What West Coast diocese?

Time magazine has an article on how the Church uses head-shrinkers, including some non-Catholics and others not especially sympathetic to Church teachings, to learn about prospective and current seminarians' sexuality, sexual history and other mental-health related matters.

Obviously there's dangers in using psychiatrists given the American Psychiatric Association's PC litmus tests on homosexuality, but the article is informative on how the Church does and doesn't use head-shrinkers, and in principle there can be nothing wrong with making use of secular expertise in at least some fields (to pick an uncontroversial example, a good carpenter who is Protestant is preferable to a bad one who is Catholic. Though I hear Jewish carpenters are best of all.)

But one passage in the second section caught my eye:

When a psychologist reports a candidate's describing his prior dating life as "'I didn't go with a girl, I went with a guy for three years,' that's usually a game stopper," says Monsignor Steven Rohlfs, rector at Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmetsburg, Md. But most in his position are more accepting. Plante reports that one West Coast diocese responded to rumors of Rome's new hard line by asking him to keep homosexual designation out of his final reports, for fear it would hurt gay priests' careers down the line.

Did everybody catch that? ... one West Coast diocese ... [asked the head-shrinker] to keep homosexual designation out of his final reports." I wonder what West Coast diocese that might have been. Hmmm ... there are other possibilities too numerous to allow the listing of every potential suspect.

And there's more to be disturbed about. One of the big excuses for bishop malfeasance in re The Situation was that "the expert head-shrinkers told us pedophiles could be cured." Set aside all the various ways this is not an argument even if true -- this little tidbit buried in the Time article still indicates that the dioceses are the dog and the head-shrinkers the tail in their relationship (thus giving the factual lie to the bishops' post hoc excuse).

But even beyond that, the "please don't tell us" bit also illustrates the depth of the American Church's contempt for Rome, and the way large chunks of it are essentially wedded to the homosexual agenda. If we have to do X if we know something ... don't tell us that something. In discussing The Document None of Us Have Seen, those of us skeptical of the reports it would issue a blanket ban on all homosexual men argued that it wouldn't really address the problem because AmChurch would just ignore it. I consider us vindicated.