Way to go Brad - I quite agree!
Now I’ve been reading this thread for a while trying to get up the enthusiasm (and nerve) to post. However, since I was a) brought up a Catholic and b) am gay, I probably ought to say something.
When I was a kid – Catholic school, taught by nuns, Mass every Sunday – homosexuality, in fact any sort of sexuality and sex were complete non-topics. They just weren’t talked about, didn’t exist. There was no sex education at school, we had to work it out for ourselves. Message – sex is bad, sex is wrong, sex shouldn’t happen unless you are married and only then in order to procreate. Sex as recreation??? Lordy, NO! Contraception??? *faints*. That’s the background I grew up in.
I should make it plain that I no longer consider myself to be part of the Catholic Church, apart from a complete lack of enthusiasm for being religious I have some fairly serious objections to some of its teachings – primarily regarding the treatment of women and homosexuals. I left the Church long before it was brought home to me that I am gay.
I can’t say I’ve studied the Bible since I left school (where it was a compulsory subject, obviously!), but I do not agree that you can take it, or its intended meaning, at face value, UNLESS you are reading a direct copy of the original works, in the original language. Anything that is a translation is subject to the whims and prejudices of the translator(s). Translation is not an exact science, colloquial phrases do not translate directly, they are interpreted (You must have heard how Cinderella's fur slipper only became glass through a mistake in translation...). Translators may have their own axe to grind. I have read, though I’m afraid I can’t quote sources, that the original works that made up the Bible did not in fact have anything against homosexuality – that came with later teaching, prejudice and errors in translation.
To my mind much of what Catholics/Christians teach, and have taught, is in opposition to something that another religion or culture did that they didn’t like. The ancient Greeks were polytheistic, they also had no problem at all with homosexuality. For the new Christians, just getting their religion off the ground, the former is very bad– so let’s bash the Greeks, and denigrate their whole lifestyle, by making one of their common practices completely abhorrent. (We still see it today: it’s considered bad luck to wear green at a Christian wedding. Why? Because green was one of the colours associated with the pagan Goddess.)
I had a friend who, before I knew him, was in a seminary studying to be a Catholic priest. He was also gay. He was horrified by the attitudes of the other trainees towards gays, he said that he couldn’t reconcile the ‘love everyone’ teaching with the spiteful attitudes, snide remarks and giggling, though apparently the others could, and the teachers didn’t do anything to correct them, in fact they joined in. Such will be the next generation of priests, with prejudices firmly in place. My friend didn’t let on that he was gay, he also left the seminary and career that he deeply believed in.
So having rambled on, I’ll answer the original question. Yes the Catholic Church does consider homosexuality to be an abomination, though *I personally* believe its premise for doing so is flawed. Mostly though sex of any sort is such a taboo subject that most Catholics have a really hard time talking about it – so perhaps take with a pinch of salt any devout Catholic (who was brought up as one) who is prepared to open up about it
"gay" - it was originally an acronym, it should be G.A.Y. Good As You. And so we are
[mod-hat off]
The only human to really understand God would be Jesus, who IS God (at least in my belief he is). 
"Just one small aubergine..."
