Law affirms church doctrine to youths: Cardinal Bernard F. Law, dancing and singing with an exuberant crowd of young Boston Catholics, yesterday declared that those who believe the church's teachings on divorce, women's ordination, and other hot-button topics will change when the pope dies are mistaken [...] One woman asked Law how Catholics should live out the church's teaching that Christians should love homosexuals, but oppose homosexual acts, and whether it would be OK to attend commitment ceremonies held by gays and lesbians. ''We are called to love and accept every human being,'' he said. But he said that the church expects every unmarried person, gay or straight, to be celibate. ''Any acting out sexually outside of a marriage, which is a lasting union between a man and a woman, is not in accord with the teachings of Jesus and the church,'' he said. ''Anything else that calls itself a marriage isn't a marriage, from our perspective, so that for us to give public recognition to that in any way would be to affirm a pattern of living that is not ordained by God ... It would be inappropriate for us to be supportive of organized efforts to indicate that it really doesn't make any difference, that it's just up to personal choice.''

OooooKay. Yes. Right. Quite. Because of course a man who continually made it possible for priests to not only "act out sexually" outside of marriages, but who knowingly allowed them to do it against children, is such a believable person on this issue.

Law offered an unsolicited critique of violence toward gays and lesbians. ''We need to be very clear that we don't approve of the kind of terrible negative actions and violence against those persons who proclaim themselves to be homosexuals, and the violence of words that occurs - that's totally unacceptable, and that's against the gospel of Christ,'' he said.

Well, that was big of him, now wasn't it?

And in the meantime, they're still having ever so much fun back in the ol' Beantown:

Boston Diocese Agrees to Sex Scandal Oversight: The Archdiocese of Boston, at the epicenter of a damaging child sex scandal in the Catholic Church, will hire a full-time director to oversee how it handles allegations of sexual abuse against priests, a church appointed panel said on Tuesday. The panel, appointed earlier this year by the archdiocese's leader, Cardinal Bernard Law, said the new director would be in place by the end of August, along with a new advisory board, made up mostly of lay people, to oversee outreach to victims of priestly sexual abuse.

I would note that this is somewhat less than the article makes it appear. The director willl be supervising the same oversight review board that was fairly ineffective the first time around, since it never really got the information to work with, and was stacked with cronies. Granted, it has been reconstituted, so we'll see how effective it can be now.

But still ... there's just something odd about taking advice on sexual morality from someone who is startlingly immoral, sexually or otherwise.