​Vatican perplexed by vexatious sex

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Will the Vatican ever love LBGTQUIA+ with open hearts and minds?

Christians have been hot and bothered by sex for 2,000 years and Catholic popes, cardinals, bishops, priests and nuns have been flummoxing Catholics on their knees in pews or in confessionals forevermore. Will the Vatican ever evolve to enroll all members of the human race? In early days we have the Prophet Paul stating celibacy is preferable to marriage because “it’s better to marry than to burn with lust.” Saint Jerome added color and aroma when he told young widows, “You should remain celibate for the rest of your lives rather than return to the married state like a dog to its vomit.” Now, that would influence anyone — perhaps including even a nymphomaniac or a male sex addict with 27 accusers.

Here’s how the Roman Catholic bishops and the North Dakota Catholic Conference welcome 10 percent of our population belonging to the the LBGTQUIA+ community, our friends and neighbors we are supposed to love according to Jesus Christ: HCR 1013 opposed same sex marriage, HB 1181 and 1141 controlled language about “biological sex” and all official policies, and 1144 was about the use of restrooms, showers, athletic rooms and facilities by transgender people. They are listed under “Support for Common-Sense Legislation on Sex, Gender, and Marriage” as published by North Dakota Catholic churches.

The problem is, this is the 21st century, not the 14th century burning of 32,000 heretics during the Spanish Inquisition where 300,000 people were arrested and forced to do penance. Or the 16th century, when Martin Luther said in public he was going to celebrate a friend’s wedding by having sex with his own wife. Or the 20th century, when gays were banned from the military, athletic events and same-sex marriage.

An expert on Irish Catholics asks: “Can the church evolve?”

Not so long ago, Ireland was called “the most Catholic country in the world.” Now it would be listed among the least. ‘Tis said only about two percent of Italians go to weekly Catholic mass. I depend upon my favorite Irish columnist, Fintan O’Toole, to keep me informed why the Irish finally told the Vatican’s ambassador to Ireland “to get outa Dodge” and take a lot of priests with him. In the short span of a decade or two, the Irish people, particularly those on the feminine side, have approved abortion, same-sex marriages, accepted all members of the LBGTQUIA+ community and elected a gay man president who is married to a gay male doctor. Heavens to Betsy the lesbian, what happened?!

Well, two things were important. Irish girls and married women got tired of spending lots of money going to England for an abortion. For the other reason, read about the Irish girls who got pregnant by mistake and by playing Vatican Roulette — and then got tired of working their butts off for Catholic philandering bishops and priests in the Magdalene Laundries for their sinning. And then the skeletons of 787 babies were found in a cesspool by one of the laundries. It’s enough to make one vomit, a person might say.

My man Fintan is very interested in what Pope Leo, the new American and Peruvian and Francis-like pope thinks about the homosexual community. O’Toole’s article, “Can the Church Evolve?,” in the latestNew York Review of Bookscovers the subject quite well. In 2023, Leo made this statement: “And we must not hide behind an idea of authority that no longer makes sense today.”

Is that a teaser or is he pushing on the door where the LBGTQUIA+ community lives and works? Pope Francis kept hinting, but never passed the threshold. Will pope Leo finally open the door?

Will Pope Leo pinch-hitting for Pope Francis hit three home runs?

Conservative Catholic cardinals and bishops keep throwing curveballs, knuckleballs and sliders, to use baseball terms, at liberal popes when they try to cure the millennium-old major problems of the Vatican in trying to recruit and maintain one of the world’s seven great religions in a very competitive market. The three pitches represent abortion, homosexuality and the other half — women. The subject of winning is emphasized in the famous last lines of the baseball poem “Casey at The Bat”: “Somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;/ The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, /And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout:/But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.”

Women have been a strikeout for the Vatican since Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were buddies. She was a companion in all four Gospels, was present at his tomb and (depending on sources) was the first person to see him after the resurrection. In the 13th Century, Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas called her “the apostle to the apostles.” But evidently she was not invited to the Last Supper. Therefore, Mary Magdalene was not an apostle. The Vatican has been using that excuse for years in keeping half the human race out of the pulpits of cathedrals and churches “manned” always by popes, cardinals, bishops and priests.

I’m sure it’s both amusing and maddening to some that Ruth Fitzgerald, national coordinator of the Women’s Ordination Conference based in Washington died June 15, 2025, at age 90 from cerebral arteriosclerosis, usually the cause of death of males. A devout Catholic, Ruth had been demonstrating and “preaching” for the ordination of women for many years, calling the Catholic Church and the Vatican “the last of the sexist institutions, we will not accept men telling women they can’t be priests because that’s the way God wants it. She does not!”

Ruth gained attention and worldwide notoriety by holding a candlelight protest at a place where Pope John Paul II was staying while visiting Washington in 1979. When he left in the morning, she and her compatriots yelled “Ordain Women!” The pope smiled at them and shook his head no.

She often said she had a “calling” to be a priest of the Catholic Church. When Pope John Paul issued a statement in 1994 saying the priesthood had been reserved by God for men alone, Fitzgerald, raised in an Irish-Catholic home, fought back in interviews.

“We’re being put on a stake like Saint Joan of Arc,” she said. “This is an inquisition. No doubt about it.”

Remember, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431, at age 19 for committing heresy. She was convicted by an English-friendly court. And I believe she was a transgender person during her teen years. (Much of this info came from columnist Michael Rosenwald.)

For 2,000 years, the Vatican has had an opinion about women that was summarized by George Puttenham in his 1589 essay “The Arte of English Poesie:” ‘We limit the comely parts of a woman to consist of four points, that is, to be a shrew in the kitchen, a saint in the church, an angel at the board, and an ape in bed.”

Rate of abortion has probably not changed for thousands of years

There are records going back at least 7,000 years about how Homo sapien females have aborted fetuses by jumping up and down for hours, drinking or eating from at least 100 different plants growing near or in rivers, using various tools to promote the loss of the fetus, or going to primitive “medical” facilities operated by greedy or empathetic men or women. Pope Leo already has his first strike for failing to ordain women. Will he get his second strike by continuing the banning of abortions by the Vatican?

There are Catholics who believe there is a perfect God who answers prayers. The Bible says God checks us out while in the womb. In the Book of Jeremiah, God said: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” If He does, he also approves the live birth of members of the LBGTQUIA+ community who make up 10% of the planet’s population. I would think a perfect God would create perfect babies. Yes, life begins at conception. But about 20% of the fetuses, called “unborn babies” by some, die before they take their first live breath.

As prenatal and postnatal medical care slowly becomes more available across the globe, the maternal death rate has improved from 460 per 100,000 in 1985 to 197 per 100,000 in 2023. Abortion has become an economic problem more than a religious question. The average cost of raising a child to age 18 in 2024 was $311,000. In 2025 cost increased to about $320,000.

Welcome to the real world. Pope Leo will probably get his second strike.

And then comes the third strike — homosexuality. And Leo is out.

The evidence has been overwhelming for centuries; population and genetics experts have estimated that over 100 billion Homo sapiens have lived and died since we first walked on earth. That means that roughly 10 billion members of the LBGTQUIA+ community are buried in our land where we walk — including an estimated one billion transgender people we have heard so much about lately from King Donald and his Trumplicans. (By the way: I have a name for the new White House ballroom: “Trump’s Dump.”)

I have to ask: what was “intrinsically disordered” about Alexander the Great who ruled much of the world? How about Michelangelo and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where popes were elected? Artist and engineer Leonardo DaVinci, who supervised construction of the dome on St Peter’s Cathedral? If God had checked out everybody in the womb, He must have decided that homosexuals were not “intrinsically disordered” because he also observed the birth.

Jonathan Jones has written a fascinating book about Hieronymus Bosch and his paintings filled with sexy people in the 15th and 16th century culture wars similar to what we are going through in today’s politics. Jones recognizes the role gay people played in this paragraph about the life of Michelangelo: “For, like a carnival, it turned the norms of Christianity upside down. It vindicated not just the heterosexual passion but queer desire too. Michelangelo thought he could fill the Sistine Chapel with nudes and even paint men kissing each other in the heights of the Last Judgment because he had been getting away with it all his life. When he was about 17 he painted a seething scene of mostly naked men struggling and writhing, ‘The Battle of the Centaurs.’ He later sent love poems to a young nobleman.”

If Pope Leo XIV does not get the Vatican to accept the LBGTQUIA+ community, that will be strike three and he will be called out.