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.

Donald Cozzens to Bishops Accusing Elizabeth Johnson: Step Up and Let Yourselves Be Seen

I'm struck today by a number of articles that seem to me to offer interesting perspectives on topics I've discussed here in the past.  And so I think I'll do one of those "in the news" series of postings, catching up on issues from previous postings.

First, I'm intrigued by Donald Cozzens' call for transparency on the part of the U.S. Catholic bishops in the case of Elizabeth Johnson.  As I have noted in a number of postings in the past several weeks, the U.S. Catholic bishops' committee on doctrine issued a condemnation of Sr. Elizabeth Johnson's 2007 book Quest for the Living God at the end of March.  The bishops claim that the book is doctrinally defective and is an imperfect guide to Catholic truth for those using the book in classrooms and other theological discussion groups.

As Donald Cozzens notes, this condemnation ostensibly reflects concerns raised by a number of U.S. bishops, whose identities we don't know.  Though the bishops have a policy that encourages bishops to engage in dialogue with a theologian whose work is under episcopal scrutiny prior to issuing a condemnation of this sort, in the case of Elizabeth Johnson, there was no such dialogue.  She was not informed of the ostensible defects of her work as it was being reviewed by the bishops' committee, not told who had made accusations against her, and not given a chance to defend herself and her work as it was being reviewed.

Hence Cozzens' call for transparency now: who is questioning Johnson's work, and why are those bishops doing so?  In Cozzens' view, an adult church demands adult techniques of handling dispute--not secrecy and top-down, authoritarian suppression of discussion:

For the bishops who accused Johnson, I have a thought. Step out from behind the sanctuary of your chancery desks and identify yourselves. Johnson is ready to sit down with you for a serious conversation about the mystery of the living God.

It seems to me that’s the adult thing to do.

Though I certainly don't know the identity of any of Johnson's accusers, I can well imagine the theological niche within the U.S. bishops' conference from which the accusations are emanating.  I can imagine that niche because I began to be aware that Elizabeth Johnson was on the radar screen of the Catholic fringe right by the early 1990s.  And when I became aware of that fact, I also became aware of several of the primary factors that were driving the attack on Johnson and other theologians who were beginning to be perceived as threats to Catholic truth in this period.

Here's how the attacks on Johnson came on my radar screen: not too long after I was given a terminal contract in 1993 by Belmont Abbey College, whose theology department I chaired, the Benedictine community of monks that own the college hosted a lecture by a popular American Catholic speaker, Fr. Alfred McBride, on the topic of the future of Catholic theology.  Curiously, though I was chairing the theology department of this Catholic college at the time, I wasn't invited to the lecture.

I found out about it only post factum, from some of the majors in the department who were potential candidates for monastic life and who had been invited to the lecture.  They told me that McBride's lecture was, in their view, a broadside attack on much of American Catholic theology in the wake of Vatican II--the kind of theology they was being taught in many of their theology classes at Belmont Abbey.

In particular, they told me, he lambasted Elizabeth Johnson, who was "tearing apart" the church with her feminist ideas of God.  How was she permitted to get away with this kind of thing?  Where were the theological controls that used to assure that anyone calling herself a Catholic theologian was a bona fide Catholic theologian, and not a maverick dangerous to orthodoxy?

When I heard the reports of my students about these attacks on Elizabeth Johnson in a quasi-secret lecture advertised as a public lecture, which was essentially a call for a purge of groups of theologians regarded as threats to an embattled clerical regime, it became clear to me that the monks of Belmont Abbey had invited Alfred McBride to give the lecture because of their own concerns--concerns that underlay my terminal contract--about issues of control in the theological realm.  I was the first lay chair of Belmont Abbey's theology department.

Throughout my troubled two years at this small Benedictine college, there was constant turmoil due to the palpable fear of many of the monks that the appointment of a lay chair of the theology department signaled the end of clerical control of the discipline of theology.  On more than one occasion, I had the unhappy experience of sitting through sermons in the abbey church in which the monk preaching told students that theologians were leading them astray, and that they needed to study theology on their knees, praying for God to hold them fast in the truth.  I also discovered after I received a terminal contract that, during my time at the college, one of my books had circulated through the monastery, where monks made marginal notes re: the "errors" of the text, to show that I wasn't qualified to teach theology.

Not long after I was issued a terminal contract with no explanation for why I was being fired, the monastery's abbot gave a public presentation to the college community in which he spoke of the need to lop off diseased limbs in order to restore the catholicity of the college.  He followed this with a statement to the media which was printed in the local paper, in which he said that the catholicity of Catholic colleges was waning as more lay faculty taught in these colleges.  He had assumed the presidency of the college, pushing out its lay president, in order to reassert catholicity, and he wanted the public to know this.

The underlying implication of these remarks was clear: lay theologians cannot be controlled in the same way that clerical theologians can be controlled.  Theology had always been and should remain a clerical discipline, tightly controlled by church officials.  Those calling the shots at this particular Catholic college were eager to use the latest mechanism of control on the horizon at that point in time--the mandatum, a "permission" to teach theology granted by the local bishop to theologians after those theologians have taken an oath of loyalty--as a mechanism assuring continued clerical control of the discipline of theology, in an age in which theologians are increasingly lay persons and not priests.

(Unfortunately--an aside, but a pertinent one--the priest that Belmont Abbey was eager to hire to replace me in order to restore the catholicity of the theology department came with some embarrassing baggage.  He disappeared mysteriously halfway through an academic year, while college officials remained mum about the disappearance.  In 2002, the reason for his disappearance became evident from information released during the disclosure process in the Boston trials about clerical sexual abuse: he had come to the college with well-known and proven allegations of sexual advances to seminarians at his previous place of employment.

When this information became public, the then abbot, a monk who had hired me to teach theology and then ditched me with great alacrity when he saw that the prevailing winds were against having a lay chair of the theology department, told the media that he had not known of the priest's messy past at the time he was hired.  The bishop of Charlotte made a similar statement to the media.  Both then had to admit that they had lied a few days later, when Cardinal Law released documents showing he had telephoned and written the abbot and the bishop to tell them about the priest's history of sexual approaches to students when Belmont Abbey College hired him.)

What was of supreme importance to the monks who sought to unseat me as the first lay chair of this college's theology department was, as I have noted, to find mechanisms to assure continued clerical control of the discipline of theology in an age in which theologians are increasingly lay persons and not priests.  And increasingly laypersons and nuns: the growing number of religious women obtaining academic degrees in the field of theology, teaching theology, and writing theological works is also of serious concern to those who imagine that waning clerical control of theological discourse represents the end of catholicity in the church.  Elizabeth Johnson is a lightning rod for these concerns, I began to realize as I worked through my own painful experiences with this small Catholic college, for precisely the same reason I was a lightning rod as a lay theologian.

She's a lightning rod because she's not a priest.  And not a man.  And she is beyond the control of those who equate catholicity with male clerical control.  She's a lightning rod for those who imagine that the church is somehow falling apart when men are not completely in control of it and all that it says and does.

And that's ultimately what the recent condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson's work is all about, and what the U.S. bishops intend to communicate with this condemnation: theology belongs to us.  It belongs to clerics.  It belongs to clerics who also happen to be men.  It belongs primarily to clerics because the church itself belongs primarily to clerics.  They determine the meaning of catholicity, of its symbols and doctrines.   And we can control clerics teaching theology in ways we cannot control lay persons or religious women who teach theology--and this lack of control concerns us and many others who are concerned about the waning of mechanisms of male control in culture at large.

The bishops who have raised concerns about Elizabeth Johnson?  This is where they're coming from.  And we will not ever know their identities, I suspect, because they do not want their identities disclosed.  They don't want their identities disclosed any more than the powerful men in back rooms with whom these bishops collude to keep patriarchal control mechanisms in place in society at large want their identities known.  What they're doing in the case of Elizabeth Johnson is all about reasserting a sense of control that they imagine is threatened by people like Elizabeth Johnson, which does its work within church structures precisely by remaining hidden and unaccountable.

(P.S. I've noted that the fact that Steve and I are a gay couple and were hired together to teach theology at Belmont Abbey played a definite role in the choice of the school to give me an unexplained terminal contract  after two years.  I know this because the president of the college told a student this, when the student expressed his concern about the terminal contract in a conversation with the president.

But this was, I suspect, not the primary reason the monks and bishop of Charlotte wanted me to be terminated.  It was very clear to me--and I have quite a bit of evidence to back up this claim--that the primary movers in the decision to give me a terminal contract were the then abbot Oscar Burnett and the then bishop of Charlotte John Donoghue, who were also being pressured by some very powerful and wealthy right-wing Catholics in the area to fire me.  Though Belmont Abbey refused ever to provide a reason for the termination, before the president of the college was himself fired, he told me that the bishop and abbot were pushing for my firing because they wanted direct control over the theology department, which they felt they had lost with a lay department chair.

The gay issue was simply a convenient way to frame the grab for control and to make it seem palatable to the public--and it proved a very effective way for the monastic community and key players in the old boys' club that dominated the faculty at that point in time to spin my expulsion from the college, which was, in effect, also my expulsion from the Catholic theological academy itself.)

New Scientific Findings Confirm Catholic Magisterial Teachings about Sex? Semen as "Better Gift Than Chocolate" for Women

This is one of the crazy corners of American scientific research about which I'll freely admit I know next to nothing.  I first became aware that this field of research--re: the male-female union-cementing properties of semen--existed, when a proponent of the theology of the body logged onto a Commonweal thread some months ago to argue that new research shows that women crave semen (as it were), since a good dose of semen in their vagina gives them an upper-type experience unparalleled anywhere else in nature.

Really.  I'm not joking.  As crude as this proposal sounds, that's essentially what I read the TOB proponent to say on the Commonweal thread.  (TOB = theology of the body, and is the acronym beloved by the Catholic right as it sagely discusses these inanities in the mystogogical, pseudo-theological language of John Paul the Great.)

And science proves what the Catholic church has been saying for some years now, don't you know, the TOB proponent also argued: contraception that thwarts the injection of the upper-inducing semen into a woman's vagina is not "natural" or real sex.  It doesn't give women the thrill they crave, which nature has designed for them to have when their man does his business with them.

And as soon as I read this load of malarkey on the Commonweal blog site, I knew that quite a few (male heterosexual) Catholics of the TOB school were certain to latch onto this new pseudo-scientific finding and would try to make much of it as "proof" of the validity of TOB.  And of the validity of the Catholic magisterial opposition to homosexuality.  And to artificial contraception.  And to the designs of women who want to escape from male control and male domination and the male injection of that relationship-cementing magical substance they so desperately need to be whole women.

And now that I'm reading about this controversy (first link above) involving Lazar Greenfield, Steven Platek, et al., I'm no more convinced than I was by the summary of this research at the Commonweal site that we're seeing some stunning new scientific breakthrough that has finally vindicated Catholic sexual ethics, via rigid scientific research.  Let me count the ways that I'm dubious--while freely admitting I have done no careful reading at all in this field, and am basing my doubts on the Commonweal thread I mention above, and this article about Greenfield:

1. Research by psychologists confirming a biological thesis that semen acts like an anti-depressant for women?  Really?  What biological mechanisms, pray tell, are being confirmed here?  And how do we define something so nebulous as depression?  And how do we know that it's the semen per se that gives the uplifting experience to college-aged women whose male partners don't use condoms, or some other factors that go beyond the biological--say, the sense of cachet provided by knowing they have a man, and that their man is a real man who eschews condoms?  There are too many uncontrolled variables in this research, as it's described here, for me to be overwhelmed by its conclusion that semen provides that natural lift women are looking for in life.

2. And when Platek et al. also grant that the vagina is also "a very hostile environment for sperm," I wonder why they'd conclude at the same time, on the basis of their observation of the anti-depressant properties (on women) of semen in unprotected sex, that the "numerous semen testimonials from other women who attest to the anti-depressant effects of semen exposure" point to a conclusion that semen is a natural anti-depressant.  Designed for women.  A natural anti-depressant when injected, mind you, into the vagina.  In the only kind of sexual activity the Catholic church endorses as natural.  If the vagina is "hostile" to semen, if it compromises the female immune system, should we be touting the natural anti-depressant virtues of semen in unprotected male-female sex--the "better gift for that day [i.e., St. Valentine's day] than chocolates," in Dr. Greenfield's formulation? 

3. And my inquiring mind also wants to know: have comparative studies been done to discover whether semen functions as a magical substance with similar uplifting effects for gay men?  Or have studies been done to find out whether men coming into contact with vaginal secretions find themselves curiously elated by a better gift than chocolate?  If not, why not?  Why is this study, and why is this field of research, framed from the outset as a discovery that semen is men's gift to women--the better gift than chocolate?  (And we all know who craves the uplift of chocolate, and who gives chocolate to whom.)

Count me an unbeliever.  I'm just not yet seeing anything in this slice of research--admittedly, a thin slice, since I haven't read more in the field--that convinces me that the Catholic magical-mystical approach to human sexuality promoted by John Paul the Great and beloved of the TOB crowd is anything other than scientific and theological nonsense wrapped up in high-flown rhetoric disguising its long-since outmoded scientific conclusions about gender, sexuality, and male-female roles.  Or that this crude male-skewed scientific "research" is a solid basis on which to build a theological system that justifies male domination, female subordination, and condemnation of those God makes gay and lesbian.

J. Crew Ad Shows Boy with Pink Toenails, and Hell Breaks Loose

I've been following the perfervid reaction of the political and religious right to the recent J. Crew ad featuring a mother with her son's toenails painted pink with no little amusement.  And quite a bit of impatience.

I can't imagine this kind of manufactured outrage in response to an ad like this anywhere else in the developed world.  What it says about us Americans and our level of education regarding matters central to our daily lives, including gender, gender roles, sexuality, etc., is hardly flattering.  And what it says about our ongoing hysteria at the thought that "traditional" male roles we consider engraved in stone (and mandated by the bible) might be more negotiable (and more noxious, to all of us) than we realize is also pretty revealing.  Revealing about who and what we really value in our world.  And who really counts in our society.

Jon Stewart did an excellent job of sending up the manufactured outrage on his "Daily Show" this past Wednesday.  His response to the rantings of the right seems to me to raise the correct questions:

1. Why do some of us persistently want to blame women--mothers, in particular--for a perceived decline in masculinity that we imagine is undermining our cultural stability?  When Sarah Hoffman blogs about her pink boy (and here), and--more importantly--when she informs bewildered critics that she doesn't force her son to conform to their gender stereotypes, all hell breaks loose.  It's as if, single-handedly, Hoffman is taking the one thread most certain to unravel the whole skein of Western Christian culture and pulling that thread out of the skein, to the peril of all of us.

Precisely the same thing happened in the fall of 2010 when a blogger, Sarah, whose blog identifies her as "Nerdy Apple Blossom," permitted her son to wear a gender-bending Hallowe'en costume.  When she did so, various "Christian" mothers and assorted other "Christians" who logged onto her blog informed her, in all Christian kindness and humility, mind you, that she was wrong-headed and likely to be sending her son to hell--along with all the rest of us.  Since the stability of our culture depends on forcing little boys who might like to wear costumes with pink angel wings to don football jerseys and lay hold of baseball bats, instead.

2. And why do all those who are so (self-righteously) convinced that their version of gender roles should apply to the entire cosmos never seem to think about the disparity between how we treat mothers who "permit" their sons to wear pink and those who, without blinking an eye, allow their daughters to seize the baseball bats and sport the football jerseys?  We're really saying, aren't we, that the sole--the neuralgic--point to be considered in these mother-blaming narratives about child-rearing is what happens to little boys. About what happens to little boys when they're "permitted" to transgress the gender roles we want to impose on them.  Little girls either don't count very much, or their amusing attempts to turn themselves into little boys are to be winked at and encouraged, while boys desiring to act like girls need to be slapped down hard.

And why are we saying these things, I wonder?  And what do we intend to gain by seeking to punish mothers who do not enforce our gender stereotypes and to coerce the little boys of those mothers to act in a way that reassures us of the rightness of those stereotypes?

What are we saying about ourselves?  About the depth of our humanity?  The extent of our tolerance?  Our appreciation for diversity?

About our willingness to accept the wide-ranging differences in how people embody masculinity and femininity, across a whole spectrum of behaviors and choices that may or many not conform to our preconceived notions of what it means to be male or female?  And about the kind of society we want to build, as we confront the bewildering, enriching diversity of human behavior vis-a-vis gender roles everywhere in the world and over the course of history?

These are some of the questions this controversy and Stewart's hilarious send-up of the political and religious right evoke for me.  Somehow, I don't think the response of the religious and political right to this particular ad is designed to get us talking about those questions.

A Reader Writes about Elizabeth Johnson Condemnation: What Are They So Afraid Of?

When I blogged yesterday about the condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson's book Quest for the Living God, MollyJ posted a great comment, asking, "What is the church so danged afraid of?"  Molly also notes that the bishops' response to Johnson sounds very "agendized."

And I agree.  I can't pretend to have a single scrap of information about what has gone on behind the scenes to produce this condemnation.  But my lack of inside information doesn't prevent me from piecing together the tidbits of information I've acquired over the course of some 30 years now as a Catholic theologian in the U.S. (albeit one shoved way to the margins), and, based on those tidbits, reaching some conclusions about why the bishops are making this statement about Johnson's work.  Conclusions that seem plausible to me, at least.

And here they are, for what they're worth to readers:

First and foremost, what the bishops are afraid of is loss of control.  But the fear of loss of control that they're voicing in the condemnation of this book is a broader fear than a specifically religious or specifically Catholic fear.  It's a fear that runs through patriarchal power structures in both faith communities and society at large at this point in history.  It's a quite specific fear that is particularly intent at our time in history, and particularly powerful in some communities of faith, notably the Roman Catholic church.

This is a fear among heterosexual (or heterosexual-posturing) men that they are on the verge of losing control of the key institutions and symbols of many societies and religious groups.  And in response to that fear, there's a ratcheted-up claim among heterosexual (or heterosexual-posturing) men that they exclusively and unilaterally own God.  And the central symbols of various religious traditions.

What the bishops are voicing in their condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson is, ultimately, ownership.  Ownership of God.  Of the symbol of God, which is fundamental to, indispensable to, the entire system of Catholic doctrine.  Ownership of all language about God.  Of all official language about God, which, they keep insisting (along with the Vatican) must always be filtered through their screening mechanisms and stamped with their divine seal of approbation before it's promulgated to the people of God.

As if ordinary layfolks and women and other ragtag people can't possibly know, understand, experience, and talk about God. Not in any official and meaningful way.  Not in any way that affects the allocation of power and structures of power in social groups and religious communities.

What is offensive about Elizabeth Johnson's approach to theology and to talking about God--what is offensive to the bishops, above all--is her method of doing theology as though the experience of ordinary layfolks and women and other ragtag human beings counts.  As if it is valid experience of the divine.  As if we need to listen intently to such experience in order to develop anything close to an adequate theological language about God.

Scan Catholic blog sites in recent days where there's discussion of this book and why the bishops have chosen to condemn it, and you'll notice an interesting sociological trend in the discussion: far and away the majority of those defending the bishops and their choice to condemn the book are men.  And over and over, those men's defense of what the bishops have chosen to do boils down to a language of sheer, raw power.

The bishops should condemn such books, the defensores fidei are saying, because they have the right to do so, and people forget who owns rights unless those who have them assert their rights.  Unless they assert their rights over others.  

The men defending the bishops' action with regard to Elizabeth Johnson's book are jubilant that the bishops have asserted their power over a feminist theologian who dares to write about God in any voice other than the official voice of a chancery office or episcopal palace.  The bishops' decision to condemn Elizabeth Johnson's work is being framed by these male defensores as a demonstration of episcopal muscle of which these defenders of the faith would like to see quite a bit more: more heretic bashing.  More imprimaturs.  More oaths and mandata.

More mechanisms of control to assure that there's only one voice--only one authoritarian voice--declaring The Truth to the world.  Declaring Catholic Truth.  Declaring The Truth that men know, own, and dispense as they wish to the rest of the world.

One of the most amusing responses I am now hearing at blog sites as power-brokering men chew over the "victory" of the U.S. bishops' muscular demonstration of power over Elizabeth Johnson is this: she herself admits she went to press, they say, before she had the full truth about God.  And now she wants to whine when those with more access to the truth--those who own the taps from which dribs and drabs of truth are dispensed to the rest of us--slap her hands for her sloppy work?

The spectacular misunderstanding of what theology is all about exhibited in that recurring statement on some Catholic blogs in the past day or so is mind-boggling.  Can anyone really be so ignorant of what theology is about at the most fundamental level possible--that it's a communitarian search, requiring many perspectives and many voices, for language and symbols to express our experience of the divine?  To voice an experience of the divine Who transcends any and all language?

The reflex to control runs directly counter to everything that the experience of the divine means if it's authentic, in the view of the classic religious traditions of the world.  Authentic experience of God, we're told repeatedly by the classic religious traditions of the world, inducts us into a life of faith in which we continuously experience a loss of control.  Because we've encountered God.  Who is utterly beyond all human control.  Who is utterly beyond all human language. The claim to own The Truth about God and a uniquely correct language in which to utter that truth is, on the face of it, a claim that places those making the claim beyond the pale of authentic experience of the divine, in the understanding of the world's classic religious traditions.

The spiritual life is about going where we never expected to go, walking along paths that lead somewhere we never intended to walk.  It's about letting go of control, and of ourselves, in ceaseless acts of self-giving to others and to God.  In ceaseless acts of self-giving to anyone and everyone in need--which is to say, to the whole world.  It's about Jesus going down into and under the waters of the Jordan River and letting himself be submerged in them as he begins his ministry--a ministry whose paths lead to Calvary, not to a royal throne or a military commander's palace.  Not to power and control, but to the renunciation of those alluring mirages that stand between us and the living God whose love burns away all desire to control, to exercise power over others.

As I think about what the bishops are doing and saying in condemning Elizabeth Johnson's work, I wonder what powerful men where are now pulling the strings for the Catholic bishops of the U.S. I wonder about whose money is changing hands behind the scenes to urge the bishops to attack federal policies designed to prevent discrimination against gay citizens in the area of housing, to remain silent when bullying of gay youths create epidemics of suicide, and when workers' rights are being assaulted in one state after another.  I wonder whose money urged the bishops to, well, lie about health care reform last year and claim that the new federal health care plan would subvent abortions.

I wonder who has bought and spurred on this ugly inquisitorial gesture against one of the most highly respected American Catholic theologians.  Who happens to be a woman.

I wonder about all of these matters as I see the bishops make yet another utterly doltish, bafflingly wrong-headed pastoral move that, in the minds of the men who are cheering them, demonstrates the bishops' magnificent power to all the world.  When what it really tells an increasing number of us, instead, as the abuse crisis continues to unfold and we learn just what the bishops have really been doing as all that money changes hands behind the scenes, is that the bishops are totally devoid of any power that spiritually or morally astute people would recognize as authentic, transformative religious power.

That kind of power is to be found now in the theology of Elizabeth Johnson--not in any words the bishops are uttering. 

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.

Father John Corapi and the Manly-Man Model of the Priesthood: Survey of Recent Discussion

As I follow the news that another of the manly man hero-priests beloved of the Catholic right, Father John Corapi of EWTN fame, has been put on leave due to allegations of sexual misconduct with adult women (and drug abuse), I’m fascinated by a spin-off conversation now developing on some Catholic websites in the wake of the news about Corapi.  This is a conversation about precisely how and in what specific ways the Catholic church is now benefiting (or not) from its fixation of late on recovering the manly-man model for its priests.

Before I point you to sites at which that important conversation is now taking place, a brief comment about the situation framing the discussion.  Corapi himself broke the news of his having been put on leave with a recent statement at his blog site noting that he’s been charged with “multiple sexual exploits” with several adult women and with “drug addiction.”  Corapi denies the charges, and maintains that Catholic officials are now putting priests against whom non-credible allegations have been made on probation.

I don’t intend to comment on Corapi’s guilt or innocence, or the basis by which any church official may have put him on leave.  It’s not even clear whether Corapi is under scrutiny by a bishop or bishops since, as his blog posting notes, the woman making allegations about him wrote to three bishops, or if it is his religious superiors who have chosen to act.   He belongs to the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity.

It would be inappropriate of me to comment in any way about the guilt or innocence or procedural aspects of Corapi’s case, since I know nothing about the particulars—and he certainly deserves to be regarded as innocent until proven guilty (though I have seen no evidence at all to corroborate the claim that priests are being removed from ministry on the basis of tenuous, non-credible charges).  His case is somewhat different from that of Father Thomas Euteneuer, against whom charges of sexual misconduct with adult women have also been made, in that 1) Euteneuer admitted his guilt in at least one of the several cases about which there has been discussion of credible charges made, and 2) his admission was confirmed both by his former employer, Human Life International, and by the Diocese of Palm Beach, Florida, both of which revealed that they had already known of the charges against Euteneuer when he made them public.  And HLI’s statement about the matter indicated that there were charges in addition to the one to which his admission of guilt specifically responded.

I know little about Corapi except what I’ve seen when I occasionally flick through the offerings of EWTN, and then just as quickly click the television off.  I’ll freely admit I find him unappealing.  I can’t listen to him go on and on about his doctrinal certainties at the EWTN site without feeling queasy.  I had never specifically identified the queasiness as a reaction to the hyper-macho shtick about which there’s now discussion in the wake of the recent news about him.

I had thought of it more as a regional or perhaps even a class reaction: it’s the bullying tone, the shouting, the murdering of the king’s English, and the muddy, nasal, vowel-garbling accent that I find off-putting, as I listen to him.  And, yes, the anti-intellectual certitude with which he offers his reductionist, oh-so-certain understanding of the doctrines about which he preaches.

As I say, I had chalked my visceral reaction up to the fact that I just don’t seem to fit into the normative paradigms of American Catholicism, which emanate from urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest far from home for me.  And so when I read my way through comments about Corapi on some thread at one of the “In All Things” discussions at America in the past year (I'm sorry: I can't remember which thread this was), and read one glowing comment after another about Corapi by Catholic men logging in to praise Corapi’s scintillating theology and even the speaking style and rhetoric I find so repulsive, I just shrugged my shoulders and decided that, once again, the movers and shakers of American Catholicism don’t seem to have much room for me and my kind.

Now, though, I’m beginning to wonder: it may well have been the macho shtick to which I was reacting all along, without knowing it.  I’m wondering about this because, as I scan various Catholic blog sites recently for information about the Corapi case, I’ve happened on a fascinating discussion at several sites—a discussion of that manly-man fixation among some American Catholics who believe that the ills of the priesthood in the late 20th century had everything to do with the loss of machismo in the priesthood.  And who prescribe a return to clerical machismo as the way out of the deep crisis in which the church now finds itself.   And Corapi is at the center of this discussion because—I discover—he represents for a strong, mobilized group of followers precisely the kind of priestly machismo we need in order to cure the ills of American Catholicism.

I became aware of this discussion a day or so ago through something Elizabeth Scalia posted at her Anchoress site.   Scalia notes that Max Lindenmann had recently blogged about “types” of priests and why no one type is better than another.  Scalia excerpts a piece of Lindenmann’s commentary that, in fact, mentions a young priest in his (Phoenix) diocese for whom folks are predicting an illustrious future—a priest who sports what Lindenmann calls “the Fr. Corapi Starter Kit,”  an “aggressively shaven dome” and “a goatee fit for an outlaw biker or a king’s musketeer.”  And this young Corapi knock-off strides rather than walks, intones rather than speaks.

Scalia comments (bold-face in the original):  

Now I rather love priests with a bit of Spencer Tracy gruffness to them, but I love the soft-spoken sorts, too. 

Oddly enough, Fr. Mychal Judge was one of the first on the ground to die in the mess of 9/11.

I'm not quite sure why Scalia thinks it was odd that Mychal Judge was one of the first to die on the ground in the 9/11 events.  What she doesn’t say, of course, but what many readers will well know, is this: Mychal Judge was an openly gay priest.  He was, in short, precisely the kind of priest the prescribers of the Corapi manly-man fix are now insisting is at the root of the problem in American Catholicism.  He was the kind of priest they are working very hard to root out of all seminaries, in order to introduce a generation of priests who buy the Fr. Corapi Starter Kit.

Who will cure all that ails us.

And here’s Lindenmann himself on this prescription for the American Catholic church:

If instruction in the seminaries is taking a similar tone, conflating a call to holiness aimed at the soul with an appeal to the male ego (located guess where), then somebody's playing a very dangerous game. Masculine pride is a naturally volatile substance. In a system where masculinity and femininity are rigidly defined and polarized, it becomes machismo, the psychological equivalent of nitroglycerine. It can make men behave in ways that are ridiculous at best, atrocious at worst. Think Mike Dukakis in the tank. No, better, think Tom wedding Katie.

Lindenmann’s reference to “a similar tone” is a reference to the manly-man-as-cure analysis of Todd Aglioro in a Catholic Culture essay entitled “The New Catholic Manliness”—about which more in a moment.  For now, here’s where Lindenmann is going with the “similar tone” remark: he notes that Aglioro’s essay “blames femininity for everything he doesn't like about the Church, from bad catechesis to ‘the worst crimes of the Lavender Mafia.’” And: when Aglioro writes about “manly virtue,” one gets the sense, Lindenmann suggests, that for Aglioro, “manliness is virtue.”

And Lindenmann is skeptical of this analysis.  He’s skeptical for the reasons outlined above: creating rigid, polar-opposite definitions of masculinity and femininity (à la John Paul II's theology of the body)* and making one of these the solution to the problems of the church endows manly men with a dangerous, ego-charging sense of self-worth that easily translates into domination of others.  Of anyone “lower” than themselves.  And, specifically, of anyone feminine—whether women or feminized men—since masculinity is, per the foundational norms of this schema, superior to femininity.

Superiority so cheaply bought—with a shaved head, a bad tan, and a badly dyed goatee, a strut and a shout—doesn’t do anyone very much good, Lindenmann suggests.  Least of all the man who imagines he has reincarnated himself as a demi-god because he’s acquired a cheap starter kit to project the macho image.  Least of all a priest who imagines that a Fr. Corapi Starter Kit equips him for pastoral ministry better than, say, the gospels or the example of Jesus (who humbled himself to adopt a woman’s posture and wash his followers’ feet) does.

And Lindenmann goes further: he notes what a similar mindset—what the Fr. Corapi Starter Kit—has done for those working in the subprime mortgage industry, with which, I gather, he himself has work experience.  Just as Aglioro’s analysis of the new Catholic manliness does, Lindenmann thinks that the subprime industry exalts machismo and denigrates femininity.  It creates the same hard-soft polarity for which Aglioro argues as a prescription for the ills of contemporary American Catholicism.

And in Lindenmann’s experience, in doing so, it creates a model of being human that is not only unattractive, but dehumanizing and morally dangerous—hardly a model any community of followers of Jesus should be keen to adopt:

But subprime does, I think, have a lesson for the priesthood. It's this: once you polarize hard and soft, once you internalize those polarities as good and bad, then your whole value structure will become distorted, and your self will follow. Once you start conceiving missions that can only be accomplished with a stiff arm and a strut—that's when you run the risk of becoming someone you don't recognize, and couldn't possibly like.

As I’ve noted, Lindenmann is commenting here on an essay Todd Aglioro published two years ago at the Catholic Culture website, entitled “The New Catholic Manliness.”  Aglioro’s essay is . . . an interesting  (and I'll be honest: often downright hilarious). . . read for all kinds of reasons.  As Lindenmann notes, it develops a neat analysis of diametrically opposed male-female characteristics, and then implicitly ranks these in a hierarchical schema.  And guess which come out on top?  And which set is the solution and which the problem in the contemporary Catholic church?

And it quite specifically prescribes this model for—it calls for its imposition on—seminaries, as a solution to what’s wrong with American Catholicism today.  This is the subtext of Aglioro’s analysis I find particularly fascinating because, when I’ve written about this topic in the past, some readers have suggested that I’m over-stating or even making up my case about how the manly-man paradigm is now driving both the thinking of many Catholics about the priesthood today, and the direction now being taken in seminary formation.

As Aglioro states outright, “Good seminaries are not simply enjoying a serendipitous influx of manlier applicants; they're expressly targeting them.”  Aglioro quotes for corroboration Msgr. Stewart Swetland and Msgr. Steven Rohlfs of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland:

For one, they [seminarians] are carrying themselves differently: "They take pride in their masculine attributes," says Monsignor Swetland. "The last couple generations of priests generally weren't too concerned about taking care of themselves physically," but these days "they work out, they play sports, they want to look and dress and act like men." Also in contrast to their predecessors, they're interested in pursuing "a distinctly masculine spirituality," says Monsignor Rohlfs — in part, he adds with a laugh, because "there's a sense of relief that it's now acceptable to talk that way."  

In contrast to their predecessors: this is analysis—this is a prescription—deliberately pitched against what Aglioro and others in his camp imagine seminarians of the immediate post-Vatican period were like.  Seminarians that those promoting the return to a manly-man priesthood want us to imagine are at the root of the abuse problem in the Catholic church in the U.S.  Gay seminarians, you understand.  The Mychal Judges.  Not the John Corapis or Tom Euteneuers.

And so rooting out those “feminine traits and roles” that used to “plague” seminaries is also rooting out the same-sex relationships that have also plagued seminaries (and—subtext—have led to the abuse crisis during the period in which the Lavender Mafia dominated American church life):

The change [to a macho understanding of priesthood] has begun to bear evident fruits in the interactions among younger clergy and seminarians, thanks to a reemphasis on the classical sense of friendship, which helps guard against same-sex attraction while building a lifelong foundation for priestly fellowship and mutual help. Among such men there is virtually no evidence of the affectation of feminine traits and roles that has plagued many seminaries.

The priests now being churned out by our seminaries are not merely bona fide men free of feminine affectation: they’re orthodox men ready to do battle for the church to whom they’re wed, priests eager to teach “hard or ‘crunchy’ doctrine” in season or out of season.  Lump it or like it, people of God.  Father knows best.  Real men don’t waver or yield.  The new generation of manly-men priests who will save our tottering, unbalanced, hyper-feminized church are priests in the image of John Paul II, a manly-man priest “who by all accounts was the inspiration, motivation, and architect of the whole project.”

For some reason, Aglioro’s article never mentions Benedict.

And so the path is bright before us: if we want to renew the American Catholic church, to lift it out of its current (feminine-produced) malaise, we need to keep cleaning out our seminaries—cleaning them out of “effeminate” candidates and the “ideologues” who preferred such candidates over manly men:

In many seminaries, even those that have cleared their staffs of ideologues, who before would give unabashed preference to effeminate candidates while straining out the masculine ones, there are still future priests with a seriously deficient — or skewed — sense of what it means to be a man. Some of these will become deadbeat spiritual fathers; others will have to battle — or will succumb to — homosexual urges.

And, as I read Scalia and Lindenmann, I'm delighted to discover that even Catholics far more inclined than I am to buy into the restorationist model of John Paul II and Benedict are finally waking up to the downright noxious silliness of all of this gay-baiting analysis.  And to the proposal that a church dominated by priests of the ilk of John Corapi or Tom Euteneuer or Ryan Erickson would be preferable to a church dominated by priests of the ilk of Mychal Judge.

Or even—God help us—that we'd have a church free of the gays because more and more seminarians are choosing to work out, play sports, and dress like real men!  No, sir, don't know a single gay to whom that description might apply.  I find this thesis just about as convincing and reassuring as I found that silly little baseball cap Benedict was sporting last summer to be a convincing sign that he belongs solidly in the crowd of of manly-men priests.

*Readers interested in tracking what I've written on this theme can click on the tag "theology of the body" at the bottom of this Corapi posting, and follow postings with that tag back in time.