Catholic and Gay

 

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leading 19th-century American intellectual, warned that adhering to accepted “truths” sometimes blinds people to wider realities. He named this limited perspective as leading to “a foolish consistency that is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

I thought of Emerson when last month, the homosexuality conundrum was addressed by Pope Francis and his team of advisors in the Vatican. The Catholic Church is in the middle of a major internal debate about the standing of LGBTQ members in the church.

On the one side we have the clear consistent church teaching that God created two sexes, male and female to take care of human procreation. This line of thinking stresses the obvious physical dependence and attraction between men and women, that result in new life.

“Increase and multiply” remains the biblical command that must be obeyed and has a divine imprimatur. This leaves no room for same-sex intimacy, incapable of pregnancy, which is marked as unnatural, deviant and sinful.

On the other side, a strong group of moralists point to a diverse God who cannot be fitted in some logical box that undermines the complexity of creation. Seeing gay people as some kind of divine mistake inevitably leads to dubious moral assertions.  These theologians affirm all God’s creation with no place in their vocabulary for assigning deviance.

Starting in the 1960s, a new popular movement asserted the rights of men and women to express their love and affection within their own gender. This sexual revolution faced hostile rejection in some quarters, but gradually, Western culture accepted that who a person chooses to love should always be respected as a personal choice. Today, the spirit of live and let live is the accepted philosophy in nearly every Western country.

Scientific studies clearly establish that around 20% of people in all cultures find sexual love in their own gender community.

This creates a major quandary for the Vatican because their beliefs have been set in stone over many centuries: homosexuality must be viewed as an illness and they have enshrined this belief in all kinds of restrictions that critics convincingly claim perpetuate a homophobic outlook that inevitably leads to negative attitudes to the LGBTQ community.

Gay men make up around 40% of the American Catholic clergy, according to mini-studies by researchers attached to  the New York Times. Other estimates run as high as 70%.

The Catholic Church would be unable to operate without its gay priests, according to Francis DiBernardo, the executive director of the New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based group that supports gay Catholics.

Where does Francis stand on these issues? In the early part of his pontificate, he responded pointedly to a question about the gay lifestyle by asking the broad-minded question who am I to judge? Many in the Vatican hierarchy told him that as pope it was his job to articulate the views of all his predecessors who were clear in their condemnation of what they deemed deviant and morally reprehensible sexual behavior.

Then, in June, the pope used an anti-gay slur when talking to Italian bishops at an official church gathering. How could a pope who cultivated a sense of understanding with the gay community use homophobic slang and caution his audience about accepting gay men as seminarians?

The Vatican press office came to his defense, claiming that the pope was misrepresented and that “he never meant to express himself in homophobic terms,” and he offered an apology.

Strengthening this welcoming philosophy that “there is room for everyone” in the Catholic Church, it emerged that Francis had written to an openly gay man who wanted to enter a local seminary that he should “keep going.”

Just as this firestorm was receding at a time of a major Gay Pride parade in Rome involving over a million participants, a report of another scalding statement by Francis where he used the same negative language in claiming that the church was confronted in the Vatican with “an air of faggotry” diminishing the work of Vatican leaders.

Just days before the big Pride march the pope had assured Fr. James Martin, who founded the Catholic LGBTQ “Outreach” ministry, of his love for the gay community.

How can one square barroom talk about faggotry coming from a man with genuine leadership credentials in the universal areas of environmental protection and proclaiming the rights of refugees? This is a major question that only the pope can answer.

Using the Emerson paradigm, is reaffirming the old biological certainties the most enlightened way to continue?

Francis must tell us in clear and unambiguous language whether his church continues to believe that intimate homosexual love between adults is unnatural and thus morally reprehensible. Or has he accepted the reasoning of many outstanding theologians who want an open welcome for all loving couples, an approach that fits well with the spirit of the New Testament.

Gerry OShea blogs at wemustbetalking.com.