, and not just to gay men. And reading it made me a little growly, to say the least.

But this morning, on the way to work, ruminating over that post, a cartoon lightbulb appeared over my head. It stayed there all day, until I got home again.

I condensed several of the Monsignor's quoted remarks into a paragraph:

One must free oneself from the idea that leads one to believe that, insofar as a homosexual person respects his commitment to continence lived in chastity, there will not be problems and he can therefore be ordained a priest...a commitment in holy orders presupposes that the candidate has attained a sufficient affective and sexual maturity coherent with his masculine sexual identity...he must, in principle, be suitable for marriage and able to exercise fatherhood over his children. And it is under those mature conditions that he renounces exercising them in order to give himself to God in the priesthood.

I then fed that to the Gender Genie. Now, with the disclaimer that, according to the algorithmic hoo-doo involved in the Genie's calculations it should really be given at least a 500-word chunk of prose to analyze -- allowing for that, in the interest of fairness and all -- the Gender Genie's assessment of Msgr. Anatrella's comments is that...

He sounds like a girl.