Un-orthodox Love

There is a wonderful blog, titled Ad Dominum, which I often visit. Recently blogger Thom Curnutte posted an impassioned and wonderfully articulate note that a Catholic friend of his had posted on Facebook in response to the anti-gay pronouncements of an acquaintance. There were several comments to this post, one of which came from Jacob, who claimed to be “a small voice of orthodoxy tarnished minimally by vice and personal agenda, guided by a spirit of love.”

As my comments on Thom’s post are rather long, I have decided to post them here rather than take up space on Ad Dominum.


I loved what Laura wrote. I believe that she speaks honestly and passionately the words that are in the hearts of most, if not all, gay Catholics. As Thom has pointed out, she has made “many fantastic points.”

And as a gay man who has left his parish in protest over the institutional homophobia he perceives in the Church in general and in particular in his own archdiocese, I both admire and envy her active involvement in her own parish.

Jacob’s response to Laura brings two issues to mind. The first is that I do not think a straight white male can in any way understand what it is like to be gay (I use the term gay here to refer to all LGBT people), let alone to be gay and Catholic. Jacob simply cannot imagine how it feels to read a homophobic article like that which was recently published in the Boston Pilot or to read the outrageously misleading “information” about homosexuality in the literature of the Courage apostolate. How could he even begin to comprehend the feelings of gay parents who are told their children may not attend Catholic school because of their relationship? So speak as he might about “female anthropology” and “the sacramental union between one man and one woman,” Jacob’s words are empty semantics to those who know that God created them gay and that the Church denies them their full humanity. There is a distinct disconnect between this profound self-knowledge—which can come from no other source than from God—and the doctrine-based arguments against gay marriage (and therefore against the sacredness of gay relationships based on love and mutual commitment) made by a straight person.

Laura has made the courageous decision to be an active Catholic in spite of the very difficult and ongoing dilemma this presents for her. The choices she has made—both to return to the Church and to be an active parishioner—can only have come after a great deal of thought and with a profound and no doubt pained awareness of the teachings of the Church on homosexuality. So I find that there is a kind of arrogance in a person who would presume to lecture, however gently and lovingly, on the “correctness” of his point of view to someone like Laura.

The second issue is this: In his response to Laura, Jacob says the following: “It’s taken a long time for me to find the humility to submit myself to the Authority of Christ and his Church and its Magisterial teaching…. I have always found that the Church has well-thought detailed reasons for everything it teaches, despite that those reasons are not readily apparent, and may be contingent upon the acceptance of something that I haven’t yet learned.” Orthodox Catholics work on the assumption that the Church was established by Christ and that it cannot therefore be in error. Only those who disagree with its teachings are wrong. This is an assumption that is supported neither by scholarship nor by reason. Even if Christ did found his Church upon the rock of Peter—and there is research that shows this in fact did not happen as it is reported in Matthew—it is simply childish to assume that either Peter, a man of weak character and little faith, or any number of his successors could be trusted to carry the pure message of Jesus to the children of God without at some point allowing it to be contaminated by the stench of greed, lust, and pride or losing it altogether in rigid institutionalism. One only has to look at the shameful mess the medieval popes made of the Church to see that what we know as the Catholic Church of those times—and of today—has little to do with the life and the message of Christ.

Christ was about love, not authority and Magisterial teaching.” In fact, his whole preaching life demonstrated his disdain for the attempts of the “authority” of his time to trump love with the Law. Why can the modern Church not see this? Why must faithful Catholics like Laura struggle daily to have their love accepted as legitimate by their Church?

I honour Jacob’s sincerity, but I have boundless appreciation and empathy for Laura’s courageous struggle and only great good wishes for her journey.

Thank you, Thom, for posting her story.

Forgiveness

I have been thinking on and off for a long time about words that we often use or hear in a religious context but that we may not understand in their fullest and deepest meaning and that we may not therefore be able to apply to our daily lives. They are beautiful words that have a kind of mystical power to touch our hearts, yet I suspect that we do not think of them often. And where do we go to find the "true" meanings of these words? How do we learn to live lives of humility and compassion, to recognize and accept God's grace, to truly forgive our "enemies" (who sometimes include ourselves)?

Let's think about forgiveness, for example. I have almost finished reading Wm. Paul Young's The Shack. In case you are not familiar with this book (and be warned, I will be giving away some of the elements of the plot here), it is the story of a man, Mack, whose daughter is abducted from the campsite where she and her father and siblings have been spending the weekend and is taken to a remote mountain shack and brutally murdered. The family is of course devastated by this tragedy. A few years after the death of his daughter, Mack finds a note in his mailbox. The note is from "Papa" and suggests that Mack make a visit to "the shack" as Papa will be there. Papa is the name that Mack's wife uses for God. While Mack suspects that the note is some kind of sick joke, perhaps on the part of his daughter's murderer, he is somehow compelled to make the trip to the shack.

As it turns out, it is not only Papa (God) who is at the shack (in the form of a smiling African-American woman) but also Jesus, and Suraya, a somewhat ephemeral Asian-looking woman who is apparently the Holy Spirit. During the time he spends with this Trinity at the shack, Mack learns a great deal about life and death, about humanity, about God, and about himself. Near the end of Mack's time at the shack, God (who has changed into an older, outdoorsy-type man with long white hair pulled back into a ponytail) takes Mack up into the mountains, and before showing him the place where his daughter's body lies, firmly but lovingly nudges Mack into forgiving her killer.

But Mack must first acknowledge the malice and bitterness he feels toward this man:

"Son, you need to speak it, to name it."

Now there was no holding back as hot tears poured down his face, and between sobs Mack cried, "Papa, how can I ever forgive that son of a bitch who killed my Missy? If he were here today, I don't know what I would do. I know it isn't right, but I want him to hurt like he hurt me... If I can't get justice, I still want revenge."

Papa tries to explain to Mack the true nature of forgiveness: that it can lead to redemption for the one forgiven, that it is not about forgetting or excusing, that it does not require the establishment of a relationship with the one forgiven. But Mack cannot let go:

"I don't think I can do this," Mack whispered.

"I want you to. Forgiveness is first for you, the forgiver," answered Papa, "to release you from something that will eat you alive, that will destroy your joy and your ability to love fully and openly. Do you think this man cares about the pain and torment you have gone through? If anything, he feeds on that knowledge. Don't you want to cut that off? And in doing so, you'll release him from a burden he carries whether he knows it or not - acknowledges it or not. When you choose to forgive another, you love him well."

"I do not love him."

"Not today, you don't. But I do, Mack, not for what he's become, but for the broken child that has been twisted by his pain. I want to help you take on the nature that finds more power in love and forgiveness than hate."

Papa finally gets through and Mack starts to cry.

He wept until he had cried out all the darkness, all the longing, and all the loss, until there was nothing left.

With his eyes now closed, rocking back and forth, he pleaded, "Help me, Papa. Help me! What do I do? How do I forgive him?"

"Tell him."

Mack looked up, half expecting to see a man he had never met standing there.

"How, Papa?"

"Just say it out loud. There is power in what my children declare."

Mack began to whisper in tones at first halfhearted and stumbling, but then with increasing conviction. "I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you."

Most of us do not have as much to forgive as Mack does. Yet we do carry anger and resentment around with us, usually for far too long. Often we do not even acknowledge it until some new offence perpetrated by the one or ones we need to forgive causes it to flare up again. And I do think Papa is right: unforgiving anger will destroy our joy and our ability to love fully and openly.

Some of us carry great anger and resentment toward our Church for how it treats gay people - and the children of gay people. These feelings have been expressed vehemently and often in this blog and in others. Some will say that the anger we feel and express is righteous (like Jesus' anger toward the moneychangers in the temple) because we are so keenly and profoundly aware that what the Church teaches and the actions precipitated in the name of that teaching are terribly wrong. They might say that anger fuels action and action fuels change. They are, I believe, right in what they say.

After Mack has forgiven his daughter's murderer, he asks Papa: "So is it alright if I'm still angry?"

Papa was quick to respond. "Absolutely! What he did was terrible. He caused incredible pain to many. It was wrong, and anger is the right response to something that is so wrong. But don't let the anger and pain and loss you feel prevent you from forgiving him and removing your hands from around his neck."

The modern Church is not a murderer, but I do feel anger and pain and loss (I had a sad dream last night about the parish I recently left in protest). I must somehow recognnize, however, that loving her (which I still do) and forgiving her (which I am having great difficulty with) will free me to creatively use the anger I still feel to help change her.

Photo Credit

"Reconciliation: A Space Where Mercy and Forgiveness Meet_1111" by hoyasmeg

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The Bible tells me so. Oh, really?

In his most recent book, A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren states that “for a new kind of Christianity to emerge, we need a new approach to the Bible.” He claims that most Christians treat the Bible as a kind of constitution; in other words, it is a set of immutable laws that Christians are expected to live by. At the core of this constitutional metaphor is the idea of authority—not so much the authority of the Bible itself but “the authority of the people interpreting the Bible.” McLaren cites a pre-Civil War novel as an extreme example of where this exploitation of the Bible-as-constitution metaphor can border on the extreme.

Nellie Norton was a novel to celebrate the greatness of slavery, and the subtitle was basically something like this: “How the Bible is a pro-slavery Bible and God is a pro-slavery God." Now, that turns your stomach to hear that now but we haven’t had any scrutiny about the way we read the Bible. We’re still using it the same way.

We are indeed still using the Bible the same way. In fact, many claim today that the Bible is an anti-gay Bible and God is an anti-gay God.

For the Bible Tells Me So is a wonderful documentary that came out a few years ago and made the rounds of the film festivals; I’m not sure whether it ever found its way into general release. The film is about Christian parents with gay children.

The documentary looks at five families, including Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop elected in the Episcopal Church, and his parents, and former U.S. presidential candidate Richard Gephardt and his wife and their lesbian daughter Chrissy. In the film we learn of the struggle of the parents to come to terms, in the context of their own religious upbringing and beliefs, with the sexual orientation of their children and with their own prejudices and their fears for their children’s safety and well-being. The film also examines the fears and misgivings faced by gay and lesbian children in religious families as they hear the condemnations of homosexuality in their churches and as they consider coming out to their parents.

The Bible is a major character in this documentary as it is quoted by pastors and laypeople alike in order to condemn homosexuality and homosexuals. There are numerous clips of preachers railing against homosexuality; the most common word that is used against it is “abomination.” One preacher, Jimmy Swaggart, says to his congregation: “I’ve never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. If one ever looks at me like that, I’m gonna kill him and tell God he died.” He goes on to say—with no awareness of the irony of his statement—that “God calls homosexuality an abomination. It’s an abomination! It’s an abomination!”

A parent of a lesbian daughter and husband of a Christian minister says, “I’ve learned enough about the Bible now to understand God. I understand how God works, how Jesus works.” A little later, when talking about his two children, he has this to say: “When my kids were growing up, I said, ‘God, please don’t let my son grow up to be a faggot and my daughter a slut’. And he did not…he did not do that. He reversed it (laughs).”

Gene Robinson, who was a model Christian boy in his childhood church, says, “From ten to eleven on Sunday morning everyone was in Sunday school class, [which] was always and only focused on the Bible. So we were absolutely steeped in scripture.” From the seventh grade, Robinson knew that he was different from the other boys his age and he immediately realized that he must keep this difference to himself. “I was always familiar with what the Bible said: Anyone who is thought to be ‘that way’ was an abomination before God.”

All of the stories in For the Bible Tells Me So are compelling. The senior Robinsons, southerners and members their whole lives (they are in their late seventies when the film is shot) of the Church of the Disciples of Christ, deeply and unconditionally love their son. The Gephardts are willing to forego Richard’s quest for the presidency if their daughter feels the campaign—and Gephardt believes her being a lesbian will be an issue—is in any way going to be painful for her.

For me, the most powerful story in the film is that of Mary Lou Wallner and her daughter Anna. Mary Lou was raised in a family of fundamentalist believers and attended “a conservative, Bible-believing church” every Sunday of her childhood and her adult life. In her Christian community, “everything in the Bible was taken literally and there were rules about everything.”

The church that Mary Lou was attending taught that homosexuality was a sin—and not just a sin but the sin of all sins. “I didn’t really study the Bible at all about [homosexuality], but I did pull out those passages and read them and certainly used them against Anna, later.”

When she was away at college, Anna wrote to her mother and told her that she was gay. Mary Lou reacted to this news by first going to the bathroom and throwing up and “then just going completely underground, not telling anybody and being ashamed and embarrassed.” She wrote her daughter back and told her “some things…that were not very loving.”

Undoubtedly the most difficult part of your letter is the gay thing. I will never accept that in you. I feel it’s a terrible waste, besides being spiritually and morally wrong. For a reason I don’t quite fathom I have a harder time dealing with that issue than almost anything in the world. I do and will continue to love you, but I will always hate that.

She thought her daughter’s sexuality was a choice and that “she needed to just get her act together and stop this.”

The letter caused an irreparable break between daughter and mother. Ten months later, before there could be any reconciliation, Mary Lou’s daughter took her own life by hanging herself from the bar in her bedroom closet.

The death of her daughter led Mary Lou to question what she had been taught by her church—that being gay was a choice, for example—and to begin to research the subject of homosexuality for herself. What she learned was this: “…instead of taking the Bible literally, I have to take it in the context and culture of the day in which it was written.” She has since become an activist for the advancement of gay rights and for the understanding of gay and lesbian people by the church.

Jorge Valencia of the Trevor Project Suicide Hotline says:

It’s estimated that every five hours an LGBT teen takes his life, and for every teen that takes his or her own life, there are twenty more who try. One of the top five reasons why teenagers call us is for religious reasons. They’re feeling there isn’t a place for them and God.

Reverend Jimmy Creech of Faith in America says:

The church, because of its teachings that homosexuality is sinful, is wrong, is a perversion, has created the climate in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered children growing up feel very much in conflict with the world in which they live. It really shapes their thinking so that they hate themselves, so that they internalize this judgment and condemnation.

In The Bible Tells Me So, a number of clergy members, including biblical scholars like Reverend Peter J. Gomes of Harvard Divinity School, stress the wisdom and importance of reading the Bible in the context of the period and culture in which it was written. They point out, for example, that the famous prohibition against homosexuality in Leviticus—“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall be put to death. Their blood is upon them”—does not exist in isolation from other abominations: eating shrimp, planting two different seeds in the same hole, comingling crops, eating a rabbit, and so on.

Moreover, biblical scholarship has determined that in the Hebrew Bible the word abomination “is always used to address a ritual wrong. It never is used to refer to something innately immoral. Eating pork was not innately immoral for a Jew, but it was an abomination because it was a violation of a ritual requirement.”

It is not a stretch to say that selective reading of the Bible, as a constitution, led to the tragic death of Mary Lou Wallner’s daughter and has led to the deaths of many other young people. It has also resulted in closeted lives of fear, self-loathing, and confusion for countless numbers of LGBT teenagers who do not take their own lives. In this age of information, where the truth of both scripture and homosexuality are readily available, the choice of pastors and laypersons to not only remain ignorant but to preach in ignorance is, in the sense of the word as they so like to use it, an abomination.

In A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren suggests an alternative metaphor for the Bible; his suggestion is that we think of the Bible as a library, which is “a collection of documents.” His rationale for the use of this metaphor is that “in a good library you want to present all sides of an issue. A good library preserves key arguments; a good constitution eliminates all arguments.”

A library is a sacred place of ideas. For every argument you find there, you will find a counter-argument, made with the same intelligence, with the same love for truth as the first. This interplay of ideas promotes growth—spiritual, intellectual, and emotional. If we can see the Bible as a library rather than as a constitution, Christian churches and Christian families might begin to have respectful and loving conversations that include the LGBT members of those churches and those families and that allow them to be who they are.


If you have not seen The Bible Tells Me So, I highly recommend it. You can watch it on YouTube in nine parts. Here is the first:

Letter to My Parish Priest

I wrote this  letter to my parish priest this morning and sent it by e-mail, with a copy to our priest in residence.

Dear Father:

I am sure that by now you have read the most recent issue of The B.C. Catholic newspaper. I am sure also that you have at least seen the article on page 12 with the headline "Homosexuality, pedophilia related: cardinal," if you have not read it.

Nearly four years ago I returned to the Church of my baptism after more than 35 years of wandering in a spiritual wilderness. I was well aware at the time of the teaching of the Church on homosexuality but I had not read and studied as much as I have since my return. I felt that the Church is like one's family: sometimes there are issues that family members disagree about, but they still love each other and the family stays together. When I decided to choose St. ---- as my parish, I was touched by the warm welcome I received from you and from fellow parishioners, and I have grown to love this parish despite the fact that theologically I am decidedly to the left of most members of our community.

When I read the pamphlets created by the Courage apostolate (and distributed in a workshop during Priests' Study Week in November 2007) that you kindly gave me in December 2007, I was shocked at the homophobic misinformation that they contained. I was also outraged that such deliberate ignorance should be foisted upon priests who likely have neither the time nor the motivation to verify the content of the workshop and the pamphlets. I am a writer, so at the time I wrote an article on this topic. Out of respect for you, I did not immediately attempt to publish that article and only did so when I established a blog in late 2009. The article is attached to this e-mail message.

I was again deeply disappointed, offended, and outraged when I read the B.C. Catholic article. It is clearly the intent of this article (and thus of the editors who decided to publish it) to connect pedophilia and homosexuality in the minds of readers. Nowhere does the article report the almost universal ridicule with which Cardinal Bertone's remarks were greeted. Nor does it report that the authors of the independent study on clerical sexual abuse commissioned by the USCCB replied to a specific question by an American bishop by stating that the study found no link between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of pre- or post-pubescent children.

The editors of The B.C. Catholic are fully aware that many readers will only glance at the headline of an article and that many of those who do take the time to actually read the page 12 article will not be aware of the scientific facts that have resulted from studies of sexual abuse. These readers will therefore receive the absolutely incorrect impression from the article that indeed there is a link between homosexuality and pedophilia. There is no way that the editors cannot have been aware of this when they decided to publish the article. The article is, in effect, a lie.

I am profoundly discouraged by the ignorance, irresponsibility, and insensibility reflected in this article. Moreover, I feel that I am in the wilderness again because I now believe there is no one in the Archdiocese who is willing to acknowledge the wound opened by such hateful attitudes and actions, let alone to begin to attempt to heal it. I am a soul in distress but because that soul is a gay man's soul, I do not expect pastoral understanding and care from my Church.

The B.C. Catholic is, I understand, the official voice of the Archdiocese of Vancouver. If the page 12 article is a reflection of the message of love in the Gospel, a message which it is part of the mission of any diocese to deliver to the faithful, I, a simple Christian who hungers for that message, did not find it on page 12.

When you declined to allow me to be a catechist in 2007, after I told you I was gay, it was out of deep respect and great affection for you as a pastor and as a friend that I remained silent about your decision. For the same reasons, I have not told anyone in our parish that I am gay and that I respectfully disagree with the teaching of the Church on homosexuality. You must understand that this has caused me great personal conflict. After the publication by The B.C. Catholic of such an egregiously ignorant and hurtful article, however, I can no longer remain silent. As I am only one parishioner out of several thousand at St. -----, I do not wish to cause you either embarrassment or stress that is out of all proportion to my importance as a member of the community. Therefore, in order to preserve my integrity, my only recourse is to excuse myself from continued membership in St. ----- parish. You have no idea how deeply this saddens me.

I sincerely hope that both you and Father ---- experience continued joy in your ministry.


In Christ's love,


Ross

Outrage

I do not like raging diatribes. I believe that it is my responsibility as a writer to criticize when I feel it is necessary to criticize but to do so thoughtfully, reasonably, and with what I humbly consider to be the resources of truth. But today I am deeply angered and profoundly saddened by what I have read in the dicoesan newspaper which arrived in my mailbox this afternoon. What has been printed in this edition is so ignorant, so irresponsible, and so insensitive that I feel I must now seriously consider whether I can be associated with a church that propogates this brand of  homophobic misinformation and still maintain my personal integrity.

At this moment I cannot decide whether to vomit or to weep.

The title of the article on page 12 of The B.C. Catholic is "Homosexuality, pedophilia related: cardinal." The subhead is "Most clerical abuse cases involve attraction to male adolescents, Vatican spokesman confirms." The reader does not have to go beyond these two lines to be alerted to the ignorance of the editors of this newspaper as it is a well-known and documented fact that pedophilia involves the abuse of pre-pubescent children, while ephebophilia, the abuse of post-pubescent children, is an entirely different disorder. It does not matter whether the editors know the difference or not; to juxtapose these two lines is egregiously irresponsible.

The article begins:

The Vatican Secretary of State [Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone] told reporters in Chile that no study has ever shown a connection between celibacy and pedophilia, but many psychologists and psychiatrists believe there is a connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.

At no point in what follows does the reporter give any indication that the general response to Bertone's statement has ranged from outrage to outright ridicule. Nor does it state that when the independent report on clerical sexual abuse commissioned by the USCCB was released, one of the architects of that report was asked directly by an American bishop if the research of the reporting body indicated that sexual abuse was more likely to be committed by a homosexual; she replied that the research produced no evidence of a link between sexual abuse and homosexuality. Has anyone at The B.C. Catholic read this report?

If the reader of this article has not looked at the facts that lie behind the crisis of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, not to mention the scientific research on sexual abuse in general, he or she will be led to believe that both pedophelia and ephebophilia are linked directly to homosexuality. One does not have to be a genius to see that the real purpose of the article is to use the cardinal's profoundly ignorant statement as further "evidence" to support and promote the teaching of the Church that homosexuality is "disordered."

I am sick at heart and I frankly do not know where in the Church to turn for healing. If the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Vancouver can issue forth such despicable ignorance, it is not likely that my pastor or any other priest is going to acknowledge that this article is a willful and hurtful example of what is truly disordered: the teaching of the Church on homosexuality.

As I said, I do not like diatribes. I apologize for this one lapse.

Jesus, Compassion, and Homosexuality

I am currently reading Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus AGAIN for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith. Chapter Three of this fascinating and enlightening book is entitled "Jesus, Compassion, and Politics." Here Borg claims that the compassion so evident in the teaching and in the public life of Jesus "was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in community." Jesus' concept of compassion was in opposition to the predominant Jewish paradigm of the day, which was holiness ("Be holy as God is holy"). The issue that reflected this opposition was the law of purity and its social and political, as well as its religious, implications. In the Judaism of Jesus' time, "holiness was understood to mean 'separation from everything unclean'...[and] [t]he ethos of purity produced a politics of purity--that is, a society structured around a purity system."

The purity system marginalized those who were considered to be the most impure: occupational groups such as tax collectors and shepherds; people who were not considered to be physically whole, such as "the maimed, the chronically ill, lepers, eunuchs, and so forth"; and the "abjectly poor." Women were considered generally less pure than men, and gentiles were "impure and unclean."

But according to Borg, "[i]n the message and activity of Jesus, we see an alternative social vision: a community shaped not by the ethos and politics of purity, but by the ethos and politics of compassion." Jesus presented a different concept of purity, one in which inner purity was to be more valued than purity on the outside: "There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile." Both the teachings of Jesus and his activities were a "challenge to the purity system." He healed lepers and hemorrhaging women and ate meals with tax collectors and sinners. For Jesus, compassion always trumped purity.

In a section of the chapter entitled Spirit, Compassion, and Us, Borg says the following:

The intra-Jewish battle between Jesus and the advocates of the purity system can be seen as a battle over two different ways to interpret Scripture. Both he and his critics stood in the tradition of Israel and sought to be faithful to it. The elites of his day read Scripture in accordance with the paradigm of holiness as purity. Jesus read it in accordance with the paradigm of compassion. Each provided a lens through which the tradition was seen. It was thus a hermeneutical battle, a conflict between two very different ways of interpreting the sacred traditions of Judaism. It was not, of course, the kind of academic hermeneutical argument that occurs today in scholarly circles. Rather it was a hermeneutical battle about the shape of a world, and the stakes were high.

The same hermeneutical struggle goes on in the church today. In parts of the church there are groups that emphasize holiness and purity as the Christian way of life, and they draw their own sharp boundaries between the righteous and sinners. It is a sad irony that these groups, many of which are seeking very earnestly to be faithful to Scripture, end up emphasizing those parts of Scripture that Jesus himself challenged and opposed. An interpretation of Scripture faithful to Jesus and the early Christian movement sees the Bible through the lens of compassion, not purity.

To use a specific example, I am convinced that much of the strongly negative attitude toward homosexuality on the part of some Christians has arisen because, in addition to whatever non-religious homophobic reasons may be involved, homosexuality is seen (often unconsciously) as a purity issue. For these Christians, there's something "dirty" about it, boundaries are being crossed, things are being put together that do not belong together, and so forth. Indeed, homosexuality was a purity issue in ancient Judaism. The prohibition against it is found in the purity laws of the book of Leviticus.

It seems to me that the shattering of purity boundaries by both Jesus and Paul should also apply to the purity code's perception of homosexuality. Homosexual behavior should therefore be evaluated by the same criteria as heterosexual behavior. It also seems to me that the passage in which Paul negates the other central polarities of his world ["In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female."] also means "In Christ there is neither straight nor gay." Granted, Paul didn't say that, but the logic of "life in the Spirit" and the ethos of compassion imply it.

One can only pray for the coming of the day on which the Catholic hierarchy chooses the ethos of compassion over what Marcus Borg calls "a purity system constituted by external boundaries." One does of course assume - compassionately - that Church attitudes toward and teachings on homosexuality do not involve "non-religious homophobic reasons" for such attitudes and teachings.

Clerical Abuse: A Lesson From America

In the wake of the terrible storm of the revelation of clerical sexual abuse in Boston and beyond in 2002, priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley wrote a book entitled Priests: A Calling in Crisis. The purpose of the book, according to its author, is to “report the sociological facts about the Catholic clergy as these facts emerge from analysis of survey data” in order to correct the misinformation on the priesthood and abuse of minors disseminated by an uninformed press, inexpert clerical or ex-clerical spokespersons, and individuals and organizations with an ideological axe to grind.

There is a tradition of research on the priesthood that could provide a very different and more nuanced perspective on the Catholic priesthood in the United States, one in which most people were not interested during the fateful year of 2002 because, like all responsible research, it presents a picture that is gray, ambiguous, problematic, and hence easier to quote out of context and to ignore. Reaching back into the late 1960s and extending to an analysis of the 1993 Los Angeles Times study of the priesthood (Greeley, 1995), it presents priests as on average happy, mature, and self-fulfilled men. I hope this book contributes to the continuance of that tradition.

The storm that hit the United States in 2002 recently appears to have begun wreaking havoc in Western Europe. We are already seeing comments about celibacy as a possible direct or indirect cause of the abuse; there is no doubt that homosexuality and the “disproportionate number” of gay priests will be once again dragged out as another probable cause of clerical sex abuse. It is useful, then, to take another look at Greeley’s study, which is based on the 1993 Los Angeles Times survey of the priesthood as well as a replication of the survey, with slight modifications (“The second Times survey is the first time that a national sample of priests have been asked directly about their sexual behavior”), conducted by the newspaper in 2002. Each of the surveys polled approximately 2000 priests.

The 2002 survey revealed that approximately 16 percent of priests “admitted that they were either homosexual or inclined in that direction, hardly the large number claimed by such ‘studies’ as those of A.W. Richard Sipe or the Kansas City Star.” The number is, however, larger than generally accepted percentages of homosexuals in the wider population. While the percentage of celibate heterosexual priests is higher than that of gay priests, Greeley notes that “most homosexual priests appear to be celibate. Thus those who shrilly insist that it is time to say ‘goodbye to good men’ are merely displaying their own homophobia.”

One must consider also the possibility that a priesthood with a higher percentage of homosexuals might provide a haven for child abusers. While most homosexuals are not abusers and most abusers are not homosexuals, the propensity of Catholic conservatives to claim that child abuse is essentially a homosexual problem must be considered. However, those who argue in such fashion, no matter how exalted their positions in the Church might be, have yet to offer anything but their own unsubstantiated assertions to support their argument.

Since many abuses were committed by men who were ordained long before homosexuality became visible in the seminaries and the dioceses, the argument that there is a link between the increased presence of homosexuals and child abuse seems inherently improbable.

A preliminary report commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to investigate clerical sexual abuse has also found that there is no connection between homosexuality and the increased likelihood of sex abuse. In fact, according to a CBS report on the survey, “many experts on sex offenders reject any link between sexual orientation and committing abuse.” The study was prepared for the USCCB by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. At the meeting held for the release of the report one bishop asked a researcher from the college whether “their study indicated that homosexuality should be considered when evaluating a candidate for the priesthood.” The response was that if the exclusion of a homosexual candidate for the priesthood “were based on the fact that that person would be more probable than any other candidate to abuse, we do not find that at this time.”

Celibacy has also been cited as one probable cause of the clerical sex abuse crisis, both in 2002 and most recently in relation to the European situation. The highest ranking bishop in Germany, where victims of abuse have come forward in large numbers in the past few weeks, has denied that there is a link between sexual abuse of minors by priests and celibacy. The eminent theologian Father Hans Küng, no friend of the Church hierarchy, has termed the archbishop’s denials “erroneous.” The London Times reports:

He said it was the case that abuse was found also in families, schools and other churches. But he asked: “Why is it so prevalent in the Catholic Church under celibate leadership?” He said that celibacy was not the only cause of the misconduct but described it as “the most important and structurally the most decisive” expression of the church’s uptight attitude to sex.

In Priests: A Calling in Crisis, Father Greeley notes a similar response to the 2002 crisis in the United States.

Most of those who spoke to the media or wrote on the subject assumed that the reason [the abuse occurred] was obvious. Priests could not marry, either because of church law or because they were incapable of mature sexual love with a woman. Therefore they preyed on the young and innocent. The only way to stop the abuse was to eliminate the foolish celibacy rule and with it the sinister clerical culture that supported abusers. For Catholic “liberals” the abuse scandal provided a rallying point to push their demands for a married clergy, women priests, and a more democratic church.

Occasionally someone observed that abusers of the young were usually men with deep and perhaps incurable personality problems and that, if they marry, they often abuse their own children. Marriage then does not seem to be a cure for abuse. Almost no one said that it degraded women to assume that the abolition of celibacy would stop abuse.

Journalists sought out “experts,” mostly former priests, to answer their questions. Some former priests hinted that those who remain in the priesthood are not real men because they do not sleep with a woman. They spoke of the infantilism of the male clerical culture, which produced and protected abusers. They questioned the psychological maturity of priests, and their fidelity to the promise of celibacy.

These “experts” were not widely known in the Catholic population and had little influence in general on Catholic thinking—though most priests have heard about them. However, they used their fifteen minutes of celebrity to reinforce the general assumption among Americans that celibacy is unhealthy and that it was no surprise that celibates are freaks, and perhaps monsters.

Greeley goes on to show that there is no sound evidence, from either psychologists or sociologists, that celibacy results in psychological maladjustment among priests, maladjustment that would lead to acting out through the sexual abuse of minors. Through analysis of the data in the Times surveys, Greeley demonstrates that in fact the opposite is true and concludes:

Priests are clearly happy and satisfied men. They report on the average that the priesthood has been better than they had expected it would be, that they are very satisfied with their lives as priests, that they would choose to be a priest again, and that they are not likely to leave the priesthood. They score higher on measures of satisfaction than do doctors, lawyers, faculty members, and Protestant ministers.

The 2002 Times survey produced some interesting and surprising data about the attitudes of priests to the abuse scandal. Question 60 on the survey asks: "Thinking now about the recent allegations of sexual misconduct by priests….Do you think that most, many, some, or only a few of the allegations are true?” Only 19 percent of the respondents believed that most charges were true. 42 percent thought that many of the allegations were true, and 38 percent believed that only some or none of them were true. “It would appear that most priests even in the summer and autumn of 2002 were still in denial and do not understand the horror of the abuse of the victim and the victim’s family.” In fact, “[w]hen asked what troubled them most about the allegations of abuse, only 5% said that it was the suffering of the victims.”

It would appear that the respondents to the 2002 study tend to wash their hands of personal responsibility. You blame bishops and the whole Church and the media and the cover-up and the reassignment, and you worry about false charges and the greed of lawyers, and you regret the loss of credibility, but not many of you feel any personal responsibility and only 5% of you worry about the suffering of the victims.

You don’t ask yourselves how many times you knew or suspected that something bad was going on in a rectory or how often you demonized a victim and his family or blamed lawyers for causing the problem or how often you insisted that in a given case the priest was innocent. Had he not denied the charges? Had not the doctors and the police cleared him? How often did you admit even to yourself that maybe you were kidding yourself because of loyalty to the priesthood? So, of the various characters involved in the tragedy, the bishops and the media and the victims and the lawyers did bad things. But not priests. Forty-one percent want the responsible bishops to resign, and 11% want them to be indicted and sent to jail. But not the priests who might have cooperated in the cover-ups and certainly not those who knew deep down inside that something was wrong and did not speak up.

Greeley attributes this denial of responsibility to the “norms of clerical culture,” which include a taboo on “betraying” a fellow priest. “The problems in the priesthood come from neither celibacy nor homosexuality. The problems come rather from the iron law of denial and silence that clerical culture imposes on priests.” Bishops also belong to this band of brothers and often their first impulse is to help and protect a priest when he is in trouble.

This is not an excuse for their behavior but merely an attempt to put it in the context of the ideology of clerical culture. Cardinal Egan wrote sympathetically that a Bridgeport priest whom he reassigned was “graceful.” No one had told him that most abusers are charming men and graceful liars. Abusers often seem to their friends to be “one of the guys.” You stand by one of the guys even if you are a bishop.

Greeley believes that the bishops who reassigned abusive priests, especially after 1992, when guidelines for handling abuse cases had been set in place, committed grave sin. The worst of their sins was re-victimizing the victims by refusing to acknowledge them, by refusing to recognize "the terrible wreckage that sexual abuse causes for human lives.” He says that these bishops “were, in fact, according to the strict canons of the old moral theology, necessary cooperators in evil and objectively as responsible for the evil as those who actually did it.”

Priests with “deep and perhaps incurable personality problems” were responsible for the horrific abuse of young people both in America and in Europe. These priests should have been removed from ministry by their bishops. While it is possible that bishops did not understand the nature of pedophilia or ephebophilia when most of these abuses were taking place, it is not possible to imagine that they or their vicars general could not have been aware of the terrible pain suffered by the victims—children, innocent and helpless in the face of demands from such esteemed and holy men as priests—and their families. In his book on the Boston crisis, Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal, author David France recounts the experience of a mother, whose son had been abused by the priest Joseph Birmingham, when she confronted Monsignor John Jennings, head of personnel for the Boston archdiocese, about the serial abuse committed by Birmingham at her parish and expressed her concern for the potential victims at the parish to which the priest had just been reassigned.

Monsignor Jennings motioned for the women to sit on chairs arrayed before his expansive desk on a hand-tied Tibetan carpet. Elaine gestured to have her sister tuck in on her left and Judy Fairbanks on her right. “Make sure I don’t lose control,” she said under her breath, “because if I lose control we’ll screw the whole thing up.”

After introductions she got right to the point. “Our main concern is, number one, we want Father B. to have psychiatric help.”

Jennings held up a hand. “We wouldn’t agree to something like that,” he said.

“We want his new pastor to be notified that this problem exists. That way he can keep an eye on him.”

“We wouldn’t agree,” he scowled.

“Three, not to have any contact with young children. If he has to be around them put him in with the high school kids, and they’ll probably knock his block off if he tries something funny.”

Jennings shook his head as though to say the entire matter was out of everybody’s hands.

“Why can’t you have psychiatric treatment for him?” one of the women interrupted.

In its wisdom the church had done what would be done. “It’s not in the cards,” he said.

The women pressed their agenda, futilely visiting and revisiting the group’s three goals. Ultimately Jennings signalled the end of his patience. “Ladies, “ he exploded. He raised a scolding finger at Elaine. “You must be very careful of slander.”

Elaine climbed to her feet, tugging against her sister’s efforts to restrain her, insane with anger. If the desk had been any narrower, she knew she would have slapped the monsignor’s face. In her mind his collar had disappeared and he was no more noble than any common man. She raised her own finger back at him.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” she said. “where do you think my husband would be if he pulled this shit? If he pulled this shit he’d be in jail. He’d never be able to have another teaching job in his life. Furthermore, if this archdiocese doesn’t have enough money to send Father B. for psychiatric care, I don’t know what religion is if it doesn’t even take care of its own. And if you can’t afford it, I suggest you people hock this Oriental rug!”

Elaine and the ladies left Jennings’ office and went immediately to see Father John McCormack who had previously been pastor of their parish and whom Elaine knew well. She was sure that he would help her, but all she got was a blessing.

She would never set foot back inside a Catholic church. She would even withdraw her son from St. John’s Preparatory, where he was expected to begin his freshman year in the fall. “I don’t know if you’re harboring the same type of men at your place or not, but I can’t take that chance,” she explained. The administration refused to refund her $500, and that became the last penny the Catholic church ever got from her or her family.

Even so, it did nothing to assuage her guilt and bitter self-recrimination. Over the following year she was back and forth to her doctor for high blood pressure and anxiety. She wasn’t sleeping. Her doctor said he had never seen such profound stress in such a young woman. Before the year was through, she would suffer a massive stroke that would freeze the right side of her body and close one of her eyes. She was thirty-seven years old.

The case of this woman and her son symbolizes the pain of families all over the U.S.—and as is now being revealed, in many countries of the world—caused by the callous indifference of the clerical hierarchy to the profound suffering of victims of abuse. I was going to say that the example was perhaps extreme and France’s retelling of the story somewhat melodramatic. On second thought, I am certain that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of similar “extreme and melodramatic” stories, all of them true, in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere.

I have said before that I am an unabashed moral relativist. The bishops—and particularly the Bishop of Rome—have emphatically declared that they are not. Yet it seems to me that the repeated victimization of children and the abetting of that victimization by the very shepherds who are divinely charged with watching over them is always and absolutely morally wrong. Blaming the horror of sexual abuse on homosexuals in the priesthood or on clerical celibacy is either monstrous ignorance or, worse, a smokescreen to cover the real sin. And the real sin is the failure of those in high positions—and perhaps even the highest position—to love and protect the children of God, and their failure, when their sin is exposed, to retreat in shame and in penitence to a monastery.

On Conscience

How many people, whether Catholic, Jewish, or Sikh, actually have a relationship with God or experience God in their prayers, in the mundane events or tasks of their daily lives, in their work, in their relations with their fellow human beings? If there is some kind of connection, a form of discourse perhaps, with God, how is it manifested? I wonder whether the communication that takes place is direct, as in the voice of God speaking to the believer, or if it is metaphorical, through signs. A young seminarian based his whole vocation on just such a sign. He told God that if he sent him a sign in the form of the sighting of a black rose, he would take that as a divine message that he should become a priest. The next day he saw a black rose in a shop and knew there and then what God intended for him. I am sure that there are countless stories like this young man’s.

I must admit that I have never experienced the presence of God in my life. Yet I do believe in God. Maybe I just have not had my receiver turned on or at least tuned in; perhaps God indeed does speak to me—when Butterfly sings “Un Bel di Vedremo” or when I see the snow-covered mountains in Vancouver on a sunny winter’s day. As Eckhart Tolle tells us with such beautiful simplicity, the constant chatter of our thinking mind prevents us from becoming aware of and truly experiencing the stillness that is the space between our thoughts. Is it in this space, this stillness, that we will find God?

I wonder if one of the ways that God does speak with us is through conscience. I do not mean the conscience that is trained and guided by the dogma and doctrine of any organized religion, particularly the Catholic Church, but rather that voice, governed neither by passion nor by reason, that tells us, in any given situation, what is morally right and what is morally wrong.

Let us indulge in a slight digression for the moment and look at the Catholic discussion of natural law. According to the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, natural law is “the rule of conduct which is prescribed to us by the Creator in the constitution of the nature with which He has endowed us.” The explanation goes on:

According to St. Thomas [Aquinas], the natural law is “nothing else than the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law”….Like all the rest of creation, man is destined by God to an end, and receives from Him a direction towards this end. This ordination is of a character in harmony with his free intelligent nature. In virtue of his intelligence and free will, man is master of his conduct. Unlike the things of the mere material world, he can vary his action, act, or abstain from action as he pleases. Yet he is not a lawless being in an ordered universe. In the very constitution of his nature, he too has a law laid down for him, reflecting that ordination and direction of all things, which is the eternal law. The rule, then, which God has prescribed for our conduct, is found in our nature itself. Those actions which conform with its tendencies, lead to our destined end, and are thereby constituted right and morally good; those at variance with our nature are wrong and immoral.

How do we know, then, whether an action conforms with our divinely endowed nature or is at variance with it? The Church would have us subscribe to its interpretation of natural law in considering the morality of our actions:

Actions are wrong if, though subserving the satisfaction of some particular need or tendency, they are at the same time incompatible with that rational harmonious subordination of the lower to the higher which reason should maintain among our conflicting tendencies and desires. For example, to nourish our bodies is right; but to indulge our appetite for food to the detriment of our corporal or spiritual life is wrong. Self-preservation is right, but to refuse to expose our life when the well-being of society requires it, is wrong. It is wrong to drink to intoxication, for, besides being injurious to health, such indulgence deprives one of the use of reason, which is intended by God to be the guide and dictator of conduct. Theft is wrong because it subverts the basis of social life; and man’s nature requires for its proper development that he live in a state of society.

Here is where we get into a few problems because there is now a mediator between God and the individual natures of human beings. In the “rational harmonious subordination of the lower to the higher,” for example, who decides what is lower and what is higher? How has it been determined—and by whom—that reason “is intended by God to be the guide and dictator of conduct”? It is rather simplistic to say that theft is always wrong; when a man steals from a wealthy exploiter in order to feed his starving family, surely this cannot be called wrong.

If my God (or yours) is a God of love, reason should tell us that an action is only wrong if it causes harm to self or to others; if we love God, ourselves, and others, we do not intentionally cause harm to be done. I do not believe that we need a set of laws, either religious or secular, to tell us this because we participate in the “eternal law” through the working of conscience, which tells us whether an action is harmful to ourselves or to others. Nevertheless, as humans are weak—or sinful—they do not always act out of love or according to the dictates of conscience. The seven deadly sins do indeed reflect the dark side of human nature, and because many of us act on that aspect of our nature, we need to prescribe consequences for failure to listen to our conscience when serious harm results from that failure. Naturally, there are also those who are so damaged that the regulating function of conscience is disordered; the rest of the world needs to be protected from these broken souls.

When we were children and we did something which we clearly knew was wrong, like striking a younger sibling or taking the possession of another against his or her will, our parents would say to us, “You know that’s wrong. Why do I have to tell you?” As adults we also know that actions that harm others or potentially harm others—directly or indirectly—are wrong. As we are social creatures, we have a fairly sophisticated understanding of our responsibilities toward ourselves and others. We do not need God or conscience to tell us that running a red or “nearly-red” light is wrong or that dropping garbage on the side of the road is immoral or that smoking will likely kill us and maybe a few others along with us.

But what do we do when the line between right and wrong is not so clear? I believe that if we allow ourselves to be guided by the voice of God—which is in all cases the voice of love—intoned through our conscience, we cannot fail to arrive at the answer that is right for us. Let us take, for example, the recent controversy sparked by the decision of Notre Dame University, a Catholic institution, to invite pro-choice President Obama to give the 2009 commencement speech and to bestow on him an honorary degree. Conservative pro-life groups, including nearly three score of Catholic bishops, denounced the invitation. Moreover, Harvard Law professor and former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, Mary Ann Glendon, who was to receive the university’s Laetare Award at the commencement, sent a letter to university president Father John Jenkins declining the award.

The Laetare speech was delivered, in Glendon’s place, by Judge John T. Noonan, who had been recipient of the award in 1984. An article on the website of America Magazine lauded this choice: “In the event, he delivered one of the most memorable speeches of any commencement, one that should rank with Secretary of State George Marshall’s commencement address at Harvard in 1947, not in terms of their immediate political significance but in terms of the way both men used the moment to raise the intellectual climate of the nation.”

Here is what Noonan had to say in his speech on the rights and demands of conscience:

By conscience, as you graduates of 2009 know, we apprehend what God asks of us and what the love of our neighbor requires. More than the voice of your mother, more than an emotional impulse, this mysterious, impalpable, imprescriptible, indestructible, and indispensable guide governs our moral life. Each one is different. You may suggest what my conscience should say, but you cannot tell me what my conscience must say. That's the rub when your moral vision is clear and the other fellow's is cloudy. You become impatient, the more frustrated if the other fellow is a friend - an old friend or a potential friend. Why can't he or she see it? To satisfy that frustration by shunning or denouncing your unseeing companion will accomplish little beyond expressing your own exasperation.

The Catholic Church teaches that man’s conscience must be educated and that the primary source of instruction is the “authoritative teaching of the Church.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1783-1785) states:

Conscience must be formed and moral judgment enlightened. A well-formed conscience is upright and truthful. It formulates its judgments according to reason, in conformity with the true good willed by the wisdom of the Creator. The education of conscience is indispensable for human beings who are subjected to negative influences and tempted by sin to prefer their own judgment and to reject authoritative teachings.

The education of the conscience is a lifelong task. From the earliest years it awakens the child to the knowledge and practice of the interior law recognized by conscience. Prudent education teaches virtue; it prevents or cures fear, selfishness, and pride, resentment arising from guilt, and feelings of complacency, born of human weakness and faults. The education of the conscience guarantees freedom and engenders peace of heart.

In the formation of conscience the Word of God is the light for our path, we must assimilate it in faith and prayer and put it into practice. We must also examine our conscience before the Lord’s Cross. We are assisted by gifts of the Holy Spirit, aided by the witness or advice of others and guided by the authoritative teaching of the Church.

Again we have a mediator, in the form of the “authoritative teaching” of the Church, prescribing exactly how we are to adhere to “the rule of conduct which is prescribed to us by the Creator in the constitution of the nature with which He has endowed us.” In other words, God speaks to us through the Church, which in turn interprets and codifies his law in all its complexity and minute detail and passes it on to us, who are expected to obey. Failure to obey constitutes sin, either mortal or venial, and could result in our being condemned to the everlasting fires of hell.

There can be no question that the Church, especially at the local level, is a force for good in that through the ritualized enactment of the liturgy of the Word and of the Eucharist it serves to remind us of our need to recognize that which is greater than we are, of the need to love God and to love our community, and of the need to acknowledge and provide comfort to the less fortunate in our world. The sacraments, “visible signs of an invisible grace,” enrich our lives and bring us closer to God. The Church can also be a powerful moral guide, when the issue involves social justice or a clear choice between good and evil (cause harm or do not cause harm), both for us as individuals and for the world at large.

When it comes to our relationship with God or our experience of God, however, I would argue that as intelligent adults we must also recognize that the Church is made up of men—imperfect men often committed to the preservation of power, both their own and that of the institution. It is sinful and imperfect men—men who may indeed be well intentioned—who interpret God’s law and require us strictly to agree with and obey the dogma and doctrine that result from their interpretation. In the process of submission to the earthly authority of the Church, we seem to have lost the awareness that God does—through our conscience—speak directly to us. If we can quiet the constant calculating, judgmental, and anxious activity of our thinking mind, we will hear—or rather feel—the voice of God telling us what is right for us. In order for us to lead peaceful, truly productive lives, this voice must assume primacy over any other, including that of Church, state, society, or parents.

On July 25 1968 Pope Paul VI issued Humanae vitae, the long-anticipated encyclical on birth control. The essence of the encyclical’s message was “The Church, calling human beings back to the observance of the norms of natural law, as interpreted by her constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.” Upon learning that the pope had gone against the recommendations of the commission he himself had appointed, Catholics began following the advice of Catholic University theologian and professor Father Charles Curran: “Spouses may responsibly decide according to their conscience that artificial contraception in some circumstances is permissible and indeed necessary to preserve and foster the values and sacredness of marriage.” Writer James Carroll, about to be ordained a priest at the time, recalls in his book Practising Catholic:

Eight other CU theologians were first signers of Curran’s statement. It was a shot heard round the ecclesiastical world. Within days, hundreds of other theologians and Church officials joined them, including some of the most admired scholars in all of Catholicism, like Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, and Bernard Häring. Most of the Paulist priests who had been my professors over the previous six years affirmed the Curran position. Very quickly, Canadian and European bishops’ conferences issued statements saying that Catholics should consider contraception a matter of conscience….As far as I knew, not one of my classmates accepted the encyclical, and not one of our professors indicated that we should. No sooner had the encyclical been issued than vast numbers of Catholics instinctively understood that they could reject it without thereby becoming bad Catholics. This became as essential part of Catholic self-understanding, though bishops would rail against it for the next generation.

In spite of the reinstatement of monarchical papal authority following the election of John Paul II and repeated reaffirmations of the principles espoused by Humanae vitae, Catholic couples all over the world continue to listen to their conscience when it comes to the issue of artificial birth control. Many of these couples, fully aware of the doctrinal prohibition against this practice, must ask themselves if preventing contraception does harm and is thereby an evil action. They must wonder how it became an imperative of natural law that the act of making love to the one they love must “be open to the transmission of life.”

Just as Catholics understand that they can reject the teachings of the Church on contraception without becoming bad Catholics, as a gay man, my conscience tells me that the doctrine on homosexuality as reflected in Joseph Ratzinger’s 1986 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” is one which I and all other gay Catholics—in fact, all Catholics period—can ignore without guilt. The letter states the following:

In the discussion which followed the publication of the Declaration [the "Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics" issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on December 29, 1975], however, an overly benign interpretation was given to the homosexual condition itself, some going so far as to call it neutral, or even good. Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not.

Love between two people of the same sex in no way contravenes “the rule of conduct which is prescribed to us by the Creator in the constitution of the nature with which He has endowed us.” In fact, homosexuality constitutes part of my divinely endowed nature, so God and I are just fine with it. Moreover, a gay relationship based on mutual love and respect can under no circumstances be considered evil. I can live a peaceful and productive life as a gay man—even if I am in a gay relationship—and still be a good Catholic because what God says to me through my nature and through my conscience trumps the teaching of the Church.

If our conscience is to be educated by the authoritative teaching of the Church, we must be able to insist, in this modern age, that the Church be educated by the authoritative teaching of the modern natural and social sciences. As Catholics we need to adopt a mature faith tempered by integrity and healthy skepticism and recognize the tendency of Church leaders to resist change and cling to a medieval, anti-modern view of the Church as a hierarchical institution. As Hans Küng states in his The Catholic Church: A Short History, “In this view the pope stands at the head as absolute sole ruler; then comes the aristocracy of the bishops and priests; and finally, in a passive function, the subject people of the faithful.”

These words of Cardinal Ratzinger in his “Letter to Bishops” reflect the arrogance and distortion of truth to which this tendency leads:

Naturally, an exhaustive treatment of this complex issue cannot be attempted here, but we will focus our reflection within the distinctive context of the Catholic moral perspective. It is a perspective which finds support in the more secure findings of the natural sciences, which have their own legitimate and proper methodology and field of inquiry.

However, the Catholic moral viewpoint is founded on human reason illumined by faith and is consciously motivated by the desire to do the will of God our Father. The Church is thus in a position to learn from scientific discovery but also to transcend the horizons of science and to be confident that her more global vision does greater justice to the rich reality of the human person in his spiritual and physical dimensions, created by God and heir, by grace, to eternal life.


While these words are personally offensive to me, I am secure in my conscience that they do not reflect the will of God, that in this case the “authoritative teaching” of the Church is an oxymoron. I am also confident that those who chose in 1968—and those who to this day continue to choose—to follow their conscience rather than the doctrine affirmed by Humanae vitae, recognize that the will of God does not necessarily correspond to the “authoritative teaching” of the Church and that when God speaks to us in a voice unmediated by any agent, we are hearing the Truth.