Dear Fr. Thomas,

Thank you for writing this article. Of course, the identity of the Church's priests is a very important thing: they are first and foremost servants of God. What I can't understand, then, is why sexual orientation need be an important aspect of that priestly identity: you seem to agree, insofar as a man should not be turned away from seminary based on sexual orientation.

At the same time, would the irrelevance of sexual orientation in selecting priests not also carry over into the active lives of the priests? It is perfectly irrelevant that a man is attracted sexually to this or that category of people when that man is a priest. Hence, there is no meaningful classification of "gay priests" or "straight priests", but only priests as such. What good is to announce one's "identity" as a "gay priest" if that is irrelevant to his duties as a servant of God? That only exacerbates issues through the prism of identity politics and needless sensation.