For centuries now, these structures have been much preoccupied with controlling the appearance and the reality of clerical sexuality, especially homosexuality. The official words about homosexual activity are anchored in an apparatus for disciplining the facts of homosexual activity in the clergy. Whatever the original causal relations between official teachings and clerical discipline might have been, it is now certainly true that clerical discipline keeps many clergymen from speaking candidly about the possibility of changing the official teachings. It keeps some of them from even thinking about that possibility. Whenever the Vatican does change moral teachings on a controversial point, as it did 150 years ago in the case of slavery, it insists all the more loudly that nothing has changed.
Bureaucratic speech strives to maintain the illusion of unchanging control.
I use it here with a clear center, but without clear boundaries. The center comprises priests who are ordained either for a diocese or in one of the religious orders. Further out from the center are various stages on the way to the priesthood and the male members of the religious orders who do not seek ordination.