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http://video.libero.it/app/play?id=8c2323f32801f77e41ac4bf62691338c Withdrawn because of RAI copyright infringement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

Comments

[Nancy Danielson]

"that acceptance of gays and gay unions is acceptance of love."

This statement is false. Homosexual sexual acts are not unitive from the beginning. Love is not possessive nor does it serve to manipulate.

We are called to Love one another.

"Gay" is not a person, it is a word that describes how one relates sexually to a person.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

Nancy, gays are happy to be called gays, generally speaking, though many dislike the phrase 'gay people' -- for reasons that would take some figuring out. PC people assure me that one should call people what they themselves like to be called. I do not see why you want to confine gay to adjectival and not nominal usage.

That gay sexual love is possessive, manipulative and non-unitive is an outrageous claim, condemning millions of good people, lifelong loving couples, in an untenable way. Gays are people with the vocation of loving people of their own sex just as heterosexuals are people with the vocation and talent for loving people of the opposite sex. The supposition that one form of love has no value is a kind of Manicheanism. "They are not well in their wits to whom anything that Thou has created is displeasing" said Augustine, who should know.

[Nancy Danielson]

Joseph, we are ALL called to Love people in relationship. The vocation of Marriage, as you know, "is written in the very nature of Man and Woman as they came from the hand of the Creator."(CCC,no.1603) This was confirmed by Christ.(MT. 19:3-6)

To refer to anyone according to sexual desire, is to refer to someone according to lust. Christ, as you know, would never refer to anyone as "heterosexual", "homosexual", "gay", etc., because such terms do not respect the dignity of the Human Person.

We are all called to Live our Lives according to The Word of God, Love. It is Christ who defines Love.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

"Gay" is a word that describes how one relates sexually to a person, you say. Actually it has a wider meaning than that. Sexual orientation affects every dimension of one's spirit and it is present even when one is not relating sexually to any person in particular. Also the "relating sexually" can include the all-important dimension of love. So I prefer Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori's view that gayness is a vocation to love people of one's own sex.

You seem to imply that gay people are called to heterosexual marriage? How can you justify claiming such a thing???

You equate sexual desire with lust. That is a semi-Manichean view, which our Church finally disowned in the twentieth century.

Christ would never refer to anyone as heterosexual etc.? How do you make that out? The Church freely uses such terminology in its official documents, the very ones you quote as knockdown arguments! In fact your argument is aimed at erasing the reality of gay identity. Have you ever noticed the parallel between this and the old noxious rhetoric that said the salvation of the Jew lies in his losing his identity as Jew?

[Nancy Danielson]

"Sexual orientation affects every dimension of one's spirit and it is present even when one is not relating sexually to any person in particular."

The only True orientation that exists in all God's children is a spirit that is oriented towards the will of God, who is Perfect Love.

The Church refers to a "homosexual" inclination as being disordered, because an inclination towards such a sexual relationship is disordered from the beginning.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

The Bible does not say that the only True orientation is spiritual; it also praises the sexual orientation that makes man and woman one flesh; you see no problem, I am sure, with seeing this as in accord with the will of God who is perfect love.

Now the church has problems with the homosexual orientation which inclines many men and women not to marriage with someone of the opposite sex but to passionate love of members of their own sex. It has tried to present this as disordered, but its case has been greatly weakened by current anthropological and biological understanding of homosexuality, as well as by the witness of millions of gays who have formed loving unions or who have testified that "gay is good". In my judgment, the Church has lost the argument (just as it lost older arguments about Copernicus, slavery, usury and what not).

Also you falsely suggest that the Church puts the word homosexual in scare quotes and does not refer to "homosexual persons".

[Spirit of Vatican II]

I note the following from Stephen Hand, whose website seems to have gone off the deep end: '"The Catholic Church teaches that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are". This is an incoherent stance since this "orientation" is hardly genetic, it defies the teleology of the body, and feeds on perverse sexual fantasy in order to sustain itself. Man's true "orientation," without exception, is towards His Maker and His commandments, objective reality, the orientation of creation with its male-female diversity / complementarity. To reject this objective reality is to show contempt for both the world, creation, and the fact of our contingency as created beings. The homosexualist "orientation" is a counter-reality possible only apart from return to our Creator, conversion-healing in Christ, and death to the 'old' unrecreated man given to sin within ourselves (St. Paul, Rom 6).'
http://stephenhand2.blogspot.com/2008/12/pope-likens-saving-gays-to-saving.html

I wonder if the source for this lunacy is Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, whom Mr Hand admires: http://stephenhand2.blogspot.com/search/label/Cardinal%20Biffi

[Spirit of Vatican II]

In the name of defending free speech, Stephen Hand loads his site with Holocaust denial propaganda: http://stephenhand2.blogspot.com/2009/02/title-legal-charges-leveled-against.html

[Nancy Danielson]

The source of Truth regarding Man's True orientation is I AM, The Truth of Love, The Word of God Made Flesh.

We can not transform Christ, it is Christ who transforms us.

I wish you Peace in Christ.

[Rat-biter]

" acceptance of gays and gay unions is acceptance of love."

## It depends what is meant by love. As Dante points out in the Purgatorio, and explains.

Nero loved Christians - as scapegoats; & as outdoor lighting (see Tacitus, Histories 15.44).

Love is not by itself a guarantee of its own legitimacy - love of pornography is a love, but that does not mean it is a mode of Christian discipleship. The thing loved is unChristian, because it harms others.

Love is good, but can be directed to evil; what is loved, is what decides its moral character. Someone who loves your property, and proves his love of it by taking it from you by stealth & against you will, is a thief, not a lover. His love of your property won't count in his favour, but against him; yet his love is real - it's why he takes what is not his to take :)

So theft is a sin, not a mode of Christian discipleship. St. Moses the Black was a bandit before his conversion: he is not honoured as a bandit, but as a Saint & martyr who gave up his banditry.

SSA may well be a form of love: that does not mean it is Christian behaviour. It does not mean that it is not damnable. SSA may be sinful, but that does not mean gay-bashing is Christian: they are two opposing forms of sin: like avarice and extravagance.

Is homosexuality able to be Christian ? I don't know. But I do know that I'm not entirely easy with some of the arguments for the proposition.

[Rat-biter]

"I wonder if the source for this lunacy is Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, whom Mr Hand admires:
http://stephenhand2.blogspot.com/search/label/Cardinal%20Biffi"

The link doesn't work, because the weblog has been removed.

[Spirit of Vatican II]

SSA cannot be damnable -- the Church certainly has never suggested anything of the sort.

Homsexual acts are considered to be objectively immoral insofar as they constitute indulgence of sex without the openness to procreation. The argument that homosexual acts can be an expression of love in the same sense that heterosexual acts can be an expression of love -- the unitive dimension -- is the point pushed by those who seek a development of the church's doctrine on this point.

That there are gay couples who truly love one another, I think no one can question. The issue turns, then, on whether physical expression of that love can be valorized, and on what basis: as a lesser evil, a temporary pastoral compromise, a venial matter to be overlooked since "love covers a multitude of sins", or a sacred expression of love inviting comparison with the marriage act.

Many moral theologians, such as Xavier Thevenot and Oliver O'Donovan, query whether the monogamous couple model really fits most gays or is the total "solution" to their moral questions.