The Pope's remarks in his book-length interview Light of the World will not make gay people in the Church happy or make gay people happy with the Church. He re-iterates the standard teaching that sexuality is ordered toward the procreation of children within marriage. Anything which does not flow toward that end is, in Catholic parlance, dis-ordered. No surprise. It's basically the same reason why artificial birth control is not ok.
A big part of what makes the issue so hot is the idea of sexual orientation, and of sexual orientation as being central to personal identity. To my knowledge, this relatively recent set of concepts has little or no history, not only in Catholicism, but in cultural thinking about sex prior to the 19th century West. The Church has responded by invoking the distinction between person and act, the famous "sin and sinner" distinction. For the homosexual person, this disordered inclination is a burden and a trial, and while expressing the inclination is wrong, the person deserves the ordinary respect due to anyone. It makes sense on an intellectual level --it's how most of us tolerate most other human beings, after all-- but it's hard to accept psychologically if you are on the receiving end of the rejection and your sexuality feels central to your identity. Mine does.
Eve Tushnet, an orthodox Catholic, and therefore celibate, lesbian does not dispute the Pope's teaching but does fault him on sharing an assumption about homosexuality with, ironically, secular liberalism, the ideology that Benedict finds most problematic, far more than Islam, for instance. I'll let her speak for herself, but the jist of it is that homosexual people don't want just a set of particular physical actions, but hunger for a specific kind of human relationship. And neither the Pope nor The World seem to get that.
What I have found unacceptable is to believe that when I care deeply for another man and express that love physically, the best I have to offer, in a way, it is essentially deformed. Very hard to maintain much self-respect in that kind of paradigm, try as you might. I am a male and I have a typically male form of sexuality. I like to look, for example. But my sexuality is not about particular acts of organs with other organs. At base, it is about a certain kind of connection that includes physical engagement. And the orthodox teaching is that that physical engagement violates whatever good there is in the connection. I cannot buy that, in good conscience. As I have said before, my sexual misdeeds come from the fact that I am human, not that I am gay.
What Benedict does say, very clearly, is that homosexual priests are a bad idea, that the sexual orientation and the sacramental role are incompatible. He says that gay men have a skewed relationship to both sexes which makes pastoral care problematic. And since gays are supposed to be celibate anyway, as a condition of morality, it makes the sacrificial element in celibacy superfluous.
And in his least charming response, when confronted with the reality of homosexuals in the priesthood and monastic life, he describes it as "one of the miseries of the Church." I tracked down the German original and the word he used is "Nöte" (with an umlaut over the O, which may not reproduce on Blogger). It means "hardships". Clearly something he would rather not have to put up with.
On a case by case basis, you can argue with him for sure. I can't see that either Franciscan Mychal Judge or Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins were bad priests at all. But to be somewhat consistent, I would have to say that he has a genuine concern if the celibate priesthood becomes publicly identified as a homosexual caste and if "gay culture" becomes the standard for clerical or religious life. I think that an all-male priesthood is crucial to the survival and identity of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. But if all the males, or most, are homosexual...That is much the impression many people have now. Straight men, that is to say, regular and ordinary men, would stay away. As they do from any profession once it becomes feminized.
6 comments:
1. You wish to take Benedict's "one of the miseries of the Church" in the direction of "hardships"? Augustinianly enough, I was thinking Pascal: the glories and the miseries of the church. These two can 'co-incide,' you know. The reality of practising and non-preactising homosexuals in the priesthood and in the orders could somehow also become one of the glories of the Church.
2. I remember when (1982?) you pointed out the difference between moral theology's »Don't do these acts« which imply'd no particular ontological defectiveness in the person who did them, and the "ontological" concept of orientation which (when not affirm'd) results in a determination of defectiveness in persons who have this orientation even when they refrain from expressing this orientation — sc in sexual acts, not, presumably, expressing it in other ways which conservatives seem ontologically obtusely oblivious to — not to mention expression in the nonhetero versions of heterosexuality which fascinate me. (Conservative Christians really should put together a TV series "Straight Eye on the Queer Guy" in which regular guys go around suppressing various expressions of gay sensibility in homoe decor and clothing.)
-I didn't put heterosexuality in quote marks just now, because I think it includes real libido vis-à-vis womengirls somehow, and not only e.g. unconsciously fake declarations of being driven mad with lust for girls — declarations which sound 'off.' The love stories in opera, ballet, ice dancing, etc don't seem fake for being disproportionately maintain'd by nonhetero guys.
-My guess is many love poems from guy to womangirl have been composed sincerely by nonhetero men: their sex drive doesn't take them to womengirls directly, but at the same time freedom from the insistentness of sex drive toward womengirls enables such guys to see and clearly appreciate womengirls, including their beauty.
-Not that an obvious 'higher' heterosexuality isn't a useful mask for an absence in the 'lower' heterosexuality department. Presumably many virgin nonhetero guys don't see that (evidently) having sex contra 'orientation' is more easily done than they suppose; so that pining for the unattainable isn't necessary at all. (No doubt it's very difficult for nonhetero guys to do this if they feel it's horrifically wrong, terrifyingly unconscionable, frighteningly 'living a lie' to entertain the wrong sort of fantaises. Womengirls and hetero guys go ahead and have the fantasies they wish in such situations. As in so many things, rules apply only to nonhetero guys!)
-In the movie "Amarcord" that you love so much, the sexual culture for young guys that runs parallel to Catholic morality doesn't take the duty of pure thoughts seriously in the least — but only as regards heterosexual desire. That same culture — connived in by the authorities — is subliminally totally John Calvin against treating homosexual desire in youths with similar insouciance. All boys must be at least socially-constructed heteros for Christianity and Islam and Judaism to make sense for a whole culture. Maybe dharma too. ... Even if or especially if every member of such a group of friends were actually nonhetero, if one member mention'd the frisson of homoerotic ideations, they surely would react with severe 'homophobia.' ... I wonder how much Christianity could be squeezed from a population group with few nonhetero males in it.
-The psyches of nonhetero men who put their idealizations into boy-and-girl man-and-woman love stories are perhaps not available for idealizations in homoerotic love; perhaps this is intentional, for the sake of Christian culture, and wishing to disempower taking the priesthood and religious life in homoerotic directions. Moral theology didn't find any ontological defectiveness in persons guilty of homosexual acts, but it also prevented the desires of such persons from having any ontological significance to begin with (as does Islam, Judaism, and dharma. Buddhism denies ontological significance to all sexuality as maya, although presumably there’s lots of foreground effort to deny this. If sexuality ain’t maya, then ain’t nothing maya.)
3. Re: "this relatively recent set of concepts [sexual orientation] has little or no history, not only in Catholicism, but in cultural thinking about sex prior to the 19th century West":
-I guess an unPickwickian application of Aristophanes' three different hoop versions of anthropos (in Plato's Symposium) wasn't needed until Nietzsche's era (German psychiatry's attempt to routinize Rousseau?).
4. Do you recommend that Benedict 16 and Catholic doctrine in general accept the foundation from moral theology? The door would be open, then, to maintaining that sexual desire is licitly express'd only maritally, as you say in your "No surprise" link.
4. Do you recommend that Benedict 16 and Catholic doctrine in general accept the foundation from moral theology? The door would be open, then, to maintaining that sexual desire is licitly express'd only maritally, as you say in your "No surprise" link.
-For the RCC and Christianity generally, it goes without saying that most, indeed almost all sexual desire isn't toward marital coitus open to conception. The task of interpretation, then, would include somehow not implying that the person given to homosexual desire is more ontologically defective than the heterosexually oriented person.
-I agree that with marital sex open to conception as the reigning ideal, it is more difficult to interpret homosexual desire as pointing to or somehow properly culminating in marital sex. Yet perhaps something plausible could be devised — I mean, something of the same level of plausibility as the rest of the interpretation of sexuality as culminating in marital sex. For I don't suppose that many hetero guys have ever found that sexual desire as experienced over a lifetime intrinsically leads into their marraige. Womengirls' sexuality too isn't intrinsically marital, it's just that they don't have much sex drive. Marriage does ‘make sense’ of their attachment libido, except that this is much stronger for their children than for their husband. — Ooo!, everywhere you look in God’s creation there’s so much opportunity for self-overcoming and effort making! ... Christianity teaches marriage as sexual fulfilment, which is funny — but which also leads to disastrous misunderstandings.
5. I guess marriage must be seen as fulfilment of sexuality not as primarily a sacrifice of sexuality since it's important that entering the priesthood be seen by the faithful as a sexual sacrifice. If a gay male were permitted one partner (monogamy) while being priest, this too would be no sexual sacrifice but sexual fulfilment.
-The faithful seem to me to not make any distinction between priestly celibacy and religious celibacy. Authority doesn't encourage such a distinction, I guess. Lots of RCs don't understand that a priest doesn't take a vow of celibacy — or of poverty and obedience. What is the actual Catholic doctrine of the 'fatherhood' involved in priesthood?
-I guess priesthood is thought to involve spiritual fatherhood since priests are call'd "father." Is it both, then? namely that a male must be sexually normal to sacrifice this sexuality for the priesthood, and in order to be spiritually a father? One can't be a spiritual father unless one sacrifices one’s biological father? Or rather: such sacrifice is suitable symbolically for spiritual fatherhood, since special dispensation is made for marry’d men to become priests, and RCC says Eastern Orthodox priests are valid priests.
re amarcord: connivance of the authorities: maybe indicated in failure of teacher-priest to block projection image of the semi-naked woman au verso that had been added into the ordinary educational images in the slide show?
Re miseries and hardships. You are probably right. He was probably thinking of Pascal as well.
As for the rest, at the moment, I plead Farouk.
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