PASTORAL SENSITIVITY AND CHURCH DISCIPLINE…A CONUNDRUM FOR TODAY’S LISTENING AND SYMPATHETIC CHURCH OF THE NOW

 This morning Fox News’ Fox and Friends had a segment with the former Bruce, but now Kaitlin, Jenner. S/he is now a part time contributor to Fox News. 

I just started the seminary in 1976 following Jenner’s triumphal summer Olympics. He was quite the jock and featured in many commercials at that time and on the Wheaties cereal boxes. He was an American sports hero.

Thus, when I see him today dressed in drag and with cosmetic surgery to make him appear as female, I can’t even bring myself to look at him. Through his fault, through his fault, through his most grievous fault. It simply is unnatural and flies in the face of biology, chemistry, science, DNA and natural law, just to mention a few things that all people should support. 

But let’s play what if:

What if Bruce Jenner had been a Catholic and decided to enter the priesthood at about the same time I did and we went to the same seminary and both ordained in 1980.

What if Bruce Jenner, as a priest in good standing, once Pope Francis became pope, decided he would now play the part of a female as society now allows and looks as he does today and claims being a woman as he does today, but still claims to be a priest, which he would be?

Would the listening, poor and compromising Church of the Now feel compelled to embrace Father Kaitlin, unless he demanded that he be called Mother Jenner, and allowed to continue to minister in this Church of the Synodal Now, because of the newly acquired truths we have about fluidity of sexuality and gender in its glorious non-binary joys?

And what if Mother Jenner preferred the TLM to the modern Roman Missal and refused to celebrate the Modern Missal, which would get Mother Jenner into more hot water leading to a censure of some kind?