← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 10598 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-10-19
2003-10-19 12:50 | User Profile
Andrew Sullivan has left the Roman Catholic Church, he says, because he senses a reaction against the secular embrace of homosexuality in the American Church.
This is very heartening. I hope it's true, although I've yet to see much more than grumbling thus far about out lavendar clergy.
I also hope and pray that my brother in Christ Andrew Sullivan will repent of his arrogant rebellion against the authority of Scripture and 2,000 years of Holy Tradition, and join the rest of us at the altar as we work out our own salvation in fear and trembling.
Walter
By ANDREW SULLIVAN
Published: October 19, 2003
Дast week, something quite banal happened at St. Benedict's Church in the Bronx. A gay couple were told they could no longer sing in the choir. Their sin was to have gotten a civil marriage license in Canada. One man had sung in the choir for 32 years; the other had joined the church 25 years ago. Both had received certificates from the church commending them for "noteworthy participation." But their marriage had gained publicity; it was even announced in The New York Times. This "scandal" led to their expulsion. The archbishop's spokesman explained that the priest had "an obligation" to exclude them.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a very small event. But it is a vivid example of why this last year has made the once difficult lives of gay Catholics close to impossible. The church has gone beyond its doctrinal opposition to emotional or sexual relationships between gay men and lesbians to an outspoken and increasingly shrill campaign against them. Gay relationships were described by the Vatican earlier this year as "evil." Gay couples who bring up children were described as committing the equivalent of "violence" against their own offspring. Gay men are being deterred from applying to seminaries and may soon be declared unfit for the priesthood, even though they commit to celibacy. The American Catholic church has endorsed a constitutional amendment that would strip gay couples of any civil benefits of any kind in the United States.
For the first time in my own life, I find myself unable to go to Mass. During the most heated bouts of rhetoric coming from the Vatican this summer, I felt tears of grief and anger welling up where once I had been able to contain them. Faith beyond resentment began to seem unreachable.
For some, the answer is as easy as it always has been. Leave, they say. The gay world looks at gay Catholics with a mixture of contempt and pity. The Catholic world looks at us as if we want to destroy an institution we simply want to belong to. So why not leave? In some ways, I suppose, I have. What was for almost 40 years a weekly church habit dried up this past year to close to nothing. Every time I walked into a church or close to one, the anger and hurt overwhelmed me. It was as if a dam of intellectual resistance to emotional distress finally burst.
But there was no comfort in this, no relief, no resolution. There is no ultimate meaning for me outside the Gospels, however hard I try to imagine it; no true solace but the Eucharist; no divine love outside of Christ and the church he guides. In that sense, I have not left the church because I cannot leave the church, no more than I can leave my family. Like many other gay Catholics, I love this church; for me, there is and never will be any other. But I realize I cannot participate in it any longer either. It would be an act of dishonesty to enable an institution that is now a major force for the obliteration of gay lives and loves; that covered up for so long the sexual abuse of children but uses the word "evil" for two gay people wanting to commit to each other for life.
I know what I am inside. I do not believe that my orientation is on a par with others' lapses into lust when they also have an option for sexual and emotional life that is blessed and celebrated by the church. I do not believe I am intrinsically sick or disordered, as the hierarchy teaches, although I am a sinner in many, many ways. I do not believe that the gift of human sexuality is always and everywhere evil outside of procreation. (Many heterosexual Catholics, of course, agree with me, but they can hide and pass in ways that gay Catholics cannot.) I believe that denying gay people any outlet for their deepest emotional needs is wrong. I think it slowly destroys people, hollows them out, alienates them finally from their very selves.
But I must also finally concede that this will not change as a matter of doctrine. That doctrine ââ¬â never elaborated by Jesus ââ¬â was constructed when gay people as we understand them today were not known to exist; but its authority will not change just because gay people now have the courage to explain who they are and how they feel. In fact, it seems as if the emergence of gay people into the light of the world has only intensified the church's resistance. That shift in the last few years from passive silence to active hostility is what makes the Vatican's current stance so distressing. Terrified of their own knowledge of the wide presence of closeted gay men in the priesthood, concerned that the sexual doctrines required of heterosexuals are under threat, the hierarchy has decided to draw the line at homosexuals. We have become the unwilling instruments of their need to reassert control.
In an appeal to the growing fundamentalism of the developing world, this is a shrewd strategy. In the global context, gays are easily expendable. But it is also a strikingly inhumane one. The current pope is obviously a deep and holy man; but that makes his hostility even more painful. He will send emissaries to terrorists, he will meet with a man who tried to assassinate him. But he has not and will not meet with openly gay Catholics. They are, to him, beneath dialogue. His message is unmistakable. Gay people are the last of the untouchables. We can exist in the church only by silence, by bearing false witness to who we are.
I was once more hopeful. I saw within the church's doctrines room for a humane view of homosexuality, a genuinely Catholic approach to including all nonprocreative people ââ¬â the old, the infertile, the gay ââ¬â in God's church. But I can see now that the dialogue is finally shutting down.
Perhaps a new pope will change things. But the odds are that hostility will get even worse. I revere those who can keep up the struggle within the channels of the church. I respect those who have left. But I am somewhere in between now.
There are moments in a spiritual life when the heart simply breaks. Some time in the last year, mine did. I can only pray that in some distant future, some other gay people not yet born will be able to come back to the church, to sing in the choir, and know that the only true scandal in the world is the scandal of God's love for his creation, all of it, all of us, in a church that may one day, finally, become home to us all.
Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at The New Republic.
2003-10-19 13:14 | User Profile
My father is protestant, my mother catholic. I'm catholic, but I dont care what the church is saying. In fact catholizism is unnatural because priests have to live without a woman. If you think how this way many of the best thinkers in catholic nations died without children.
And now, to accept homosexuality and still do not allowing priests to marry with this anachronic Zoelibat is an idioty.
But in some European regions the catholic church is the last barrier against the Neo-Liberalism. So to be against the Catholic church is something problematic sometimes, especially if there is no real moral alternative.
Even Hitler recognized this.
But the unnatural character and egailitarism of the Catholic church is a real problem and the church changed in time...not to its better.
Today I got the feeling this church just kept the worst things and lost the best.
2003-10-19 13:31 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Agrippa]My father is protestant, my mother catholic. I'm catholic, but I dont care what the church is saying. In fact catholizism is unnatural because priests have to live without a woman. If you think how this way many of the best thinkers in catholic nations died without children.
And now, to accept homosexuality and still do not allowing priests to marry with this anachronic Zoelibat is an idioty.
But in some European regions the catholic church is the last barrier against the Neo-Liberalism. So to be against the Catholic church is something problematic sometimes, especially if there is no real moral alternative.
Even Hitler recognized this.
But the unnatural character and egailitarism of the Catholic church is a real problem and the church changed in time...not to its better.
Today I got the feeling this church just kept the worst things and lost the best.[/QUOTE]
I agree that most clergy should be married. The Orthodox have that one right, I think. Parish priests - the ones who deal most directly with families - should themselves be husbands and fathers. This would be an important blow against the pink mafia that is bent on molesting our children and preaching the most corrosive heresy imaginable to our people.
Regrettably, I fear that will not happen soon. JPII is very much against it, as are I think the great majority of the College of Cardinals.
Walter
2003-10-19 14:51 | User Profile
The only good reason for Zoelibat nowadays I can imagine is, that if you change one rule, which was established almost 1000 years ago (2. Laterankonzil 1139), you have much more pressure to change other things too. This could be the end of a unified catholic church. Therefore I understand why even rational priests are sometimes critical to changes.
But the Zoelibat is really a catastrophy in history of catholic folks, just think about all the good scientist, politicians etc. which were descendents of protestant clerics, and still are.
You are right it is different in the orthodox church, priests which are married before they are ordained. So the rule there is, as far as I know, if you already married, you can keep the wife, but its not allowed to marry after they're ordained.
So there is a Zoelibat there too, but not as strict and with the possibility of a marriage before the ordination.
2003-10-19 16:48 | User Profile
I can't think of a more destructive principle for any priestly order than the celebacy rule. For monks perhaps and possibly even for nuns but not active men working amongst both sexes in the secular world. What are young priests expected to do with the testosterone building up in their brains? With monks the hormone can possibly be channeled very effectively through prayer and meditation, although I have my doubts, but it is possible that celebacy and meditation would complement one another, especially in the case of older men, although I am willing to predict plenty of homosexuality in monestaries amongst the younger men.
It may be that a large percentage of young and middle aged men, deprived of sex with a woman for years, will turn homosexual as a release valve. It is easy to see how latent homosexuality may have developed in primate societies as a response to alpha males controling entire harems of females, and rather than have the male hormones drive the beta males insane, channel the chemical into homosexuality.
So it is likely that homosexuals are not necessarily attracted to the priesthood as made in the priesthood.