Clerical Abuse: The Story So Far, Looking Ahead.

For a long time I resisted writing about the assorted scandals of clerical sexual abuse from around the world.  After the Irish Ryan report though, I broke my silence, writing for the first time of own experiences, which I presented as just a preamble, declaring my interest, and promised more. You may be wondering what has happened to the rest of reflection on the topic.

In fact, the theme is far from forgotten or neglected, occupying a great deal of my thinking time – and the more I think about it, the wider the scope becomes.  It may not be immediately obvious, but a good portion of what I have written over the past few weeks is part of the argument I am developing.  (Indeed, it could be stated that almost everything I put onto this site is part of my argument – but that is jumping rather too far ahead.)

For now, I would just like to restate what I have published this far and how it fits in to the bigger picture.

Saint John Henry Newman?

The cause of Cardinal Newman advanced further this week with the acceptance by the Holy See of a miracle attributed to him.  (He was declared “Venerable” in 1991, and will be beatified next year, 2010.)

Newman deserves particular attention from LGBT Catholics for two reasons:

Coming Out as Spiritual Experience

Over 40 years since Stonewall, it has become commonplace to recognise the value of coming out as a growth experience, bringing benefits to mental health, self-esteem and personal integrity. Less widely recognised is the value of coming out as spiritual growth.  This idea, which well deserves to be better known, gets extensive treatment in Daniel Helminiak’s book, “Sex and the Sacred”.

(Helminiak is an openly gay Catholic priest with doctorates in both spirituality and psychology, who teaches spirituality in a faculty of psychology – so he is eminently well qualified to write on the subject. For more  on Daniel Helminiak, see his own website, “Visions of Daniel“))

In his preface, Helminiak notes that the argumetns in the early days of the gay liberation movement were purely reactive & defensive, making the case that homosexuality is NOT a sin, NOT a sickness, and NOT a mental disorder.

“Confirmed: God is slightly gay”- (Columnist Mark Morford)

Well, OK – not so much GOD, as Her/His creation:

“Just ask the animals. As soon as they stop having all that homosexual sex”

but for what that says about the Divinity, there may not be too much of a dsitinction.

Mark Morton writes in his column on SFGate about new research in the animal kingdom which shows that some homosexuality occurs in virtually every animal species.  It has long been known  that some animals engage in homosex, but the new research shows that this is in fact far more widspread than previously recognised.  I saw the news reports that Morford refers to when they first appeared, but he writes about them with humour, stule and verve, prducing a piece which is irreverent but fun, as well as important.

“I am sitting here right now smiling just a little, fondly recalling that famously controversial children’s book, the one about the gay penguins.

Remember? That positively adorable pair of them, at the Central Park Zoo, who had adopted an abandoned egg and then hatched it themselves and were raising the chick together as a couple, even though the chick was clearly not theirs …..The best part: the story was absolutely true. The book, “And Tango Makes Three,” was beautiful and sweet and touching in all the right ways — except, of course, for the fact that it was also totally evil.

For indeed, the penguins in question, named Roy and Silo, were both males. This meant they were clearly in some sort of ungodly, aberrant homosexual relationship, mocking natural laws and defying God’s will that all creatures only cohabitate with the opposite sex and buy microfiber sofas from Pottery Barn and eat their meals in silent resentment and never have sex.”

“I am right now amused at this because it turns out Roy and Silo were not really so much of an anomaly at all. Nor were they some sort of unholy freakshow, an immoral mistake in the eyes of a wrathful hetero God. Far from it. Turns out they were, in fact, far more the norm than many humans, even to this day, want to let on.

Behold, the ongoing, increasingly startling research: homosexual and bisexual behavior, it turns out, is rampant in the animal kingdom. And by rampant, I mean proving to be damn near universal, commonplace across all species everywhere, existing for myriad reasons ranging from pure survival and procreative influence, right on over to pure pleasure, co-parenting, giddy screeching multiple monkey orgasm, even love, and a few dozen other potential explanations science hasn’t quite figured out yet. Imagine.”

This discovery in the animal kingdom ties in well with the simple fact, willfully ignored by so many, that in human socities too, some degree of homosexuality is commonplace.  It is not homosexuality that is perverse and “against nature”, but exclusive heterosexuality.

Read the full article here.

The Perversion of Heterosexuality.

Theologian Sally Gearhart has written:

“Exclusive heterosexuality has to be understood as a perversion of [humanity's] natural state.  We very quickly rob infants of their health and wholesomeness.  We require them from birth to fall into one of two widely differing and oppositely valued caegories:  girls and boys.  We require them to obliterate half their loving nature so as to become lovers only of members of the opposite sex.  It is as if at birth without our knoweldge or consent we are injected with a heavy addictive drug that will assure our limitation to  one sex role and to exclusively heterosexual realtions.   We’re hooked early.  We’re heterosexual junkies.  When we become adults, we push that drug ourselves, not just on the adults and children but on every newborn infant.  To kick the habit is near impossible.”

And later

“To the Tune of a Welcoming God”

Michael Bayley at The Wild Reed has drawn my attention to David Weiss’ book “To the Tune of a Welcoming God”, and posts two excerpts from the book.

In the first, David describes his journey in coming out – not as gay, but as a gay ally.  The second is a prose poem,   “Words Offered at the End of the Day to an Unknown Friend Living in Fear”. Both are worth reading:  we as LGBT people of faith need to speak up opnely and in our own voices, but we also need allies, and we need to hold firmly to the knowledge that God is always welcoming:  not “in spite” of our sexuality, but just because we are all God’s people.

I do not reproduce the text here, but encourage you to read it.  Go to

“Coming Out” as Wrestling with the Divine

At this time of Pride, marking the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, I wanted to post something on the important legacy of visibilty and coming out.

After mulling over some thoughts on what to say, I picked up Richard Cleaver’s “Know My Name” for re-reading, and was delighted by the synchronicity of finding that his Chapter 2, “Knowing and Naming”, deals with exactly this subject.  So instead of rehashing or expanding the ideas I presented in my opening post 6 months ago (“Welcome:  Come in, and Come out”), I thought I would share with you some of Cleaver’s insights.

First, Cleaver points out that in addition to the modern association of “coming out” with escaping the closet, there are two other important contexts. It can also call to mind the Exodus story of coming out of the land of Egypt, of escaping slavery and oppression; and it was used before Stonewall to mimic the English debutante ritual of “coming out” into society, of achieving the first recognition as an adult in polite society .  For us then, coming out is both a liberation from oppression and an acceptance and a welcome into a new society.  He then continues by arguing that coming out in the modern sense is an essential first step in hearing the Gospel message of liberation .

To do so, he points to the well-known costs of nto coming out:  psychological self-oppression,  increased suicide risk (especially in the young), and the arrests for sexual activity in restrooms / cottages of men who are usually married or otherwise closeted.  Against that, he contrats the perosnal rewards of coming out.  After speaking the truth to ourselves, the next stage, of meeting with others like ourselves,

“is generally even more of a transforming moment than the private recognition and acceptance of our gayness….Coming out publicly (a continuous process, not a single  event) brings a sense of freedom that must be experienced to be believed.  Coming out is one of our many seasons of joy.”

This is a sentiment which, from my own experience, I heartily endorse, and to which I would add the observation that  ”Joy is an infallible sign of the Holy Spirit.”

He then turns to some possible costs of coming out: active discrimination, including in employment; difficulties in securing adequate access to children; a misguided steering into inappropriate marriage, in the expectation of a ‘cure’;  and finally the hostility or even misguided interference of the churches.  This leads to a stinging repudiation of the Church’s involvement:

“It is no surprise that whether we leave or stay, we react to the church with suspicion.  Something about what the church is teaching, something about how the church conceives itself, is not right.  In the case of the church’s relation to gay men and lesbians, we can dissect out two particular explanations for this suspicion.

First, the church has allowed itself to subordinate the commandment of love to the demands of heterosexist culture, defying Paul’s injunction, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” (Rom 12:2) ……It is.. the result of the church’s long-standing obsession with sexual activity, which leads to a reduction of the lives of lesbians and gay men to the realm of sexual experience.”

“This brings me to my second suspicion about the church, which is why it is willing to accmomodate itself to the mind of the age, to compromise with bourgeois culture:  it hopes to maintain its authority and thus its institutional power in society by preventing lesbians and gay men from speaking about their own experiences. The institution benefits.. from a theology that permits it to hand down decisions without any data even being collected, let alone examined“.  (Emphasis added).

To which I add once again that this is why I am convinced we need to be out and visible in the church.  As long as we remain closeted and out of sight, as long as we refrain from speaking of our own experiences, we are complicit in our own oppression.

Cleaver then goes on to discuss several well-known Gospel stories, drawing from them important lessons for us in the LGBT community.

Reflecting on the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, he avoids some of the better known observations, and makes two other  points.  He notes that while recognising her sexual noncomformity, Jesus notably does not admonish or condemn her, nor does she express repentance.

“Jesus is no welfare caseworker… his goal is to transform society, not to ‘fix’ those who suffer injustice so that the existing social order may run more smoothly.”

The second point is that after the initial exchange, the woman proceeds to put to Him some “theological” questions on worship.  The story, notes Cleaver, is not about promiscuity at all, but about “who is capable of doing theology” .

This point on doing theology is made again when he looks at the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10).  While Martha works, Mary sits and listens to Jesus speak.  Mary complains, but the reply is that Mary  “has chosen the better part”. In Jewish society, women were expected to do the domestic work, only the men participated in religious study or debates, and the sexes sat apart when guests were present for meals.  It would have been unheard of for women to participate in religious discussions, yet Christ not only condones this, he commends her for it.  Jewish women and other social outcasts were expected to be invisible:  but for the Lord, no-one is invisible, all are welcome to join in making theology.

In telling of the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19 -31), Cleaver compares Lazarus with the LGBT community “outside the door” of the church, while the rich man is compared with the institutional church, which even by its indifference  contributes to our oppression.

His final biblical reflection is an extended discussion of Jacob’s wrestling with the angel at Peniel (Gen 32:  22-32). For Cleaver, there arae two important themes in this story:  the wrestling itself, and the act of naming. From this he reflects on the importance to us of naming honestly our oppression.  Noting that

“We learn to name our oppression by struggling with it”,

he insists that we should present ourselves in full frankness and honesty, implying that we should resist the temptation to mimic conventional patterns of morality out of a mere desire to avoid offence:

“The strategy of putting forward only “acceptable” images of ourselves is doomed to failure… We should be forthright about who we are.”

For me, the 3 key lessons from Cleaver, all of which I endorse whole-heartedly, are:

In spite of the obvious dangers and costs, coming out publicly is invigorating, liberating and life-giving;

We need to extend the  ”coming out” process into our lives in the Church, where we should expect to be fully visible, and to speak out frankly and honestly of our views and experiencces;

and that by doing so, we will be exercising our right to share in making theology, in spite of the efforts of the institutional church to exercise a monopoly.

“We must speak with our own voices, in all their imperfections, when responding to God’s overtures.  Moses stuttered;  Israel limped.  What matters is not image but inegrity.  If God calls, we must know who answers. We answer to our true names, because these are the names God calls us by.  The cost of learning them is wrestling with the divine.”

Amen to that.

Jeremiah’s Return

Over at Gospel for Gays, Jeremiah has written of his own return to the Catholic Church.  After being driven away originally in anger a the Canadian Bishops over their opposition to gay marriage he returned eventually after a discussion with a local pastor. Much of his experience resonates with mine:  the emphasis on the local parish (I and many others have never encountered any hostility in local parishes);  and his belief in dealing with the official church by living in constant conversation with the Holy Spirit. Extracted from “My Return”:

“But do you ever really quit the church?  In my case, probably not.  

Gospel Reflections

Numerous writers have excellent Gospel reflections – fewer write specifically from an LGBT perspective.

I would recommend that you develop your own personal ones – but this is not so easy if you are new to it.  To get you going, I will be putting together a list of syggestions prepared by others.

On-line, Jeremiah at Gay Gospels has  started a new blog with a strong emphasis on Gospel reflections from a gay perspective. Follow the links to sample his writing:

6 Month Review: Thanks to All

It is now 6 months since I lunched “Queering the Church”, six months which have been enriching and rewarding.  It is time to step back and reflect on the ups and downs, to give thanks, and to redirect where necessary. Heartfelt thanks are due to my friend Rob Alexander for encouragement and contributions, and to fellow bloggers at The Wild Reed, Nihil Obstat, Ad Dominum,  Bilgrimage, JS O’Leary, and  Creative Advance for encouragement and links.   Thanks too, to everyone who has posted a comment of any kind.  “Censor Librorum” once described commenters as “angels who sat on her shoulder”. So it is:  else there is a real danger, in a phrase used by Bilgrimage, of feeling that one is “talking into a vacuum”.

My chief satisfaction has been in seeing that somewhere out there, there are people who find something of value here.  The total page loads now exceed 5000 from over 3000  individual visitors. many of these are surfing tourists, just passing through:  but at least 600 of you have returned for repeated  looks, some of you very frequently indeed. This is gratifying.

My second satisfaction is that  maintaining and developing this site keeps me constantly challenged, grappling with the issues, reading, and thinking, thus constantly feeding my own growth and development as a gay Catholic.  Again, for this I am grateful.

The main area where I need to improve, I think, is in filling the gaps.  In launching the site, I envisaged two major aims:  to comment on current events or issues that caught my attention, and also to provide a  comprehensive resource base for the LGBT Catholic community.  This is reflected in the design, with a front page that is essentially comment, and back pages for the resource base.  In practice, I have provided far more of the first, and somewhat neglected the back page resources (especially Scripture and Spirituality). To correct the balance, I have started paying more attention to internal links and site navigation (see my new Site Map page), and aim to spend more time on adding fresh material to these pages as well.

Finally, my one big dissapointment, which I discussed yesterday.  I would dearly love to have not just your comments, but also your own contributions.  Let this grow, in time, into a genuine community voice. Until then, thank you all once again for your support, in whatever form you have given it.

Nevertheless, I thank you all again for your support thus far, in whatever form you have given it.