Opposite-Sex Marriage and Deep-Rooted Cultural Tradition: Considering the Argument

And then there's this: last week, as I continued trying to find my way out of my latest little stint of selva oscura, I follow the thread responding to Michael O'Loughlin's good commentary at the America blog on the debate about civil unions for same-sex couples in Rhode Island.  Why I bother, I don't know, since I can write the predictable (and exceptionally banal) responses from most of the contributors to this blog in advance--the predictable male heterosexist responses, that is to say.

There's a watchdog group that has long monitored the Jesuits and America, and who intend to do everything in their (male, heterosexist, privileged, Republican) power to keep those leftie Jesuits in check.  To remind the Jesuits, if they even think about showing some solidarity with gay and lesbian people in their struggle for justice, that they'll pay a steep price for doing so.

And, predictably, one of these watchdogs, a Mr. Smith, who always chimes in when the gay issue is raised at the America site, says to Jim McCrea, a regular contributor to these threads who writes with good sense (and accurate theological background), the following:  

Marriage in the West means one man and one woman.  You upset such a deep-rooted piece of cultural tradition at your very great peril, especially when there are excellent alternatives, like reciprocal benefits legislation.  

And on the same day that I read this, I happen to be reading through the estate records of an ancestor of mine, a man named James Lane who died in eastern North Carolina in the summer of 1789.  (This is one of the ways I handle the selva oscura: I spend hours snooping into the lives of those who have gone before me, doing genealogical research, because it's in many ways very much like putting together the pieces of an intricate puzzle--and putting puzzles together has real therapeutic value for me.)

And I find this: when James Lane's estate is inventoried, the inventory shows the following items among his possessions as he dies: a copy of Pilgrim's Progress, a bible, and a Book of Common Prayer.  James is, in other words, not merely a casual churchgoer, an enculturated Christian who calls himself Christian because the established church had demanded up to the Revolution that everyone living in North Carolina be at least nominally a member of the Church of England.

He and his family are pious Christians, members of that solid middle class that, we're told by historians, built the nation through its hard work, devotion to moral principle, and commitment to church and churchly ways. And commitment to the "deep-rooted pieces of cultural tradition" about which Mr. Smith speaks, which we upset at our "very great peril," when they're rooted in long-standing Christian tradition.  And in the bible itself.

Like marriage as the union of one man and one woman for life.  (Except that that's not at all what the bible says marriage is all about for, oh, millennia of sacred history, when polygamy is the norm: one man with many wives.  But no women with many husbands.  And divorce permitted to men, who can repudiate their wives in the twinkling of an eye, by a word of renunciation, while no women are ever permitted to do the same to their husbands.  But never mind about all that: let's not confuse ourselves with facts while we do battle to uphold the "deep-rooted pieces of cultural tradition" that we envisage discarding to our "very great peril.")

And then I leaf through the estate records to the settlement of James's estate, and find the following: in addition to "the Negro Woman Named Moll" whom James had left in his will to son Ethelred and the "Two Negro Boys" whom the will had left money for James's widow Sarah to purchase, who, along with their increase, were to be "divided" among the youngest children of the family after Sarah's death, there were an unnamed "Negro Wench" and her child Zilla, Beck, Bett, Hannh, Silvia, and Jude, all disbursed as property among James's oldest children (including my ancestor Zilpah Lane and her husband Sumner Holland).  With stipulations that Jude and her increase were to be divided, following Sarah's death, among the older children.

Zilpah, by the way--in case you're wondering--was the name of a handmaid (read: slave) of Jacob's wife Leah, whose father Laban gave Zilpah to Leah.  Zilpah then marries Jacob, who has also wives Leah, Rachel, and Bilhah.  Rachel and Leah are sisters.  He ends up being married to both sisters because Laban deceives Jacob by switching Leah for Rachel when Jacob imagines he's marrying Rachel.  When Rachel and Leah compete to give Jacob sons, they then use their maidservants Bilhah and Zilpah in the son-bearing game, offering them to Jacob as wife material.  Some accounts suggest Bilhah and Zilpah are half-sisters of Leah and Rachel.

All in the family, don't you know.  The good, old-fashioned, God-fearing family . . . .

Deep-rooted cultural traditions.  Just like the traditions re: slavery that went hand in hand with Pilgrim's Progress and the Book of Common Prayer.  And the bible.  Traditions that James Lane and all the other upright Christians around him would have been shocked to learn anyone questioned or considered irreconcilable with Christian morality and Christian faith.

Since they had been practiced for centuries by good bible-reading, church-going Christians.  Since slavery is not merely allowed but presupposed and defended by the Jewish and Christian scriptures.  Since it was a deep-rooted part of the cultural heritage of those who wrote the biblical books.  

And, of course, despite the bible's support for slavery, despite the longstanding endorsement of this practice in both Judaism and Christianity, despite the continuation of slavery in Christian cultures right into the 19th century, we'd now be hard-pressed to find any Christian anywhere openly espousing a return to bible-based slavery.

Espousing bible-based slavery because we upset "deep-rooted pieces of cultural tradition" at our "very great peril," if we overturn them when they have biblical warrant.  When they've always been there.  When it's always been done this way.  When everyone around us takes this for granted, and only a tiny minority of people (the losers of history, and surely they can't be on God's side, since God's a winner) question how things have always been done.

We have discarded slavery because we have finally decided to take Paul at his word, when he tells us that "in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."  We've decided, in other words, that despite the countenancing of slavery in other biblical texts (including other texts attributed to Paul himself), the very heart and soul of the gospel is summed up in Paul's proclamation of the freedom and equality of all believers in Christ.

We've decided that the bible was not really ever about--not in its most essential proclamation about who God is and what God desires for the world--the subordination of one group of people to another, the subjugation of one group of people by another.  It's about, instead, a vision of a world in which every one who comes from the hand of God is treated with equal dignity and respect.  And has equal access to the goods of the world.  And to the rights accorded to everyone merely because she is a human being.

We have long since gotten this when it comes to the issue of slavery.  Why, I wonder, is it taking the Mr. Smiths of the world so long to get it when it comes to the issue of gender roles, and the power allocated to men and to women respectively?  And to the related issue of sexual orientation?

It's almost as if some of the men who rule us these days don't want to get it.

The graphic is Dutch Baroque artist Matthias Stom's depiction of Abraham with two of his wives, Sarah and Hagar.

Mary Hunt on Royal Wedding: Theologically, "Stabilizing for the Status Quo"

As with everything she writes, Mary Hunt's recent commentary at Religion Dispatches on the royal wedding is well worth reading.  Hunt's take: in key respects, the symbolism woven into the recent wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was "stabilizing for the status quo," in a theological sense.  And more's the pity.

Hunt notes that Kate's father gave her in marriage by giving her hand to the priest solemnizing the marriage, who then gave her hand to William.  When the marriage ceremony ended, the presider pronounced William and Kate "man and wife"--not husband and wife.  And the entire ceremony relied heavily on patriarchal rhetoric identifying God as father, ruler, and king.

The puzzle here, Hunt points out, is that while increasing numbers of young people (the royal couple included) ignore the stipulations of churches about premarital liaisons and about many aspects of gender behavior, people still commonly opt for marriage ceremonies that reinforce patriarchal assumptions which couples presumably otherwise reject: 

Young people who live together for years before they marry, women who hold responsible positions in the world, even some same-sex couples fall into the traps set by patriarchal religions. Somehow, despite any other modern or postmodern ways of behaving, when it comes to a wedding they want the old model. And they get it when uncritical clergy repeat the ancient formulas without any connection to the way women with men, women with women, and men with men conduct their lives before and after the ceremony.

This makes clear just how irrelevant religion is to most people. Yet they instrumentalize it for marriages (not to mention funerals and burials) without apology. I don’t blame them. If religious leaders don’t do our part to show new ways of celebrating that are more congruent with reality—new language, symbols, and gestures—what options do they have?

These are points well worth making, it seems to me.  When it comes to thinking about gender and gender roles, there's a cultivated archaism in much of our social behavior that is apparent in few other aspects of our cultural lives today.  And in this discrete area, we deliberately and willingly resort to religious warrants to prop up gender assumptions long since exploded in many areas of our society and our own practice.

This is, of course, precisely why Austen Ivereigh wanted to point to the power of this particular liturgical ceremony to remind us that traditional marriage is all about one man marrying one woman--even if the man marrying the woman happens to have lived with her without benefit of marriage prior to the wedding.  Or to have impregnated her.  Or several hers.

It's all about issuing symbolic reminders, backed by religious warrant, of who counts in our society and who doesn't.  Of who's on top and who's on bottom.  And of who should stay on bottom and not get out of her place.

In a symbolic way, weddings still very frequently enact governing presuppositions of our society that have everything to do with heterosexual male power and control, and which those intent on using religious symbols to shore up such male domination of women and gay men do not want to see getting out of their hands.  Hence the perfervid praise of this ceremony in some male heterosexist quarters, in the Catholic church and other churches in which men have much invested in maintaining male heterosexual power and control.  

And hence Mary Hunt's questions, from a feminist theological perspective, which need to be asked.  They need to be asked, that is, by anyone who does not take for granted that someone born with a penis happens because of that biological chance to be born as well with entitlement not given by birth to anyone born without a penis.  Or by anyone who does not take for granted that God has a penis, metaphorically speaking, and that God therefore shares the concern of some of God's male cheerleaders to keep those with a penis on top in our world and in our communities of faith.

Assuming, that is, that they use their penises in the natural and divinely ordained way.

From One Royal Wedding to Another: Kate and Wills Marry, and I Remember Charles and Diana

When I wrote yesterday about Austen Ivereigh's anti-gay heterosexist take on the Kate and Wills show, I said in a comment to TheraP that I had not intended to mention the royal wedding at all on this blog.  I chose to do so only after having read Ivereigh's comments, which, in my view, deserve attention as one in a series of male-entitled heterosexist blasts he has made against his gay brothers and sisters in recent years at America and elsewhere.  Blasts that baffle me, since I wonder what causes him to invest so much energy in issuing persistent reminders to his gay brothers and sisters that they do not count and must not expect to be included in his Catholic church.

And now, having set my foot on the path of wedding commentary, I find myself unable to get off that fateful path until I've reached its end.  Or, as our British cousins say (and changing metaphors wildly), In for a penny, in for a pound.  Or, As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.  Or something like that.  Both seem appropriate here.

I didn't watch the royal wedding.  I find myself little interested in it except as a cultural phenomenon, as an illustration of our willingness to permit those who rule us to mount lavish spectacles designed to manipulate our consciousness and distract us from the real business of our lives.  I find the royal wedding interesting as an illustration of our never-quite-vanquished hankering for a Father who knows best and has our best interests at heart--if only we relinquish our adulthood to Him and let Him return us to perpetual childhood.  In this light, I find the fawning wedding-inspired commentary of many American conservative thinkers about monarchy and all it might do for us, if we could only find the right father figure to whom to yield ourselves, fascinating.  And repulsive, in how it misses the point about what we really need to become a humane society today.

I also find what has been taking place with the Kate and Wills show interesting because it brings back sharp, evocative memories of the wedding of Charles and Diana, which was surrounded by equal fanfare and similar fawning media adulation.  I didn't watch the Chuck and DiDi show, either, though when it was staged, I happened to be living and studying in Canada, a country linked to the Crown, many of whose citizens still preserve a certain nostalgic fondness for the monarchy--though many others find the fuss about the royals baffling, and the institution itself embarrassingly archaic (and a drain on the British economy).

Almost all of the Canadians with whom I studied in the 1970s and 1980s ignored the monarchy.  Some were actively opposed to it.  One friend would deliberately turn stamps (with the head of the Queen) upside down before she affixed them to letters.  The only ardent monarchist I ever met in my years in Canada was, as it turned out, the Polish-born friend about whom I've blogged elsewhere, who was for monarchy anywhere: he supported any king, queen, prince, or princess anywhere in the world.  Just because.  As a matter of principle.  Because that was how things were meant to be.

As a guest in another country, I didn't normally get into intra-national political discussions, unless my Canadian friends invited me to do so.  When I did so, I almost always found them jocular and mannerly, even when they were characterized by good-natured sparring between my Canadian friends and "the" Americans.  "The" Americans who were nothing like me, since I hadn't grown up in the parts of the U.S. with which my Canadian friends were familiar and which they used to form their opinion of the Yanks.  I was very surprised, indeed, to discover that I was a Yank in Canada, when I had been taught throughout my formative years that whatever in the world a Yankees might be, I was to be the precise opposite, with ever fiber of my being.

And, though my family tree is brimful of Revolutionary soldiers, a number of whom died fighting in battle to sever the ties of the American colonies to the Crown, I myself haven't ever given a great deal of thought to monarchy or its alternatives.  I don't quite understand the hankering for royalty many Americans have--not because I'm particularly opposed to monarchy, but because whatever monarchy represents seems long ago and far away to me, given the experiences that shaped me as I grew up in the U.S.  If I was shaped in any overt political direction by my parents and schooling, that direction would most likely be called Jeffersonian democracy, with strong hints of agrarianism.  I was taught to admire and try to emulate those who sought to make democratic society truly democratic, and to provide economic advantages (hence the agrarianism) to every citizen, so that all citizens might find some way to sustain their lives and communities, and become fully participating members of democratic society.

When Charles and Diana married, I was teaching a summer course at a Jesuit college in northern Ontario.  The Jesuits who ran the university were French-Canadian to a man, as were almost all of the students in their college.  The summer was good for my French, since I found myself in a sink-or-swim situation at faculty gatherings, in which I had to speak French if I wanted to communicate at all.  I ended the summer with a better grasp of spoken French than I had ever had after years of schoolroom French--though, admittedly, the French I spoke after that summer was heavily overlaid with a joual accent that would have horrified the Sorbonne-educated woman who taught me French as an undergraduate.

And the clash between the standard French I'd been taught in college and what I heard around me during that wonderfully instructive summer sometimes led to ludicrous misunderstandings, including my inability to know how to reply when I answered the phone in my office--an office assigned to a Père Pion, who was away for the summer--and thought I heard someone saying, "Papillon?"  I had no idea what to say when these calls came through, until I finally realized I was hearing people asking for Fr. Pion in a Québécois accent.  Not for a butterfly.

The French Canadian students and faculty at this Jesuit school were gloriously hospitable.  I'll never forget passing the beautifully tended little garden on which one of the Jesuit brothers lavished daily care, and having him pull out of the ground a number of radishes, hold them up to me, and say, Mais manger-en!  Ce sont médicinales.  Just as I won't forget the librarian who taught me to recognize edible wild plants of the area that her grandmother had picked for spring salads--also with medicinal qualities.  

Or the wonderful party the French students threw on one occasion--precisely what it was, I've forgotten, though it had some church significance, as well as I can recall.  It may, in fact, have been St. John's day.  The party taught me how gifted some cultures are at creating the conditions for celebration by pooling the limited resources available to individual members of the community so that, when those limited resources are gathered together and turned into the basis for a celebration, everyone benefits from them.  

A few pieces of fresh fruit here added to several slices of cheese there, along with flowers from someone's garden and a bottle of wine and loaf of bread from another person's larder: and there was the party, with more than enough for everyone.  After we had eaten and listened to music, I remember we walked outside in a kind of procession, which the students of the Anglican college on the same campus gathered to watch in silence: two cultures, with entirely different predispositions and radically different histories, on silent (and somewhat tense) display with the events of that interesting evening.  And I, caught between them, since by cultural and ethnic background, I certainly belonged with the wary, watching Anglos, but happened to be processing with the French with whom I'd affiliated myself when I became Catholic.

This was the context in which I heard news of the marriage of Charles and Diana that summer.  Needless to say, the French Canadian students and faculty among whom I was living as the royal couple married were anything but enthralled with the wedding and its fanfare.  They laughed uproariously at the news that many fellow Canadians and many Americans intended to stay up far into the night to watch the royal ceremony on television.  Why would anyone want to lose sleep to watch that man with such big ears marry? they'd ask when we gathered to discuss the news of the day.

And so it went, and so it goes as Kate and Wills marry: and I have absolutely no idea where this particular posting is going, or why I am sharing these fond memories, other than to point out that things don't seem to change--not fundamentally--over the course of years.  Not easily.  And not frequently.

People remain stuck in cultural patterns that deform them.  People remain altogether too willing to relinquish control of their adult lives to mythic figures and mythic forces that they're taught to regard as saviors, figures and forces that inevitably betray those who give the reins of their autonomy into the hands of those saviors.  Whether political, economic, or religious: mythic savior figures in each and every case.

People remain voraciously hungry for fairy tales, too--but for the easiest fairy tales of all, not for the ones that require virtue or a heroic quest of us.  The fairy tales that enthrall us on television (or in legislative halls or churches) are the ones that promise easy virtue to us, automatic reward, if we but fit the norm.  If we conform.  If we do what's expected of us.

As Mr. Ivereigh says, if we become proper boys and girls and approach the altar wearing properly matched topcoats and gowns.   If we keep the wedding cakes crowned with little men beside little women.  If we uphold the central symbols that make everyone in our society comfortable with themselves.  If we do not challenge those symbols in a way that forces people to think about what they take for granted--or about the injustice enshrined in the world we seek so desperately to reinforce by keeping those central symbols in place, the injustice we seek to keep hidden as we madly manipulate those central symbols and claim that they are readings of reality as God ordains it, and not culturally determined choices that can be changed.

And so it goes, as William marries Kate.  And I certainly wish them a happy life together.  They'll need it, on the stage they occupy.

Austen Ivereigh on the Royal Wedding: Not the Gays' Show

To all you gay folks who imagine the royal wedding (or marriage in any shape, form, or fashion) might have something to do with you, English Catholic blogger and America contributor Austen Ivereigh is here to set you straight.  Ivereigh posts today about how the Kate and Wills show is "a winning combination of elements which film-makers strive after: on the one hand, what is totally 'other.' -- a dreamy, fairy-tale setting: the marriage of a prince, the making of a princess -- with what, on the other, is universal and human: boy meets girl; they fall in love; they marry."

But please be advised  that this show is for heterosexuals only--like Ivereigh and his wife:

And as some bishops have already been pointing out, what happens tomorrow is a great tribute to the institution of marriage -- the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of creating and rearing children. There are many "alternatives" to that model around us -- same-sex unions, single parents, divorced couples -- and advocates of equality would want us to be believe they are all equally valid. But they aren't. History, research and experience all point to a stable, loving marriage between a man and a woman as the best possible environment for a child -- measured by almost any outcome.

Be forewarned, gay folks who like glamor and pageantry.  The Kate and Wills show is not for you and your kind.  It's a "tribute to the institution of marriage"--to Mr. Ivereigh's kind of marriage, that is.  

You gays can just move on and find your glam elsewhere, thank you very much--even if you might have designed a dress here, made up a bunch of posies there, arranged some hair for the spectacular event, written some majestic music or signed up to play said music at the royal wedding.  Or if you might be sitting at the altar or in the choir stalls as the ceremony takes place.

No gays need apply.  Not your show.

Mary Hunt on U.S. Bishops' Condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson: All about Power

In her inimitable, straight-to-the-point way, theologian Mary Hunt dissects the U.S. Catholic bishops' recent action against theologian Elizabeth Johnson's book Quest for the Living God.  Hunt's analysis doesn't contain any information that hasn't already appeared in other accounts.  But as always, better than other tellings of the story, it drives right to the heart of the matter, framing the USCCB's condemnation of Johnson as an assertion of naked power at a time when the bishops' moral and teaching authority could not be in more disrepute, due to their handling of the abuse crisis.

And it's not at all without significance, Hunt notes, that the bishops are targeting a feminist theologian right now, one who has argued for women's ordination.  As she points out, groups like her WATER have long made the connections between clericalism and other issues that demand moral analysis from the standpoint of justice, and it is, in large part, the willingness of feminist theologians and women's activist groups to challenge the Catholic system of clericalism and connect it, through critical analysis, to other insupportable forms of injustice that incurs Rome's wrath.  These challenges are challenges to the claims of the clerical system to wield unilateral power in defining Catholicism--the kind of power on which Michael Sean Winters continues to insist authentic Catholicity is based.*

The Elizabeth Johnson story is, Hunt thinks, all about the Vatican and bishops asserting their right to define what is or is not Catholic, who is in and who is out, at a point in history when many Catholics--notably feminist thinkers--challenge the clerical system's right to unilateral ownership of the symbols and definition of Catholicism:

At issue here is not theology but power—the power to name theology ‘Catholic’. Countless interpretations of Dr. Johnson’s work later, the bishops’ point is simply to insist that they alone are the arbiters of all things Catholic. It doesn’t matter that many don’t understand, much less appreciate, contemporary theological method, nor that Elizabeth Johnson is hardly outré in feminist theological circles. What matters here is the fact that she writes and teaches at Fordham University, a social location that matches her commitments to theologize in the heart of the tradition.

The whole point of this exercise in my view is to send a message to the larger academic community that only those who toe the doctrinal line, absolutely and without any wiggle room, are theologically acceptable.

And as Mary Hunt's outstanding analysis of the Elizabeth Johnson story and what it means at a fundamental level appears, the board of the leading Catholic theological society in the U.S., the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA), has also issued a statement.  As this statement notes, the bishops' action in Johnson's case violated their own rules requiring dialogue with a theologian before her book was condemned.  The U.S. bishops, in dialogue with U.S. Catholic theologians, had worked out a system that permits theologians to know when questions have been raised about their work, and what those questions are.  The system worked out for the U.S. also creates a place for theologians under investigation to engage in dialogue with the bishops as the bishops scrutinize their work.

None of this happened in the case of Elizabeth Johnson.  Because what happened with Johnson is not really about the integrity of her work or the soundness of her theology.  It is really about power, pure and simple: naked power.  It is about the assertion of power over others at a point in history at which the claim to power of those doing the asserting is being robustly challenged, particularly by feminist thinkers.

For me personally, there's a grand irony in reading the CTSA statement side by side with Hunt's truth-telling analysis.  This irony points to some of the key tensions between groups on the cutting edge of theological reflection, like Hunt's WATER group, and centrist Catholic organizations like CTSA, which in my view do not and cannot point the way to a vibrant future for the American Catholic church.  To explain this I'll have to tell a personal story.

I know a number of the current CTSA board members personally.  I was in grad school with them, in fact.  And though one of these CTSA members now has exceptionally strong power to include Steve and me as Catholic theologians pushed to the margins of the academy in a way we have not been included in the past, neither she nor the other person whom we know on the CTSA board has ever lifted a finger to see we're included.  And they don't intend to do so.

To the contrary: the CTSA member with great power to include us told us after we were both fired at Belmont Abbey College that, though she deplored what that school did to us and how it was done, we had not played the political game adroitly.  We had, in other words, brought our own humiliation and marginalization down on our heads--by not pretending and hiding successfully enough.  

We had outed ourselves--the unforgivable sin, for a Catholic institution--simply by being.  By being gay.  By being a gay couple.  By living together.  By not apologizing for doing so.  And so, though neither of us had ever made any public statement at all about our sexual orientation or our relationship, we had not played the game adroitly enough because we had not dissimulated successfully enough.

This analysis--you weren't politically savvy, and look what happened--defends the system wielding unjust power and using ethically shabby methods to target gay folks working in Catholic institutions.  It blames the victim.  It's the kind of analysis centrists, who continue to cozy up to the power of the center and thereby gain positions of authority there, love to dole out to those on the margins.  This is how centrists get their power, and why they don't ever intend effectively to challenge the presuppositions on which the unjust power of ruling elites is based: when push comes to shove, they always defend the system itself, only mildly criticizing the operations of its power when those have been grossly unethical. 

But never breaking with that system or mounting any effective, honest analysis of it.  And blaming those hapless and powerless people who find themselves caught in the machinations of the power system, chewed up, and spit out--blaming these victims for what the merciless machine does to them.

And there's more.  The other CTSA board member Steve and I know well was one of our closest friends all through graduate school.  She was a close friend, that is, until Belmont Abbey fired us and pushed us out of the closet.

When that happened, we became like lepers whom she could not, would not touch.  We would go to CTSA national meetings, see this friend in hallways during meetings, say hello, and she would run--literally scamper--to get away from us.  The one time we actually managed to corner her and talk to her about what had happened to us as Catholic theologians, she said to us, "Well, now you'll have to find your community of support in the gay community.  Not the Catholic church."

This woman is a nun.  We were astonished at this conclusion: we Catholics can't offer you support as gay human beings who belong to our church every bit as much as we do.  You'll have to look for it somewhere else--outside the church, where support for your kind of people exists.  I do not want or intend to remain your friend, now that you are out of the closet.  Catholics can't offer that kind of friendship (and certainly not jobs and health care benefits) to those who are openly and unapologetically gay.  You're going to have to make your way in the world now without the support of the body of Christ--which continues to preach about the obligation to love everyone and challenge discrimination against anyone, and which promotes everyone's right to have bread on the table and access to health care.

Just not gays working in Catholic institutions, though, you understand.  Those statements stop applying in that case.  We are family.  You are not.  Your "gay lifestyle"--your open, honest acknowledgment of your God-given identity, your refusal to apologize for it.  That's the impediment we can't get around.  Keeping it well-hidden wouldn't be a problem for the family at all, since, God knows, there's enough closeted homosexuality in Catholic episcopal palaces and rectories and convents and the Vatican to sink a fleet of good-sized battleships, if they were loaded full of all the closet cases about which we wink--because they remain in the closet.

All of this is in my mind right now as I read Mary Hunt's article about Elizabeth Johnson side by side with the CTSA statement about the Johnson case because of another comment I recall this former friend who is now on the CTSA board making to me.  At some point not long before our firing at Belmont Abbey, I happened to mention to her that I was in touch with Mary Hunt, who was involved in the editorial process for an article of mine soon to be published in a journal.

When she heard this, my then-friend raised her eyebrows and said, "Mary Hunt.  I'd leave her alone.  And WATER.  They're way out on the margins."  

What she meant, of course, was, "Mary Hunt is a lesbian.  Lesbians don't really have a place in the bosom of the church.  As I do.  Lesbians and lesbian feminists find their support network in the gay community.  The church can't embrace them and offer them support."

As I say, reading Mary Hunt's article alongside the CTSA board's statement about Elizabeth Johnson makes me think about the two very different futures for American Catholicism both documents envisage, and for which they're working.  One of the two is still so situated within, comfortable with, the institution it mildly criticizes, that it blinds itself to the significant shortcomings of that institution which make it impossible for the institution to proclaim the gospel effectively at this point in history.

Quite specifically, the centrist model imagines it can defend women and the rights of women while remaining totally silent about heterosexism and homophobia--about the considerable heterosexism and homophobia still embedded in Catholic institutions, which completely undercuts those institutions' claims to be about justice for women or anyone else.  

I spent a good bit of time this weekend talking back and forth at this Commonweal thread about racism, the churches, and politics.  And, as any reader who has the patience to slog through the comments here will discover, in the context of that back-and-forth dialogue, one contributor who surely knew--since my username is William Lindsey--that I'm a male (and who would, if [s]he follows Commonweal threads often, also know I'm a gay male), decided at some point to shift to a she/he construction in talking about me.  Because (s)he bitterly disliked what I was saying in the conversation.

This anonymous contributor, j.a.m., has been on other Commonweal threads recently making nasty comments about feminism and women's rights.  And then, surprisingly, another contributor, Gerelyn (Hollingsworth), who also often appears on Commonweal threads making statements that appear to support women's rights, suddenly weighed in, criticizing several other contributors who called j.a.m.'s bluff--because he was gay-bashing--and sided with j.a.m.!  She sided with a Commonweal contributor who frequently knocks women and feminist theology.  Which she claims to support.

The Catholic "feminist" sided with the Catholic anti-feminist against the gay man.  And she took to task the other contributors in the thread, William Fitzgerald and Mary, who had called j.a.m.'s bluff in a hilarious way (by beginning to identify j.a.m. himself with female pronouns) due to his or her nasty gender-switching attack on me, which was intended to discredit anything I said.  And, above all, to tell me I'm not welcome in respectable Catholic conservations of the center--the real name of the game when these attacks take place.

This is an interesting exchange, isn't it?  At one level, what's most interesting about it, perhaps, is the freedom people still seem to enjoy in centrist Catholic circles that want to claim intellectual credibility to use these adolescent tactics to disempower someone who's gay.  The gender-switching game with the pronouns: that's embarrassingly crude and embarrassingly immature.  It wouldn't fly in most other intellectual circles that want to claim any credibility in the academy at large.  That it can still fly in Catholic centrist circles says a lot about where we are (or aren't), as American Catholics right now.  It says a lot about how stuck in adolescence the club of the American Catholic center is.

And also interesting is the pretense of some Catholic intellectuals that it's possible to be feminists and then collude with homophobic prejudice that is, when it targets gay men, all about using crude anti-feminist stereotypes to attack men imagined as women.  The gender analysis of Catholic "feminists" who can't recognize that homophobia targeting gay men is rooted in the very system of insupportable claims men make about male entitlement and male superiority as they deny rights to women: this is not very sophisticated gender analysis at all.

Mary Hunt does and has long made those connections.  And for that reason, I see her and those with whom she stands as important signposts to the future for the American Catholic church.  Though I was warned against her years ago by someone who is now a CTSA board member and who is now claiming to stand in support of Elizabeth Johnson and Johnson's feminist theology, I'm rather happy, on the whole, to have ended up out on the margins with Hunt and not in the center with my former friends in CTSA.

The air feels more salubrious out on the disreputable verges where we ragtag and thrown-away folks are told we belong.

* For Mary Hunt's very effective response to Michael Sean Winters about who defines Catholic identity and how that defining gets done, see this Religion Dispatches article--and see my summary of this debate in this Bilgrimage posting.

Celebrating (?) U.S. Lay Catholics' Support for Gay Rights: The Need for Critical Analysis of Male-Entitled Heterosexism in Catholicism

And a quick gloss to what I posted earlier today about celebrating (?) American Catholics' support for gay rights:

The big problem in the Catholic church as it's now configured, against which Catholics committed to justice for gay and lesbian persons also need to push back very hard, is male-entitled heterosexism.  Leaders of the Catholic church have been working overtime in recent years to re-brand the Catholic church as a bastion of power and privilege for heterosexual males.

And they've succeeded, to a great extent.  While millions of Catholics in the developed world have distanced themselves from the homophobia and heterosexism, often leaving the church to escape these toxins, Christians from communions that have ordained women and gays who oppose these developments have flocked to Rome in recent years.  The development of the Father Corapi Starter Kit model for the priesthood--the emergence to center stage of Euteneuer and Corapi as leaders of "crunchy" manly-man Catholicism--depends entirely on the re-branding of the Catholic church as a male-entitled heterosexist club.  The homophobia of the leaders of the Catholic church goes hand in hand with ugly misogyny that subjects American nuns to an investigation of their fidelity while the numerous bishops who have protected pedophile priests are never called on the carpet.

The abuse crisis depends on clericalism.  It emanates from clericalism.  And at the heart of the clerical system is a belief in clerical entitlement--in clerical power and privilege--that is bolstered by male heterosexist entitlement.

Even though at the dark heart of that same system there is (to use lesbian-feminist poet Adrienne Rich's marvelous formulation) an unholy trinity of lies, secrets, and silence about the real sexual orientation and real sexual lives of many clerics.

Why the Corapi and Euteneuer Stories Matter

Here's why I think the stories of Fathers Euteneuer and Corapi are worth paying attention to, why they matter:

When the first round of revelations about the abuse crisis broke in Boston in 2002, the more or less immediate response of the U.S. Catholic bishops and the Vatican was to look for a scapegoat--to deflect attention from their own responsibility for the abuse crisis, for the decades of cover-up and shuffling around of serial abusers of which we got a glimpse in the files that the cases in Boston opened to us.

That scapegoat was gays.  To be specific, it was gay priests.  To be very specific, it was gay priests who did not comport themselves in a macho-posturing way that hid their sexual orientation from others.  The initial diversionary response of church officials to the abuse crisis--the initial tactic to divert attention from the fact that the bishops and Vatican were themselves responsible for the crisis--was to point the finger at a socially marginal group rather easily scapegoated, as the problem to be dealt with to solve the abuse crisis.

And so not far down the road from the Boston revelations, a Vatican-mandated policy came down, barring gays from the priesthood and requiring seminaries to screen candidates on the basis of sexual orientation.  Now, as Todd Aglioro notes in the essay to which my posting about Corapi yesterday pointed, Catholic seminaries are actively screening for "manlier" candidates.  They're actively choosing candidates for the priesthood who come pre-equipped with what Max Lindenmann calls a Father Corapi Starter Kit--who strut, shout, affect a hyper-macho shtick, and teach "crunchy" doctrine regardless of whether that doctrine is received or not.

In short, the Catholic church is now promoting, through its seminary-selection process, a  male-entitled, male-dominant heterosexism that not only does not challenge the gender inequities built into many social and ecclesial institutions, but actively fosters those inequities.  And rewards the kind of hyper-masculine acting out that encourages men to think of women as objects and possessions, as humans built on a less human scale than the scale God used to create heterosexual males.  And rewards the shallowness of immature men who imagine that masculinity is a commodity that can be bought at the cheap price of a shaved head, a dyed goatee, or a cigar, a tattoo, or a motorcycle.

And still, despite this fix, the abuse crisis continues to unfold.  And as it does so, it becomes ever more apparent that abusive priests come in all shapes, sizes, flavors--including macho and effeminate ones, gay and straight ones, pre- and post-Vatican II ones.  And all sexual orientations.

It becomes more and more obvious, in other words, that sexual orientation has always been a red herring in the discussion of the abuse crisis, and one interjected into the discussion of the crisis specifically to deflect attention from what most seriously deserves our attention, if we want to understand this crisis: and that's the bishops and the Vatican.  And their abuse of power.  

The abuse crisis is and always has been about abuse of power.  About abuse of power by clerics shaped by their seminary training and Catholic culture to imagine themselves as endowed with special gifts, power and privilege that set them above the laity.  About the abuse of vulnerable minors by adults for whom exercising power over others--for whom owning others as objects--provides a sexual kick.

It's about the abuse of power by bishops and a Vatican so jealous to protect clerical power and privilege that the bishops and Rome appear willing to skirt the law to assure that their absolute power over the people of God goes unchecked.  And that their criminal actions go undetected and their closely guarded secrets go undisclosed.

And it's about wealthy elites within the church--elites dominated by heterosexual men--who have been willing to collude freely with church officials, not a few of whom are closeted, homophobic, and intent on scapegoating their brother priests who happen to be gay, as a way of diverting attention from their malfeasance in the abuse crisis. It's about the power of those wealthy elites of heterosexual men colluding with closeted, homophobic church officials to buy media attention that blames gay priests (and gay people in general) for everything that's wrong with the church and the world today. 

And so here's what happens when the Euteneuer and Corapi story tell us what we ought to have seen all along--that turning the priesthood into an enclave of males acting as grossly and overweeningly male as possible is hardly going to save the church: what happens is that this wealthy elite of heterosexual males footing the bill for closeted gay hierarchical officials scapegoating gay priests for the abuse crisis lose control of the dominant narrative.  They lose control of a narrative for whom they invented Euteneuer and Corapi, for which they turned them into high-profile, macho-posturing hero priests.

Post-Euteneuer and post-Corapi, it's no longer going to be anywhere nearly so easy as it has been up to now to divert the discussion of what's happening in the abuse crisis to gay priests.  And away from the bishops.  We'll see this diversionary attempt continue, of course.  It will continue to dominate the commentary of epigones like Bill Donohue who are all about seeding disinformation in the mainstream media, to try to control the dominant media narrative re: the abuse crisis.

But fewer and fewer people are going to be willing to listen to that diversionary narrative, after what we've learned from the stories of Euteneuer and Corapi (and countless other stories, as we amass more and more evidence about the abuse crisis which is not massaged by the bishops).  Fewer and fewer people are willing to listen to the diversionary narrative for another reason, as well: American society has reached a tipping point when it comes to discussion of gay and lesbian rights, gay and lesbian people, gay and lesbian issues.

That tipping point means that an ever-increasing number of people are informed as they have never been informed in the past about gay issues and gay lives.  An ever-increasing number of people know and love someone who is gay, and that makes it harder for those trying to use gay human beings as scapegoats to accomplish their dirty work.

Why are the stories of Father Euteneuer and Corapi significant?  They're significant because they indicate that one of the most powerful diversionary narratives in American Catholicism following the revelations of 2002 is now definitively broken and can't be fixed.  And that, in turn, opens a valuable door for those trying to call the bishops and Vatican to accountability for the crisis.

As they should always have been called to accountability, all along, from the very beginning of the revelations.

Richard Gaillardetz on the State of American Catholicism: My Response--"I Was a Stranger and You . . ."

In the discussion thread following my posting about Andrew Sullivan's latest comments re: the abuse crisis in the Catholic church this past weekend, a sharp reader, Brian Gallagher, drew a connection between Sullivan's analysis and questions that Catholic theologian Richard Gaillardetz raises in a recent lecture he gave on the state of American Catholicism today.  Gaillardetz's lecture is online now at the National Catholic Reporter website. 

Gaillardetz gave the lecture recently at University of Toledo as part of the Murray/Bacik lecture series.  It's entitled “The State of the Church, 2011: Reflections on the State of American Catholicism Today.” 

For anyone concerned about the current state and future of American Catholicism, the Gaillardetz lecture is  well worth reading.  For a snapshot of the reflections of various Catholic thinkers of the center, including theologians, about the Gaillardetz lecture, see the response to Peter Steinfels's recent posting re: the lecture at the Commonweal blog site.

My intent here is not to summarize this lecture, or even to discuss it in toto--though I highly recommend it to readers and hope that those concerned to understand where American Catholicism may be headed today will read it carefully.  What I'd like to zero in on here is  what Gaillardetz has to say about the 2009 pastoral letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops entitled, "Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan."  (For my own reflections on that pastoral letter at the time it was issued, see these two postings from October and November 2009.)

Gaillardetz makes his comments about the 2009 bishops' document on marriage in the context of his broader argument that, even if American Catholicism shows some signs of flourishing today, nonetheless "something is amiss" and the church in the U.S. finds itself in "a state of unrest."  And to know how to understand and address this situation, we need to know how we have arrived at "this troubling, enigmatic moment in American Catholicism," and we have to think about where we intend to go from here.

Gaillardetz does an historical sounding to show how we've gotten to where we are today.  He surveys the birth and death of a pre-Vatican subcultural Catholicism rooted in ethnic enclaves that had not been fully enculturated in mainstream American culture, and to which there was often resistance on the part of the mainstream. He then examines how post-Vatican II American Catholicism seemed to enter into a period of flourishing as American Catholics entered the social mainstream and were encouraged by Vatican II to engage in fruitful dialogue with mainstream culture.  

And then came the backlash  in the period from 1990 to the present, in which a new model of leadership was imposed by John Paul II and his successor Benedict, with a strong emphasis on "reforming the reform" of Vatican II and on a restorationist model of the church that once again pits the church against the social mainstream and accents its role of countercultural resistance.  In this resistance, a new generation of bishop-leaders have been encouraged sharply to delineate the difference between authentic Catholicism and the values and ideas of secular society.

And I must note that while the preceding summary faithfully replicates Gaillardetz's framework of analysis and--I hope--his primary points within that framework, it also makes free use of my own categories of analysis to understand the trajectory he's sketching here.  Free use of my own categories for which I don't want Gaillardetz blamed . . . .

And the end result of that shift to a new model of episcopal and Vatican leadership with John Paul II and Benedict--the end result of the restorationist "reform of the reform"--is that we now find ourselves at this point:  as Gaillardetz notes, Pew Forum data in the spring of 2008, which I've cited repeatedly on this blog, showed that by 2008, one in three American adults raised Catholic has left the Catholic church, and one in ten American adults is a former Catholic.  If all former Catholics in the U.S. were grouped into a single denomination, that denomination would form the second largest church in the country.  

And here's the lesson Gaillardetz draws from that study: 

The future of American Catholicism will depend in no small measure on our willingness to take seriously this mass exodus from the Church. We need to ask ourselves, what is going on here? 

In Gaillardetz's view, data gathered by the Pew report indicate that many of those now  leaving the Catholic church in the U.S. in this mass exodus are walking "because the quality of church life is poor and church leadership appears inattentive to their real pastoral concerns."  And it's in this context that Gaillardetz examines the 2009 pastoral letter on marriage--as an example of the poor quality of church life and inattentive leadership that are precipitating the mass exodus.  He writes:

Let me offer a simple example. In 2009 the American bishops released a pastoral letter on marriage titled, "Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan." When I first heard of the forthcoming letter, I was encouraged. I believe that in our current "upgrade" culture, two people remaining committed to one another for life is one of the most demanding things anyone could undertake. Pastoral assistance and support from church leaders was certainly welcome. The document that appeared includes very helpful and even inspiring passages, but its emphasis, regrettably, is on the intrinsic evils of artificial birth control and same-sex marriage. Now I recognize that these are official Catholic teachings and this is not the forum to debate them, but here is the problem. When my wife and I are going through a difficult patch in our marriage, it is not like at the end of some marital spat we look at one another and say, "boy, I wish those gay people weren't trying to get married, it would make our marriage a lot easier!" I understand the need on occasion to clarify official church teaching, but when a preoccupation with doctrinal orthodoxy, focused on a few select and controversial teachings, trumps expending the necessary energy to listen to the felt concerns of ordinary married people, well, you get our current situation. 

I'd like to draw attention to the preceding passage for two reasons.  The first is this: it makes a very compelling case for Gaillardetz's thesis that people are walking away from the Catholic church in the U.S. rapidly due to a poor quality of church life and to poor and inattentive leadership.

But, second, the prescriptive analysis embedded in Gaillardetz's discussion of the problem--his implied solution to the  problem--only underscores the problem, in my view.  It does not adequately address the problem and does not suggest a solution that will effectively address the problem at its base.  

Here's what I hear Gaillardetz saying: My wife and I were "encouraged" when we first heard that the bishops were going to issue this pastoral document about marriage in 2009.  We welcome teaching about marriage that helps us live our commitment as a married couple more faithfully.  We live in an "upgrade" culture in which the coinage of marriage as a lifelong commitment is being debased.  And my wife and I welcome the guidance of our church's pastoral leaders as we struggle to live our marital commitment within that cultural context. 

But the bishops' preoccupation with "the intrinsic evils of artificial birth control and same-sex marriage" hasn't proven helpful to us or other married heterosexual Catholic couples.  It seems absurd to us to imagine that, when we struggle to live faithfully as a married couple, same-sex couples impede us or threaten the sanctity of our marriage.

Good analysis, at one level.  The bishops' strange preoccupation with artificial contraception and same-sex marriage in a document whose ostensible purpose is to explain and defend the core values of marriage in a culture in which those values seem at risk makes little sense to many married Catholics like Gaillardetz.

I can understand this point. I welcome it.  I'm glad Gaillardetz is making it.

But there's this: for many of us, the announcement of the bishops in 2009 that they were going to issue a pastoral document about marriage was anything but welcome.  Because we don't belong to the church in the same way that Gaillardetz and his wife belong.  We are not welcomed in the church in the same way that Gaillardetz and his wife are welcomed.  We do not have the entree that they have.

And rather than strengthening and affirming our marriages, the document would--we knew beyond a shadow of doubt when we heard it was in the hopper--attack.  Undermine.  Exclude.  Condemn.

And so we who are not welcome, included, affirmed are far less apt than Gaillardetz and his wife are to yield to the magisterium the automatic right and privilege of declaring "official Catholic teaching:" about marriage --not while those doing the defining and declaring overlook our graced experience and ignore our contribution to the Catholic community as faithful disciples of Jesus.  We are far less inclined than are Gaillardetz and his wife to welcome a "pastoral" document whose intent is, for us and our brothers and sisters, anything but pastoral.  And we're far less inclined than are Gaillardetz and his wife to relinquish to the bishops the task of defining official Catholic teaching about marriage in this unilateral and exclusive  and non-dialogical way that ignores our lived experience of grace and our lives of gay discipleship within the Christian community.

The problem on which I want to zero in here is the dialogic problem.  It's a central problem of American Catholicism.  It is part and parcel of a much larger problem that underlies the current mass exodus from the church.  This dialogic problem has everything to do with the fundamental reasons that people are rapidly leaving the American Catholic church. As Gaillardetz himself says, there is, at base, a profound lack of hospitality, of welcome, in American Catholicism--and people are walking away as a result:

For every former Catholic who has left the church over a doctrinal question, I suspect there are many more who have left because of their concrete experience of local parish life. Insipid preaching, poorly planned liturgies, a basic lack of Christian hospitality—these are the realities that are driving people away. 

And here's the point I want to make, precisely, in response to Gaillardetz's analysis of the 2009 marriage letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops: there is nowhere in American Catholicism today any official dialogic space in which lay Catholics can sit down and talk together about the various experiences of glaring unwelcome that are quickly driving one person after another out of the church.  There are, almost nowhere in American Catholic parishes, universities, dioceses, organizations any welcoming dialogic spaces in which gay and lesbian Catholics can speak about our experiences as followers of Jesus, as faithful Catholics struggling to live lives faithful to the gospel within a church whose pastoral leaders have declared war on us.

Gaillardetz's lecture notes our obligation (and our need) to "wrestle" with the tradition.  And this is a valuable recommendation.  But wrestling with the tradition, in the Catholic context, requires communal wrestling.  It requires wrestling within the community, wrestling in dialogue with the tradition, with the pastoral leaders of the church, and with one's brothers and sisters in Christ.  It requires welcoming dialogic spaces in which Catholics with various life experiences and viewpoints can come together to talk.  And to share our lives.

There is no space at all, there is no dialogic space at all, within the American Catholic church today in which gay and lesbian Catholics are invited to wrestle with the tradition in dialogue with their brothers and sisters who happen to be heterosexual.  There is no wrestling space at all within American Catholicism in which the kind of dialogue on which I reported yesterday, where Steve and I met with an African-American church and shared our experience as a gay couple with them, takes place.

And Gaillardetz's own analysis of the shortcomings of the 2009 pastoral letter on marriage only deepens the problem--even as it rightly points to the tremendous pastoral shortcomings of the bishops' current stance on issues of marriage and sexuality.  Gaillardetz's analysis implies that the pastoral problem created by this stance primarily affects heterosexual married Catholics like himself and his wife--heterosexual married Catholics who would otherwise welcome and be "encouraged" by the bishops' "official" declarations re: marriage. 

For many of us who share Gaillardetz's analysis of the poor theology and anti-pastoral intent of the 2009 marriage document, the fundamental problem (and therefore the solution to the problem) appears quite different.  It's a problem of being unable to welcome or be encouraged by any statement issued by a group of pastoral leaders whose fundamental message to us has been, for some time now, that we ourselves are unwelcome. 

And that problem--which is to say, the deep, well-nigh intractable problem of unwelcome and lack of hospitality which is driving one person after another out of the church--is only compounded by our  heterosexual and married brother and sister Catholics, insofar as they continue to seem unable to grasp the dimensions of this problem.  Or what the experience of their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters within the church has been and continues to be.

Or what deep damage the male-dominated heterosexism of our leaders, our community, and our institutions continues to do to all of us.

The graphic for this posting is artist Andrea Bowers' "Quilt of Radical Hospitality" from Susanne Vielmetter's Los Angeles Projects gallery.

You Have to Hear This . . .

You just have to hear Joelle Casteix of SNAP talking about Father Martin O'Loghlen's case to John Kobylt and Kenneth Chiampou at KFI AM 640's (southern California) "John and Ken Show."  The link is at Patrick Wall's blog (with a hat tip to the wonderful Abuse Tracker site). 

If I were pope--and I have an inkling I may not ever be, so please don't hold your breath contemplating that horrid possibility--I think I'd put every bishop in the world in a room and have him listen to this interview.  Over and over.  Non-stop.  For, oh, about 10 days.

I'd offer bread and water as the bishops listen.  I'm not utterly cruel.

And, in particular, I'd have the contingent who want to say that this is, for pete's sake, just a story about a lonely, sad, repressed priest kissing a teenaged girl listen for 20 days non-stop.  Sipping water and chewing bread as they listen.

This story is just so sick from all kinds of angles, and what's most disturbing about it all is that the sickness in the narrative is normalized in the heterosexist male-dominated culture of Catholicism, so that every excuse in the book comes pouring forth when a story about this particular kind of abuse breaks open:   

Just an isolated, overworked priest doing what men do, kissing a teenaged girl.  

And we all know what teenaged girls are like when their hormones are raging.

Not gay, after all.  Not molesting boys like the rest of them. Doing the normal thing for a change.

And so he gained valuable experience.  Other priests can benefit from this experience.  Let's put him on the review board of the diocese.

Called her up and tried to apologize, didn't he? 

Got counseling, got himself straightened out--why don't they leave poor Father alone and let him minister in a parish?  Forgive and forget!  That's what Christianity is all about.

Just sickening, the excuses.  As John and Ken conclude, this is a story of stinky liars running a Catholic diocese, trying to convince us--with all the abundant records of what O'Loglen did to Julie Malcolm in his bulging file--that they didn't happen to look carefully at O'Loghlen's file when they put him back into ministry.  In 2009!

And who managed to whisk O'Loghlen out of the country to the Philippines, I wonder, for the precise period of years in which California extended the window for abuse victims to file suit against molesters?  Whose power has been protecting and promoting this priest who was superior of his religious community, with powerful ties in Rome?  Why has he been protected and promoted?  After his molestation of Julie Malcolm was well known.

Worth the whole listen: Joelle Casteix's brilliant analysis of the minors that clerical perpetrators choose to groom and molest--the defenseless, vulnerable, confused young people who are least likely to have any power to fight back.  Or to blow the whistle after they've been molested.

Bread and water and non-stop wall-to-wall messaging for 10 or 20 days.  Would they get the message then, those who keep placing priests like Martin O'Loghlen back into parish ministry and schools?  And the many Catholics who continue to make excuses for the stinky, lying behavior of those who make the decisions to put O'Loghlen and others back into ministry?

The graphic for the posting is a photograph of Joelle Casteix.

New Catholic iPhone App Stirs Controversy with Questions about Homosexuality

 

Here's a story that fascinates me for all kinds of reasons: recently, several young Catholic men from Indiana collaborated with priests Fr. Dan Scheidt and Thomas Weinandy of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to produce an iPhone app to help Catholics prepare for confession.  Maureen Dowd had interesting commentary on this techno-sacramental breakthrough in the New York Times some days back. 

Disclaimer: I'm not even sure what the hell an app is.  Or an iPhone for that matter.  I have a cell phone that is now the dinosaur version of that technology, but which does all I really need to do right now with any phone--which is to say, it calls people and can, if I wish, store addresses and phone numbers and take pictures.  And it can go online, I reckon, though I've never tried that and don't know how (or want) to do that.

As well as I understand (and more informed readers, please correct me if I'm wrong), the point of this new app for the Sacrament of Penance is to provide a kind of cheat-sheet for penitents, so that you will know when you go into the confessional or penance room that you have sinned.  Really sinned.  As in species and number, as the traditional catechisms tell Catholics they are obliged to confess: what particular sins did you commit, and how many times did you commit them?  

And, of course, this, in turn, raises the interesting question of precisely what is or is not a sin, and what ought to occupy the attention of a penitent when he/she enters the confessional.  Not having grown up Catholic and having joined the Catholic church only as Vatican II was underway, I still find it mind-boggling when my partner Steve talks about the weekly confession to which he and his siblings were hauled every Saturday  evening before Sunday Mass, at which he didn't scruple to invent a list of sins he had never committed at all--a mortal sin in and of itself, since it violates the rules of the sacrament.

His weekly list included the same sins each week, with numbers varying: disobeyed my parents, said bad words, and stole something.  He never stole anything in his life, seldom disobeyed his parents, didn't even know any "bad" words.  But one had to have something to confess.

And so one made do.  And the question I have asked Steve constantly, and about which he just laughs now, is whether this approach to sin and forgiveness didn't inculcate in him and other cradle Catholics at a very early age a rather superficial approach to sin, in which the deep roots of sin in our hearts (here, my Augustinian-Calvinist childhood formation shows through) get overlooked as we focus on peccadilloes that, ultimately, let us off the hook for our real sins.  

Sins like refusing to see the face of someone in need.  Or taunting the classmate considered weak or defenseless. Or hardening our hearts and not cooperating with divine grace as it tries to enlarge our hearts. Or treating an animal as if it does not have a soul.  

And so you see the point I'm winding around to here: given that these app thingamajiggies are, as well as I understand, not capable of providing the whole catechism to you as you head into the confessional booth, someone somewhere must pick and choose among the many, many, many acts the Catholic church regards as serious sins, and upload those particular acts to the app.  The Catholic church regards it as sinful to 1) lend money at a usurious rate, 2) engage in acts of racial or other kinds of discrimination, 3) entertain impure thoughts (or, needless to say, be entertained by them), 4) masturbate, 5) consult a Ouija board or a psychic, 6) have any kind of sex outside holy wedlock, 7) consummate a sexual act in the privacy of one's marital bedroom without the semen ending up in the vagina, 8) use drugs or get drunk, etc., etc., etc.

With so much ripe penitential material to choose from, where to begin choosing?  Apparently, the app recognizes the complexity of that question, and so it makes adjustments.  Like tailoring itself to the vocational status of the penitent in the Catholic church.  According to Dowd, if one signs in as a priest or a religious (a nun, priest, or brother belonging to a religious community), the app asks you if you have flirted.

But if you sign in as a lay Catholic, it asks (these questions all pertain to the sixth commandment) if you have engaged in homosexual activity.  And if you are a woman and the app knows that, when you try to identify yourself as a priest, the app informs you starchily that "sex and vocation are incompatible." (Reminding me a bit in this regard of how the first Mormon-designed genealogy program used to behave when I would accidentally try to list two people of the same sex as married while I was entering data into that program.  A big message would flash, saying, "James Buchanan and William Rufus King are BOTH MEN.  THEY CANNOT MARRY!")

And it's about this point--who determines what sins shall be entered into the cheat sheet of an application like this app--that fascinating controversy is now emerging.  After the app was released, Wayne Besen of the organization Truth Wins Out, which works to help gay folks recover from the ravages of ex-gay "therapy," dared to publish a statement in which he says that the real sin that the app ought to be asking us about is not whether we've engaged in homosexual activity, but whether we've harmed gay folks in the name of religion.

Naturally, that observation--which seems sound and necessary to me--didn't go over well in some quarters, and there's now considerable controversy about Besen's response to the new app.  Besen addresses this controversy in a subsequent essay in which he makes the following interesting point (among several other interesting points):

First, the faithful defenders were upset because they did not like losing control of the storyline. For centuries they wore the white hats in the Saints vs. Sinner drama. They elevated themselves by perching on a pedestal of privilege where they get to reject and we must respect. The idea of reversing these "set" roles has them apoplectic.

I find that analysis provocative.  And I think it's on target.  It ties into my previous posting today, in which I point out that the Catholic church is paying an increasingly steep price for its heteronormativity, which legitimates the behavior of any and all heterosexual males no matter how grossly immoral that behavior turns out to be, while attacking the behavior (and the very humanity and the very lives) of any and all gay and lesbian folks, no matter how morally admirable those folks may be. 

The price the Catholic church is paying now for turning itself into a heteronormative homophobic boys' club is the price of increasing cognitive dissonance, as more and more people know more and more gay folks and see that the animus--the downright hostile nastiness--of the Catholic hierarchy towards those who are LGBT at this point in history is deeply morally troubling.  Far more troubling than the nature and lives of those under attack.  The hostile nastiness of Catholic officials towards those who are gay and lesbian at this point in history is the real sin that deserves careful attention--not the love of gay folks for themselves (through acceptance of their God-given nature) or for the significant others in their lives.

Besen's point--people of faith animated by hostility towards those who are LGBT are losing control of the dominant narrative about who's the saint and who's the sinner--is a point very well-taken.  It accounts for the rancor with which conservative anti-gay Christians are meeting the claim many of us who are gay and lesbian believers keep making, resolutely, simply, persistently, and intend to keep making, because we know it's true: God is with us.  God may well be on our side, in fact, if love is what matters in all religious traditions.  Not hate.

When I posted several days ago about the Magnificat and how its theme of casting down the mighty and lifting up the lowly applies, in my humble opinion, to stories such as that of Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, one right-wing Catholic reader of this blog logged into another of my Euteneuer postings to say I had "rampantly misappropriated" the Magnificat.

The subtext of that remark is loud and clear: you, as a gay person who refuse to admit that your nature and life are disordered and sinful, cannot own the Magnificat.  Only an "orthodox" Catholic owns that or any other prayer.

I beg to differ, and I intend to keep begging to differ.  The Magnificat belongs to me and any other gay Christian who finds inspiration in that prayer--as it belongs to the thousands of disenfranchised, beaten-down believers around the world, little people just like Mary and her son, who long to see the mighty cast down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up, the hungry fed with good things and the rich sent empty away.

And, in fact, we even dare to imagine that this prayer might apply to our own lives and the lives of others struggling for justice.  Here and now.  In the world in which we're living right now.  And many of us find it strange that right-wing Christians would imagine they have ownership of a prayer that is so disconcertingly inconvenient for anyone who tries to put God on the side of wealth, power, privilege, and oppression of others.

I think that Wayne Besen is right: those who have long thought that they have exclusive ownership of prayers, sacraments, sin lists, orthodoxy, the churches, etc., are now losing control of the dominant narrative (and of their own narratives of domination).   So that one day down the road, it may happen that if some of us ever darken the door of a church again, we'll be bringing along cheat-sheets to ask Father a few questions of our own.

And for those of us who are gay, the first question on the list might be the very question Besen wants to substitute for the current app's question about whether one has committed a homosexual act.  Many of us may be asking our confessor, instead, "Have you been guilty of spiritually abusing a homosexual?"