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1. Why such characteristics should be seen to be contradictory and therefore worthy of publicity is the real issue! Is it the bigoted and prejudiced expectations of some to the contrary that are the real point of this article?
   The chickens have certainly come home to roost for those Catholic homophobes who have been so quick to equate male homosexuality with pedophilia.
   Now that we are about to embark on a Royal Commission, which, among other things, is perceived in the popular imagination to be a response to widespread allegations that pedophiles are more likely than others to wear clerical garb, is it not time for us to clean up the Church by apologising to gay people for this careless slur?
   To reinforce the concerns of many Catholics, is it not also obvious that some of our Bishops have ended up with egg on their faces by so relentlessly prosecuting their case against civil unions in recent times?

   Posted By: Michael Furtado

2. You cannot be openly 'gay', i.e. a practicing homosexual and be devoutly Catholic. So I see the Faith has suffered in Sicily as well as the rest of Europe and beyond.

   Posted By: Patrick Carriveau

3. The faith in Sicily has made its accommodations with culture - as it does everywhere else - to come alive, though in many distorted and paganised ways.
   Hence its close association with a particularly feudal and seedy form of corruption, called the Mafia, which has one of the most violent histories of any secret society in Europe.
   Not only that, but it has enabled its members to export their brand of extreme graft, extortion and violence across the globe, while being tolerated for the most part by Cardinal Archbishops more concerned with the annual miraculous liquefaction of St Januarius's blood than in standing up to thugs who wouldn't think twice of mowing them down with machine guns.
   Its precisely the bleatings of anti-modernists, enjoining docility and an 'other-worldly' mode of fidelity that keep many Sicilian Catholics from growing up and participating in the modern world in ways that challenge such a distorted social order in the manner in which Christ Himself did.
   To insist instead that Signor Crocetta steps back into the closet at 61 to wrestle, as a teen-ager might, with his sexuality on a matter on which the entire body of Catholic moral opinion is manifestly divided, is not only an absurd denial of his God-given human identity but puts him on the slippery path of compromise with a manifestly more troublesome and evil social order.
   I rejoice in his self-identification as a Catholic, especially insofar as he appears to understand and plead that we are sinners all!

   Posted By: Michael Furtado

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