Faith in the Dock | The American Spectator

A Catholic priest in Iceland is facing a potential prison sentence for upholding the Catholic Church’s moral teaching on homosexuality. According to EWTN News, the French-born Fr. Jakob Rolland caused a bit of an uproar when he was interviewed for a radio program and chose to defend the Church’s age-old moral teachings on marriage, sexuality, and the Blessed Sacrament.

When asked if those engaging in homosexual activity could receive Holy Communion, Rolland replied,

If a person has a tendency or inclination toward homosexuality, that’s not a sin. It becomes a sin when such an inclination is lived out in a sinful manner. First, one must undergo conversion, go to confession, and truly consider the possibility of changing one’s life and living in chastity in order to receive Communion.

The priest himself operates a ministry to assist those with homosexual desires and inclinations to live their lives chastely. He added, “Of course, we are there to help people.”

Now, LGBT organizations are clamoring for Rolland’s arrest, pointing to a 2023 Icelandic law criminalizing “conversion therapy.” While the priest noted that his ministry does not necessarily attempt to change an individual’s sexual desires or inclinations, but rather seeks to convert the heart and encourage and equip others to live chastely, some LGBT activists have argued that even providing support to those who struggle with unwanted homosexual inclinations could be a violation of the law. The matter has even been raised in Iceland’s Parliament.

“I must fight for the Lord,” Rolland said when confronted with the potential for criminal charges and imprisonment. “If we don’t speak up, no one does. Everyone is afraid to do so even if they disagree due to the laws and prevailing mindset here in Iceland; and because the country is so isolated, the outside world remains unaware of what is happening,” he continued. “I believe we have a duty to speak the truth and to protect children. That’s the great danger in Iceland: People are sleeping amidst a dictatorship. They don’t dare to speak out.”

What a double standard the Left maintains. Those who struggle with unwanted homosexual thoughts and desires are to be denied help and simply told, “This is who you are, deal with it.” But those who identify as transgender are afforded drugs and surgeries and every protection imaginable in order to reinforce their delusion. Then again, it may not be such a cognitively dissonant double standard after all: both are broken psyches, wounded souls, and the Left denies both the help and healing they so desperately need.

Leftism, as I’ve maintained for years, is not a mere political force; its chief aim is to be a spiritual force, a religion. Leftism is the favored instrument of Hell at the present moment in human history. Where Christianity recognizes that all men are bestowed with inherent human dignity since they were made in the image and likeness of God, leftism awards human dignity only to those who remake themselves in its own Luciferian image.

Where Christianity honors a long list of Saints who spent their lives remaking (often painfully) their own wills in the image of Christ, leftism canonizes those who follow in Lucifer’s footsteps and declare themselves to be God. But where leftism promises pleasure and delight and power and riches, Christianity offers the cross.

Ultimately, the road to Calvary is the road to healing. A  man who loathes and detests his own biological body and psyche will not find healing in horrifically mutilative genital surgeries and a lifetime playing dress-up. But if he were to take Christ as his example and tread the harsh road to Calvary, he may find death waiting, certainly — death to his own self, to his own desires, to his own self-hatred, to his own pain — but the promise of Christ means that the cross is not the end: it is rather the gateway to new life, to life everlasting. In this respect, leftism can never imitate or ape the offerings of Christ.

READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy:

The Emerald Revival: Catholicism Surges in Modern Ireland

In Defense of Mass Deportations

The Church’s Misguided Mercy