Joseph S. O'Leary homepage

Papal Support for Gay Adoption: The Church that might have been

http://gaymystic.blogspot.com/2009/07/luciani-as-patriarch-of-venice-became.html

The Wikipedia entry on the moral theology of John Paul I still displays the following:

Sexual orientation

In 1941, he wrote a thesis, Strategy of a Strange War (currently in the Apostolic Library), in which he discussed human sexuality after observing the sexual behavior of Italian prisoners. He concluded that sexual orientation was essentially unchangeable, and that it was not uncommon for heterosexual male prisoners to engage in same-sex acts, thus illustrating a distinction between sexual behavior and sexual orientation. During his time as Patriarch of Venice he became particularly outspoken on issues of sexuality, and controversially advocated greater tolerance and acceptance in the Church for gay men and women.

LGBT adoption

He permitted the adoption of children from orphanages in his diocese by homosexual couples reasoning in a letter to a colleague, "that we have found that homosexuals will take handicapped and less than healthy and attractive children. Most importantly they will take bastards." It was his lobbying in the Italian Parliament that made it legal for single persons to adopt children in Italy, directly accepting that this would include homosexuals. In a letter to his mother he bemoaned that "There is something terribly wrong with a society that thinks one's sex is what makes one a good parent".

Gay civil unions

Before his death Pope Paul VI even permitted Luciani to address the Vatican cardinals on the possibility that the Church might encourage homosexuals to enter into long-term loving relationships. This received a poor reception, but in conclusion he stated that :

"The day is not far off when we will have to answer to these people who through the years have been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose human dignity has been offended, their identity denied and their liberty oppressed. What is more we will have to answer to the God who created them".

Wikipedia cites a source of doubtful value: Lucien Gregoire, White Light, Dark Night, London, 2007.

The Tsunami of Normalization: Roberto Benigni

Theological essays such as those of Sebastian Moore, John McNeill and James Alison represent an unstoppable tsunami of normalization in Catholic discourse on gayness:

http://sebastianmoore.blogspot.com/2007/11/irrepressible-reflection.html

http://www.soulforce.org/article/463

http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/john-mcneills-prophetic-witness-to.html

http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng52.html

http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng53.html

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/02/the-ash-wednesd.html

http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-on-lent-and-tears-of-things-andrew.html#disqus_thread

http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/lent-and-tears-of-things-meditation-on.html

It seems that we are moving out of the reactive period of gay Catholic discourse, when picking holes in the bad arguments of the Vatican was the main activity. Also the discourses of liberal (and more often pseudo-liberal) moral theology have been left behind. Instead we see the beginnings of a constructive gay theology, to which biblical scholars from D. S. Bailey to Walter Wink (or on the Catholic side Luke Timothy Johnson), historians from John Boswell to Mark Jordan, and thinkers such as those linked above as well as the late Gareth Moore, Gerard Loughlin and Marilyn McCord Adams are contributing the essential building blocks.

But now the full force of the tsunami is felt not in the quiet enclaves of theology but when an iconic figure like Roberto Benigni puts his talent at the service of human common sense:

http://dailymotion.virgilio.it/swf/x8euf6

http://www.megavideo.com/?v=SVOD9XY7

http://video.libero.it/app/play?id=8c2323f32801f77e41ac4bf62691338c Withdrawn because of RAI copyright infringement

http://patrickattard.blogspot.com/2009/02/liberovideo-roberto-benigni-su-la.html Video inaccessible

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1079043264692&ref=share Best quality video for Facebook members

http://donfrancobarbero.blogspot.com/2009/02/benigni-ha-seppellito-povia.html

http://gionata.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/per-sempre-tuo-una-lettera-damore-di-oscar-wilde/#comment-827

Easy to accuse Benigni of sentimentalism and buonismo, but he has the winning argument: that acceptance of gays and gay unions is acceptance of love.

Here are more words from the heart: http://patrickattard.blogspot.com/2009/02/youtube-dustin-lance-black-speaks-at.html

John McNeill's Open Letter to the American Bishops

An Open Letter to the American Bishops on the Issue of Homosexuality

In 1974, the delegates of Dignity’s first national convention requested in a letter, that a dialogue be opened between the American bishops and the members of the Catholic gay and lesbian community. With very few exceptions that letter was ignored.

Now, nearly thirty years later, once again I call upon the American bishops to open that dialogue.

For over thirty years, I have ministered as priest and psychotherapist to lesbians and gays. I helped found Dignity, New York to provide a safe and loving community within the Catholic Church for gay people. This June will mark the twenty-fifth year I have given retreats for lesbians and gays, at Kirkridge, an ecumenical retreat center.

I have written three books on gay spirituality: The Church and the Homosexual, Taking a Chance on God, and Freedom, Glorious Freedom. I also published an autobiography on my own spiritual journey as a gay priest. As a result of my experience, I have come to the conclusion that what is at stake at this point in time is not only the spiritual and psychological health of many gay and lesbian Catholics and other lesbian and gay Christians. What is at stake is your moral authority to teach on this issue.

In the past, when you undertook a listening process to hear what the Holy Spirit was saying through the People of God, you won our respect. We respected you when you made your statements on the economy, on nuclear warfare and, especially, your aborted effort to draw up a letter on the role of women in the Church. You listened carefully to what women had to say and, and drew up your statements responding to what you heard from women. These actions gave us gay and lesbians reason to hope that the Holy Spirit would lead you into a spirit of willingness to listen to us gay and lesbian Catholics.

What is at stake now is your own moral authority! Unless we gay and lesbian Catholics receive the message that you take us seriously and are willing to listen carefully to what the Holy Spirit is saying to you through our lives and our experience, your judgments on homosexuality will be, for the most part, ignored and you will lose what authority you have left to deserve to be listened to with respect on this issue.

I have never heard the same level of courage from the American Bishops in dealing with the Vatican as that shown by the Major Superiors of Religious Men in response to the egregious document issued by The Congregation for the Defense of the Faith, entitled, “Some Considerations Concerning Homosexual Persons” as follows:

“We view (this document) as a hindrance to the Church leaders of the United States in this most difficult and sensitive area of human living. ---We are shocked that the statement calls for discrimination against gay men and lesbian women. We find the reasoning for supporting such discrimination to be strained, unconvincing and counterproductive to our statements and actions to support the pastoral needs and personal dignity of such persons. Far from a help to the Bishops and other religious leaders in the United States Catholic Church, the statement complicates our already complex ministry to all people.

“Moreover we find the arguments used to justify discrimination based on stereotypes and falsehoods that are out of touch with modern psychological and sociological understandings of human sexuality. We regrets such actions by the CDF and we reaffirm our support for the human rights of all our brothers and sisters.”

As a gay Catholic theologian and psychotherapist, I am fully aware of the enormous destruction recent Vatican documents have caused in the psychic life of young Catholic gays, and of the violence they will provoke against all gay people. I find myself in a dilemma what kind of faith and trust can I place in a teaching authority that I see clearly acts in an unloving, hateful and destructive way toward my gay family and is more interested in defending its institutional interest than it is in truth and justice?

In the name of the thousands of gay and lesbian Catholics and other Christians to whom it has been my God-given privilege to minister, I make this statement:

At this point, the ignorance and distortion of homosexuality, the use of stereotypes and falsehoods in official Church documents, forces us who are gay Catholics to issue the institutional Church a serious warning. Your ignorance of homosexuality can no longer be excused as inculpable; it has become of necessity a deliberate and malicious ignorance. In the name of Catholic gays and lesbians everywhere, we cry out “Enough!”

Enough! Enough of your distortions of Scripture. You continue to claim that a loving homosexual act in a committed relationship is condemned in Scripture, when competent scholars are nearly unanimous in acknowledging that nowhere in Scripture is the problem of sexual acts between two gay men or lesbian women who love each other, ever dealt with, never mind condemned. You must listen to biblical scholars to find out what Scripture truly has to say about homosexual relationships.

Enough! Enough of your efforts to reduce all homosexual acts to expressions of lust, and your refusal to see them as possible expressions of a deep and genuine human love. The second group you must listen to are competent professional psychiatrists and psychotherapists from whom you can learn about the healthy and positive nature of mature gay and lesbian relationships. They will assure you that homosexual orientation is both unchosen and unchangeable and that any ministry promising to change that orientation is a fraud.

Enough! Enough of your efforts through groups like Courage and other exgay ministries to lead young gays to internalize self-hatred with the result that they are able to relate to God only as a God of fear, shame and guilt and lose all hope in a God of mercy and love. What is bad psychology has to be bad theology!

Enough! Enough again, of your efforts to foster hatred, violence, discrimination and rejection of us in the human community. We gay and lesbian Catholics pray daily that the Holy Spirit will lead you into a spirit of repentance. You must publicly accept your share of the blame for gay murders and bashing and so many suicides of young gays and ask forgiveness from God and from the gay community.

Enough, also, of driving us from the home of our mother, the Church, and attempting to deny us the fullness of human intimacy and sexual love. You frequently base that denial by an appeal to the dead letter of the “natural law.” Another group to whom you must listen are the moral theologians who, as a majority, argue that natural law is no longer an adequate basis for dealing with sexual questions. They must be dealt with within the context of interpersonal human relationships.

Above all else, you must enter into dialogue with the gay and lesbian members of the Catholic community. We are the ones living out the human experience of a gay orientation, so we alone can discern directly in our experience what God’s spirit is saying to us.

And for the first time in history you have gay and lesbian Catholic communities of worship and prayer who are seeking individually and collectively to hear what the Spirit is saying to them in their gay experience --- what experiences lead to the peace and joy of oneness with the Spirit of God and what experiences lead away from that peace and joy!

God gave you the commission of discerning the truth. But there is no mandate from Jesus Christ to “create” the truth. We pray daily that the Holy Spirit will lead you to search humbly for the truth concerning homosexuality through dialogue with your lesbian sisters and gay brothers.

The only consolation I can offer gay and lesbian Catholics in the meantime is the profound hope that the very absurdity and hateful spirit of recent Vatican documents will lead gay Catholics to refuse them and recognize the contradiction of their message and that of Jesus who never once spoke a negative word concerning homosexuals.

I work, hope and pray that lesbian and gay Catholics and other gay Christians will exercise their legitimate freedom of conscience, discerning what God is saying to them directly through their gay experience. I hope, too, that they will be able to de-fang the poisons of pathologically homophobic religion, accepting the good news that God loves them and accepts them as gays and lesbians and refusing to be caught in the vortex of self-hatred vis-à-vis a God of fear.

I believe that we are at the moment of a special “kairos” in this matter. The Holy Spirit is “doing something new.” I was recently the guest at a gay ecumenical community that established homes for adult retarded people in the city of Basel in Switzerland. The extraordinary spirit of love and compassion that permeated that community was a foretaste of what lies in the future. I believe there is a vast reservoir of human and divine love that has remained until now untapped because of prejudice and homophobia. The Spirit is calling on you to help release that vast potential of human and divine love through your action sat this national conference.

Please be assured that the actions of Soulforce and Dignity at your national conference are based in profound respect and love. We pray and hope that the same Holy Spirit who has graciously liberated us who are gay to self-respect and self-love will liberate in you, our Catholic leaders, a profound love for your gay brothers and lesbian sisters and melt away all prejudice and judgmentalism in your hearts. May you make us welcome as full members in your family in Christ.

May God bless your efforts!

Sincerely in Christ
John J. McNeill

New Catholic Thinking on Homosexuality

.

The following essay by Sebastian Moore OSB ( http://sebastianmoore.blogspot.com/2007/11/irrepressible-reflection.html ) offers a persuasive and challenging moral approach to same-sex relationships. It should be taken as a basic reference when the Church finally gets around to discussing these issues and working out a coherent approach.

(See also James Alison at http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng52.html )

.

AN IRREPRESSIBLE REFLECTION

.

The Anglican Communion appears to be in its death-throes over homosexuality. With a confidence that now astounds us, the anti-gay members are setting up large bodies of ecclesially legitimized dissent. Theologies are erected against each other.

And, all the time, inexorably, elementally, the homosexual taboo collapses. Nothing can reverse this collapse, since it is the prevailing of love and tolerance over all that bias can erect against it. Nothing can reverse this collapse, which is freeing a sizable world-wide minority from a self-hatred that society imposes and the Holy Spirit opposes. Nothing can reverse this collapse, which puts an end to needless suffering on an enormous scale. Theologies demanding the taboo must fall like a house of cards.

And with a wonderful irony, the Catholic Church, that bases its moral teaching not ultimately on scripture but on the Natural Law which expresses the best insights we have from our sciences into the good life, is in a position to ask what all the fuss is about.

Still, the effect of the collapse has further implications, as follows. The effect of the taboo, which implies the non-existence societally of gays and lesbians, is that there is no legislation for them, meaning by ‘legislation’ here simply recognized customs. Thus when the taboo collapses, they find themselves in a world without moral landmarks, with promiscuity the norm. So the collapse of the taboo requires a humane filling-in with moral norms comparable to those that are present in the straight world. These norms already exist, of course, in the gay and lesbian world, and the controlling principle is friendship and fidelity.

As the taboo ceases to exist, these norms will assume a crucial importance. And as the Catholic Church, the most sexually conservative of Christian bodies, adjusts to the collapse of the taboo, its teachers will find available a long tradition of church-blessed friendships which were not specified as sexual. The locus classicus for these is a book called ‘The Friend’, author on Google!

It goes without saying that serious gay and lesbian people do not regard promiscuity as an option. They are human beings, and humans make friends and friendship makes demands. The assumption that were the church to accept homosexuality as a valid orientation the result would be a Catholic homosexual mayhem is insulting to gays and lesbians.

The tradition of church-blessed friendships is Catholic, it belongs to the world of Christendom, and this fact is an extension of the irony pointed out earlier in this essay. The surprising richness of the Catholic tradition in the moral area that has been under the reign of the taboo, so that when the taboo loses its hold, the Catholic tradition has much to fall back on, is one of the joys of that tradition.

This needs spelling-out. One effect of the homosexual taboo, which implies the non-existence societally of gays and lesbians, is that there is no legislation for them. Thus when the taboo collapses, they find themselves in a world without moral landmarks, exposed to promiscuity in the absence of direction.

So the collapse of the taboo requires a humane filling-in with moral norms comparable to those in the straight world. These now already exist, of course, in the gay and lesbian world, and the controlling principle is friendship and fidelity.

As the taboo ceases to exist, these norms will assume a crucial importance. And as the Catholic Church, the most conservative, sexually, of Christian bodies, adjusts to the collapse of the taboo, its teachers can turn their attention to a long tradition of church-blessed friendships which were not specified as sexual but were not the less intense for that. The locus classicus for this is ‘The Friend’ by (Google please!)

It goes without saying that serious gay and lesbian people do not regard promiscuity as an option. They are human beings, and humans make friends, and friendship makes demands. The assumption that were the church to accept homosexuality as a valid orientation the result would be a homosexual mayhem is an insult to gay and lesbian people.

Now the collapse of the taboo is culturally selective. Broadly speaking, it is happening in the Christian world, in the world that has been crucially influenced by faith in Jesus, who brought us freedom and bought it for us on a cross.

Not surprisingly, it is where the taboo is collapsing that governments are instituting the so-called civil partnerships. This enactment, far from signalling a decay in public morals, shows an awareness of the moral dimension of the collapse of the taboo. And difficult as it may be to accept this, this new legislation expresses a moral maturity well in advance of the still official teaching of the church, for which homosexuality is ‘a disorder’—a teaching, incidentally, that goes against the Council of Trent on the nature of original sin and of our redemption from it, which rejects the Lutheran notion that equates original sin with ‘concupiscence’, so that you could have an inherited depraved desire, which the ‘disorder’ of homosexuality could be taken to exemplify.

In sum: Two most bewilderingly opposed moral positions on homosexuality depend on whether you are, or are not, experiencing the collapse of the taboo. Nothing is easier to understand than homophobia. It is natural where the collapse is not an established societal fact; it collapses as the taboo collapses. Dr Rowan Williams and a Latvian cardinal whose name escapes me are both Christian prelates. But the former inhabits the collapse, the latter the taboo in force, so that he can declare civil partnerships to be more insidious than Soviet Communism, whose dominance his own country endured for forty years. He said that civil partnerships expressed ‘sexual atheism.’

Some time ago, the Guardian carried a two-page map of the world, on which were shown the areas where the taboo is finished and the areas still under its control. Broadly speaking, the tolerant areas are Christian or post-Christian. Strikingly, most of Africa is intolerant, some states having the death penalty for homosexuals, whereas Capetown is tolerant; for Capetown has seen the Christian battle for civil rights versus Apartheid, associated with the noble memory of Bishop Trevor Huddleston. It is not ecumenically fashionable to point out that this coincidence of the demise of the taboo with Christian regions of humanity is not surprising if we believe that Jesus brings a fuller revelation of God than do the other avatars of humanity.

One becomes conscious of the collapse through two things that I can think of. First, having friends who are gay and lesbian. Secondly, to have done serious reading on the matter. The other day, a friend picked up, in a book fair for a pound, a book called The Homosexual in America. It was published in 1950, when the taboo was still in force. It is by a homosexual man, highly literate and creative, and it spells out the hazards to which a creative and socially engaged gay man was daily exposed. The pressure of society came on him in a variety of ways, as though the taboo, through its very anonymity, diffusing fear, could find different places exposed to blackmail. Indeed, it took a high degree of literacy to be able spell this out as our author has done. The book is introduced by Dr Albert Ellis, still going strong as the creator of the most popular therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Another piece of recommended reading is The Men with the Pink Triangle, written by a German gay man and documenting his experience as a victim of National Socialism. The pink triangle got you worse treatment in the camps than the Star of David. And when the war was ended and the horror of the camps exposed, the victims honoured, no such honouring was accorded to the gays, who had to return to the closet and continue to live under the taboo.

Currently I am trying to learn to think non-dualistically, and of course the collapse of the taboo is very sympathetic to non-dualistic thinking. James Alison is the most non-dualistic thinker I know, and people find him elusive in consequence. Now if you ask me for a recipe for dualism, I think immediately of the way I was educated sexually by the church seventy years ago. With this teaching, a person is cut in two, with a top half and a bottom half. With the coming of pubescence, the bottom half came under the jurisdiction of the church, so that by age twelve things could happen in the bottom half that, unrepented, could land you in hell for all eternity. It was a firmly held position that in the matter of sexuality there is ‘no light matter.’ The locus classicus for this is the sermon in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Who can forget the film, the sermon preached by John Gielgud, and the twitch of that nose as he said ‘and, above all, the stench!’

James Alison, who does not have to make a secret of being gay, is professionally devoted to the meta-anthropology introduced into theology by Rene Girard, and is translating this into a new catechesis for which the collapse of the homosexual taboo can be seen as only part of a total reapplication to the human condition of the freedom with which Christ has made us free. But this connection needs spelling out, and here is a suggestion.

The brilliantly simple analysis of sexual desire by Oughourlian (ref) is able to show two people passionately in love why it is that this love easily turns to hate, the reason being that desire is mimetic; in creating lovers it creates rivals. Now it is impossible to study this dynamism and not see that it applies to gays as it does to straights. Put another way, the Girardian insight into sexuality is more searching than the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ allow. As pretending to be the radical categories for sexuality, these categories are dualistic. Desire in search of understanding goes behind them. It also goes behind the dualism of love and hate, accounting for both. Does it not become clear that it is impossible to engage in this sexual analysis and continue with the taboo’s outlawing of homosexuality and the still official theological description of this condition as ‘a disorder’? Living with Girard, this position appears quaint, not to say queer!

A new, non-dualistic response to the faith that, in spite of so much, ‘believed on in the world’ (1 Tim. 3: 6), is able to ‘unbind the conscience of the homosexual’ in a way that liberates the person into the full sacramental life and discipline of the church. What does it mean to unbind the conscience of the homosexual? What is the bind? It consists in the fact that the essential goodness of sexual love between two persons, long denied or at least unstated in Catholic moral thinking, now enjoys a positive recognition. It has been a slow and painful process. As a student in Rome in the late forties, I remember the obloquy with which Dom Herbert Doms was mentioned in lectures. He had dared to praise sexual pleasure as the cement in a marriage. But that position, hilariously but accurately documented in Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven by Uta Ranke-Heinemann—the bedside reading, I discovered, of three women friends—has now surrendered, and sexual fulfillment is honoured in marriage counselling sessions. But not for homosexuals! They now hear from the church that sexual love is of God, but not for them! That is the bind. We may not refuse to think on the scale that the Spirit of Jesus is today demanding that we now think and live.

Quaestio Disputata: Luke Timothy Johnson on Homosexuality

In a very sensible essay in Commonweal – http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1957 – Luke Timothy Johnson dwells on the contradiction between what Scripture says about homosexuality (for instance, Paul’s view that same-sex desire is a punishment for idolatry) and what one can learn from contemporary experience, not only in the human and biological sciences, but in the lives of one’s relatives and friends. He has received replies from two gay Catholics committed to celibacy and to the Church’s teaching on the illicitness of sexual acts between two people of the same sex.

.

He claims that the crisis in Christian denominations over homosexuality is disproportionate, and that it distracts the Church from the countless other sexuality-related problems. ‘The relatively small set of same-sex unions gets singled out for moral condemnation, while the vast pandemic of sexual disorder goes ignored. In my view, this scapegoating of homosexuality has less to do with sex than with perceived threats to the authority of Scripture and the teaching authority of the church.’ He points out that ‘Christianity as actually practiced has never lived in precise accord with the Scriptures. War stands in tension with Jesus’ command of nonviolence, while divorce, even under another name (annulment), defies Jesus’ clear prohibition.’ The hard-line attitude to homosexuality was ‘probably held by many of us at some point until our lives and the lives of those we love made us begin to question them. So we can-and should-understand the mix of fear and anger that fuels the passionate defense of such positions. For those who hold them, something sacred is at stake. And something sacred is at stake. The authority of Scripture and of the church’s tradition is scarcely trivial. A real challenge confronts those of us who perceive God at work among all persons and in all covenanted and life-enhancing forms of sexual love.’

.

‘We must state our grounds for standing in tension with the clear commands of Scripture, and include in those grounds some basis in Scripture itself. To avoid this task is to put ourselves in the very position that others insist we already occupy-that of liberal despisers of the tradition and of the church’s sacred writings.’ ‘We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By so doing, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality-namely, that it is a vice freely chosen, a symptom of human corruption, and disobedience to God’s created order.’

.

‘Many of us who stand for the full recognition of gay and lesbian persons within the Christian communion find ourselves in a position similar to that of the early abolitionists-and of the early advocates for women’s full and equal roles in church and society. We are fully aware of the weight of scriptural evidence pointing away from our position, yet place our trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through written texts. To justify this trust, we invoke the basic Pauline principle that the Spirit gives life but the letter kills (2 Corinthians 3:6). And if the letter of Scripture cannot find room for the activity of the living God in the transformation of human lives, then trust and obedience must be paid to the living God rather than to the words of Scripture.

.

‘For me this is no theoretical or academic position, but rather a passionate conviction. It is one many of us have come to through personal struggle, and for some, real suffering. In my case, I trusted that God was at work in the life of one of my four daughters, who struggled against bigotry to claim her sexual identity as a lesbian. I trusted God was at work in the life she shares with her partner-a long-lasting and fruitful marriage dedicated to the care of others, and one that has borne fruit in a wonderful little girl who is among my and my wife’s dear grandchildren. I also trusted the many stories of students and friends whose life witnessed to a deep faith in God but whose bodies moved sexually in ways different from the way my own did. And finally I began to appreciate the ways in which my own former attitudes and language had helped to create a world where family, friends, and students were treated cruelly.’

.

‘The church cannot say “yes” to what the New Testament calls porneia (“sexual immorality”); but the church must say yes to the witness of lives that build the holiness of the church. The challenge, therefore, is to discern what constitutes the positive and negative in sexual behavior. A start would be to adapt Galatians 3:28 and state that “in Christ there is neither gay nor straight”- and on that basis, to begin to ask serious questions concerning the holiness of the church, applying the same criteria on both sides… If holiness among heterosexuals includes fidelity, chastity, modesty, and fruitfulness, we can ask whether and how the same elements are present in same-sex love…. Peter and Paul and James were open to the truth God wanted them to learn. They paid attention to human narratives-testimonies-that spoke of God at work among Gentiles in ways that not even Jewish believers in a crucified messiah could appreciate. The apostles had to be shown how the same Holy Spirit who had come upon them also came to those very unlike them, people whom they regarded as unclean by nature and evil in their practices. When shown the evidence of transformed lives, they saw and accepted what God was doing… I suggest, therefore, that the New Testament provides impressive support for our reliance on the experience of God in human lives - not in its commands, but in its narratives and in the very process by which it came into existence… The natural-law tradition is compatible with my argument that moral thinking should begin with what God discloses to us in creation… The Pharisees’ sin has come to be called “scotosis,” a deliberate and willful darkening of the mind that results from the refusal to acknowledge God’s presence and power at work in human stories. If the neglect of Scripture is a form of sin, John suggests, a blind adherence to Scripture when God is trying to show us the truth in human bodies is also a form of sin, and a far more grievous one.’

.

In the same issue of Commonweal Eve Tushnet writes: ‘We should seek to reconcile love of God and love of others whenever they appear to conflict. But we can’t simply assume that such a conflict never exists-or that, if a conflict seems to arise, God couldn’t possibly be asking us to sacrifice a human relationship…Homosexuality has become a cultural battleground for reasons that have very little to do with Catholic morality or scriptural prohibitions… Several recent studies have found that Americans are having a harder time making and keeping close personal relationships… And so we’re ready to cheer on any kind of personal connection at all, any love that lasts, since we see it much more rarely than we used to… The often vicious and violent anxiety about masculinity is one reason that the ways in which homosexuality is stigmatized in our culture look nothing like the ways we treat many other things Scripture calls vices… This isn’t how we treat the acts we really consider sinful. It’s how we treat scapegoats… If we seek to overcome any aspects of our culture that conflict with the gospel, I’m not sure why we would expect the gay liberation movement-slightly over a hundred years old, and largely Western in character-to be less culture-bound, and therefore a better guide to the countercultural aspects of the gospel, than the Catholic Church… How often have we thought that we understood our experiences, only to realize later that we had only the barest understanding of our own motives and impulses? …Johnson’s approach places far too much trust in personal experience. He views our experience as both more transparent and less fallible than it is…Scripture is weird and tangly and anything but obvious-but at least it wasn’t written by someone who shared all our desires, preferences, and cultural background… The only theological “school” or approach that has helped me understand at least parts of the church teaching on homosexuality is the theology of the body… In this approach, we look to Genesis, to the creation narratives, to discover who we truly are and how we could most perfectly relate to one another. Although marriage is the primary focus of the theology of the body, sexual difference is a recurring theme…Here, man is defined by his longing for woman, woman by her longing for man; this is the “nuptial meaning of the body.” The male becomes a man and the female a woman in their yearning for each other. Love of the other both creates and reconciles the sexes… But there are equally obvious problems with applying this Genesis model to homosexuality. I’ve never found that lesbian women were less womanly, or gay men less manly... Moreover, showing that homosexual relationships are imperfect, that they do not echo our life in Eden as well as heterosexual relationships can, might not be the same as showing that gay sex is always and everywhere wrong… The “theology of the body” approach doesn’t give any guidance on the questions currently most pressing to me: How can I express my love of women in ways consonant with church teaching; and how can I deepen my love of Christ through all the other loves in my life, including romantic love?... The coming-out story is a quintessentially American story. It is self-discovery in opposition to societal regulation. It is personal liberation-as American as “lighting out for the territory.” There are ways to tell the Christian story so that it corresponds very well to this story of self-discovery and liberation… But there are other ways of talking about Christian life-ways that focus on sacrifice, martyrdom, dying in Christ to live with him - which are perhaps less quintessentially American, and for that reason all the more necessary for us... [I think there is a false dualism here. Christian gays who have ‘come out’ in places like Nigeria or Russia have certainly not fled the Cross.] Johnson, like many writers who oppose the church’s prohibition against all homosexual acts, points to the real virtues exhibited by so many gay couples: loyalty, caretaking, and compassion…The question is whether that is enough. How could it not be? How could Christ require more?... The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants… We are tempted to believe that our love of God and our love of others won’t ever conflict. But there will be times when it does seem like God is asking us to choose. At the very least, God may require us to radically reshape our understanding of what love of another person should look like. God may ask you not to stop loving your partner but to express that love without sex… Johnson begins by saying that his position “stand[s] in tension with Scripture.” But he then seems to use human beloveds as a kind of walking Scripture in themselves, able to contradict and correct the merely paper canon… [Here Tushnet shows little understanding of Johnson’s hermeneutic; he points out that the canon is precisely not a set of paper regulations but depicts a dynamic process of spiritual discernment, of which the foremost exponents are the Prophets and Paul.] But our human experience, including our erotic experience, cannot be a replacement for the divine revelation preserved by the church… [This presupposes a very static, indeed frozen, conception of divine revelation, one contradicted by the many changes in offical Catholic moral teaching over the centuries.] I am unimpressed with the attempts to resolve the conflict by negating the teaching. And so I have to seek ways to make that teaching more intelligible. I hope this essay has suggested some ways already. Strengthen your families (and your friendships). Accept your children, loving and welcoming them, even, and perhaps especially, when you can’t approve of all of their beliefs or choices…Don’t set homosexuality apart, a specially and un-Scripturally stigmatized and identity-shaping category… [Alas, Scripture does stigmatize homosexuality, in Leviticus and in Romans 1.] [In the Catholic Church] there is a rich theology of friendship, helping me to express my love of women both sacrificially and chastely. There’s honor for both celibacy and married life, and resources for living fruitfully in either of these states. We have Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, we have saints who are possibly even crazier than I am, we have the Anima Christi and Thomas à Kempis’s rewriting of the Song of Songs as a hymn to the crucified Christ.’

.

John Heard ( http://johnheard.blogspot.com ) objects: ‘Anyone with any experience of the Vatican’s teachings on human sexuality knows that the Church speaks out frequently against adultery, divorce, pornography, masturbation and other failures at love. [In fact, the Church allows many exceptions on divorce, such as the Pauline and Petrine privileges, not to mention annulments.] Indeed, John Paul the Great’s seminal Theology of the Body – which may just turn out to be the Summa Theologiae of the next Christian millennium – deals primarily with human sexuality per se… [This remark shows a very constricted view of theology, in line with Heard’s tendency to make the teaching on homosexuality an articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae and the touchstone of orthodoxy, rather than a fairly secondary prescription.] If the Church is hard on sodomites, then she is equally hard on most teenage boys and challenges a whole army of fornicating straight men. This shows that she is against the acts, not against the individuals… The Vatican did not invent “gay marriage” so as to have a reason to torment homoactivists, rather homoactivists agitated for something that the Church in her wisdom and love saw as anti-human. [It is true that the unexpected success of the gay marriage movement has drawn intense reactions from the official Church; but there was already an intense to the first stirrings of gay liberation, in Persona Humana 1975 and Homosexualitatis Problema 1986, the latter of which teaches that the homosexual orientation is as such intrinsically disordered -- surely a formula for gay self-hatred?] Johnson and others have the cart before the horse. They also seem to have put off Christianity – with its fairly settled sources of authority – namely Scripture, Tradition and the teaching authority crystallised in the Magisterium which is exercised by the Popes and other Church leaders in keeping with the sensus fidei – for other, extra-Christian and sometimes radically Pagan moral and religious touchstones… Self-denial and mortification of the physical body will bring us closer to transcendence, prepare us for perfection. Yet Johnson and others seem to ignore these rich Christian ideas on suffering, abstinence, temperance, etc., in favour of something altogether more flabby… [Johnson did not ignore them, and as a former monk he should know more about them than Heard.] Why does Johnson think “covenanted sexuality” is better than other kinds of sexuality?... [Because the Bible tells him so!] What is good about Covenants is what God gives us that enables us to give something of ourselves to each other. [Here Heard seems to answer his own question in a way that corresponds to what Johnson says about his daughter and her covenanted partner.] “Gay marriages” which involve necessarily non-Christian or anti-Christian exhortation to sodomy or other homogenital acts are, by definition therefore, not worthy of such covenants in faith. They can never be marriages… [This begs the question, and the ‘therefore’ is a non sequitur.] It gets even wilder. Johnson then claims that “the deepest truth revealed by Scripture itself-namely, that God does create the world anew at every moment, does call into being that which is not, and does raise the dead to new and greater forms of life,” which is not what my Bible tells me… [Johnson clearly knows the Bible better than Heard; see Romans 4.17.] Does this muddled gesturing towards profundity really rival the solid Catholic idea that Scripture is all about God’s love for wretched man?... [Heard, in his usual provocative style, goes on to unload reams of abuse on Johnson, apparently completely unable to understand the rich final paragraphs of Johnson’s essay.] No Catholic ever used Paul or Moses to justify slave ownership, certainly not with the approval of the wider Church. [Alas, even Paul’s ‘I am sending you back your slave’ in Philemon was so invoked; and the Holy Office declared as late as 1866 that slavery was compatible with natural law.] … When has the Paraclete relied on Scripture-rejection to buttress orthodoxy and lead a new springtime?... [Jesus and Paul ‘fulfil’ rather than ‘abolish’ the law, but as is well known their hostile critics could only see Scripture-rejection in what they were doing.] Johnson reveals that he is not actually same sex attracted. This means that he writes… from outside the kind of experience that he asserts as the vouchsafe [sic] of his novel idea of orthodoxy. He is not in possession of the experience that would make him the prophet he posits. [In fact, Johnson refers to the experience of his daughter and of other relatives and friends. By this logic, only a slave could have become an abolitionist. Heard may be saying that experience is not the warrant of prophecy, for he mentioned that the abolitionists did not come from the deep South of the US but from the far north. But surely Johnson has then exactly the kind of experience that best equips a prophet -- empathetic identification with victims of injustice?]

.

It seems to me that Tushnet and Heard have failed to respond to the basic perception of Johnson. Significantly neither of them refers to the personal experiences he invoked. He is not setting up the authority of experience as a summary court of judgment over Scripture, but pleads for a mature interaction between Scripture and experience, such as we see enacted within the pages of Scripture itself. He points out that experience shows Scripture to be wrong on certain points, such as the etiology of homosexuality. In the same way, Scriptural attitudes to slavery or genocide have been corrected in light of experience. In each case one could dismiss the findings of the court of experience as merely modern trendiness, yet the truths that experience brought to light turned out not to be so easily dismissed. This is not relativism but its opposite.

.

He also points out that Scripture is a dynamic, self-correcting text, and that if we read Scripture integrally we are freed to follow the Spirit that gives life even if it brings us into contradiction with the surface letter. That is, far from subjecting the authority of Scipture to modern experience, he uses modern experience as a catalyst for recovering the truly liberating authority of Scripture.

.

A question raised by some bloggers – http://jintoku.blogspot.com/2007/06/revelation-and-experience.html (an excellent statement from Tobias Haller) and

http://chris.tessone.net/2007/06/19/johnson-and-tushnet-on-experience – is whether Johnson is conceding too much in claiming that development in our thinking on homosexuality puts us in contradiction with Scripture. After all, if one said ‘Many of my best friends are Cretans, and they are the most honest people I know’, one would not really be contradicting Scripture, even though on the literal plane it says ‘“Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons”. This testimony is true’ (Titus 1.12-13). Of course any writer will reflect notions circulating in his milieu, as Paul does in his conventional vice-lists, which have nothing to do with a calm and considered reflection on same-sex loving relations.

.

Nor is the Bible perfectly consistent; David’s love for Jonathan and Jonathan’s for David is glorified in the epic of 1-2 Samuel; no male-female relationship in these books comes near it. If Romans 1 is taken as portraying same-sex desire as intrinsically disordered (as in various Vatican documents since 1975), then it is hard to see how Scripture is not contradicting itself on this point. As our culture recuperates from the long night of homophobic dominance, suddenly texts whose meaning and authority seemed as plain as day recede into deserved obscurity, just like texts justifying genocide, slavery or treatment of women as chattels. Meanwhile, other texts come to the fore with new clarity, texts that speak with deep appreciation of the freedom and non-discrimination that the Gospel represents. Ironically, as one commentator in the above blogs notes, Jews are currently far better at drawing such humane wisdom from their Scriptures than Christians. Indeed fundamentalist Christians have done much to make Scripture hateful by highlighting a tiny handful of texts selected as slogans of homophobic propaganda. Our own Church has cast a deep shadow on the reception of Romans by highlighting so insistently the confused obiter dicta of Romans 1, which no doubt owe more to the rhetorical schools of the time than to observation of human nature.

.

Moral theologian Paul Surlis addresses the question of the Bible with his customary incisiveness in The Furrow, April 2007:

.

'Benedict should also listen to gay, lesbian and transgender Catholics who presumably are around 6 percent of all Catholics, as they are o the general population. He should reflect on their affirmation that sexual orientation is a discovery not a choice, an insight unknown to biblical writers two and three thousand years ago who assumed that all persons were heterosexual and only the perverse opted for homosexual relationships. This insight alone invalidates the shaky biblical structures condemning homosexuality which have much to do with taboos against non-procreative sexuality when infant mortality was high and a beleaguered Israel needed soldiers and workers for its very survival. And Benedict would be asked to ponder the fact that slavery is endorsed and even mandated far more strenuously than homosexuality is condemned in the Bible. Yet, today slavery is regarded as intrinsically evil and is everywhere condemned even if practised in places. But if such a turnaround of biblical teaching can occur in the area of slavery why may we not witness a reversal of centuries of misguided condemnations of homosexuality which is increasingly recognized as neither disordered nor sinful when consensually embraced in equal relationships?'

.

Another blog (http://markshea.blogspot.com) raves about Eve Tushnet’s saintly wisdom, but for some in the excited combox discussion Eve falls short of full orthodoxy: ‘Is she a little soft on the inclination itself? Is it perhaps that if the longing of male for female and otherwise builds us into the sexual person we are meant to be, then no matter how one tries, one will never grow into a full human person until that longing for the opposite sex (chaste as it may be and often should be) is present? No matter how chaste we are, how fortified with stoicism, that longing for the same sex will not bring us to full humnaity. If so, the Church, in saying that SSA is a disorder, is also saying that we must become “ordered”.’

.

I note that this particular site, though espousing worthy views on the Bush Administration’s attitudes to torture and war, greets a virulently homophobic article (focusing on anal warts) by Bush’s nominee for US Surgeon General as follows: ‘Doctor notes (literally) bleedin’ obvious, is shouted down by Usual Suspects’ (in the category, ‘Gay Blackshorts on the March’). The combox commentators developed this with relish: ‘Advocates of homosexual acts love to keep us in mind of the sitcoms where gays are funny with their banter about stylish clothing, Judy Garland, etc. Who would be mean to such adorable people? Start describing the reality: glory holes, men emerging from bathroom stalls, and the actual act itself, and watch them squirm because they know the truth destroys their position.’

.

The Bush nominee’s piece was rapturously received on the weblog of Ignatius Press, the publishers of Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar, under the heading ‘Cavemen were better plumbers than the Kinsey-ites’  (http://insightscoop.typepad.com).

.

Among the family traits that define the neocath community, one of the most widely distributed is strident anti-gay rhetoric. Catholic teaching has increasingly become identified with the strident right wing in the US culture wars. This in itself is a reason to take another look at this teaching and to try to establish a broader and saner platform for talking about human sexuality.

US Bishops on Ministry to Gays

There’s a memorable poem by Paul Durcan that goes something like this:

.

“At the close of their October meeting in Maynooth today,

“The Irish Bishops decreed that colour photography would henceforth be forbidden.

“‘Life’, their Lordships declared, ‘is essentially a matter of black and white.

‘Colour photography obscures this basic fact.’”

.

These lines floated into my mind as I read the US Bishops’ recent documents concerning the legitimate and illegitimate expressions of love. Any solemn expression of the teaching mission of the episcopate must have something of value in it, and indeed the bishops’ document on ministry to gays does signal a careful, responsible respect for love and for life. However, it is “fatally flawed”, as one observer has commented, by its assessment of homosexual sexual orientation itself. Apart from that, faced with the phenomenon of love between husband and wife, in one document, and between two persons of the same sex, in the other document, the bishops focus so much on possible behavior they disapprove of – contraception and homosexual relations – that they risk coming across as destructive and even cynical in their attitude to love in practice.  Now of course the Bishops’ explicit target is not love, but what neocaths call “condomistic” and “sodomitical” sexual acts. Nonetheless, in their excessive worry about the proliferation of such acts their message comes across as expressing a suspicion of love itself – that is, human sexual love between two sexual human beings.

.

Consider my friends Olivier and Marco, who having lived together for ten years, “tied the knot” in a civil ceremony in Paris this spring, or my friends John and Peter who did the same in London this September. To both couples I sent my warmest congratulations, admiring and envying their ability to create loving relationships, which have manifestly been a blessing for them and for all who know them. More and more, such joyful occasions are becoming a normal part of life, and civilized people know how to respond appropriately, just as they would to a wedding or to the birth of a child.

.

The bishops disapprove of this response. If one of these couples asked a priest for a blessing, in private, the bishops would presumably say that this request should be turned down, as collusion in evil. Their document offers no encouragement to Olivier and Marco, John and Peter, no basis for the least recognition of their love or their achievement and not even a single gracious pastoral word of respect for their freedom of conscience.

.

Refusal of recognition is a way of dehumanizing the other. It is the foundation of the abuse of children, deprived of parental love and understanding. The episcopal document can be read as implying something even worse than refusal of human recognition. It appears to be speaking words of firm condemnation – certainly that is the only part of the document that is likely to be heard, and to be trumpeted and broadcast by the neocaths. The bishops have preempted any attempt to vindicate the human qualities of these couples and their love by measuring them against a dogmatic yardstick. And the yardstick is a rather crude one, consisting in repetition of two or three mantras: homosexuality is disordered, homosexual acts are immoral, there cannot be anything like gay marriage.

.

In practice, does this not amount to a declaration of war on love?

.

One can understand the bishops’ nervousness about “gay marriage”. While it can be argued that gay couples share analogically in some of the blessings of marriage, and while laws to protect their civil liberty to spend their lives together should be welcomed, it may well be going too far, too fast, to call such unions “marriage”. In vitro fertilization of lesbian mothers by male donors is another very questionable development. Adoption by same-sex couples should be practiced only when suitable heterosexual married couples are not available. One’s conservative instincts revolt against many things that look like unwise social engineering.

.

Had the bishops opened a debate on these issues their document might have enjoyed a warm reception. As it is, the only comes from the vocal neocath minority (notably John Heard and Amy Welborn; the comments elicited by the latter on her website should give pause to bishops and priests who have cultivated this homophobic culture). Of course the more extreme Catholic fringe thinks that the bishops’ routine denunciation of homophobic violence is a sell-out (http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idarticle=6481). There is a wacky group calling itself the Catholic Medical Association who have been the most vocal in pushing the bishops into the strange psychology now advanced: http://www.bettnet.com/blog/index.php/comments/us_bishops_homosexuality_statement_fatally_flawed. It seems that the bishops takes such crank organizations seriously. Meanwhile, mainstream Catholics, psychiatrists and gay groups have panned the document, and the ordinary clergy have expressed no interest.

.

The NCR zoomed in on the fatal flaw – the incorrect account of homosexual orientation – in their editorial of Nov 24: “That science and human experience generally say otherwise is of little concern, apparently, though the bishops were clear they weren’t suggesting that homosexuals are required to change. This time, too, the bishops, while acknowledging that those with homosexual tendencies should seek supportive friendships, advise homosexuals to be quiet about their inclinations in church... It is difficult to figure out how to approach these documents. They are products of some realm so removed from the real lives of the faithful one has to wonder why any group of busy men administering a church would bother. They ignore science, human experience and the groups they attempt to characterize. The documents are not only embarrassing but insulting and degrading to those the bishops are charged to lead. The saddest thing is that the valuable insights the bishops have into the deficiencies and influences of the wider culture get buried.”

.

Jeff Mirus, who is one of the phalanx of bloggers I call neocaths, has saluted the document as “a model of Catholic clarity, a significant step forward from so many statements on so many topics which have profoundly troubled faithful Catholics over the past thirty years. Unlike the highly controversial and doctrinally weak Always Our Children statement, issued by the Administrative Committee in 1997, the 2006 guidelines provide all that is best in Catholic tradition, combining doctrinal precision and pastoral sensitivity in the context of a very clear presentation of human sexuality in the light of natural law.” Au contraire, Always Our Children was distinguished by a warm pastoral tone. The new document comes across as a cold bureaucratic exercise, even as designed to be ignored. Its authors must have felt hemmed in by Vatican pressures. A sign that the document lacks pastoral value is the fact that no gays or lesbians were consulted. A non-empirical document can hardly be praised for pastoral sensitivity. Contradictorily, the document urges pastors to listen to the experiences and needs of gay people – a contradiction arising no doubt from the fact that the document was put together by a committee.

.

The stress on doctrinal clarity or doctrinal purity in documents on sex is probably misguided. Sexuality and sexual ethics are a matter of prudence and wisdom, generosity and love – human and moral virtues, not doctrinal refinements. A priori dogmatic maps of sexuality  tend to foreclose reception of empirical information coming from the biological and human sciences and tend to make dialogue with real flesh and blood human beings impossible.

.

Here are the subtitles in the first section, entitled “General Principles”:

.

1. Respecting Human Dignity

.

Its well-meaning remarks about respecting gays notwithstanding, the document fails to respect the dignity of gays, in that it refuses to dialogue with them and seeks to muzzle their voices (for the silencing techniques, see http://astro.temple.edu/~arcc/gramick.htm). Nor is there any evidence that the bishops have sustained any serious dialogue with the parents of gays, on whom untold suffering has been inflicted by their teachings. Here is what one such parent wrote:

.

The Catholic bishops’ latest regressive statement on homosexuality is a sad commentary. It betrays unprecedented levels of institutionalized self-rejection. It is no secret to Catholics or non-Catholics that significant numbers of Catholic priests, bishops and beyond are homosexual persons. Their persistent inability to fundamentally love themselves lies at the heart of their twisted policies regarding gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) persons. But we will not allow their problem to become our problem. We Catholic families of well-adjusted, functional, out-of-the-closet GLBT adult children and grandchildren reject out of hand the bishops’ notion that any human person is automatically called to celibacy and silence by virtue of his or her sexual orientation. We know from real-life experience that homosexuality is a normal variation of the God-given gift of human sexuality. It is a gift that our adult children are called to express lovingly and responsibly. (Georgia Mueller, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Nov. 17)

.

2. The Place of Sexuality in God’s Plan

.

The thesis that homosexuality has no place in God’s plan is redolent of the heresy of Manicheanism: “they are not well in their wits to whom anything that Thou has created is displeasing” (Augustine). “Always Our Children” more wisely and humanely spoke of sexuality as a divine gift, with specific application to the sexual orientation of gays and lesbians. “The purpose of sexual desire is the draw man and woman together in the bond of marriage” say the present bishops, with the apparent implication that the psychosexual affectivity of gays and lesbians has no purpose.

.

3. Homosexual Acts Cannot Fulfill the Natural Ends of Human Sexuality

.

They have indeed no procreative purpose, but they can play a unitive role, which is one of the natural ends of human sexuality; consultation with non-self-hating gays and lesbians would have shed light on this; meanwhile, it should not be forgotten that the procreative end cannot be fulfilled by many heterosexual acts either. When the bishops report St. Paul’s notion that homosexual acts arise from idolatry – omitting to mention that he also claims that homosexual desire itself arises from idolatry – the bishops leave natural law reasoning behind and come close to biblical fundamentalism (following the regrettable lead of Persona Humana 1975, which also quotes the Pauline text).

.

4. Homosexual Inclination Is Not Itself a Sin

.

Prima facie, this statement is as offensive as saying that being black or being born Jewish is not itself a sin. To equate the entire sexuality of gays and lesbians with what in heterosexuals is disordered concupiscence, sexual desire not subordinated to love, is “about as bad as it gets” in terms of devaluing another human being. Even sublimation of sexuality in a loving relationship is not countenanced in this text. “Persons with homosexual inclinations” are cursed with an evil disposition, for which however they cannot be blamed since they did not choose it. The bishops defend church teaching against a straw-man misinterpretation, the idea that it implies that everything about gays and lesbians is disordered – no, they say, not everything, just their sexuality is disordered. That is exactly like saying that not everything about blacks is disordered, just their race. The bishops deny that there is any validity in the parallel between gays/lesbians and blacks of Jews – but fail to give any convincing evidence against it.

.

5. Therapy for Homosexual Inclinations?

.

The bishops flout mainstream psychological orthodoxy by given equal credibility to flaky and abusive movements like NARTH and the ex-gay cults; as Michael Bayly notes, the bizarre phrase “same-sex attraction disorder” is taken over from NARTH by the group “Courage”, a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous for “sufferers from SSA disorder”; and “Courage” is the only association for Catholic gays to which the US bishops have given their approval (and the group loudest in praise of the present document). See http://thewildreed.blogspot.com/2006/10/vatican-stance-on-gay-priests-signals.html.

.

It should be noted that in speaking of objective disorderedness the bishops are not remaining on a transcendental metaphysical level, but are descending to the empirical level of human psychology, as their discussion of “therapy” shows. They are in direct contradiction to majority psychological opinion not only in the USA but in all developed countries. They may subscribe to the christianist conspiracy theory that the APA’s removal of homosexuality from the list of mental disorders was in response to political lobbying and had no scientific justification. In thus pooh-poohing psychiatric orthodoxy the bishops may be charging toward a contemporary equivalent of the Galileo affair.

.

Bruce Williams OP argues that “objective disorder” refers only to homosexual concupiscence, the disordered desire for certain sexual acts; but the bishops clearly speak of the homosexual orientation as such as disordered, and contemplate the possibility of therapy not for concupiscence but for homosexuality as such.

.

The bishops speak of “persons with a homosexual inclination or tendency” – it is doubtful if any such persons exist. There are persons with a homosexual orientation in exactly the same sense as there are persons with a heterosexual orientation. There are also bisexual persons, who are often considered to be primarily of one orientation or the other. The failure of the bishops to advert to orientation (in contrast to Persona Humana) puts their discussion at a distance from the empirical realities from the start.

.

The human texture of affection and sexuality, whether hetero- or homosexual does not lend itself to this kind of bureaucratic handling. At no point does the document convincingly show insight into the lives of normal gays and lesbians.

.

6. Necessity for Training in Virtue

.

You cannot train people unless you attempt to understand them; in any case it is animals who are trained, people are educated. You cannot educate anyone if you begin by muzzling them and misinforming them.

.

7. Necessity of Friendship and Community

.

If the bishops recognized homophile friendship as a positive thing, that would be in accord with the best Catholic tradition. They do grudgingly admit this, in the most unattractive language: “A homosexual person can have an abiding relationship with another homosexual [sic] without genital sexual expression.” But the novel doctrine that homosexual orientation is objectively disordered has queered the pitch on them here.

.

8. Growth in Holiness

.

Holiness based on self-hatred and a manichean vision of sex has produced its fruits for all to see in an abusive clerical culture. Many gays and lesbians could give church preachers lessons on the meaning of human friendship; they could also give them lessons on the nature of “friendship with God.”

.

9. Cultural Obstacles

.

There are blessings as well as banes in modern culture; but a church that has given up on the prophetic task of reading the signs of the times cannot discern where the blessings lie. Scattershot denunciation of relativism, denial of objective norms and hedonism is a poor substitute for dialogue with gays and listening to their moral witness. Let it not be forgotten that bishops throughout history have been the principal agents of having gays executed or imprisoned and have never stood for their most basic human or civil rights. To fail to learn the lesson or repentance and modesty such a devastating track record implies is to invite further scandals.

.

When the bishops indulge in biblical fundamentalism, I wonder do they know their bedfellows? They should look at the responses generated by the following utterance of Rev. Oliver Thomas in “USA Today”  (http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2006/11/when_religion_l.html#23):

.

“The suffering that gay and lesbian people have endured at the hands of religion is incalculable, but they can look expectantly to the future for vindication. Scientific facts, after all, are a stubborn thing. Even our religious beliefs must finally yield to them as the church in its battle with Galileo ultimately realized. But for religion, the future might be ominous. Watching the growing conflict between medical science and religion over homosexuality is like watching a train wreck from a distance. You can see it coming for miles and sense the inevitable conclusion, but you’re powerless to stop it. The more church leaders dig in their heels, the worse it’s likely to be.”

.

The responses were, in fact, murderous, for the Bible, in fact, advocates the murder of gays. The bishops need theological advice on the hermeneutics of Scripture. Note that one cannot have serious theology without open discussion.

.

The long string of pastoral recommendations are not accompanied by an account of what the church is already actually doing. Reaction from those who have actually seen ministry to gays and lesbians in action, and are not just sketching notional possibilities in the manner of George Bush’s plans for reforming Iraq, are scathing: http://www.thetaskforce.org/media/release.cfm?releaseID=991. Practical suggestions for improvement of ongoing activities would make sense, but in reality the relation between mother church and her gay/lesbian children is now so riddled with obscurantism and double-talk that the pastoral recommendations can only be regarded as more bureaucratic posturing, like recommendations on getting Catholics to stop using artificial contraception – a matter that the laity have taken into their own hands.

.

The neocaths who are pushing bishops to issue such documents and who rave and drool over them when they are at last published should remember that the cultivation of error can have deadly effects. The Church may stand responsible for millions of deaths from the AIDS epidemic, as one of the main reasons that many people have not used condoms is the moral pressure of the encyclical Humanae Vitae combined with the objective collusion between the Church and retrograde elements in African sexual culture (as well as its explicit alliances with Muslim fundamentalism on issues of reproduction, sexual ethics and blocking of same-sex civil unions.) Now the Vatican is “thinking” about allowing the use of condoms by bona fide married couples – http://www.guardian.co.uk/pope/story/0,,1954759,00.html. Perhaps it is time for the bishops to cease obsessing about Romans 1 and start reflecting anew on Matthew 23.

.

While the present document does not honor the teaching office of the Bishops, this should not be used to discredit their worthier utterances. Here is what they say on torture:

.

“Torture violates the basic dignity of the human person that all religions hold dear. It degrades everyone involved – policy-makers, perpetrators and victims. It contradicts our nation’s most cherished ideals. Any policies that permit torture and inhumane treatment are shocking and morally intolerable. Nothing less is at stake in the torture abuse crisis than the soul of our nation. What does it signify if torture is condemned in word but allowed in deed? Let America abolish torture now – without exceptions”.

.

There is only one problem with this document – it is only 79 words long, where 79 pages are required.

.

I wonder could this constant discussion of “homosexuality” be an unconscious strategy of the churches to avoid having to face more painful matters? The last four years have inflicted terrible agony on the people of Iraq and terrible guilt on all the nations involved in the US/UK led misadventure (including Ireland and Japan). Where is the healing, illuminating, united Christian voice on this?

.

I think it is time for the leaders of all churches to lead their people in “preempting” the judgment by donning sackloth and ashes, in mourning and repentance, as in ancient Israel.

.

After the dust of this horrible affair has settled all will need the balm of forgiveness – Iraqis for Iraqis, Iraqis for their Western false friends, Palestinians for Israelis and vice versa. We need now to accept the posture of suppliants for forgiveness – forgiveness from those we have injured, those we have tortured or allowed to be tortured (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1970086,00.html), and forgiveness from the Lord. That would be an infinitely more valuable sign of Christian witness and leadership than all this wrangling about sexual ethics.

.

Joseph S. O'Leary

Mother Church and her Gay/Lesbian Children

From CEIDE 2:1 (Sept./Oct. 1998)

On January 6, 1998, Enrico Sini Luzia (67) was found dead in his Roman apartment, his skull crushed in. An aristocrat, prominent in the Vatican protocol corps, he was the latest victim in a spate of murders of gays. Arcigay, the dynamic and well-organised gay network, argued that the Vatican itself must take some responsibility for this string of crimes, as having created a climate of hatred toward gays.

Scandal struck again on January 13, when Alfredo Ormano (39), a Sicilian, inflicted fatal burns on himself in St Peter's Square, as a protest against the oppression of gay people. In a dismal response, the Vatican denied that this suicide had any reference to the Church; the dead man had failed to couch his protest in the proper bureaucratic style.

These incidents can be construed as "epiphanies" of the current relationship between the Church and her gay sons and daughters. They reveal a gulf or void where there should be a two-way relationship, a coldness where there should be love.

The objective immorality of gay sexual expression in all circumstances, along with its logical correlative, the "intrinsically disordered” character of the homosexual orientation itself, form the core of current Vatican teaching. So great has been the investment of church authority in these claims that one cannot imagine them being changed in the near future.

On no theme have Vatican documents been more strident or more forcefully backed up with practical steps: punishment of revisionist theologians and even archbishops, intervention against civic statutes favourable to gay rights, dissolution of gay Catholic organisations.

Where the human voice and the questioning intelligence have been silenced, it seems that blood has to speak instead. I am thinking not only of the blood of Italian men but of the many gay Irish teenagers who have been pushed to suicide by the failure of parents and clergy to speak a word of acceptance.

When the Vatican formulated its official apology for the Inquisition this year, the multitudes burnt as heretics and witches were duly remembered. But no mention was made of the thousands of gay people burnt directly by the Papal States down to 1750 and executed in other states with papal approval.

"Sodomites" were demonised in exactly the same style as "witches" were, and treated with equal brutality. Sixteenth century missionaries had sodomites burnt in the Philippines at the same time as they were having Jews burnt in India. But there is no evidence that this weighs on the Vatican's conscience.

Today in Afghanistan gay men are commonly "stoned", with the help of walls and bulldozers. The Vatican, which collaborates with fundamentalist Muslims on family planning issues, can scarcely condemn this, since in its own teaching it still gives prominence to the texts in Leviticus that call for such stonings.

The Catechism denounces "unjust discrimination" against gay people, but the Vatican nonetheless defends what it calls 'just discrimination". This category can justify any form of anti-gay legislation.

Thus in Nicaragua the Church is reported to be behind Mrs Chamorra's draconian new laws (8 years for "anal penetration"; 3 years for same-sex "concubinage").

A note of decency was struck by the American Bishops in October 1997 in their pastoral message to parents of gays,"Always our Children": "A shocking number of homosexual youth end up on the streets because of rejection by their families". "We call on all Christians and citizens of good will to confront their own fears about homosexuality and to curb the humour and discrimination that offends homosexual persons". "It seems appropriate to understand sexual orientation (heterosexual or homosexual) as a fundamental dimension of one's personality and to recognise its relative stability in a person". "Use the words homosexual, gay, and lesbian in honest and acceptable ways, especially from the pulpit".

The document was vigorously denounced by right-wing Catholics, and in July this year the Vatican objected that since the document was not unanimous the Bishops should have asked Vatican approval before publishing it, a procedure to be rendered mandatory by new regulations.

It is encouraging that the battle has spread beyond the tiny, easily dismissed groups of gay Catholics of 20 years ago to the upper echelons of the hierarchy.

What gays should have learned from all this, as the Jewish people had to learn, is the importance of organising (beyond the vast but fragile world of the commercial gay scene). No liberal statement emanates from church authorities without long and hard pleading from gay groups within the churches.

The forces of homophobic prejudice - as seen in the expulsion of so many gay youngsters from their homes - are ever poised to strike, and the Church has shown herself unworthy of trust as a protection against them.

Instead of being a Christlike friend to gay people, offering richer and deeper models of community, she has all too often shown herself their devilish foe.

It may well be asked how Christ could allow his Church to be involved in the judicial murder of gay people over hundreds of years. I do not know the answer to that question.

But the human mechanisms of this betrayal of the Gospel can be reconstructed. A key factor has been clerical hypocrisy. Incapable of acknowledging openly our sexuality or gayness, we turn to the homosexual men and women in our churches a face of bland incomprehension, of pretended obtuseness.

We stifle the healing words we could so easily speak, because the Moloch of clerical conformity speaks more loudly than the blood of adolescent suicides, or than the tears of those whose lives we have poisoned by our doctrines, doctrines we refuse to discuss with them or even among ourselves.

Prudent trimming, opportune disengagement, positive concurrence in the expected lie, convenient silences, reflexes of dismissal and denial, are only some of the subtle forms of the clerical vice. The role of hypocrite is a comfortable and polished one. But it has brought endless torment to faithful Catholics struggling to carry the burdens we so calmly lay on them.

No doubt it was because he foresaw this that Jesus spoke so fiercely against the well-meaning scribes and pharisees (Matthew 23). When moral teaching becomes in principle a one-way communication, when it is couched in a condemnatory tone, and marked by a phobia about face-to-face discussion with the people addressed, then we are in a "pharisaical" situation.

Church discourse on gay people is heavily reliant on dehumanising objectifications, referring constantly to "objectively disordered tendencies" or "dispositions" or "inclinations" and to "objectively immoral acts". When Vatican documents seek to give themselves an air of scientific respectability, as they tell gay people the "objective truth" about their sexual identities, they parody the jargon of old-fashioned homophobic psychoanalysts, who had never learned to listen to their "patients" or to let them speak from their own lived experience.

In these utterances there is no respect shown to the freedom and intelligence of the addressee's moral conscience. It is taken for granted that gay people have no moral insights of their own which could enrich and correct church tradition.

Any questioning is dismissed a priori as stemming from an erroneous conscience, which is seen as having no right to express itself (whatever Vatican II may have said on the matter).

Paul VI struck a pastoral tone in his birth control encyclical and in his interventions to ensure that it was not applied in a crushing manner, notably a letter to Cardinal O'Boyle stressing that "objectively immoral" actions could be "inculpable, diminished in guilt, or subjectively defensible".

The 1975 Declaration on Sexual Ethics stressed that great prudence must be exercised in judging the culpability of gay people. This was glossed by Fr Visser, one of the three authors of the Declaration. to mean that a gay person who otherwise faced severe personal or social difficulties could be encouraged to seek a stable relationship as the best solution (text in The Tablet, 30 May 1998).

Such pastoral latitude has been almost imperceptible in the aggressive interventions of recent years.

Paul VI also to some extent encouraged debate on his sexual teachings, confident that the truth would emerge through open discussion. Now, a paragraph added this year to the Code of Canon Law threatens 'just punishment" to theologians who air revisionist views on these matters, and implicitly excommunicates them.

The fact that the revisionist proposals are so tame and reasonable only makes them all the more treacherous in the Vatican's view, as it strains out every conceivable gnat.

Building on the above-mentioned pastoral liberalism, revisionists deduce that the "objective evil" of contraceptive or homosexual acts in natural law is not a positive malice (as in the case of incest) but only an ontological deficiency, a failure to fully realize the natural procreative and unitive dimensions of sexuality. They propose that loving same-sex relationships, which strive towards fidelity, can participate in, even if they could not fully express, the values of marriage – not procreation, but creativity of another kind; not the union of the sexes, but a loving union cemented by physical expression; not the sacrament of Christ's love for the Church, but a sign nonetheless of the creative presence of God's love in the world.

They interpret the homosexual orientation not as a totally negative “anomaly” (as the Vatican sees it) but as sharing in its own way the goodness of the sexual order in general. Sexuality may have a dark side, due to "original sin", but it is in its essence good. Its orientation to the values of love, creativity, and pleasure is inherently moral, and should be responsibly guided, not unreasonably thwarted.

Despite Vatican denial, we are here in presence of an open question or "quaestio disputata" in Catholic ethics. It is not going to go away. The revisionists are few in number and are not encouraged to develop their case with the requisite scholarly sophistication. But their discourse gains persuasion from the priority it gives to the gospel values of mercy, compassion, freedom, and love, over the Vatican's "morality of the sacrosanct semen" (Yves Congar).

Their discourse engages with the human situation of gay people, marked by sin and grace, and helps them find a path of responsibility and creative fidelity between sexual anarchy on the one hand and the Vatican strait-jacket on the other.

The Gospel preaches an inclusive community, where the outcast has the place of honour. The tone and content of Christian teachings on gay and lesbian sexuality should build up such community. one in which human beings can share their feelings and thoughts openly, without having to wear carefully tailored masks.

To evangelise our discourse we need first to humanise it. And perhaps to humanise it would already be to evangelise it. The prophets called not for hearts of bronze but for hearts of flesh, not for sacrifice but for mercy; they had seen enough of the ravages of inhuman law.

Jesus in turn rooted his teachings in one value only. We wait for the Church to address to her gay and lesbian sons and daughters a message reflecting that value in both tone and content, and showing, as a kind mother should, that love is a reality, not just a verbal pawn in a game of control and condemnation.

APPENDIX (CEIDE 2:3)
The above article drew an interesting response from a Northern Ireland woman. As we do not often hear gay issues discussed from a mother's perspective. I think that what she has to say is of particular value:

"My son, now 36, has been in a committed relationship for eleven years. He didn't tell us he was gay for about six years into the relationship. After the initial shock and private tears I sat and wrote to him and assured him I loved him no less and to bring his partner over from London to visit us.

“They come twice a year. I never had a doubt and was rewarded. The partner is a lovely young man, Jewish and five years younger. It's as if they can't love us enough for the acceptance; they say we will never be able to understand how much it means. The whole extended family, in-laws etc., have all accepted them.

"To see them in their flat together, and to be at the Sabbath meal in the partner's family home - lit candles, Hebrew prayers, glass of wine, the yomulkas on the male heads - was a very emotional experience for me. All I can say is that for me God is present in our lives and there is no way I can see how he is not present when my son and his friend are here.

"It upsets me that it is considered such a dreadful thing that nobody talks about it. I keep on wondering why it is never mentioned.

“I love making people grapple with it. I fee I am pitied by some. It never seems to occur to them that they could have a son that they don't know about.

“I made a decision to tell my friends and neighbours.'The truth shall set you free' is really true. I wrote to a bishop and told him in ten pages about the 'silence' of my son's growing up and the silence of Church and State as regards myself. Such a nice sympathetic letter came back.

"I read once an interesting comparison between the man born blind in John's Gospel and the gay man, invisible in society; the Pharisees (Church) have no insight into the fact that the gay person could possibly have anything to offer them about God.

“I've read a book called 'Is the homosexual my neighbour?' It was very useful as it went over all the biblical texts in a new light, which gave me a bit of courage to grapple with the Church's strictures down through the years.

“It's as though the Church says to the gay person: if you want to enter God's Kingdom you must forgo a sexual life. It seems so inhuman.

"Compassion is the word for what is absent in the Church. It is all very well condescendingly to say the homosexual person must not be discriminated against, but the Church does nothing to see that they are not discriminated against.

“I enclose a cutting from ‘The Universe’ (PRIEST WARNS OF GAY DANGER...) He dismisses the 'Gay' identity as a deceptive hope, a dead end and unworthy of human beings... ‘Homosexuals will never find the love, peace and acceptance they deserve unless they forsake godless philosophies and hedonistic lifestyles’.

"It was from the like of that that my son hoped to spare me by not revealing himself for so long. I am now in the same position as a homosexual always is, i.e. an invisible minority, listening to snide remarks, reading anti-gay data etc., feeling very isolated in the Church on Sunday, especially a male-run Church, my head bulging with thoughts and opinions, always on the receiving end of things.

“Isolated too at the mere mention of "family". Never once did anyone point out that the Nuptial Blessing's assumption about seeing one's children's children could be challenged by 'Nature' itself, and the person would then be detested as being against nature and unnatural.

"For myself the whole thing is the mystery of God, the One who can't be packaged by Canon Law or finite minds.

“I once came across a quote that went something like this: 'Those who share the Christian conviction that human life is profoundly distorted by human alienation from God, need to be especially open to the possibility that non-conforming individuals may be different because they are alert to aspects of goodness that the culture as a whole is neglecting’"'

I would like to add a few comments:

(1) My correspondent rightly deplores the conspiracy of silence which has had such an insidious undermining effect on gay people, especially in the vulnerable period of adolescence, when it is often a causative factor in suicides or suicide attempts.

(2) Same sex love is often celebrated as a vehicle of divine charity in Christian tradition, building on the insights of Plato; for example, Augustine's Confessions, Book IV, or Aelred of Rievaulx " Of Spiritual Friendship”. Why is this tradition so often hidden under a bushel?

(3) The sexual expression of such love, particularly in the context of such a faithful relationship as my correspondent describes, would be "tolerated" even if not "approved" by many moral theologians. In any case. moral theologians often point out that a much higher degree of force and certitude attaches to the basic principles of Christian morality (e.g. the primacy of love) than to the detailed applications of such principles (e.g. teachings about homosexuality or birth control); this leaves a large field open to moral reflection and to conscience.

Of course moral theologians are dogged by vigilantes who delate them to their bishops or the Vatican. One can only marvel at the patience with which they attempt to do justice to the insights of tradition while at the same time defending the individual conscience. If they sometimes fall victim to a self-censorship that leaves the faithful in the lurch. that is not surprising.

(4) My correspondent is an educated and articulate Catholic. She and her son have been able to cut through the thickets of mystification and bullying, to choose a mature and warmly human attitude to the ethical conduct of life.

Others, less privileged, have a sadder story to tell - a story of how benighted attitudes have poisoned family relationships and caused the ability to love to be squandered and misdirected.

How many of the simple faithful have been alienated, or enslaved, by peremptory and oppressive presentations of faith and morals!

(5) The riddle of silent discrimination is with the gay person from adolescence and perhaps only rarely gives rise to lucid and confident anger. The mother's outrage, when she sees from the outside the injustice of the situation, is fresher.

Recently the world has reacted with outrage to the murder of a gay student in Wyoming. Some will warn against stridency. and appeal for a more nuanced and serene approach. Gays, fearing that they will be stereotyped, may take too much heed of those warnings, complicating the issue by a self-deprecating irony or humour.

What is needed is a simple word of justice and anger, of love and acceptance. Such words are understood by all, "one touch of nature makes the whole world kin."

It should not be forgotten that homophobia is mainly based on simple ignorance, and that the best weapon against ignorance is open and clear communication.

                                                                         Joseph S. O'Leary

The Flesh and the Spirit (1984)

In the theology of the apostle Paul "Flesh" and "Spirit" refer not so much to body and soul, as to two orders of being, the one characterised by bondage, wickedness and a closed, darkened mind hostile to truth, the other by a glorious freedom, standing in righteousness and in hope-filled openness to God's future. Irish gays may be intimidated by those who harp morosely on their "sins of the flesh," and indeed may be prone to accuse themselves of mediocrity and failure. That is largely because they have internalised the criteria of human worth traditionally upheld by Irish society, in which very simple and exceptionless rules of sexual orthodoxy were automatically invoked to classify people as good or bad.

However, it is encouraging to remember that Jesus frequently pointed out that the sexually unorthodox were streets ahead of the religious and legal authorities in God's eyes. Comparing the works of the Irish gay community - the spread of honesty, tolerance, friendship and a spirit of caring - with the attitudes of those who have thrown the weight of their authority behind the law which destroyed Oscar Wilde, I think it not unlikely that it is the puritanically sexless people who are really in bondage to the flesh, while those who live their sexual lives honestly, albeit not angelically, are the ones who are more open to the spirit.

Jesus lived as the prophet of “the kingdom of God" which was to fulfil every human dream of liberation. To enter that kingdom one must be born anew, born of the Spirit. Some have defined this kingdom as "inclusive community," the intimate communion of men and women with God and with one another. Our world is clearly not that kingdom - one cannot claim that the thousands who starve on the streets in India enjoy inclusive community with those of us who live in a world of super-packed refrigerators. And the capitalist system has so conditioned us to utter selfishness that we cannot enjoy inclusive community with them either. A revolutionary transformation, involving a death and a resurrection for each of us, is what we ask for every time we pray "Thy kingdom come.” Rome knew what it was at when it persecuted the early Christians for that prayer. Wherever Christians are really trying to change the world today, they encounter persecution in the same way, and their witness calls us to a new sense of human brotherhood in resistance to the fear, greed and pride that divide people from one another and from God.

Now an inclusive community is also one that includes the whole person, and it is one in which a person is accepted in his or her sexuality. The Christian Church does not point to the kingdom when it asks of its members that they forget or conceal their sexuality, or when it tries to wrap this dimension of life up in sanitized packages. Too many Irish men are cowed by a church which makes them feel ashamed of their sexuality. In general a chronic malaise about sex is one of the chief causes of the anaemic and unreal character of the public life of the church in Ireland, its failure to mesh with the reality of people's lives and their struggle.

Fear, greed and pride are at work here, and must be resisted. If we fear one another so much that we compulsively conceal our sexuality and present a false front to our neighbour, or are unable to accept the full humanity of our neighbour: if we are so greedy for the security of our little capitalist niches – or for the success of our church – that we dare not risk giving offence by embracing undesirable people or by revealing ourselves in a light others might find undesirable: if we are so proud of our religious or national identity that we root out our own sexuality as unCatholic or unIrish; then is it any wonder that the harp and shamrock are yielding to the gun, the bottle, the syringe needle and the fast buck as the emblems of Irish life? If we lie on a grand scale in the area of sexuality, can we hope to have the honesty and radicality needed to steer the country through its present difficulties to a future of peace, integrity and economic freedom? Can our faith be a liberative force in these areas if it is associated with obscurantism, servility and mutual mistrust at a more intimate level?

The church is the community in which we unlearn fear, greed and pride, not one in which we become expert at branding one another as sinners. A church in which we are not accepted - or cannot accept ourselves - as we are. cannot transform us into kingdom-people. The Irish churches are still human all-too-human, still full of mistrust and paralysis; they need a touch of kingdom recklessness to make them truly human. They need to throw away their respectability, their possessions, their denominational hang-ups as promptly and as boldly as martyrs ancient and modern have thrown away their lives.

Each person's sexuality is one of the major factors that orient him or her to the inclusive community of the kingdom. That is a reason why everyone should have the right to understand, explore and express their sexual identity. I agree with D.H. Lawrence that most of the time the physical expression of sex is not appropriate, and that a general sexual looseness is no sign of freedom or fulfilment. But, conversely each person should be warmly and wholly alive from womb to grave, and should not be forced to hide the sexual dimensions of their vitality under a mask. If our sexuality can serve to build up a community of mutual trust, then it is spiritual; it cannot be classed with the "uncleanliness" against which St. Paul warns. If our sexuality keeps us humble, open and understanding in our dealings with one another, then it can help us to "pass from death to life" through "loving the brethren" according to the Johannine ideal. It is not at all easy to bind sex to trust, generosity and compassion rather than to suspicion, empty hedonism and unloving individualism; but that is the creative venture many Irish gays are embracing. In this venture the church has much to learn from dialogue with them, while in refusing that dialogue it may be taking yet another step away from the inclusive community this island needs so badly.

From: Out (Dublin) 1:1 (Dec. 1984-Jan. 1985)

APPENDIX (Out 12, 1986):

The "Letter on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual People" from the CDF has already been universally denounced for its pastoral insensitivity, and gay Catholics in particular have reacted with rage and grief. Theologians may discuss the letter's "arguments" sine ira et studio, but such a dispassionate response may be lacking in Christian and prophetic sensitivity to injustice. Blessed are those who mourn; blessed are those who shout and scream. One of them is the much suffering sterling Jesuit John McNeill, now to be suspended from the Jesuits for his public criticism of the document as "evil".

The claim that the letter's views "find support in the more secure findings of the natural sciences" (paragraph 2 of the text) is unsupported by any reference, Acquaintance with other texts on the subject by authors defensive of the "tradition" leads me to suspect that if references had been given, the scientific authorities in question would be found to enjoy only limited respectability. Freud's theory of universal bisexuality, Jung's glowing evaluation of homosexual sensibility, Kinsey's spectrum of sexual preference, Lorenz's observations of homosexual patterns in the animal kingdom, would probably ensure that these great names are absent from the CDF’s list of approved authors.

The upshot of these scientific researches is that homosexuality cannot be abstracted from the unbroken continuum of human sexuality, that it is part of the economy of sexuality throughout the animal kingdom, that it is an indispensable part of the very fabric of sexuality itself. Predominantly homosexual individuals indeed suffer disadvantages in regard to procreation and knowledge of the other sex; but these are compensated for by unique qualities which have their proper function. Homosexual love-relationships (coloured by an element of creative narcissism) can bring an almost preternatural degree of immediate understanding between the partners; can a man ever understand a woman, or vice versa, as radically and completely as a man can understand another man or a woman another woman in the homosexual situation?

"An overly benign interpretation was given to the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral, or even good… It is a more or less strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder" (par.3). Here homosexual affectivity is reduced to an animal urge. That homosexual feeling can be ordered to Platonic, spiritual friendship, towards the mutual love and support of a Ruth and Naomi or a David and Jonathan, is ignored. Yet these are not only well-known facts; they are also enshrined in Christian tradition, in such works as the De spiritali amicitia of Aelred of Rievaulx.

The Letter’s doctrinal innovation contradicts this noble tradition of the Church. It would make the beatification of John Henry Newman impossible, since he never apologised for the homosexual sensitivity which was the cement of his friendships. Such a doctrinal innovation, introduced by a small handful of men, who have made no effort to dialogue with the gay community, with pastors, the laity, theologians, or the human sciences, and who show evident signs of prejudice and fear, cannot in my opinion be regarded as an authentic exercise of the Church's teaching magisterium.

In Japanese and Malay culture the stigmatization of homosexual feeling from which the West has suffered has never taken root. Am I, as an occasional lecturer in moral theology, now obliged to teach people from these cultures to hate their own natural feelings? If I see two Filipino men or women holding hands, am I to rap them with a stick in the name of the CDF’s puritanical intuitions? In Western culture, too, many great achievements depend intrinsically on what the CDF dismisses as a disorder: Plato's Dialogues, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Michelangelo’s Captives, Virgil’s Eclogues, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past - the list is endless. Is the source of so much vision, insight, and beauty not something to be cherished as an irreplaceable component in the humanity of humankind? What sort of Philistinism is it that would brand Shakespeare a "poof" and Plato a"queer"?

In teaching people to hate their own sexuality, the Letter confirms a pastoral policy which has always been disastrous. How many young souls have been destroyed in the confessional? How many have been taught a masochistic self-hatred, leading to psychological oppression and confusion, schizophrenia and suicide? Can such evils occur in the Church of Christ? Ask the Jews.

The catena of biblical proof-texts in paragraph 6 proves nothing at all. The stories of Sodom and Gibeah stink of the patriarchal immorality which would “Expose a matron to avoid worse rape” as Milton put it. The Holiness Code of Leviticus is a bloodthirsty document which cannot be held up as a pattern of Christian morality. The lists of vices in Pauline writings reflect only the conventional moral wisdom of a time in which a correct understanding of homosexuality was not accessible. There is no evidence that any bibical author ever considered the moral dilemma of homosexual persons trying to find their way between a lonely celibacy, an unsatisfying promiscuity, and a responsible choice of a relationship of mutual support which may have a physical expression.

Like so many other parts of the letter, this section glosses over fundamental theological problems, in this case, the hermeneutical issue of the relevance of the concrete moral teachings found in Scripture to contemporary Christian morality. The Letter pours scorn on exegetes who make out that these texts do not constitute a condemnation of homosexuality. Such ill-educated scorn can only rebound on the heads of those who express it. Indeed, biblical fundamentalism of the crudest sort seems to be sweeping the halls of the Vatican of late. The entire Curia have turned into a bunch of born-again Christians who have deserted their old favourites, Aquinas and Augustine, for the superior charms of Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell. Thus John Paul II revels in an elaborate angelology and demonology based on the most naive and unliterary reading of Scripture; even Adam and Eve are being reinstated as historical personages! Two centuries of biblical exegetes have laboured in vain.

"When they engage in this activity they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination which is essentially self-indulgent" (par.7) The same argument once proved that all sexual activity is intrinsically sinful. The projection of a metaphysical taint on natural desires leads inevitably to Manicheanism, a denial of the goodness of God's creation. It also sows mistrust at the heart of the most basic human relations. For instance, if I see a baby boy kissing his father on the cheeks, I would be ill advised to wave a homophobic blackthorn stick. Psychologists now assure us that without some measure of parental "seduction" an infant suffers affective deprivation.

The veiled reference to AIDS in paragraph 9, in a context which implicitly reduces the entire gay rights movement to the advocation of promiscuity, ignores the fact that any sexual intercourse can transmit this disease. Thus to use it as an argument specifically against homosexual activity is illogical. The question of promiscuity is a different one. AIDS is a tremendous tragedy for the human race, and it promises to dwarf all our concerns for civil rights, gay liberation, truthfulness in church leaching; but it cannot eclipse the essential correctness of these concerns. Even if AIDS and the Church in tandem were to crush the gay cause now, it will ultimately triumph, because it has reason on its side. How sad that the Vatican's first response to AIDS is to use it as a stick to beat gays with. I wonder would a statistical breakdown of AIDS patients show a disproportionately large number of Catholics? I imagine it might, for the Church's sexual intransigence has left very many people without any sexual ethic at all and has pushed them to promiscuity in reaction.

The CDF’s willingness to use the suffering of gay people as amoral argument recalls the old arguments from the sufferings of the Jews to the falsity of Judaism. Indeed there is even the smell of a persecutory intent to the following: "When civil legislation is introduced to protect behaviour to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase"(par.10). In the Republic of Ireland this will be interpreted as support for the law making "sodomy" a crime deserving of life imprisonment. The views of the Letter have always been associated with the persecution of homosexuals, in Nazi Germany, in Marxist regimes, and in all Christian states.

It is true that Pius XII taught that "What does not correspond to truth and moral norms has objectively no right to exist, to be propagated and to act" (6th December, 1953); yet Vatican II recognized freedom of conscience as a natural human right. Nonetheless, the Letter shows no respect for the freedom of conscience of homosexual individuals or groups. Catholic groups like Dignity and New Ways Ministry are accused of materialistic motivations and of hypocrisy in their presentation of church teaching (an accusation that could be made with equal justice against the episcopal conferences who gave liberal interpretations of Humanae Vitae). This a priori judgement on the good faith of so many people they have never met reveals the CDF's unwillingness to practise respectful dialogue with those who conscientiously disagree with them. The Letter claims that these groups do not represent the vast majority of Catholic gays. Of course not, the vast majority of Catholic gays are cowed and silent, and their sexual lives are conducted under oppressed and self-hating conditions. That is the way the CDF wants it.

Another fundamental theological issue raised here is that of the role played by Vatican teaching in the individual Catholic's life. The Letter ignores the debate on this issue that has been going on among theologians in light of the reception or non-reception of Humanae Vitae. Would the CDF he feel entitled to berate in the same tones those good married couples who use contraceptives? Most theologians teach that the Church's teaching has value in formation of our conscience. But we have no absolute obligation to accept that teaching, if it fails to appear reasonable and convincing to us. Nor can the Church's moral teaching usurp the freedom and responsibility of conscience in its actual decisions. Catholics simply do not know how liberal Catholic moral theology is; and the Vatican are intent that they shall not know; hence the silencing of Charles Curran, the leading moral theologian in the English speaking world.

There is a silver lining to this cloud: the Letter's arguments are so bad that they invite their own reversal. The argument that people have "no conceivable right" to a sexual life if they are gay can be overturned exactly as Vatican II overturned the argument that false religions have no conceivable right to exist. The argument that homosexual affectivity is disordered because oriented to immoral acts can be reversed as follows: "Because homosexual affectivity is an intrinsic element in the natural order of sexuality, it shares in the goodness of that order. Like all sexuality it is oriented to love, creativity, and pleasure (cf. Augustine on the three ends of marriage: love, children and relief of concupiscence); this orientation is basically moral and should not be unreasonably thwarted. For most homosexuals the fulfilment of their natural sexual orientation will involve sexual activity. Pastoral care for them must include helping them to find an ethically responsible way of living their sexuality."