From the City of Brotherly and Sisterly Love!

"What? I'm the perfect choice
to hand out advice about sax."

-Archbishop Chaput

In a move sure to bring in new converts to the religion that brought us the Inquisition and the concept of being born guilty, Philadelphia's Archbishop Charles Chaput has laid down some lay-law about who should and should not be getting to know each other in the biblical sense. Which is kinda weird since he's, you know, a seventy-year-old priest who's been celibate his entire adult life. Anyway, guess who, according to Archbishop Chaput, should not be getting it on? Go on, take a guess...Give up? It's gay people!

Try to act surprised. Yeah, despite electing Pope Francis The Hip, the Catholic Church is still not super keen on gay sex, gay marriage or gay in general. I suppose it's because of all that stuff Jesus said about gay people in the Bible.

"Let's see, the meek shall inherit the blah, blah, Love one another as I have yada yada.
Huh...that's funny, I can't seem to find the part where Jesus rags on the gays..."

-Anyone who's actually looked

Above: apparently not a good
enough reason to get a divorce.

(source: Church doctrine)

But for once we're going to talk about religion's beef with straight people having sex. Specifically divorced people and the new guidelines Archbishop Chaput put up on the Archdioceses website. I'm not totally clear on whether or not these are rules Chaput made up or if they're like, Catholic rules that nobody really pays attention to anymore. Whatever the case, the rules say that divorced people, even if they were divorced for totally good reasons like, infidelity or maybe their spouse dresses up like a clown and murders people, are never allowed to have sex again.

Never. Not unless they want to spend the rest of eternity writhing in everlasting torment and-Je-sus...that clown up there is seriously unnerving...go ahead and scroll down a little. Yeah, that's better. Anyway, here's what his guidelines say:

Well, he doesn't say what kind
of brother and sister...

"With divorced and civilly-remarried persons, Church teaching requires them to refrain from sexual intimacy. This applies even if they must (for the care of their children) continue to live under one roof. Undertaking to live as brother and sister is necessary for the divorced and civilly-remarried to receive reconciliation in the Sacrament of Penance..."

-Archbishop Chaput on the sexless 

wait for death that awaits divorcées

"Fine, we'll work it out, but years from now,
when we're both dead, if it turns out there's no
afterlife, I will fucking kill you all over again."

I...I mean, dude. Look, I don't want to tell this guy how to run his Archdiocese and in fact, I'm not super-clear on what an Archdiocese is, but holy shit. I get that Church doctrine isn't necessarily supposed to be convenient, but it's certainly open to interpretation because plenty of divorced Catholics go on to have really great sex. I mean, I assume. And telling people that their options are to suck it up and deal with a loveless, possibly murder clown-related, marriage because of one priest's insistence on a draconian interpretation of Church rules is just unreasonable.

Also, unwise from like, a collection plate perspective. I sorry to get all crass and cynical here, but as I mentioned before, you're not going to persuade a lot of people to join your Church if you're constantly telling them about how much they're going to hell and how much sex they'll never have again. 

"Do you, Angela take Don to be your lawfully wedded husband, for better or worse,
for richer or poorer, through sickness and in health, through rampant infidelity, and
murder-sprees while in clown makeup? And please, be absolutely sure about this..."