Originally published at crisis magazine
The term “openness” is one of those flexible notions which, like those of “public order,” “good faith,” or “proportionality,” evade the exercise of definition.
We know the important function of “standards” in legal technique. Legislators and judges deliberately use these words taken from ordinary language, the meaning of which varies according to the context and dominant ideas. They serve to establish rules of law and to identify jurisprudential solutions that escape the requirements of logical reasoning using legal concepts. They authorize them to establish and interpret the law according to a certain common sense, with a margin of flexibility that allows them to resolve the tension that a lawyer, for example, necessarily encounters when confronted with the complexity and mobility of social life.
In the spirit of openness, the Italian Bishops’ Conference recently approved, with the apparent blessing of the Roman authorities, new guidelines that stipulate that an applicant for the seminary cannot be rejected simply because he identifies as a homosexual.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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The document “La formazione dei presbiteri nelle chiese in Italia. Orientamenti e norme per i seminari” (“The formation of priests in churches in Italy.
