Priesthood or porridge?

Dcn. Greg Kandra wins the You Can’t Make This Stuff Up Award (well, today’s anyway) by alerting us to the [I don’t have a good adjective] story about a “retired” Catholic priest “marrying” his (same-sex) partner of 20 years.

Some casual googling and leafing thru scattered issues of the Official Catholic Directory confirms that Thomas Pivinski was indeed a Catholic priest (which means that sacramentally Pivinski still is a priest per c. 845 § 1) some fifteen or twenty years ago in Paterson NJ, though he might not still be a member of the clerical state (c. 290?), and that Pivinski ministers Anglican these days. Whatever exactly one is to make of that.

Now, of course, Pivinski is not married to his partner, any more than those ladies who floated down the Blue Danube back in 2002 are now priests. Women becoming priests and guys marrying other guys is not simply forbidden, it is impossible, no matter how dressed up everybody gets for the event and no matter how many laudatory news stories get written about it. In fact, guys marrying guys (or girls marrying girls) is even more impossible (if that’s possible) than women being ordained priests because the impossibility of ‘same sex marriage’ is rooted in natural law (c. 1055 § 1), and not simply in (albeit infallibly proclaimed) Church doctrine (which, yes, I know, might be rooted in natural law, but I don’t need to debate that now).

Anyway, this isn’t news to thinking Catholics. We’ve covered this ground many times before. But here’s what is new: the affront to truth that Pivinski has worked is worse than that caused by non-believers who (perhaps through no fault of their own) can’t see what’s wrong with ‘same sex marriage’, and even worse than Catholics who should be able to see what’s wrong with ‘same sex marriage’ and choose not to do so. For Pivinski is an alter Christus (regardless of whether he is still a cleric, and I agree with Dcn. Greg that Paterson should simply tell us what Pivinski’s canonical status is) which means that Pivinski received the sacrament that configures a man most closely to Christ the Great High Priest and ever-chaste Bridegroom of his Church. What could be a greater calling than that? Nothing.

Pivinski, I suggest, has traded an indescribable inheritance for porridge. Nay, not even for porridge.