Father Mychal Judge is listed as the first official victim of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. One of the most poignant news photos of that tragic day is that of the firefighter chaplain’s body being taken out of the ruins of the towers by soot-covered firemen. His funeral mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral was packed with the city’s firefighters, police officers, public officials, and clergy, who were devastated by his death. The fact that Judge was a gay man was not then widely known. It is now, thanks to columnist Andrew Sullivan, who is using Judge as an example of how the Vatican’s position on not ordaining gays into the priesthood is wrong.

At a recent Christmas party, I ran into Father Richard Neuhaus, editor in chief of First Things, a literary magazine comprised of religious essays. Father Neuhaus is a highly regarded theologian who has been at odds with Mr. Sullivan on the Vatican position. I had just read Mr. Sullivan’s essay in Time magazine, and I asked Father Neuhaus if he knew that Judge was gay. He said he was unaware of it until it was first mentioned on Mr. Sullivan’s Web site. He said he had spoken to a close friend of Judge who confirmed that Judge was gay but celibate.

His homosexuality should not detract one iota from Judge’s record of compassion, goodness, and kindness toward all he met. Yet, according to Mr. Sullivan’s essay, under the recent Vatican guidelines, this wonderful man would not have been allowed to become a priest. I agree with Mr. Sullivan’s conclusion, but it is obvious that he does not understand anything about church dogma.

He begins his essay titled “The Vatican’s New Stereotype,” with a truism: “The church hates only sin, not sinners.” The rest of the article is his interpretation of church teaching as he wishes it were – not its reality. After writing that Judge was “a proudly gay man,” Mr. Sullivan writes that Judge and the thousands of other gay priests, bishops, and nuns would never have been accepted into the church under the new rules Pope Benedict XVI issued earlier this month.

Then Mr. Sullivan writes: “In the past, all that mattered for a priest, as far as sexual orientation was concerned, was celibacy. If a priest kept his vows, it didn’t really matter if he were refusing to have sex with a man or with a woman. All that mattered was that he kept his vows and had sex with no one.”

That’s a pretty simplistic view of the priesthood and clearly shows that Mr. Sullivan needs to bone up on theology. There is such a thing as church teaching, and for a priest to ignore that because he does not agree with it clearly disqualifies him from that sacred office.

When I first met my dear friend Hugh in the ’60s, he had just come to my work straight from being booted out of the seminary. He had fallen in love with a fellow seminarian and was advised that he was not suited for the vocation of priesthood. There is actually nothing new about the Vatican guidelines. They have always been in effect, but after Vatican II, when the church lost so many vocations, seminaries tended to be less diligent about the screening process.

Mr. Sullivan condemned the church sex abuse scandal of 2002 on his Web site but neglected to mention that nearly 81% of the cases involved homosexual priests and adolescent victims. It is this fact that has prompted the Vatican to reassert its authority. It is not changing any of its rules, as Mr. Sullivan implies.

Mr. Sullivan reminds us of the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example of how Jesus’s message was to ignore the stereotype in order to observe the soul beneath. The Vatican’s message, he insists, is to label a class of human beings as too psychologically and morally disordered to become priests.

I just love the way some pundits adopt Jesus as their liberal icon because he ate and dwelled among the sinners, unlike those of us on the right, I imagine. What they seem to forget is that Jesus’s message to these reprobates was always, “Go and sin no more.” Unless a gay priest can counsel his gay parishioners to do what the church teaches and remain celibate, he’s not a Catholic. He’s an Episcopalian. The Catholic Church teaching has and always will be the same.

According to Judge’s biographers, he was very careful not to flaunt his homosexuality to church officials. Mr. Sullivan may consider him a “proud gay man,” but according to his close friends, Judge felt he had to constrain himself. What a pity Mr. Sullivan couldn’t respect Judge’s discretion and let him rest in peace.