The recently produced document, draws extensively from a 2005 text issued by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which states that homosexual acts as "grave sins." The document said the tradition has constantly considered them as intrinsically immoral and contrary to natural law. Consequently, under no circumstance can they be approved.

Deep-seated homosexual tendencies, which are found in several men and women, are also objectively disordered and, for those same people, often constitute a trial. In short, such persons are ineligible for the Roman Catholic priesthood.

Such persons "find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women," the text states. "One must in no way overlook the negative consequences that can derive from the ordination of persons with deep-seated homosexual tendencies."

The Catholic Church had been wrestling with sexual abuse by several its clergy as far back as 2002 when it was forced by emerging scandals to acknowledge the problem they did not volunteer to deal with the issue, they sought to cover it up. Priests were engaging in homosexual acts with young men.

At the time, it was thought to be a small handful of pedophile priests, but later it was adduced that 80 percent of the abuse was of a homosexual nature aimed at young, often fatherless males.

"That eighty-one percent of the reported victims of child abuse by Catholic clergy were boys shows that the crisis was characterized by homosexual behavior," a report stated.

The Boston Globe, reported that personnel had not screened candidates for the priesthood properly, "allowing many sexually dysfunctional and 'immature' men into seminaries; and seminaries did not adequately prepare students for the priesthood, particularly for the challenge of remaining celibate."

When it finally blew up in Boston, thanks to the media, Bernard Cardinal Law fled to Rome where he remains there to this day, rather than face prosecution.

This latest ruling by the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy explicitly restates that while homosexual tendencies are only the expression of a "transitory problem" they do not constitute an insurmountable obstacle to the priesthood, but "such tendencies must be clearly overcome at least three years before ordination to the diaconate."

Where I live in Philadelphia there are at least three former Jesuit priest couples living together who believed they could not be priests and practice homosexuality. They are all now engaged in secular work.

In stark contrast to the position held, maintained and open to much vilification by pansexualists and militant homosexualists accusing the Roman Catholic Church of homophobia even hatred, stands The Episcopal Church, which has not only openly embraced sodomy, it has gone further to embrace homoerotic priests and lesbians to the priesthood and the episcopacy forcing a crisis and split in The Episcopal Church leading to the formation of the Anglican Church in North America.

The Episcopal Church has made homoeroticism a "justice" issue, declaring at times that the Apostle Paul would not have understood homosexuality in today's climate of men and women in committed in same-sex relationships.

The Episcopal Church has failed to see, understand or explain why any sexual act outside of marriage between a man and a woman in marriage is not a sin requiring repentance. It has failed to recognize that sexuality is a creation ordinance, an ontological issue not open to change by mauling the texts to suit the proclivities of a very small section of the population. They also cannot tell us when God changed His mind after 3,200 years of OT and NT teaching that explicitly prohibits such sexual acts. To justify themselves they drew to their cause a cache of liberal intellectuals and theologically revisionist theologians like William Countryman, who espoused the "new theology" allowing The Episcopal Church to embrace a behavior that has taken the lives of some 300,000 persons.

Homosexualists and their followers will never talk about the medical consequences of their behavior even though the Atlanta-based Center for Disease Control (CCD) consistently puts out reports that it is not only HIV/AIDS but some 30 other sexually transmitted diseases that can be transmitted by engaging in anal sex. Words like "gay," "pride," "justice" and "committed same-sex marriage" couches the issue in new language designed specifically to avoid any talk of the medical consequences of such behavior. Society is supposed to foot the bill for drugs to cure disease, but anal sex must never be questioned as "disordered" or life threatening behavior.

The whole homosexual agenda has been one of the biggest public relations campaigns in modern history attempting to legitimize a life denying behavior and then seducing mainline Protestant denominations, a sitting US president, indeed a whole nation into believing that sodomy is good and right in the eyes of God. And woe unto you if you should say otherwise you will be accused of homophobia and hate.

Ironically the Roman Catholic Church is benefiting from this moral lapse with many former Episcopal Church intellectuals leaving TEC and joining the RCC because they see in the RCC a bulwark against post-modernism. That too might be misplaced as Rome faces issues of its own that will not soon be remedied. It has liberal bishops and archbishops in its own ranks with many of its more orthodox archbishops critical of the Pope over his recent paper Amoris Laetitia which raised issues of marriage, divorce, remarriage and Holy Communion. More recently a senior Catholic Archbishop said that "Christ did not die for the sins of the people". The Archbishop of Freiburg, Robert Zollitsch, known for his liberal views, publicly denied the fundamental Christian dogma of the sacrificial nature of Christ's death in a recent interview with a German television station.

The Roman Catholic Church is growing in the US largely because of immigration, much of it from Mexico and Latin America which could dry up under President Donald Trump who has threatened major deportation of Mexicans. (The archdiocese in Philadelphia has closed some 60 churches in recent years).

But the Episcopal Church's open repudiation of the biblical witness to human sexuality and its refusal to engage in evangelism and discipleship (as biblically understood) will see its inevitable demise. It is only two generations from extinction, while the ACNA grows and thrives. Two-thirds of its congregations are made up of women over 60 and they are not evangelists or disciplers.

Every diocese is in numerical decline, some greater than others. Its seminaries are failing; millennials and homosexuals are neither filling its pews, and the call of the Jesus Movement by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, which he has linked with racism and white privilege, is dead on arrival.

The Episcopal Church is reaping what it has sown in its rebellion against the moral order and in doing so it is reapiong the whirlwind. The embrace of pansexuality will bring about its ultimate demise.

END