bagel-sex
Rev. John Riccardo

 

Isn’t it cute when Catholic priests pretend to know nothing—nothing at all—about gay sex?

At a national conference in Plymouth, Catholic leaders spoke out Wednesday against same-gender sexual relations, claiming it’s harmful and unnatural, but added that the Catholic Church must reach out to those with same-sex attractions. At the conference, a popular Catholic priest in metro Detroit, the Rev. John Riccardo of Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in Plymouth, told about how a family member of his wrestles with how to deal with a gay child…. In his talk to fellow clergy and others, Riccardo discussed how to talk about gay issues. He said the issue comes up when he meets with young people. “This is the question which is asked by junior-high kids: Why does God hate gays?” Riccardo said. Riccardo said he responds in terms that can relate to younger folks without being too explicit. “Here’s the image that I use,” Riccardo said. He said he tells the students, what if ‘I just rip open a bagel, I take it, and I cram it in my ear. What would you say?’

He said, the kids respond: “That doesn’t go there.”

“I say, ‘Exactly.’”

Father Riccardo goes on to talk about, you guessed it, having oodles of gay friends and even some gay family members. (Of course he has gay friends: He’s a priest.) One of his own family members, a Catholic woman, has a gay daughter who’s in a gay relationship and this good Catholic woman accepts and loves her gay daughter—she even welcomes her gay daughter and her gay daughter’s gay partner into her good Catholic home. She “doesn’t exclude them,” says Father Riccardo, because that isn’t what Jesus would do. But there’s one thing this accepting Catholic mom will never accept: her gay daughter rubbing her big gay bagel against her gay partner’s big gay bagel while they’re in her home: “She tells her child, ‘When you are here, you will not sleep together [with your gay partner]… because I think that’s harmful and here are the reasons why.'” No doubt that gay kid feels very loved.

Why are anti-gay priests like Father Riccardo, “well known in the archdiocese for his speaking and charisma,” reaching out to gays and lesbians with messages of nope (you can’t put a bagel in your ear!) and hope (Jesus loves you too… but only if your ear is bagel-free?). Detroit Free Press:

Riccardo said it’s important to reach out to gays, because “if we don’t find a way to do that, then we’re going to have a ghetto and put walls around us and no one is going to come in.”

So Father Riccardo is reaching out to the gays—and tormenting gay kids in Catholic schools with tortured, carb-heavy, sex-negative metaphors—because he doesn’t want to wind up in a walled ghetto.

Riccardo probably doesn’t believe—at least I hope he doesn’t believe—that anti-gay Catholics are going to be rounded up and locked in walled ghettos. (But Catholics locked Jews in walled ghettos for centuries, so it would be poetic justice to see Father Riccardo and Bill Donohue and Brian Brown locked up in a walled ghetto.) What Riccardo fears is Catholics winding up in a metaphorical ghetto, walled off from the rest of the culture and ignored by people who’ve realized that the Catholic Church got gay sex wrong just like it got straight sex wrong. (Contraception is not a sin; anal sex—gay or straight—is nothing like shoving a bagel in your ear.) In his speech, Father Riccardo also condemned pornography and oral sex… and I’m pretty sure that straight people are laughing that off just like gay people all over the world are laughing off Father Riccardo’s anal bagels.

Complete Article HERE!