Jennifer Wright Knust Takes Down Argument That Bible Condemns Homosexuality

In line with my first posting this morning about our need to keep educating ourselves: I highly recommend a valuable educational resource that CNN placed online yesterday--Jennifer Wright Knust's essay about the complex, multi-faceted approach of the Jewish and Christian scriptures to issues of gender and sexuality.  I'm particularly struck by Knust's take-down of the argument one hears so often from Christians who claim they are struggling with love and tolerance for their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters: the argument that, well, the bible does, after all, condemn homosexuality and define it as a sin.

This argument is right at the center of the refusal of Catholic centrists to support gay and lesbian persons in their struggle for human rights, and right at the center of the refusal of the intellectual elite of Catholic centrists even to engage their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in dialogue.  Even to see us in the room . . . .

If you've made the assumption that the scriptures do univocally condemn homosexuality and have a clear, unequivocal position on matters of gender and sexuality (one that supports Catholic magisterial teaching), I highly recommend that you work your way through Knust's essay.  The essay just might open your eyes.

Mourning Reynolds Price, "Outlaw" Christian

Carolyn Disco asks a significant question, as bloggers at the America site mourn Reynolds Price: she asks,

I can't help but ask: And the church characterizes him as 'intrinsically disordered?'

And blogger David Power replies,

His sexuality but not him Carolyn. 

I wonder what those folks who keep defending the language of intrinsic disorder when it's applied to someone other than themselves would say if someone told them that their "sexuality" is disordered.  But that naming their "sexuality" as disordered is not calling them disordered--in their nature.  In their personhood.

As if "sexuality" is some garment we can easily take off to uncover the person beneath it.  As if our sexuality is not intrinsic to our personhood and our human nature.

It's always easy to tag someone else as inferior, defective, subhuman, and so forth.  But perhaps much harder to accept that stigmatization when the ones being tagged are ourselves.

And if one of the biggest challenges of a moral education is to prod people to begin thinking about what their life experiences would be like if they lived in the skin of someone else--especially someone demonized and relegated to the margins--then I wonder how we'd grade the performance of the Catholic church and its institutions at this point in history, when it comes to educating folks morally.

Reynolds Price probes these questions in moving autobiographical meditations on his struggle with faith and his encounter with Christ.  But, of course, he does so as a disordered person someone whose "sexuality" was disordered, and so readers who are not intrinsically disordered will perhaps need to be forewarned that his reflections arise out of the experience of disorder and may not have much to offer those who are ordered.  Price's powerful meditations on his experience of God arise from years of struggle to find a place in the world for his gifts and love, and to cling to faith when the church that exercised such formative influence on his life had no tongue to condemn racial oppression, indifference to the poor, and cruelty towards those who are "disordered," as Price famously noted in his description of himself as an "outlaw Christian."

Outlawed by many churches, despite his spiritual depth, precisely because his "sexuality"--and, it goes without saying, he himself--were considered disordered.

"The Question of Love Itself Still Stays Unresolved": Tatamkhulu Afrika on the Love Between Men

I spent new year's eve in flight across the Atlantic reading Tatamkhulu Afrika's novel Bitter Eden (London: Arcadia, 2002), which I had spotted in a London bookstore.  At first, I had to work to appreciate the novel, which is written from an allusive first-person perspective that didn't grab me immediately.  I'm glad, however, that I persisted, since this is a story that gets under the skin.  I continue thinking about it now that I've finished the book, and want to share a few thoughts here.

Afrika's novel explores a by now well-known phenomenon: men ("straight" ones)  falling in love under the out-of-the-ordinary conditions of war and prisoner of war camps.  In this case, the plot involves two soldiers held in prisoner of war camps in Italy and subsequently Germany (they're shifted to Germany after Italy falls to the Allies)--a South African and an English soldier.  Afrika himself was a South African born in Egypt to an Arabian father and a Turkish mother, and he spent three years as a POW in Italy and Germany.

In some respects, the plot is conventional: it shows the two men bonding at a deep level under the extreme conditions of the camps, gradually becoming aware of the homoerotic current running through the bonds of affection they share,  even as they deny that current and engage in various violent diversionary measures to suppress and divert attention from it.  Save for one quasi-accidental physical encounter, the sexual dimension of their relationship is never consummated, though its psychological ramifications are explored in the imaginations of both soldiers.  Ironically so, since they are well aware that many of their fellow prisoners who are, in fact, unquestionably straight men are having sex with each other on a routine basis in the POW camp . . . .

A conventional framework for understanding these kinds of relationships is to view them as manifestations of situational homosexuality, in which men who would otherwise be straight fall into gay affections and gay relationships out of necessity in confinement or in extraordinarily stressful circumstances.  According to the narrative line of that conventional framework, men resume their normal lives and normative heterosexuality once the stressful conditions or confinement that has provoked the situational homosexuality has been overcome.

That's not what happens in Bitter Eden, however.  Instead, the novel's protagonists Tom and Danny find that the bond that has held them together in the concentration camps, and which has, in fact, kept them both alive, is far more intractable and meaningful than the term "situational homosexuality" suggests.  They have fallen in love, and that love perdures throughout the rest of their lives, despite the fact that Danny had been married prior to joining the army (his wife leaves him during the war), and that Tom marries following the war.  Their love is the sole grand passion that links them ineluctably for the rest of their lives and gives their lives meaning--though they never see each other again after Tom is repatriated back to South Africa when the war ends.

It's on this point that Bitter Eden is particularly psychologically acute.  As Tom discovers that he is falling for Danny, he seeks to distance himself from what he actually feels, from what he knows, in his heart of hearts, is happening to him.  He seeks to deny that he is falling in love, even as he recognizes that love is precisely the name of the problem that causes him to employ the psychological mechanisms of distanciation that seek to disguise the nature of his real quandary, even (or especially) to himself:

Sometimes I try to face up to the amorphous beast of how I feel, lend it shape, substance, of which I can ask questions, have hope of a reply.  Already my mind, recalcitrant rebel that it is, has framed such unspeakable questions as, 'Am I one of them?  Am I in love with a man?'  But I beat these questions back with the desperateness of one under siege, then with a deliberate crudeness dwell on the mechanics of sex between males.  'Comes out all covered with shit!' I think and shudder with a quite genuine disgust, yet am none the less still uncomfortably aware that the question of love itself still stays unresolved, is being linked by me to the sexual act in the simplistic and grubby-minded manner of adolescents in order that I may frighten myself back into the cosy straitjacket into which I was born and raised (p. 95).

"Yet [I] am none the less still uncomfortably aware that the question of love itself still stays unresolved": there's the nub of the problem confronting everyone who wants to convince the rest of the world that the "cosy straitjacket" of gender stereotypes and heterosexist orthodoxies into which we are born and raised is the only possible, the only imaginable, paradigm for all of our lives.  There's the question of love, which stays unresolved with stubborn determination over and over again, no matter what psychological games we play in order to pretend it's not there and that gay people do not and cannot love.

Because people of the same sex clearly do fall in love, and will risk almost anything to maintain that love and to build their lives around it, even when doing so exposes them to tremendous hardship, expulsion from family, credal community, society, etc.  Love is the intractable, undeniable, inconvenient problem of all those--notably, today, people of faith--who want to reduce gay human beings and gay relationships to crude adolescent fantasies of dirty sex. 

If Afrika is on the right track with this analysis, the psychological mechanism underlying this adolescent need, which dominates the imagination of so many people of faith today, is a mechanism that reveals the desperate need of people of faith to deny the love that clearly exists among gay human beings throughout the world--a love that exists everywhere gay people are to be found, even in societies that savagely repress homosexuality; a love that has existed in all cultures throughout history, despite draconian strictures and penalties designed to force that love to deny itself and to pretend that it does not exist.

It is love that is the problem--curiously so, for people of faith who profess love as their central value.  And so the desperate, dishonest, and crude tactic of speaking continuously--as influential spokespersons of the "Christian" right do constantly today in the U.S.--of dirty, dangerous anal sex between gay men.  Love, gay love, love between two men or two women, is the problem: it is evidently what many of these "Christians" can imagine very well, and what they must therefore invent psychological mechanisms of distanciation to avoid recognizing, perhaps in their own hearts.

And so this is the ideal that those "Christians" hold up to society as an alternative to gay love, in order to permit us to continue in our "cosy straitjackets": as the novel ends and Tom copes with news he has received of Danny's death at the opening of the narrative, he looks at his sleeping wife and thinks,

Then I am looking down at the sleeping Carina, the pallid, formal doll that I decreasingly, dutifully, seed, and I am wanting to be back in the bitter Eden, my hands beating on the postern of its skewed parameters, my heart calling out to the echoing emptiness beyond (p. 233). 

Tom's conventional marriage, his heterosexuality, revolves around an essentially loveless but dutiful "seeding" of his unfortunate wife (who is clearly aware that her husband is unable to love her as she needs to be loved), while his heart yearns for the forbidden fruit of the bitter Eden of the concentration camp, in which he experienced a happiness with his mate Danny that he has never been able to experience with his wife Carina.  These are the kind of loveless marriages to which the orthodoxy of many faith communities wants to consign those who are gay and lesbian, and anyone unfortunate enough to contract marriage with gay and lesbian human beings so propelled by self-denial that they are willing to engage in this sham.  So that the straitjackets can remain firmly in place . . . . 

As I say, there may not be much that is strikingly new in this perspective, or in the discovery that men serving in the military together often fall in love, and that this love becomes the sole and most powerful center of their lives after their service is ended.  But there is brilliant psychological acuity in this novel's telling of a rather conventional story--an acuity reinforced by the first-person narrative framework, with its lengthy flashback to Tom's war experiences.

There's one other thing that seems to me particularly noteworthy about this novel: by the time Afrika wrote it (he was eighty at the time, and died shortly after the novel's publication when a car ran him down), he had become a Muslim.  This insightful analysis of gay love was written by a person of Islamic faith, at a point in history in which Islam has become one of the primary religious vehicles of anti-gay sentiment around the world.

Novels such as this--or Tariq Ali's Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, which also contains valuable reminders of the strong and now suppressed tradition of celebration of homoerotic love in Islamic cultures represented most notably by Rumi's love for Shams--are important correctives of a fiercely destructive current in contemporary Islam that is every bit as reactionary as its counterpart in Christianity, currents that seek to eradicate all reminders of the strong alternative traditions in both religions, which have historically recognized that people of the same sex do, in fact, fall in love with each other.

And that love is good and to be nurtured, wherever it happens.  Despite the need of those who do not want to live outside their comfortable straitjackets to keep the rest of us in those same straitjackets to assure the comfort of people of faith who do not wish to come of age psychologically or spiritually.

Lutheran Bishop of Bavaria on the Curious Preoccupation with Homosexuality in Church Circles

I'm intrigued by one line, in particular, in this Huffington Post story about the decision of the Lutheran church in Bavaria to permit clergy in partnered gay unions to live with their partners in rectories.  This is the observation of the presiding bishop of Bavaria's Lutheran church, Johannes Friedrich, that while society itself has moved in the direction of understanding and affirming those who are gay, "church circles" remain more intransigent on these issues.

Bishop Friedrich is right.  Some of my partner Steve's roots lie in Bavaria, in the same staunchly Catholic region of the Oberpfalz from which the current pope comes.  We've visited his cousins there, and they've visited us and his family in Minnesota.  We had a call from some of those cousins this past weekend, in fact.

And though they live in a small village in a deeply (and exclusively) Catholic area of Germany, they don't have a homophobic bone in their bodies, and casually invite Steve and me to share a bedroom and bed when we visit.  It's not even a question.

People in general have frequently moved in the direction of tolerance and acceptance of those who are gay--in the direction of mere human decency, that is to say.  But "church circles" refuse to do so.

The question is why that's the case, and what it portends for the future of the churches.  In my own Catholic church, the culture-war battle cry of folks like the newly elected officials of the U.S. Catholic bishops' conference Dolan and Kurtz is that the church should not concede an inch to culture.  Let all the world around us go to hell in a handbasket.  We refuse to do the same.

But in response to that culture war battle cry, I'm inclined to suggest that the decision of many people of faith to accept and affirm their gay brothers and sisters is anything but a concession to cultural norms that undermine authentic Christian faith.  It's rooted, instead, in the same authentic Christian faith that church leaders of the ilk of Dolan and Kurtz claim to be defending.

Recently, when several officials of the Lutheran church in Finland stated on national television that gay relationships run counter to biblical values and the traditional values of the church, there was a national outcry, which resulted in the decision of more than 40,000 Lutheran Finns to have their names removed from the church rolls.  These Lutheran Finns did not want to be associated with a church that targets and attacks those who are gay and lesbian in the name of Christ.

With the exception of the highly energized and highly politicized religious right of the U.S. (a highly energized and highly politicized religious right that the American Catholic church is now entering even more overtly under the leadership of Dolan-Kurtz) and of some crypto-fascist Catholic groups throughout Europe, most Christians of the developed parts of the world (but far from all, particularly in leadership circles of churches) have now decided that it's homophobia that's the problem, when it comes to biblical values. 

Not homosexuality.  

In committing their church to an even more rabidly homophobic stance than it now already has at an official level, Timothy Dolan and Joseph Kurtz may imagine themselves to be making a bold and defiant countercultural gesture.  But increasingly, many of their brothers and sisters in Christ, including many of those lay Catholics whose voice they're intent on suppressing ("we are the teachers!"), will see this gesture not as countercultural, but as counter-gospel.

And they'll continue to ask why the celibate leaders of their church are so curiously preoccupied with what they think their gay brothers and sisters are doing in their bedrooms.

Belgian Primate Léonard Continues Careening Down Wrong Side of Highway: Disingenuousness of Catholic Conservatives' Attempts to Deny Implications of Rhetoric of Homosexual Disorder

I've noted repeatedly on this blog that there's a strong strategy among conservative Catholics today to deny that the Catholic magisterium says precisely what is says about homosexuality as a disorder.  As Catholic homophobia is placed on the defensive both by shifting cultural consensus and by strong opposition from within the lay ranks of the church itself, the claim is being made that the magisterium does not define gay and lesbian persons as disordered, but only gay and lesbian acts.  Note that claim in the thread following the America posting to which I've just linked.

This claim is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.  As I've noted previously, the 1986 pastoral letter that the current pope wrote as Cardinal Ratzinger when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, specifically states that the "homosexual condition" is disordered, and that those who are homosexual exhibit disordered "inclinations."  The 1986 document notes, in fact, that it is correcting misunderstandings of a 1975 CDF document that was taken to mean that the "homosexual condition" is either morally neutral or good.

The 1986 CDF document is now replicated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states that the "inclination" of those who are gay is "objectively disordered."  While it is true that these definitions of disorder depend on a natural-law view that all homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered, because the goal to which homosexual sex moves is not conception, the magisterium has never suggested that, when heterosexuals engage in "disordered" sexual acts, they exhibit a disordered "condition" or disordered "inclinations."  

The definition of disorder--a disordered condition, disordered inclinations--is applied by the Catholic magisterium exclusively to those who are gay and lesbian.  As I've previously stated, it's interesting to note that the 1986 CDF document that began the language of disorder as applied to gay and lesbian persons did so in response to a 1975 CDF document that sought to address the consensus of professional medical bodies--including the influential American Psychiatric Association in 1973--that a homosexual orientation is not a mental disorder.  The language of disorder in the Catholic magisterium keeps alive, in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary, the suspicion that those who are gay or lesbian are mentally disordered.

And so the attempt to deny that the magisterium defines gay and lesbian persons as intrinsically disordered, but speaks only of their acts as disordered, is an attempt to disguise and soft-sell what the magisterium actually says about those who are gay and lesbian, while continuing to capitalize on a cultural suspicion deeply held by social conservatives that gay and lesbian human beings are mentally aberrant, disordered in their natures, a threat to the well-being of society.

What is at stake in the current Catholic two-step about magisterial teaching re: homosexuality is apparent in a fascinating exchange recently involving the beleaguered Catholic primate of Belgium, André-Joseph Léonard.  As I've noted, Léonard's statements suggesting that AIDS provides ''a sort of intrinsic justice'' for those who have engaged in homosexual sex are now eliciting outrage.

Archbishop Léonard is under fire, as well, for having stated that homosexual love is a travesty of nature.  When pushed on this point, the archbishop denied that he had sought to imply that homosexuality is "abnormal." 

But his qualification of this denial is fascinating, for the reason I have sketched above: while scurrying away from the language of disorder, he wishes precisely to keep alive the suspicion that homosexuality is, indeed, disordered and aberrant, a threat to the health of society.  Léonard states that 

there is in the homosexual tendency and practice an orientation that is not coherent with the objective logic of sexuality.

Homosexuals have a "tendency" that issues in practice, and which is "not coherent with the objective logic of sexuality."  I'm denying that gay and lesbian persons are disordered.  But I'm also saying that their "tendency" moves in the direction of practices that contravene the objective logic of sexuality, which it is the business of a society that desires health to enforce.  

It would be hard to find a clearer picture than this of what those promoting the papal language of disorder at present intend to accomplish with that language.  Though they are quickly distancing themselves from the claim that gay and lesbian persons are disordered, they insist on keeping alive a language of disorder referring to inclinations, tendencies, and conditions--none of which can exist apart from a person who has these inclinations, tendencies, and conditions.

It is intellectually dishonest to claim that this language does not, indeed, define those who are gay and lesbian as disordered.  The statement to which I've just linked by Lieve Halsbergh, Belgian director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) rightly challenges Léonard's claim to have been "misrepresented" and that his words about gay and lesbian persons have been "twisted."

As Halsbergh notes, Léonard is a smart, highly educated man with other smart, highly educated men under him.  He knows perfectly well what he is doing and what he is suggesting with his statements about AIDS as intrinsic justice and homosexuality as a "tendency" that is "not coherent with the objective logic of sexuality."

Catholic Right Continues to Deny Magisterial Teaching about Intrinsic Disorder of Gays: I Respond Again

Because I was censored at America's "In All Things" blog recently, I don't intend to comment at that blog site any longer.  Why should I, I wonder, when my honest comments intended to be civil contributions to a civil conversation are censored with no explanation provided to me, while comments such as the following are permitted to stand:

Mareczku and others...Please stop distorting Catholic teaching to comply with your idealogy.
The RCC does NOT label homesexual PERSONS as "disordered"...or defective! It views sexual ACTS "not ordered" to reproducing as "disordered" (it says that contraception is disordered too!) It does NOT deny Holy Communion to homosexual persons (it was denied because people were hijacking the Eucharist for a political statement)...It demands compassion, respect and sensitivity for people with same sex attraction.

You are either ignorantly or willfully being dishonest in your criticisms.

Since Mareczku was responding to me, and my comment to which Mareczku is responding states that we cannot address bullying of gay teens without critically engaging Catholic teaching that gay and lesbian human beings are disordered, I am clearly among the "others" to whom Robert K. Pengel is responding here.

I'm among the "others" whom Mr. Pengel is accusing of ignorance or dishonesty.

I have to admit, I have grown weary, indeed, of this tactic of Catholics who want to defend magisterial teaching on homosexuality--a tactic of denying that the magisterium teaches that gay and lesbian persons are disordered in their very natures, and of claiming that anyone who hears such a conclusion in magisterial teaching is lying.

I'm tired of the lies being disseminated by defenders of magisterial teaching who want to misrepresent what the magisterium says about gay and lesbian persons, even as they call for total and literal fidelity to every utterance of the magisterium.  As I've noted in numerous postings here, the 1986 letter on the pastoral care of homosexual persons that the current pope, then Cardinal Ratzinger, issued as head of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, states explicitly that gay and lesbian persons are disordered in their inclinations and exhibit an intrinsically disordered "condition."

The 1986 document also explicitly states that it is correcting an overly benign misreading of a 1975 document issued by the same office before Cardinal Ratzinger was at its helm, which concluded that the "homosexual condition" is morally neutral or even good.  As a corrective to the assumption that people who are made gay or lesbian are born with a morally neutral or even a good "condition" vis-a-vis sexual orientation, the 1986 document declares that those born gay and lesbian are "intrinsically disordered"--in their inclinations.  In their "condition."  In their human natures.

The 1975 document was issued two years after the influential American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its manual of diagnostic disorders.  Because numerous studies have failed to demonstrate any correlation at all with a gay sexual orientation and mental illness.  

The 1975 document was, in other words, a response to a well-substantiated psychological finding now considered standard by professional psychiatric and medical organizations throughout the developed world: that sexual orientation is established either at birth or very early in the life of a human being, and that a gay sexual orientation is a neutral psychological reality, not an indicator of moral defect or psychological disturbance.  The 1986 document on the "pastoral" care of gay and lesbian persons wishes to keep the language of disorder alive in the face of that growing consensus among professional organizations throughout the developed sectors of the world, and of increasing numbers of educated people in those parts of the world.

The 1986 document wishes, in short, to continue speaking of gay and lesbian human beings as disordered in their "inclinations," as intrinsically disordered in their "condition"--as disordered in their very natures, since it is impossible to imagine inclinations and conditions walking around in the absence of persons--in order to counter the conclusion of contemporary science that 1) sexual orientation is innate or established early in one's life, and 2) sexual orientation is morally and psychologically neutral.  

From a theological standpoint, the growing consensus of the psychiatric and medical professional community that sexual orientation is innate or established early in life and is psychologically neutral points to the conclusion that the creator God makes some human beings gay or lesbian, that gay and lesbian people have a role to play in God's plan of salvation in the world, and that being gay or lesbian is good.  The sexual orientation of gay and lesbian persons is God's gift to them, and is essential to God's plan of salvation for those who are made gay and lesbian, as well as to God's plan of salvation for the entire world.

Not only is the definition of gay and lesbian human beings as intrinsically disordered in their very natures established by the 1986 CDF "pastoral" letter, that definition has now entered the highest levels of magisterial teachings in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states (¶2358), "The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible.  This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial."

Those now accusing their brother and sister Catholics who cite these magisterial teachings of lying--of misrepresenting magisterial teaching to say that gay and lesbian persons are objectively disordered--are themselves lying about what the magisterium says.  They are doing so because 1) there is a long-standing tradition in some sectors of the Catholic church of excusing falsehoods told to defend the church as necessary lapses serving the common good; 2) there is also a tradition, applied frequently to gay and lesbian persons as purported enemies of the church, of asserting that sin has no rights, and therefore falsehoods told about or to sinful persons are permitted; 3) these defenders of the faith do not intend to permit critical analysis of magisterial teaching, since they regard a critique of any aspect of magisterial teaching as a threat to the entire body of Catholic teaching; and 4) they recognize the increasing untenability of Catholic magisterial teaching that gay and lesbian persons are intrinsically disordered, and want to divert attention from what the magisterium actually says for apologetic reasons.

And so it is now becoming commonplace in right-wing Catholic circles first to deny what the magisterium actually says about this topic (though these same Catholics are louder than any in swearing fidelity to every aspect of magisterial teaching), and then to attack Catholics who accurately represent magisterial teaching about homosexuality as political activists who are being dishonest about what the church teaches.  It is also becoming commonplace in these same circles for right-wing Catholic apologists to claim that, even if the church does teach that gay and lesbian persons are disordered in their inclinations, the church teaches the same thing about heterosexual persons.

But it does no such thing.  And it never has done so.  The category of intrinsic disorder is reserved exclusively to describe the inclinations and "conditions" of those who are gay and lesbian--to describe the very nature and personhood of gay and lesbian persons.  It has never been used at any point in church teaching this way to describe heterosexual persons as a group, even when they engage in activities like masturbation or use of artificial contraceptives that the church regards as intrinsically disordered.

As I say, I don't intend to respond to Mr. Pengel's implicit attack on my integrity and/or intellectual ability at the America blog, but since I have my own blog and am free to write the truth here--if not at some of the blogs of the Catholic center--I have decided to respond to his statements here.  As I do so, I do have to wonder, however, how the blog sites of the Catholic center imagine they are serving the church and fostering helpful conversation, when they allow such bold lies to stand while censoring those being slammed by untruths like those Mr. Pengel is spreading.

Continued Silence of U.S. Catholic Leaders: Conversation about Gay Teen Suicide (and Lack of Moral Leadership) in American Catholicism

I’ve noted in recent postings the discussions that have been taking place at a number of U.S. Catholic blog sites about the recent suicides of one gay teen after another, and what might constitute an appropriate Catholic response to these.  I’ve noted, for instance, David Gibson’s posting about this at the Commonweal blog, and Fr. Jim Martin’s statement at America’s “In All Things” blog.  Bryan Cones also has an outstanding reflection at his blog at the U.S. Catholic site.

As I direct readers’ attention to these statements, I also want to emphasize that the conversation occurring in response to each of these postings (and others I’ll mention in a moment) is, in my view, significant—as a snapshot of the struggle of a major religious community in the U.S. to come to terms with a pressing moral issue, about which there is almost no guidance at all coming from that community’s pastoral leaders.


As I’ve also noted, Michael O’Loughlin followed Jim Martin’s posting at America with a posting linking to Martin’s, asking what messages the Catholic community is sending its gay youth when it offers them the best the tradition now has to offer—magisterial statements about the disorder of gay human beings and gays as threats to human existence, policies forbidding gays from entering the priesthood or denying gay people job security in Catholic institutions, denial of communion to gays and non-gays wearing rainbow pins or sashes,  choices to shut down Catholic charitable organizations rather than allow same-sex couples to adopt children, and political decisions to spend millions of dollars attacking the right of gay citizens to civil marriage while people go hungry and lose jobs and their homes.

And David Gibson has complemented his Commonweal posting with one analyzing Carl Paladino’s response to gay folks as a Catholic response (to whose thread I’ve been contributing this week), along with two postings (and here) comparing the discussion of these issues (and of bullying of gay youth, in particular) in the Catholic and Mormon communities.

And now Mike Sweitzer-Beckman has weighed in at National Catholic Reporter with a posting calling for the Catholic church to “get on the bandwagon” when it comes to proactive, charitable responses to the phenomenon of bullying of gay youth and the suicides that sometimes follow such bullying.

As others are doing, Sweitzer-Beckman decries the absolute silence of key Catholic pastoral leaders as these suicides receive international media attention.  As he notes, while our top pastoral leaders continue to ignore bullying of gay teens, they also ratchet up attacks on gay citizens of the U.S. and gay church members that strike many Catholics (along with many members of the public at large) as a step backwards in time and moral sensitivity):

Who is missing from this list? I have not heard any prominent Catholic Church clergy speak out on this catastrophe.

It is time for church leaders to stop waiting for the bandwagon to pull on past and to take a stand to lead the charge.

Who really wants to be known for affirming a woman’s right to vote after 1919, or for promoting the Civil Rights Act after 1964? Do we want our church to pull another Galileo and get it right some 500 years later?

The church has a mission to be prophetic, to listen to the social and natural science experts around us and it is time to start living out that vision that Jesus taught us.

Instead, it seems that the Church is going backwards.

As with the threads at America and Commonweal, I encourage readers to read not only Sweitzer-Beckman’s posting about this issue, but, as well, reader responses to the issue.  In each of these threads, anyone who wants to see close-up and on full display the sharply divided mind of contemporary American Catholicism about these issues will find the exhibit he/she is seeking, in all its bloody detail.

There is, as with any such thread at centrist Catholic blog sites, a strong, well-represented cadre of Catholics for whom the treatment of their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters is a clear issue of human rights—of human rights, about which the church itself has formed their consciences.  And so their informed consciences and their commitment to church teaching itself pull strongly against the magisterial teaching that gay and lesbian persons are intrinsically disordered, in their very natures, and the atrocious attacks on the dignity of gay people and gay relationships that follow from that teaching.

But there is, as well, in these threads an equally strong, very vocal contingent of Catholics who are adamantly opposed to full inclusion of gays and lesbians in their church and in society at large, and who share the prejudices (and have adopted many of the homophobic tactics) of their brothers and sisters in the religious right, of American religionists from non-Catholic Christian traditions strongly opposed to gay and lesbian people and rights.  Polls indicate that these naysayers are a minority in the American Catholic church.

But their influence on the thinking of the hierarchy and on the direction the Catholic church in the U.S. has taken is out of proportion to their numbers, for several reasons.  First, they are politically organized, loud, and determined to squelch opposition.  They do not hesitate to engage in bullying tactics to try to silence those within the Catholic community who push against what they define as orthodoxy.

They are also well-connected and well-funded, with ties to powerful political figures and corporate leaders who have the ability to lean on the Catholic hierarchy and enforce conformity to their right-wing views.  And here are the predictable charges with which they plaster threads like the ones I’ve cited above:

1.    Gays are sick.  They are psychologically disordered and to be quarantined, especially from children.  We need to pity them but not to normalize their sickness.

2.    Gays are a threat to children, and have targeted our children for recruitment.  Young people who commit suicide after having been bullied due to their perceived sexual orientation were seduced by gay propagandists, and killed themselves when they found they had chosen a sick lifestyle.

3.    The sickness of the homosexual "lifestyle choice" leads to actual physical sickness: gays infect society with disease and dirt, and die at early ages due to the dissipated lifestyles they have chosen.

4.    Anyone who disagrees with magisterial teaching about homosexuality needs to leave the Catholic church and join one of the rapidly vanishing mainstream Protestant churches that have caved in to prevailing cultural mores of tolerance and acceptance of gays.

5.    The bible is clear about these issues, and church teaching merely upholds the clear biblical teaching against homosexuality.

These are the prominent characteristics of the Catholic anti-gay attacks that I encounter on these and similar threads.  Please read for yourself and decide what you think.  Am I missing something of importance here, in the response of Catholics opposed to full inclusion of gays and lesbians in church and society in the U.S.?

There is also, clearly, the gays-as-enemy meme of right-wing Christians in general.  As Adelle Banks notes in a recent Religion News Service article about the soul-searching now taking place in churches of the Christian right following the suicides of recent weeks, even Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is now willing to admit that some Christians have unfairly made gays the enemy, and is calling for a cease-fire in that particular battle.

Mohler states,

"Christians have got to stop talking about people struggling with sexual issues as a tribe apart."

And this is one of the primary points I hoped to make, as I criticized the strong tendency of mainstream Catholic media coverage during the papal visit to the British Isles to lump gays and lesbians with secularists and atheists, as “enemies of the church” out to embarrass and attack the pope.  This malicious analysis completely overlooks the considerable opposition to homophobia within the Catholic community, precisely because of Catholic teachings.

One of the puzzles of much right-wing Catholic resistance to gay people and gay rights in the U.S.—and a significant indicator of the great extent to which this resistance has imbibed evangelical Protestant viewpoints that have little to do with a Catholic worldview—is the almost total lack of awareness of those on the attack about how significantly they are violating the communitarian ethic of the church they claim to defend.  Hospitality to strangers is a core Judaeo-Christian value, one  constantly upheld in the Catholic tradition as a strong moral imperative, an overriding imperative for the behavior of Catholic communities of faith.

The clear signal of unwelcome that right-wing American Catholics intend to give their gay brothers and sisters—you’re sick and not wanted here; join a liberal church that accepts the likes of you—runs absolutely counter to some of the most significant things that the Catholic worldview wants to affirm, and that Catholic apologists want to claim as marks of Catholic distinctiveness.  The rabid, mean-spirited shoving of gays and lesbians to the social and ecclesial margins by members of the Catholic right violates the communitarian ethic of Catholicism in the most egregious way possible, and radically undercuts what Catholics want to proclaim about the significance of the sacrament of Communion.

And as all of this goes on—and as the Catholic bishops of the U.S. continue to be silent about it (because gays are, after all, enemies of the church, and showing any concern for them is abetting the enemy)—here’s what continues to roll forth against gay and lesbian human beings, in the real world in which we all live.

Here’s some of the stuff we who are gay and lesbian have to contend with right now, from the mouths of people who claim to speak for God:

1.    In his recently published book Gesprekken met Monseigneur Léonard (Conversations with Archbishop Léonard), Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard, who was appointed by Pope Benedict last January as the Catholic primate of Belgium, states that the worldwide AIDS epidemic is a “matter of eminent justice”—that is, AIDS is God’s and nature’s punishment of gays for their dissolute lifestyles.

2.    And Cindy Jacobs, who describes herself as a Christian prophet, and who heads the influential Generals International movement with her husband Make, has issued a call to prayer for God’s “blood-covered justice and judgments” to fall on all Americans who entertain the cause of the “minority homosexuality community,” a cause she reduces to gay attempts to infiltrate schools.

Many Catholics—certainly those of the center, but also even many of those on the right who vehemently oppose welcome of gays in church and society—would claim that they see a large difference between what the Catholic church is now saying and doing to gay citizens of the land and its gay members ,and what folks like Cindy Jacobs would like to see done.

But I confess that, as the bishops remain stubbornly, deliberately silent about the homophobia that runs rampant through the Catholic church in the U.S., and as one suicide after another of gay youths gains national attention, I don’t see much difference at all.  And it is hard to imagine that a religious tradition with the intellectual breadth and rich heritage of Catholicism would bring itself to this point, to this moral no-exit.

But this is precisely the moral and intellectual dead end into which the current crop of bishops have led the Catholic church in the U.S.—at the behest of the Vatican itself.  And the situation is not going to change until Catholics of the center become alarmed enough about the significant erosion taking place in their church’s moral authority in the public square due to its savage treatment of gays and lesbians that they begin to push back.

Related articles

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• What Community Do I Have to Go To? (enlightened catholicism)
• Mormon & Catholic Leaderships' Role in LGBTQ Suicides (father geoff farrow)
• Rest in Peace--Children of God (gay mystic)
• The Raising of Lazarus and the Gay Experience of Coming Out (wild reed)
• Denial of Communion in Minnesota: In Conflict with Church Teaching (queering the church)