— As the pontiff apparently seeks to create more welcoming Catholic Church, a cadre of traditionalists have become emboldened in airing ferocious criticism
Pope Francis’ recent meeting with Sr Jeannine Gramick was the latest sign of an apparent opening of the church towards the LGBT community.
The photograph released on the Vatican’s official news channels was in many ways unremarkable, showing a smiling nun meeting Pope Francis in his official residence.
But close observers of the Catholic Church recognised something far from routine. This nun was Sr Jeannine Gramick, an advocate for LGBT Catholics who through the decades had been denounced by church authorities and once even feared excommunication.
Here she was, being welcomed by the man at the top. “The meeting was very emotional for me,” Sr Gramick said after the encounter last month. It was described by her LGBT advocacy organisation New Ways Ministry as “once unimaginable”.
It was the latest sign of an apparent opening of the church under Francis towards the LGBT community, which has drawn tentative optimism from some more liberal believers, but the outrage of a conservative flank.
It has deepened the suspicions of hardliners within the church that Francis is a dangerous reformer who risks worsening what they see as the confusion and undermining of church authority begun by the landmark 1960s Vatican II reforms.
Last weekend, Francis acted to impose his authority against a coterie of such traditionalists, who had become increasingly emboldened in airing public criticism.
Diabolically disordered clown
— Bishop Strickland criticising Pope Francis on Twitter
In a highly unusual move, the Vatican stripped Texas bishop Joseph Strickland of his position.
A vocal conservative and supporter of former US president Donald Trump, Strickland had been one of Francis’ fiercest critics in the United States, using a large media presence to criticise the pope’s efforts to give lay people responsibility and make the church more welcoming to LGBT people.
Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland speaks outside the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore.
“Vatican officials promote immorality,” Strickland wrote on Twitter last year. In another message, he approvingly shared a video in which Francis was criticised as a “diabolically disordered clown”.
A church investigation had found “that the continuation in office of Bishop Strickland was not feasible”, the Vatican statement said.
Can Catholic beliefs change with the times?
This was one of the questions posed by five conservative cardinals to Francis this year, in a list of queries they published in an apparent open challenge to the pope.
Asked whether divine revelation can be reinterpreted based on the changing norms of the day, Francis responded: “If it is understood as ‘interpret better’, the expression is valid.” He said some aspects of the Bible are of their time, such as slavery.
In another question, the cardinals asked whether it is permissible to bless same-sex unions, as some Catholic churches in Germany and Belgium have begun to do.
While only traditional marriages are recognised as such, “we must not lose the pastoral charity”, Francis told the cardinals. “Pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing . . . that do not convey a mistaken concept of marriage.”
By telling the cardinals that same-sex unions could blessed on a case-by-case basis, Francis opened the door on a past taboo.
Catholic priests give blessings to same-sex couples during a protest outside Cologne Cathedral, in Cologne, Germany in September 2023.
Since then, the pontiff has said that transgender people can be baptised, serve as witnesses and become godparents in some cases.
He has made clear that being gay is not in itself a “sin”, though remains of the view that homosexual acts are, along with all sexual activity outside traditional marriage.
But his papacy has striven to some extent to send the message that regardless, people should not be excluded from the church and denied pastoral care.
“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” he famously responded to a journalist shortly after his election in 2013.
Last month, former president of Ireland Mary McAleese, who is a doctor of Canon law, welcomed comments from Francis about blessings for same-sex couples but pointed out the pontiff’s stance is a “complete contradiction” of what he had said previously.
In December 2022, she accused him of “misogynistic drivel”, following an interview with a US-based Catholic magazine where he said women were not being deprived by being denied the right to become priests.
Former president Mary McAleese last month welcomed comments from Francis about blessings for same-sex couples but pointed out the pontiff’s stance is a ‘complete contradiction’ of what he had said previously.
The life story of Sr Gramick starkly illustrates the shift in approach towards LGBT people since Francis became pope.
Sr Gramick began ministering to US LGBT communities in the 1970s and became an advocate for gay people within the church, holding workshops for Catholics that explained the spectrum of human sexuality.
This alarmed a number of bishops, and complaints triggered a Vatican investigation. The Vatican’s disciplinary arm, then led by the doctrinaire Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – who would later become Pope Benedict XVI – publicly lambasted her for failing to accurately represent church teaching on “the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts”.
She was ordered to desist in her work in 1999. She did not.
Her organisation, New Ways Ministry, was censured for issuing a leaflet as marriage equality debates raged in 2010, outlining why Catholics might support legal unions for gay people. In response, US bishops declared the group could not describe itself as Catholic.
With the election of Pope Francis in 2013, however, change appeared to be in the air.
In a 2020 documentary, the pontiff said: “Homosexual people have a right to be in a family . . . What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered.”
The comment landed in New Ways Ministry like a bombshell. “We were sanctioned by the US bishops for a position that the pope now held,” its executive director Francis DeBernardo recalled. “So I decided to write to Pope Francis.”
To his shock, a response arrived swiftly from the man himself on official Vatican letterhead, beginning a correspondence between Francis and Sr Gramick. In 2022, Francis wrote to the nun to congratulate her on 50 years of ministry, thanking her for the “compassion and tenderness” of her work, and saying her willingness to feel the pain of others and “condemn no one” was in the “style of God”.
This exchange culminated in the meeting in person last month.
“It still feels a little unreal,” said DeBernardo, who was in the meeting with Francis. “To realise that we have approval from the highest level of the church, when so many middle levels of the church had been against us for so long, it’s still sinking in.”
The issue of whether the church should open up further to LGBT people was among the topics discussed at an unprecedented gathering held in the Vatican last month.
The “synod on synodality” brought together hundreds of bishops, clerics, women in religious orders and Catholic lay people to deliberate on the future of the church, including issues such as the role of women and sexual abuse.
Participants wearing synod lanyards milled around side streets by the Vatican, excitedly greeting each other with the air of a grand reunion.
That expression – ‘We have always done it that way’ – is poison for the life of the church
— Pope Francis
In a large hall usually used for papal audiences, they sat in small groups at round tables to discuss a series of questions, in sessions interspersed by prayer. Participants took turns to speak before the issues were put to a vote.
One observer likened it to Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly.
Its main emphasis was “listening to one another”, said Sr Patricia Murray, a senior Irish Loreto nun who was appointed to the commission that would draw up the synod’s conclusions. She described it as a way to “shift the feeling that the truth resides at the top of the hierarchy”.
Synods have been held since the 1960s, when they were introduced in Vatican II reforms as a way for bishops to advise the pope. But this was the first time it included non-clerics and women as voting members alongside bishops.
The idea of bringing the faithful into consultations was designed to overcome the polarising dynamics of social media that have amplified the divisions of the flock.
It was necessary to involve local churches “from the bottom up”, Francis said when he opened the synodal process, inviting congregations around the world to share their vision of the church.
“That expression – ‘We have always done it that way’ – is poison for the life of the church,” he said. “Those who think this way, perhaps without even realising it, make the mistake of not taking seriously the times in which we are living.”
Then came the backlash.
On the evening before synod participants were due to begin their deliberations in the Vatican, the de facto leader of a faction of fierce critics of Francis, US Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, held a counter event in a theatre nearby.
He spoke against the “state of confusion and errors of vision that permeate” the synod process, and urged attendees to read a book to which he had written the foreword, called The Synodal Process Is a Pandora’s Box.
The work’s publisher, The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP), promotes the book as revealing the “heresy at work in the Synod” and an agenda to “distort doctrine, subvert tradition, and destroy the divinely instituted hierarchical nature of the church”.
Such groups encapsulate an extreme right-wing influence centred in the US, where a cadre of traditionalists, somewhat ironically, are vehemently opposed to the pope.
In the US, Pope Francis faces a church that is divided along culture war lines and which has increasingly attracted conservative young men as recruits to the priesthood.
Discomfort at Francis’ criticisms of capitalism and insinuations about Latin American radicalism are at the heart of this opposition, alongside concerns about social issues.
Ample funding seems to be available: according to its tax records, the US branch of TFP reported annual revenue of $19 million (€17.5 million) last year, mostly from “contributions and grants”.
In the US, Francis faces a church that is divided along culture war lines and which has increasingly attracted conservative young men as recruits to the priesthood.
Whereas in the 1960s 68 per cent of new ordinands described themselves as theologically “progressive” and “very progressive”, that number has dwindled almost to zero today, according to a recent mass survey of thousands of US priests. It found half of newly ordained priests now describe themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative”.
Particularly among younger priests, celebrating the traditional Latin Mass gained popularity under Francis as a symbol of resistance to his reforms, church observers say.
It is seen as a token of allegiance to Pope Benedict, who had liberalised the use of the Latin Mass in a key reform and was nostalgically remembered as an upholder of tradition and doctrine.
Since Francis imposed restrictions on the use of the Latin Mass in 2021, the issue has become a flashpoint for conservative resistance to the pope.
“Francis will die, the Latin Mass will live forever,” one popular traditionalist blog in the US thundered after the pope restricted the rite.
At one point during the synod, participants wept as they heard the story of a young woman who died by suicide. She was bisexual and did not feel welcome in the church.
“I wept,” Dominican friar Timothy Radcliffe told a synod assembly in a live-streamed address. “I hope it changed us.”
Yet when the synod released its voting results and concluding report, those ambitious for change were disappointed.
The term “LGBT”, which appeared in an earlier draft, had disappeared, reportedly due to the discomfort of bishops from the Global South who see the word as a western imposition.
The conclusions deferred the question of whether women can be deacons to further study and consideration. They expressed “a profound sense of love, mercy and compassion” for those who feel hurt or neglected by the church, and acknowledged that issues like gender identity, sexual orientation, and troubled marriages “are controversial not only in society, but also in the church”.
Several theologians and Catholic commentators have since argued that the media focus on the synod’s most controversial topics has obscured the main progress that was made: the establishment of the synod model itself.
Senior participants have said it is now impossible to go back to the prior model of involving only bishops, and that the inclusion of women and laypeople is now here to stay.
Where conservatives fear the undermining of authority, proponents see the synod model as continuing the most ancient Catholic traditions, recalling the community involvement recounted in the New Testament of the earliest days of the church.
“Some people in the aula were adamantly opposed to a more welcoming approach to LGBTQ people, but that didn’t mean that they were any less my brothers and sisters in Christ,” Fr James Martin, a Jesuit who has advocated for the inclusion of gay people, wrote of his experience of the synod.
“The real message of the synod is the synod itself: how we came together to discuss difficult topics. And I was amazed that the topic was discussed so openly and so extensively in the synod, surely a major step forward in the church.”
In a reminder that while some Catholics may feel the Church is changing too much under Pope Francis, others obviously feel it isn’t changing enough, a priest in northern Italy said Thursday he’s leaving to affiliate with an offshoot of Anglicanism, claiming it’s more expressive of his “values of inclusivity.”
Father Andrea Barberini, formerly the vicar of the Catholic parish of St. Ambrogio in Cremona in the Italian region of Lombardy, made the announcement on his Facebook page.
“Becoming Anglican puts me in a distinct situation, that of no longer being in communion with the Catholic Church of Rome,” Barberini wrote. “However, it permits me to be in full harmony with my spirituality and the gift of priesthood, in tune with my vocation to a family and marriage.”
“I do this within a Church which, without any pretense of perfection, shares those values of inclusivity that I always hoped would be reached also within the Catholic Church.”
“In my new Church, I’ve discovered a community in which ecclesiastical leaders can be seen not as authority figures but as friends, and that’s an invaluable gift,” he wrote.
“Inclusivity” was among the watchwords of the recently concluded Oct. 4-29 Synod of Bishops on Synodality, which Pope Francis began by declaring that the Catholic Church must be open to “everyone, everyone.”
Nonetheless, Barberini seemed to want more than the institutional Catholic Church is prepared to deliver, choosing to join the “Inclusive Anglican Episcopal Church,” the Italian branch of the “Anglican Free Communion International,” which is an offshoot of a splinter group of Anglicans that dates to the late 19th century.
It is not recognized by the worldwide Anglican Communion led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, though it is a member of the World Council of Churches. Its presiding bishop is currently based in Florida in the U.S.
In Italy, the Inclusive Anglican Episcopal Church, based in Catania on the island of Sicily, is led by a former Catholic nun named Maria Vittoria Longhitano, who was recently named the provincial bishop for Europe of the Anglican Free Communion International. The Church endorses women’s ordination, married priests, and same-sex marriage, among other progressive positions, and uses a redacted version of the traditional Anglican Book of Common Prayer to eliminate gender-specific references to God.
Another former Catholic priest, Luca Ceccarelli, serves as a bishop in the Church after having left the Catholic priesthood 14 years ago upon announcing that he was gay, and today he’s civilly married to his longtime partner.
In presenting his reasons for leaving Catholicism, Barberini cited “doctrinal” and “theological” factors as well as motives “connected to my life journey.” Without specifying the identity of his partner, Barberini thanked “the person who is by my side in this new phase of life, whose understanding and sharing regarding the reasons for my choices are like a ‘supporting pillar’ that would destine everything to definitive collapse if it were to fail.”
Barberini made clear that he holds no “rancor” for the Catholic Church, and thanked Bishop Antonio Napolioni of Cremona for allowing him to take two years of paid leave while he pondered his future.
Nevertheless, Barberini also said some Catholics hadn’t been so understanding.
“I have to say with great displeasure that in these two years I’ve had to bandage some wounds,” he wrote. “My choice hasn’t gone down well with everyone. Different people have stopped saying hello to me, have revoked their friendship or even asked me not to contact them anymore.”
“When they sit in Church and receive Communion, they may think they are Christians, but perhaps they should reflect on what that faith really means,” Barberini wrote. If they don’t see me, a priest, as a person but only as a role, then perhaps what they feel is more of a deference to the institution.”
In terms of his future, Barberini said he’ll earn a living by teaching elementary school while dedicating himself to helping introduce more Italians to Anglicanism.
Pope Francis’s “apostolic journey” to Mongolia earlier this month had the unexpected consequence of bringing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a singular and controversial French Jesuit scientist who died nearly seventy years ago, into the news cycle. As it turns out, Teilhard’s theology of cosmic spiritual progress is a useful way to understand the challenges that Francis is currently facing, as he and the Church prepare for a global synod next month in Rome. There, three hundred and sixty-three clerical and lay leaders representing two rival conceptions of the Church will encounter one another for several weeks of behind-closed-doors dialogue—a process that is meant to be amicable but may lead to open conflict prior to a second session next October.
The main question surrounding the Pope’s journey was “Why Mongolia?” The country, with a population of around 3.3 million, has only fifteen hundred Catholics, fewer than in a large parish in Chicago—and far fewer than in other Asian nations, such as Vietnam, which has seven million Catholics and a complex history with the Church, and may have benefited from a papal visit. (By comparison, in early August, Francis celebrated Mass in Lisbon for a million and a half congregants, many of them young people there for World Youth Day.)
But the trip suited Francis’s stated wish for the Church to go “to the margins,” and allowed him to spend time with Giorgio Marengo, an Italian cleric who has lived for more than two decades in Mongolia, doing missionary work, such as fostering Catholic-Buddhist dialogue. In August of last year, Francis made Marengo, who is forty-nine, the youngest member of the College of Cardinals, where he is likely to be a progressive presence for decades to come. And being in Mongolia gave Francis an opportunity to direct remarks, implicitly, to the neighboring powers: Russia, whose war in Ukraine has occasioned a shifting and at times confusing response from him; and China, where the Vatican’s agreement to let the government choose which priests become bishops, in exchange for tolerating the Church’s presence in that nation, has been widely criticized.
The trip also expressed Francis’s own long-distance interest in Asia. As a young man in Argentina, he wanted to be a missionary in Japan; then and afterward, he hoped to follow in the footsteps of influential Jesuits who spent large parts of their careers in Asia: St. Francis Xavier, Matteo Ricci, Pedro Arrupe, and Teilhard de Chardin. Born in France in 1881, Teilhard was a restless, searching figure: a priest, a poet, a stretcher-bearer in the First World War, a paleontologist based in China (where, in the nineteen-twenties, he took part in an important expedition in search of human origins), and a mystical theologian. His written work, a sustained effort to reconcile Christian theology with the theory of evolution, placed him in the vanguard of twentieth-century theology—though lately otherwise appreciative theologians have expressed concern that his emphasis on progress through evolution led him to contrast “the advancing wing of humanity” with “definitively unprogressive ethnical groups,” thus aligning himself with movements in support of race-based eugenics. Teilhard’s notion that the earth would someday be surrounded by a complex information system powered by human consciousness has been seen as anticipating the Internet, and the Episcopal homilist at Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle, in 2018, alluded to one of Teilhard’s aphorisms: “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” But Teilhard’s most memorable concept is the notion that “tout ce qui monte, converge,” or “everything that rises must converge”—that the various forces of natural evolution and human civilization are all ascending in a pattern of spiritual progress and will converge in a “Point Omega” at the end of time.
While doing field work in Mongolia, in 1923, Teilhard celebrated what he called a Mass on the World; lacking bread and wine to consecrate in the usual fashion, he simply consecrated the whole physical world, represented by the vast steppe where he stood. The Mass was expressive of Teilhard’s thought, which, in 1927 and afterward, drew the attention of the Vatican, where officials objected to his dismissal of the idea that the human race descended from Adam and Eve, and his corresponding lack of emphasis on the idea of original sin.
During the next three decades, Teilhard elaborated on his outlook in a number of essays and two books, “The Divine Milieu” and “The Phenomenon of Man.” The Vatican and his Jesuit superiors forbade him to publish any theological writing, but he remained a faithful Catholic and an obedient Jesuit. Following a visit to the U.S. in 1948, he settled in a Jesuit residence in New York City, where he died in 1955, on Easter Sunday—and the posthumous publication of his work began. During the Second Vatican Council, which first convened in 1962, criticism of his work eased, and his books became standard texts for progressive theologians—until they fell out of favor again, under the traditionalist Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, even as they personally spoke warmly of him from time to time.
This Pope, however, has looked emphatically to Teilhard as an example. In “Laudato Si,” his landmark encyclical on the climate, from 2015—he is expected to issue another one next month—he cited Teilhard as an inspiration. After celebrating Sunday Mass in Mongolia, Francis spoke ardently about Teilhard, on the centenary of the Mass that he celebrated there. “This priest, often misunderstood,” he said, “intuited that ‘the Eucharist is always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world.’ ” The Pope was bringing the priest back from the margins, and joining his own Asian journey to Teilhard’s.
Francis’s trademark style of discourse is to issue an offhand comment that is clearly on the side of progress, but to remain vague about how progress is to be achieved, and this tendency, too, has lately sparked controversy. Following a video call with young Russian Catholics, on August 25th, in which Francis urged them to connect with their roots in the “Great Russia of saints, rulers, Great Russia of Peter I, Catherine II, that empire—great, enlightened, of great culture and great humanity,” Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, immediately castigated the Pope for celebrating Russian imperialism past and present. Then the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica published a transcript of a conversation that Francis had with Portuguese Jesuits during his trip earlier that month. When one asked about the open criticism of him by some American Catholics, including bishops, Francis replied at length. “You have seen that in the United States the situation is not easy: there is a very strong reactionary attitude. It is organized and shapes the way people belong, even emotionally,” he said. “I would like to remind those people that indietrismo”—backwardness—“is useless, and we need to understand that there is an appropriate evolution in the understanding of matters of faith.” He later added, “Those American groups you talk about, so closed, are isolating themselves. Instead of living by doctrine, by the true doctrine that always develops and bears fruit, they live by ideologies.”
Which American groups, everyone wanted to know, was Francis talking about? In the Times, C. Preston Noell III, of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (a Pennsylvania-based offshoot of a Brazilian group founded in 1960 to resist supposed communist influence on the Church), pointed out that Francis has spent less than a week in the United States as Pope, suggesting that he is poorly informed about the life of the Church here. The Washington Post ran a dossier of suspects, among them Raymond Arroyo, a host on the traditionalist Catholic cable network EWTN, based in Alabama, who has personified the network’s opposition to Francis. Others pointed to Cardinal Raymond Burke, who served as the archbishop of St. Louis and then as a Vatican official, until he was removed from one post in 2014 and replaced in a different one earlier this year. In the foreword to a new book, Burke writes that the October synod will cause “confusion and error” and lead to “the grave harm of many souls.” The book has been published in eight languages by the Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, which has sent copies to bishops and clergy, some of whom will be delegates to the synod.
— LGBTQ Catholics consider different ways to fit into the Church
by Maggie Phillips
Pope Francis recently gained media attention when he spoke out against the criminalization of homosexuality ahead of a trip to Africa, where many countries have such laws on the books. The move highlighted the precarious situation of many LGBTQ people around the world, and was hailed in much of the American press as a milestone. His follow-up statement, in which he acknowledged the inevitable objection he would receive from some quarters within his church—that homosexual activity is a sin—garnered less fanfare. (“Yes, but it is a sin,,” Francis said. “Fine, but first let us distinguish between a sin and a crime.”) This remark, however, echoed loudly in the LGBTQ Catholic community, whose members hold diverse visions for their Church—which Francis has called “a mother” who “cares for her children and guides them on the path of salvation.” Like many mother-child relationships, it’s complicated.
Jesuit priest James Martin was on the cutting edge when he published Building a Bridge, a book he wrote following the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in 2016. “The book came in response to what I saw as a real lack of response from the U.S. bishops after the Pulse massacre,” Martin said in an email to Tablet. While the book drew him into LGBTQ ministry, garnering invitations to speak to Catholic audiences on related issues, including the Vatican’s 2018 World Meeting of Families, he said it also “caused some intense reactions—both positive and negative.” Martin continues undaunted. In 2020, he launched Outreach, an annual conference for LGBTQ Catholics, which has expanded to include a website with resources and articles intended to support them. The fourth Outreach conference was held June 16-18 this year at Fordham University, and featured a variety of panelists and speakers representing the spectrum of LGBTQ Catholicism.
A 2020 UCLA study estimates there are around 1.3 million LGBT adult Catholics in the U.S., although, said Martin, “I would guess, given how they often feel excluded and rejected, probably a lower percentage than their straight counterparts” are practicing. This year, the Outreach conference coincided with a rally at Dodger Stadium, as thousands protested the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who received a Community Hero award as part of the team’s Pride night (the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops voiced their disapproval of the group’s recognition and urged prayer, but distanced themselves from the rally).
The official teaching of the Catholic Church is laid out in its catechism, a nearly thousand-page compendium of every Church teaching on virtually every subject first commissioned by Pope John Paul II in 1986. He approved its definitive form in 1992, drawing from the Bible as well as Catholic theologians, saints, and thinkers throughout history. Its section on sexuality lays out that sex must not be detached from its “unitive and procreative purposes” within a heterosexual marriage, and that every baptized Catholic is “called to lead a chaste life in keeping with their particular states of life.” This stance is part and parcel of their official opprobrium of gay sex (or indeed any sex outside of a marriage, including between a man and woman). Nevertheless, the catechism says in the same section that gay people “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided,” even as it acknowledges its teaching on chastity may lead gay Catholics to encounter “difficulties.” This, as Christians are fond of saying about more controversial teachings, is a “hard saying.” So it may seem surprising that there are out, gay Catholics who have embraced it. It may be even more surprising that there are gay Catholics who disagree with the Church’s teaching on homosexuality, but who have remained in the fold, working for change from within, rather than decamping for other Christian denominations that already allow same-sex marriage, such as the Episcopal Church, certain branches of the United Methodist Church, or the Presbyterian Church (USA). The two sides of this coin are often known in wider gay Catholic circles as “Side A” (supportive of gay marriage and relationships, hopeful for church recognition), and “Side B” (promoting celibacy). These distinctions are primarily used by LGBTQ Catholics in the pews. Leadership is a different story. “Catholic teaching prohibits both same-sex relations and same-sex marriage,” Martin said in his email. “But, for example, the German bishops have been very vocal about thinking about blessing same-sex unions.”
Like any binary, the Side A/Side B terminology contains nuances, misses subtleties, and obscures touchpoints. What is clear from the existence of groups and conferences allied with both sides is a sense that more institutional support for gay Catholics is needed. And even in a church that famously “thinks in centuries” instead of decades, there are indications that they are beginning to respond to the signs of the times.
Before Martin, there was Father Patrick Nidorf, an Augustinian priest in California who in 1969 launched Dignity, a group for gay Catholics to address what he saw as “an excessive and unreal problem of guilt that was sometimes reinforced in the confessional instead of being resolved.” The name, he said later, “just came to me as appropriate since one of our basic goals was to bring dignity into the spiritual and social lives of some very special people.” Nidorf ran the group with extraordinary sensitivity, taking steps to protect the identities and safety of members (age restrictions, requiring applications—even occasionally personal interviews—to determine good faith, holding closed meetings in private homes). The concept spread quickly, initially by word of mouth around Los Angeles and San Diego, where Nidorf was based. Nidorf published ads in the Los Angeles Free Press and later, The Advocate, with an address to write to for more information. He would then disseminate a newsletter with dates and addresses for upcoming meetings. “His mission really was a place to provide a safe, affirming place for people to find ways to integrate their sexual orientation and their faith,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the organization’s current executive director, and a keynote speaker at Outreach 2023. “Church teaching on sexuality was not terribly articulated at that point, there was just an assumption that everybody was straight.”
In 1971, Nidorf complied when his archbishop told him to cease his involvement with Dignity. Now lay-led, it continued gathering steam, and throughout the 1970s, chapters began to crop up around the country. As it grew over the decades, Dignity representatives advocated for gay rights legislation and cultural change on a broader level. Members also met with bishops to encourage an end to anti-gay discrimination and the promotion of civil rights, to call for more official Church outreach to gay Catholics, and to express concerns over the U.S. bishops’ opposition to legislation supporting initiatives like gay marriage and adoption.
Duddy-Burke attended her first local chapter meeting in 1982 at the suggestion of her straight roommate, who had read about the organization in TheBoston Globe Sunday edition, and accompanied her that same night. Duddy-Burke was pursuing a masters in divinity at a Jesuit seminary in the city at the time. A recent college graduate, she had been asked as an undergraduate to resign from her position as president of the college’s Newman Society (a Catholic organization for college students), when the chaplain had learned she was a lesbian. Speaking to me over Zoom, Duddy-Burke was visibly emotional recalling the confrontation that occurred more than 40 years ago. “Catholicism had been just central to my life,” she said. “I was a sophomore in college at that point, and I just lost my connection to Catholic community. I didn’t lose my faith, I didn’t feel any less Catholic, but there just really wasn’t a comfortable place for me to pray and worship as a Catholic, so when my roommate read about Dignity, she’s like, ‘This sounds perfect for you!’” Duddy-Burke felt totally at home she said, and “never left.”
Participants at the fourth Outreach Conference, held in June this year at Fordham University
Duddy-Burke places Dignity’s founding within the context of a changing, post-Vatican II Catholicism. What today is considered a challenge to Church teaching was, at the time, “just another call for the Church to look at things differently,” she said. “Here was this group of gay people, gay and lesbian people, and some straight supporters, who felt like, OK, we’re part of the church, too, and we’re not finding what we need.” Now called DignityUSA (there are now chapters in Canada, as well), its mission statement reads: “We believe that we can express our sexuality physically, in a unitive manner that is loving, life-giving, and life-affirming. We believe that all sexuality should be exercised in an ethically responsible and unselfish way. We believe that our transgender and queer communities can express their core identities in a sincere, affirming, and authentic manner.”
It would be an anachronism to call Dignity “Side A,” since its foundation predated the term (and, by a few months, the Stonewall riots); DignityUSA doesn’t use “Side A/Side B” terminology on its website, and Duddy-Burke never used the phrase in her interview. But the organization anticipated a Side A worldview that it continues to put forward today, maintaining the classic Side A position that gay Catholics can express their sexuality in a physical relationship. In its work, DignityUSA seeks to obviate what it sees as a needless contradiction with Church teaching, and is determined to ensure the Church hears its views.
Today, Duddy-Burke said DignityUSA has a network of about 37 active chapters around the country, as well as nationwide caucuses organized around interest or identity (categories include women, trans, aging, young adult, racial justice). “Our work today is really broad,” Duddy-Burke said. In addition to “maintaining affirming communities for the queer community,” she said, DignityUSA also engages in advocacy work. At Catholic institutions, that means challenging the termination of LGBTQ employees, as well as what they see as anti-trans policies; it also means sending reports to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Vatican from listening sessions they’ve held with LGBTQ Catholics. Outside the Church, she said, DignityUSA’s advocacy includes “working with supportive presidential administrations to ensure that conscience provisions that would allow health care workers to refuse to treat LGBTQ people, or to provide certain medical services, are stripped from regulations,” and working to make foster care “more suited to serving queer youth.” They also send a contingent of queer youth to the Catholic Church’s international World Youth Day, which will be held in August of this year in Lisbon, Portugal. “We make sure that at these local, international church events, we have a group of people who are willing to say queer people and family members are part of our church now, and we need appropriate pastoral care, and we need theology and doctrine that recognizes our humanity and affirms our rights.”
It’s difficult to generalize about “Side B” gay Catholics, who are trying to live out fulfilling lives in observance of their Church’s teaching on homosexuality. Eve Tushnet, author of Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith, and an outspoken apologist for the Church’s teachings on this issue, and Grant Hartley, a celibate gay Catholic master’s of divinity student, both spoke with Tablet about their experiences.
Although the precise origin of the terms “Side A” and “Side B” is unclear, they seem to have begun showing up in the 1990s. (Today, two additional “sides,” X and Y, are sometimes included: X stands for “ex-gay” Christians, and Side Y are gay Christians who eschew identifying as gay or LGBTQ.) It’s a complex ecosystem with some overlap as well as wide chasms; Christian podcast Life on Side B” provides a helpful if lengthy primer on the different approaches on its website. A Side B Catholic himself, Hartley is one of the podcast’s rotating cast of hosts, and, like Duddy-Burke, an Outreach 2023 panelist.
According to Hartley, the underlying idea behind adopting the language of Sides A and B was so that gay Christians who took different views on how to live out their faith and sexuality “could both be a part of this community.” The intent was to avoid charged language, he said in a phone interview, “like ‘affirming’ and ‘nonaffirming’ can sometimes be, or ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive.’”
A former evangelical Christian, Hartley has only been Catholic a couple of years. He attended the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, the Church’s required course for converts, for a year-and-a-half prior to his conversion. “I wanted to make absolutely sure,” he said. “I took my time.” He cites the Catholic Church’s historic and aesthetic legacies as the things that initially attracted him, as well as the biographies of Henry Nouwen and Gerard Manley Hopkins. “I sensed that there was a sort of gay Catholic, queer Catholic theme running through the Church tradition,” he said.
Grant Hartley
“I was sort of searching for something that would make sense of sexual ethics for me,” Hartley said. “I had long been convinced of general teachings about sexuality, about sex reserved for a marriage covenant between a man and a woman for life.” However, Hartley said, “I never really had a high view of celibacy until I sort of had to wrestle through, oh, maybe I’m supposed to be celibate, so I gotta figure out how to love this. And it seemed that the Catholic tradition—I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. The Catholic tradition had a lot to offer when it comes to sort of a system to understand sexuality and marriage, and a lot of thinking about celibacy, just riches, that were really encouraging for me.”
As Hartley surveyed the Catholic tradition, he found that monasticism, celibacy, and same-sex love “are kind of intertwined in a lot of spaces,” he said. “Maybe my being gay was actually more of a strength than a weakness.”
Hartley is careful to note, “that’s not the vibe in the whole Church. There’s portions of the Church I’ve come into contact with that I don’t feel especially safe or welcome in.”
As for his relationships with his Side A counterparts in the Church, Hartley is quick to respond when asked if he’s friends with any. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I think one of the drawbacks of Side A/Side B language is that it ends up grouping people who come to these conclusions for lots of different reasons into the same sort of camp, and I think that maybe there’s some distinctions. So, because one is Side B doesn’t say a whole lot about how they got there, or about their approach to LGBTQ culture.”
Saying the Side A/Side B language can still be divisive, and that he “has a lot in common with a lot of Side A folks,” and as an academic and speaker, Hartley said he isn’t always warmly received by some on Side B when he speaks positively about LGBTQ culture “in a nuanced and often really positive way. I see a lot of beauty there.”
Hartley said his own approach is one of reserved humility when approaching other gay Catholics who don’t share his theology. “We’re all just trying to sort of survive,” he said. “I don’t want to judge anyone for how they’re trying to survive LGBTQ Catholic world.”
From one side, Hartley said celibate Catholics can be challenged by Catholics who view their choice as something that is either a judgment on noncelibate gay Catholics, or minimized as simply a personal decision. On the other side, he said celibate gay Catholics can receive pushback from more conservative Catholics who object to the use of sexual identity language as an identification “with sinful proclivities or temptations,” and for their engagement with wider secular LGBTQ culture. Pride, he said, “feels worse” this year. “It definitely feels like an uptick in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in the Christian world,” he said. “All the talk about drag that is just—I just don’t think that people understand what drag is, actually.”
Duddy-Burke said something similar, observing that she sometimes feels LGBTQ Catholics are “used as political pawns,” and it’s less about the issues themselves than “it’s about promoting a Christian nationalist agenda,” citing recent furor over drag queens and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence being honored at the Dodgers game.
Hartley came recommended to me by Tushnet, a well-known writer and speaker in the Catholic world, a lesbian convert to the faith who also espouses a celibate sexual ethic. On Zoom, she is soft-spoken and thoughtful, occasionally pausing to find just the right turn of phrase to describe her nuanced positions on very delicate issues within the Church.
“Virtually anyone who considers themselves to be an LGBTQ or same-sex-attracted Catholic has gone on some kind of journey,” she said. Describing “overlapping, intertwining queer and same-sex-attracted communities,” Tushnet said something that helps them understand each other is that “we’ve often shared parts of our journey, we’ve wrestled with some of the same things. Sometimes that makes it hard, I think for some people. It’s very much like, ‘well, why didn’t you come to the conclusion that I did—the correct one?’ But I think for other people, the fact of that shared journey can be very powerful.”
Tushnet’s understanding of celibate gay Catholic life is complex. Arguments against gay sex from first principles, she has said in interviews elsewhere, have never made sense to her, but she was able to find her way into the Church’s arguments around sexuality, marriage, and family life through her trust in its interpretation of the Bible. However, in writing her second book, Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love, she same to realize that other gay Catholics, due to their experience with both the Church and their fellow Catholics, were not able to arrive at that same sort of trust when it came to living out something as profoundly countercultural and self-denying as lifelong celibacy.
“There are still pockets of the Catholic Church where people are still having experiences in 2023 that sound like they came from 1980,” she said. “Like, I actually did a bunch of interviews with people who had gone to Catholic schools, and I’ll have to say, the bad experiences especially, people said the same thing from the ’70s and like, five years ago.” Echoing Duddy-Burke, Tushnet said she found there is a persistent attitude that everyone in Catholic circles is straight.
She is now working on an educational resource for Catholic institutions, Building Catholic Futures, intended for both kids and parents. The materials are “created by queer people to serve the needs of queer kids in the next generation,” and while staying faithful to Catholic orthodoxy, attempts to avoid catering to the paranoias and fears of what she described as the “concerned mom person,” the parent who is perplexed by the way the world has changed from the one she grew up in, and who might be swayed in an anti-gay direction by some of the existing resources for Christian parents.
“People really said [to me], ‘One thing that would have been really helpful to me is just to know that there had been gay Christians, ever,’” she said. “So a real lack of any kind of role model and therefore any kind of vision for my own future. This comes up again and again, this is why Building Catholic Futures is called this.” She remembers being a “totally secular progressive kid” in high school obsessively scouring history, pop culture, and song lyrics to figure out who was or might be gay. “I think a big part of that was kind of, ‘what are the possibilities for me?’ So not having anyone who shares your faith, who’s in your world in that way, who shares the thing that you’ve been told all your life is the most important thing in life, and it is actually the most important thing in life, and there’s nobody who you can look up to in a way that fits with this experience that you’re beginning to realize that you have, is really devastating—and even with the internet does still happen.”
Tushnet said she has found in working on Building Catholic Futures that the gay Catholics she encounters frequently cite queer artists and writers who had an influence on them, even if they were not themselves Catholic, or were perhaps dissenters from traditional Catholicism.
“It made me conscious of how much overlap there really is in both kind of like, the joyful and beautiful aspects of queer experience,” she said, “and then also the like painful experience of being targeted and marginalized, that we can really use the guidance of people who disagree with us profoundly on the authority of the Church or the role of obedience or the nature of sexuality.”
In speaking with Catholic adults who work with young people, Tushnet said, “This is really an area where kids do not feel like the Church is giving them anything to hold on to.”
Even though Duddy-Burke, Hartley, and Tushnet may differ on the particulars, they all share a hope that the Church is beginning to listen to new approaches being developed by the laity.
When we spoke, Hartley was amping up to speak in a few weeks on the Bible and homosexuality and living a life of chastity at Outreach 2023. He admitted to being less nervous about the chastity panel than another one, on the Bible and homosexuality. “I feel really comfortable talking about why celibacy has been really liberating for me, and not like a restrictive straitjacket,” he said. “But I had to do a lot of research and thinking for the panel on the Bible and homosexuality” and what he calls “the clobber passages”: verses from Leviticus condemning homosexual sex, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and various letters from the early Church thinkers to fledgling Christian congregations. “Those aren’t really the bedrock of my sexual ethics,” he said, “But they are something that LGBTQ folks in religious spaces have to wrestle with because those are the ones that we’re confronted with.” The other passages, such as some contents of the Apostle Paul’s letters, are not necessarily the “slam dunks” against homosexuality that many Bible-quoting Christians think they are, said Hartley: “I just don’t think that’s true.”
Virtually anyone who considers themselves to be an LGBTQ or same-sex attracted Catholic has gone on some kind of journey.
For Hartley, historical and cultural context matters. “You really have to enter into a story. It’s part of what brought me to the Catholic Church to begin with, is wanting to find myself in a big story of God’s involvement.” He cites the audience for the Apostle Paul’s letters, which are famous for some lines that appear to condemn gay sex. “Some of the people listening to [Paul’s] letters were not in a position to refuse sexual activity,” Hartley said, “And so when Paul is saying these things, it’s liberating for his audience. It’s about justice and not just about sexual morality between equals. So that’s something really important to keep in mind when thinking through these passages.”
The present matters, too. Citing Leviticus 20:13, Hartley said, “It struck me that the death penalty for same-sex sex is on the books now in countries around the world.”
As an evangelical influenced by Protestant sola scripturabeliefs, “I used to think it was just a matter of reading the Bible and applying it in a straightforward way to life,” said Hartley, a view he finds “now sometimes is just downright dangerous.” There is no talk of punishment or retribution for those who violate Church teaching in speaking to Tushnet and Hartley, who were both keen to express the breadth of experiences and viewpoints within the gay Catholic community, on both Sides A and B. Both made a point of stressing their lack of judgment for their fellow gay Catholics. Duddy-Burke said much of the outright opposition that organizations like DignityUSA receive comes from ultra-conservative Catholic individuals and organizations, and occasionally “ex-gay” Catholics. She said there is room for ideological tension within the Church, but “the line gets drawn” when people operating out of animus engage in attacks based on beliefs: calls to violence, “combing records to find out if Catholic school or Catholic parish staff have taken out marriage licenses, or combing Facebook pages or Instagram—it’s that kind of stuff that I think our Church leaders need to be better about challenging, like, that is bad action, your only goal here is to hurt another individual and that needs to be stopped.”
Eve Tushnet
“Many Catholics are concerned more about LGBTQ people’s sexual morality than almost any other moral issue,” said Martin in his email. “For some reason (mainly homophobia) it’s the LGBTQ person whose moral life gets looked at under the microscope. And yet, as you say, Catholics tend to overlook all sorts of other people whose lives are not in total conformity with church teaching: straight couples who use birth control, for example. More fundamentally, we overlook people who are not forgiving, not generous to the poor, not loving, and so on, things at the heart of the Gospel.”
“In places like sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe,” Martin continued, “any mention of LGBTQ issues in the Church is incendiary. The Catholic bishops in Ghana, for example, supported criminalizing homosexuality. This is one reason why Pope Francis’ call to decriminalize homosexuality, which may seem tepid in the West, was such a big deal. He’s speaking to the worldwide Church. In other places, like the U.S. and Western Europe, the discussion is less contentious, but it is still a hot-button topic.”
Duddy-Burke said she knows gay Catholics in Uganda who have encountered intense violence and discrimination, and are now fleeing the prospect of death at the hands of their government. “For the pope to have said [homosexuality should not be criminalized] is incredibly important for the people of the world, certainly from a legal perspective but even more from a cultural perspective,” she said. “I mean, the tone the Catholic Church, the official Catholic Church, sets, impacts the lives of all 8-plus billion lives of people on the planet in some ways. The Catholic Church runs the largest private educational network in the world, the private social services network, private health care networks. You know, so, so many people across the world, their lives are just impacted in incredibly important ways by what our Church teaches and what our Church does.”
It is this concern for the marginalized, that when asked why she stays Catholic, Duddy-Burke said her reason was her “deep love of what the Catholic Church is really about,” specifically love and justice. Those two things, she said, “really are at the core of our Church teaching, and you know, that means a lot to me. I love the sacraments, the rituals of our Church,” and “truly believe that every person should have access to that.”
The final keynote speaker at Outreach spoke on Sunday, June 18. Juan Carlos Cruz is a gay Catholic who was appointed in 2021 to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, a whistleblower about Church sexual abuse who was initially accused by Pope Francis of calumny for sharing his own story of clerical sexual abuse. Today, “Juanca” and Francis are good friends; Cruz spoke of the process by which Francis came to realize the extent of the clerical abuse in Chile after more laity came forward with their stories, and recanted and apologized to Cruz. Cruz spoke about how he and Francis are in regular contact, initially with letters, then visits and frequent phone calls, with Francis sharing movie recommendations with Cruz during the pandemic. Cruz even helped draft Francis’ talking points on the decriminalization of homosexuality back in January.
Cruz said he encounters attacks from Catholics for being openly gay, and from members of the LGBTQ community for his close relationship with the pope. Someone who speaks with disarming candor of Francis’ quirks and habits with the easy articulacy of the PR professional that he is, Cruz insists he is merely a friend and not the pope’s spokesperson. Rather, he feels he has a responsibility, as someone with a foot in both worlds. “As part of the LGBTQ community, I think it’s important for me to talk about it, to familiarize people who have never had access or have been close to this, to normalize it,” he said.
After his remarks, Martin asked Cruz when things are going to change for gay Catholics in the Church. “I really don’t know,” Cruz said. Contrary to the perception, it’s not easy for the pope to change doctrine with the stroke of the pen, he said
For now, Cruz said of Francis, “I love that he is on the side of those who suffer.”
Like Hartley, Tushnet looks to the past when thinking about how the Catholic Church could develop its doctrine going forward.
“Real people who already have partners come to the Church and say, you know, I made a life commitment to this person—nowadays, I may have married this person—and I’m beginning to ask questions about my faith, and wondering if I should kind of come home to the Church. What does that mean for me?” she said. “In the past, I think it was more likely, sadly, that they would be told to leave the person, and they would either be like, ‘Absolutely not, well, I guess this really isn’t as true as I thought it was,’ or you know, make some pretty tragic decisions.”
Tushnet believes that both the Bible and Catholic history provide options to recognize same-sex love. She cites the covenant between David and Jonathan, the love between Ruth and Naomi, as well as a practice from Eastern Christianity known as adelphopoiesis, a kinship bonding ceremony between two men that while not a marriage, was a liturgical recognition of sacrificial same-sex love and support. Tushnet is a fan of the book The Friend by Alan Bray, a historical examination of the deep emotional and spiritual component that informed these friendships in Christianity’s past. “People really rediscover these because they meet a reality, which is, that two people of the same sex are loving and caring for and cherishing one another, and what are we going to do about it?” she said. “Are we going to just say well, the Church can’t acknowledge that at all? And you look, and you don’t have to say that.”
But Tushnet is careful to caution against one-size-fits-all solutions for LGBTQ Catholics, slotting covenant friendships “into the cultural space now taken by marriage, with a loss of other models of community,” she said, citing the Catholic Worker and intentional community as other alternatives. “I really don’t want there to be one model and if you do not find this one model, then you are sort of condemned to loneliness or isolation, or you’ve failed in some way.”
Even DignityUSA doesn’t discount celibacy as a way of life for gay Catholics. “Dignity believes that there certainly are people who are called to celibacy either lifelong or for a part of their lives, and that’s fine, and it’s a sacred way of life in the same way, you know, lots of other ways of life are sacred. Our problem is that it should not be imposed based on identity,” said Duddy-Burke. “There needs to be a recognition that gender identity, that sexual orientation are an inherent part of who we are.” Acknowledging that “there are people who choose celibacy for good reasons, for healthy reasons, for whom it helps them to lead a good and healthy life,” she added that “it should not be demanded of people” out of what she called “a very outdated understanding of what humanity is.”
Although he arrives at a different conclusion, Hartley makes a similar point. “There has to come a point as a Side B person,” he said, “when you choose your life, too.” He notes a “long history of being constrained, of being chosen, and it feeling like, I didn’t have anything to do with it, God sort of has this for me.” He had to “choose it back,” he said. “Something opens up, and you get to find a lot of joy in your life. So that’s what I’m experiencing, or have experienced, over the past few years, and I hope to experience even more.”
Tushnet said she has begun to place increasing emphasis on solidarity in addressing LGBTQ Catholics. Whether or not gay Catholics choose to engage with the broader secular LGBTQ culture, Tushnet said she tries to remind them that “you do owe these people. You have not really fled to the Church as your haven, and you can just sort of hunker down there and be happy, you know, with the priest who knows and likes you. You do have some responsibility to give back.”
This solidarity is a key part of the philosophy, “or rather, the theology” behind the Outreach conference, said Martin. “It is very much along the lines of Pope Francis’ model of the Church as a field hospital,” he said, “which not only treats people who have been wounded—in this case, often by the Church itself—but is radically open. What people sometimes forget is that the heart of Church teaching is not a book. It’s a person: Jesus. And by embodying his welcome of everyone, we are embodying Church teaching.”
Walter Brueggemann, one of the world’s most renowned biblical scholars, whose scriptural scholarship includes a specific focus on the Hebrew prophets, taught from 1961 to 1986 at the Eden Theological Seminary in Webster Groves, Mo. Born in northeastern Nebraska, he earned a Ph.D. in education from St. Louis University in 1974.
By Ryan Di Corpo
What Scripture has to say
It is easy enough to see at first glance why LGBTQ people, and those who stand in solidarity with them, look askance at the Bible. After all, the two most cited biblical texts on the subject are the following, from the old purity codes of ancient Israel:
You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination (Lev. 18:22).
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them (Lev. 20:13).
There they are. There is no way around them; there is no ambiguity in them. They are, moreover, seconded by another verse that occurs in a list of exclusions from the holy people of God:
No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord (Deut. 23:1).
This text apparently concerns those who had willingly become eunuchs in order to serve in foreign courts. For those who want it simple and clear and clean, these texts will serve well. They seem, moreover, to be echoed in this famous passage from the Apostle Paul:
They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error (Rom. 1:23-27).
Paul’s intention here is not fully clear, but he wants to name the most extreme affront of the Gentiles before the creator God, and Paul takes disordered sexual relations as the ultimate affront. This indictment is not as clear as those in the tradition of Leviticus, but it does serve as an echo of those texts. It is impossible to explain away these texts.
Given these most frequently cited texts (that we may designate as texts of rigor), how may we understand the Bible given a cultural circumstance that is very different from that assumed by and reflected in these old traditions?
Well, start with the awareness that the Bible does not speak with a single voice on any topic. Inspired by God as it is, all sorts of persons have a say in the complexity of Scripture, and we are under mandate to listen, as best we can, to all of its voices.
On the question of gender equity and inclusiveness, consider the following to be set alongside the most frequently cited texts. We may designate these texts as texts of welcome. Thus, the Bible permits very different voices to speak that seem to contradict those texts cited above. Therefore, the prophetic poetry of Isaiah 56:3-8 has been taken to be an exact refutation of the prohibition in Deuteronomy 23:1:
Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say, “The Lord will surely separate me from his people”; and do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off … for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those already gathered (Is. 56:3-8).
This text issues a grand welcome to those who have been excluded, so that all are gathered in by this generous gathering God. The temple is for “all peoples,” not just the ones who have kept the purity codes.
Beyond this text, we may notice other texts that are tilted toward the inclusion of all persons without asking about their qualifications, or measuring up the costs that have been articulated by those in control. Jesus issues a welcoming summons to all those who are weary and heavy laden:
Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Mt. 11:28-30).
No qualification, no exclusion. Jesus is on the side of those who are “worn out.” They may be “worn out” by being lower-class people who do all the heavy lifting, or it may be those who are “worn out” by the heavy demands of Torah, imposed by those who make the Torah filled with judgment and exclusion.
Since Jesus mentions his “yoke,” he contrasts his simple requirements with the heavy demands that are imposed on the community by teachers of rigor. Jesus’ quarrel is not with the Torah, but with Torah interpretation that had become, in his time, excessively demanding and restrictive. The burden of discipleship to Jesus is easy, contrasted to the more rigorous teaching of some of his contemporaries. Indeed, they had made the Torah, in his time, exhausting, specializing in trivialities while disregarding the neighborly accents of justice, mercy and faithfulness (cf. Mt. 23:23).
A text in Paul (unlike that of Romans 1) echoes a baptismal formula in which all are welcome without distinction:
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ (Gal. 3:28).
No ethnic distinctions, no class distinctions and no gender distinctions. None of that makes any difference “in Christ,” that is, in the church. We are all one, and we all may be one. Paul has become impatient with his friends in the churches in Galatia who have tried to order the church according to the rigors of an exclusionary Torah. In response, he issues a welcome that overrides all the distinctions that they may have preferred to make.
Start with the awareness that the Bible does not speak with a single voice on any topic. Inspired by God as it is, all sorts of persons have a say in the complexity of Scripture, and we are under mandate to listen, as best we can, to all of its voices.
Finally, among the texts I will cite is the remarkable narrative of Acts of the Apostles 10. The Apostle Peter has raised objections to eating food that, according to the purity codes, is unclean; thus, he adheres to the rigor of the priestly codes, not unlike the ones we have seen in Leviticus. His objection, however, is countered by “a voice” that he takes to be the voice of the Lord. Three times that voice came to Peter amid his vigorous objection:
What God has made clean, you must not call profane (Acts 10:15).
The voice contradicts the old purity codes! From this, Peter is able to enter into new associations in the church. He declares:
You yourselves know that it is unlawful for Jews to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean (Acts 10:28).
And from this Peter further deduces:
I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him (v. 34).
This is a remarkable moment in the life of Peter and in the life of the church, for it makes clear that the social ordering governed by Christ is beyond the bounds of the rigors of the old exclusivism.
I take the texts I have cited to be a fair representation of the very different voices that sound in Scripture. It is impossible to harmonize the mandates to exclusion in Leviticus 18:22, 20:13 and Deuteronomy 23:1 with the welcome stance of Isaiah 56, Matthew 11:28-30, Galatians 3:28 and Acts 10.
Other texts might be cited as well, but these are typical and representative. As often happens in Scripture, we are left with texts in deep tension, if not in contradiction, with each other. The work of reading the Bible responsibly is the process of adjudicating these texts that will not be fit together.
The reason the Bible seems to speak “in one voice” concerning matters that pertain to LGBTQ persons is that the loud voices most often cite only one set of texts, to the determined disregard of the texts that offer a counter-position. But our serious reading does not allow such a disregard, so that we must have all of the texts in our purview.
The process of the adjudication of biblical texts that do not readily fit together is the work of interpretation. I have termed it “emancipatory work,” and I will hope to show why this is so. Every reading of the Bible—no exceptions—is an act of interpretation. There are no “innocent” or “objective” readings, no matter how sure and absolute they may sound.
Everyone is engaged in interpretation, so that one must pay attention to how we do interpretation. In what follows, I will identify five things I have learned concerning interpretation, learnings that I hope will be useful as we read the Bible, responsibly, around the crisis of gender identity in our culture.
The reason the Bible seems to speak “in one voice” concerning matters that pertain to LGBTQ persons is that the loud voices most often cite only one set of texts, to the determined disregard of the texts that offer a counter-position.
1. All interpretation filters the text through the interpreter’s life.
All interpretation filters the text through life experience of the interpreter. The matter is inescapable and cannot be avoided. The result, of course, is that with a little effort, one can prove anything in the Bible. It is immensely useful to recognize this filtering process. More specifically, I suggest that we can identify three layers of personhood that likely operate for us in doing interpretation.
First, we read the text according to our vested interests. Sometimes we are aware of our vested interests, sometimes we are not. It is not difficult to see this process at work concerning gender issues in the Bible. Second, beneath our vested interests, we read the Bible through the lens of our fears that are sometimes powerful, even if unacknowledged. Third, at bottom, beneath our vested interests and our fears, I believe we read the Bible through our hurts that we often keep hidden not only from others, but from ourselves as well.
The defining power of our vested interests, our fears and our hurts makes our reading lens seem to us sure and reliable. We pretend that we do not read in this way, but it is useful that we have as much self-critical awareness as possible. Clearly, the matter is urgent for our adjudication of the texts I have cited.
It is not difficult to imagine how a certain set of vested interests, fears and hurts might lead to an embrace of the insistences of texts of rigor that I have cited. Conversely, it is not difficult to see how LGBTQ persons and their allies operate with a different set of filters, and so gravitate to the texts of welcome.
2. Context inescapably looms large in interpretation.
There are no texts without contexts and there are no interpreters without context that positions one to read in a distinct way. Thus, the purity codes of Leviticus reflect a social context in which a community under intense pressure sought to delineate, in a clear way, its membership, purpose and boundaries.
The text from Isaiah 56 has as its context the intense struggle, upon return from exile, to delineate the character and quality of the restored community of Israel. One cannot read Isaiah 56 without reference to the opponents of its position in the more rigorous texts, for example, in Ezekiel. And the texts from Acts and Galatians concern a church coming to terms with the radicality of the graciousness of the Gospel, a radicality rooted in Judaism that had implications for the church’s rich appropriation of its Jewish inheritance.
Each of us, as interpreter, has a specific context. But we can say something quite general about our shared interpretive context. It is evident that Western culture (and our place in it) is at a decisive point wherein we are leaving behind many old, long-established patterns of power and meaning, and we are observing the emergence of new patterns of power and meaning. It is not difficult to see our moment as an instance anticipated by the prophetic poet:
Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Is. 43:18-19)
The “old things” among us have long been organized around white male power, with its tacit, strong assumption of heterosexuality, plus a strong accent on American domination. The “new thing” emerging among us is a multiethnic, multicultural, multiracial, multi-gendered culture in which old privileges and positions of power are placed in deep jeopardy.
We can see how our current politico-cultural struggles (down to the local school board) have to do with resisting what is new and protecting and maintaining what is old or, conversely, welcoming what is new with a ready abandonment of what is old.
If this formulation from Isaiah roughly fits our circumstance in Western culture, then we can see that the texts of welcome are appropriate to our “new thing,” while the texts of rigor function as a defense of what is old. In many specific ways our cultural conflicts—and the decisions we must make—reverberate with the big issue of God’s coming newness.
In the rhetoric of Jesus, this new arrival may approximate among us the “coming of the kingdom of God,” except that the coming kingdom is never fully here but is only “at hand,” and we must not overestimate the arrival of newness. It is inescapable that we do our interpretive work in a context that is, in general ways, impacted by and shaped through this struggle for what is old and what is new.
3. Texts do not come at us one at a time
Texts do not come at us one at a time, ad seriatim, but always in clusters through a trajectory of interpretation. Thus, it may be correct to say that our several church “denominations” are, importantly, trajectories of interpretation. Location in such a trajectory is important, both because it imposes restraints upon us, and because it invites bold imagination in the context of the trajectory.
We do not, for the most part, do our interpretation in a vacuum. Rather we are “surrounded by a cloud of [nameable] witnesses” who are present with us as we do our interpretive work (Heb. 12:1).
For now, I worship in a United Methodist congregation, and it is easy enough to see the good impact of the interpretive trajectory of Methodism. Rooted largely in Paul’s witness concerning God’s grace, the specific Methodist dialect, mediated through Pelagius and then Arminius, evokes an accent on the “good works” of the church community in response to God’s goodness.
That tradition, of course, passed through and was shaped by the wise, knowing hands of John Wesley, and we may say that, at present, it reflects the general perspective of the World Council of Churches with its acute accent on social justice. The interpretive work of a member of this congregation is happily and inevitably informed by this lively tradition.
It is not different with other interpretive trajectories that are variously housed in other denominational settings. We are situated in such interpretive trajectories that allow for both innovation and continuity. Each trajectory provides for its members some guardrails for interpretation that we may not run too far afield, but that also is a matter of adjudication—quite often a matter of deeply contested adjudication.
4. We are in a “crisis of the other”
We are, for now, deeply situated in a crisis of the other. We face folk who are quite unlike us, and their presence among us is inescapable. We are no longer able to live our lives in a homogenous community of culture-related “look alikes.” There are, to be sure, many reasons for this new social reality: global trade, easier mobility, electronic communication and mass migrations among them.
We are thus required to come to terms with the “other,” who disturbs our reductionist management of life through sameness. We have a fairly simple choice that can refer to the other as a threat, a rival enemy, a competitor, or we may take the other as a neighbor. The facts on the ground are always complex, but the simple human realities with each other are not so complex.
While the matter is pressing and acute in our time, this is not a new challenge to us. The Bible provides ongoing evidence about the emergency of coming to terms with the other. Thus, the land settlements in the Book of Joshua brought Israel face-to-face with the Canaanites, a confrontation that was mixed and tended toward violence (Judg. 1).
The struggle to maintain the identity and the “purity” of the holy people of God was always a matter of dispute and contention. In the New Testament, the long, hard process of coming to terms with “Gentiles” was a major preoccupation of the early church, and a defining issue among the Apostles. We are able to see in the Book of Acts that over time, the early church reached a readiness to allow non-Jews into the community of faith.
The new thing emerging among us is a multiethnic, multicultural, multiracial, multi-gendered culture in which old privileges and positions of power are placed in deep jeopardy.
And now among us the continuing arrival of many “new peoples” is an important challenge. There is no doubt that the texts of rigor and the texts of welcome offer different stances in the affirmation or negation of the other. And certainly among the “not like us” folk are LGBTQ persons, who readily violate the old canons of conformity and sameness. Such persons are among those who easily qualify as “other,” but they are no more and no less a challenge than many other “others” among us.
And so the church is always re-deciding about the other, for we know that the “other”—LBGTQ persons among us—are not going to go away. Thus, we are required to come to terms with them. The trajectory of the texts of welcome is that they are to be seen as neighbors who are welcomed to the resources of the community and invited to make contributions to the common wellbeing of the community. By no stretch of any imagination can it be the truth of the Gospel that such “others” as LGBTQ persons are unwelcome in the community.
In that community, there are no second-class citizens. We had to learn that concerning people of color and concerning women. And now, the time has come to face the same gospel reality about LGBTQ persons as others are welcomed as first-class citizens in the community of faithfulness and justice. We learn that the other is not an unacceptable danger and that the other is not required to give up “otherness” in order to belong fully to the community. We in the community of faith, as in the Old and New Testaments, are always called to respond to the other as a neighbor who belongs with “us,” even as “we” belong with and for the “other.”
5. The Gospel is not to be confused with the Bible.
The Gospel is not to be confused with or identified with the Bible. The Bible contains all sorts of voices that are inimical to the good news of God’s love, mercy and justice. Thus, “biblicism” is a dangerous threat to the faith of the church, because it allows into our thinking claims that are contradictory to the news of the Gospel. The Gospel, unlike the Bible, is unambiguous about God’s deep love for all peoples. And where the Bible contradicts that news, as in the texts of rigor, these texts are to be seen as “beyond the pale” of gospel attentiveness.
Because:
our interpretation is filtered through our close experience,
our context calls for an embrace of God’s newness,
our interpretive trajectory is bent toward justice and mercy,
our faith calls us to the embrace of the other and
our hope is in the God of the gospel and in no other,
the full acceptance and embrace of LGBTQ persons follows as a clear mandate of the Gospel in our time. Claims to the contrary are contradictions of the truth of the Gospel on all the counts indicated above.
These several learnings about the interpretive process help us grow in faith:
We are warned about the subjectivity of our interpretive inclinations;
we are invited in our context to receive and welcome God’s newness;
we can identify our interpretive trajectory as one bent toward justice and mercy;
we may acknowledge the “other” as a neighbor;
we can trust the gospel in its critical stance concerning the Bible.
All of these angles of interpretation, taken together, authorize a sign for LGBTQ persons: Welcome!
Welcome to the neighborhood! Welcome to the gifts of the community! Welcome to the work of the community! Welcome to the continuing emancipatory work of interpretation!
It is fending off calls for women priests and blessings of same-sex couples amid criticism of its handling of sex abuse cases
For centuries the 13th century Cologne Cathedral has been a touchstone of German Catholicism. Yet for many German believers Cologne is now the epicentre of institutional dysfunction and denial, in particular over the scale of clerical child abuse and the systematic nature of its cover-up.
On a sunny Sunday evening in May, 80 people gathered in a Berlin church for a calm Catholic revolution. At 6pm the 11 metre-high wooden doors of the modernist church of St Canisius were opened for an inclusive Mass of blessing. Spaced out in pairs around the airy church were mainly same-sex couples, all looking ahead at the lanky Jesuit priest.
With expectation in the air, Fr Jan Korditschke removed his face mask and, wearing a broad smile, spread his arms and invited all present to join him in celebrating love. His sermon drew on John’s Gospel, that love is from God, and that it is not in the purview of a priest or a pope to deny the God-given blessing of love.
“God is present in love and and loving couples are already blessed with the presence of God. I am just giving it a framework through this rite,” he said.
Afterwards, with two assistants Korditschke worked his way through the church, talked briefly to each couple before praying together. Behind medical masks many tears flowed.
“It was such a relief, like a stone was rolling away from my heart,” said one man, Georg, alongside his partner afterward.
The Berlin Mass was the last in a series of services across Germany under the banner #liebegewinnt – love wins. The services were triggered by a Vatican document from March restating Catholic teaching that homosexual acts are disordered and blessings for same-sex unions are impossible.
One attendee, Robert, said he came with his partner in protest at the document’s key sentence that “God does not and cannot bless sin”. “By posing a question no one asked, just to answer it in such cold language,” he said, “Rome tried to ram home its point but have triggered a reaction they didn’t expect.”
A few feet away 15 young men and one middle-aged woman held a large hand-written banner reading “God cannot bless sin” and recited the rosary during the Mass. One protester, who declined to give his name, said that obedience to papal teaching is what has held the Catholic Church together for two millennia.
“I worry that carry-on like this,” he said, with a nod to the emerging massgoers, “will bring us toward another schism.”
Papal authority
Exactly 500 years ago, the renegade Augustinian monk Martin Luther was ordered in public to submit to this absolute papal authority by recanting his claims of corrupt church practice and flawed teaching.
Luther turned the tables on Rome by demanding they prove that his scripture-based understanding of the Christian faith was false. The confrontation spiralled and his challenge became a channel for a host of political and modernising forces. Western Christianity split and the world was never the same again.
History doesn’t repeat itself; in a largely secular Europe, most people would struggle to spell schism, let alone see any relevance for their lives. Still, something is brewing in the land of the Reformation as individual protests within the church of Rome feed into each other to create a crackling, Catholic conflagration.
German bishops appear unsure like never before as to where their loyalties lie. Should they deploy the Roman fire blanket, suffocate the flames and denounce critics as arsonist apostates? Or does their survival hinge on embracing the protest and facing down Rome?
Fr Jan Korditschke “I look to Jesus, who was respectful of religious leaders and the sabbath but not afraid of conflict when it came to prioritising the good of people”
Like their Irish colleagues, the German bishops’ fumbled response to clerical sexual abuse allegations and their cover-up in the past decade has drained away credibility and public support.
Nowhere is the struggle more visible – or the stakes higher – than in the western city of Cologne. For centuries its hulking Gothic cathedral has been a touchstone of German Catholicism. For many German believers, though, Cologne is now the epicentre of institutional dysfunction and denial, in particular over the scale of clerical child abuse and the systematic nature of its cover-up.
Last year Cologne’s conservative archbishop, Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, came under fire for suppressing a report he himself commissioned into clerical sexual abuse. A replacement report followed this year and triggered two bishops’ departure, but critics say this document was careful to avoid any analysis of whether church structures were a contributory factor to abuse. Tensions continue to build.
In January a local priest, Klaus Koltermann, wrote to Cardinal Woelki, warning of “disquiet among the greatest believers” in his parish of Dormagen, 20 minutes north of Cologne. When a local newspaper reprinted his letter, Koltermann’s superiors warned of “possibly serious breaches of your service obligations . . . that could have consequences”.
The threat was withdrawn when the priest went public with their correspondence, a stand-off he describes as a learning experience. “A new solidarity has to grow amongst us,” he told The Irish Times. “We have to become more courageous. Sadly, we priests never learned to stand up for our faith – in the church.”
In defiance
Such cases of conscience-led insubordination are gaining momentum. Two weeks ago Catholics at an ecumenical gathering with Germany’s Lutherans held joint eucharistic celebrations in defiance of their bishops.
This week a parish in Düsseldorf wrote to Cardinal Woelki disinviting him as celebrant at their confirmation Mass next month. Woelki once served as a deacon in the parish, as did two abusing priests. In their letter, some 140 parishioners said they feared the cardinal would “instrumentalise” their children’s confirmation to hit back at his critics.
“You are for us, sadly, no longer credible, we have lost our trust in you as a bishop,” they wrote.
Unlike in other countries, German Catholics have a clear way to express a vote of no-confidence with the Kirchenaustritt (church departure). All Christian church members in Germany automatically pay a so-called “church tax” in a system dating back to the 19th century, calculated at 8 per cent of their income tax. Effectively a membership fee, it earns Germany’s Catholic Church some ¤6 billion annually. Revoking the payment is seen as revocation of church membership.
The number of annual departures in 2019 was 218,000, twice the number of a decade ago. Numbers for 2020 have yet to be collated but, based on anecdotal evidence, the ongoing abuse debate has prompted an unprecedented rush for the exits.
Already facing a ticking demographic time bomb, Catholic bishops announced a “synodal process” in 2019 to discuss the road ahead. With 230 members (lay and religious) discussions are under way in four groups examining the role of priests, church power, sexuality and women in ministry. The pandemic shifted discussions online but organisers hope in-person gatherings can begin from September, with the first votes on proposals by Christmas.
For Bishop Georg Bätzing, head of the German episcopate, the “synodal path” is a balancing act between church liberals and traditionalists – with Rome looking on warily.
A parish in Düsseldorf has written to Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki, Cologne’s conservative archbishop, disinviting him as celebrant at their confirmation Mass next month
His relief was palpable this week when Pope Francis announced plans for a worldwide synodal consultation. This, said the German bishop, was proof that “we are neither schismatic nor do we as a German national church want to loosen ourselves from Rome”.
Expectations of the process are modest, however, given two emergency brakes built into the process: any decisions from the synodal path require unanimous backing of bishops, then approval from Rome.
Church strike
Rather than wait for reform from within, Lisa Kötter began a church strike two years ago, out of which has grown a grassroots movement called Maria 2.0. Two years on, with regular protests and prayer services, Maria 2.0 has gone global with its demands for the inclusion of women in all church functions, an end to mandatory celibacy, and a consequential response to clerical sexual abuse.
“We see the entire patriarchal basis of the Catholic Church as wrong and not inclusive, out of step with the teaching of Jesus,” said Kötter.
It’s a measure of the movement’s effect that it already has a conservative countermovement, Maria 1.0. And, after initial icy silence, Kötter has been invited to private meetings with bishops. But the friendly conversation always reaches a dead end, she says, when conversation turns to the main bone of contention: church privileges and power that men claim for themselves.
With calls for women priests and blessing same-sex couples, Kötter and Fr Korditschke push back against the idea that they are part of a Luther 2.0 movement. Neither wants a break with Rome but, then again, neither did the man who became the face of the Reformation.
Korditschke says Germany’s Lutheran churches, with more liberal positions on women ministers and social questions, have raised expectations among local Catholics — and tensions when change comes slowly, or not at all.
“I look to Jesus, who was respectful of religious leaders and the sabbath but not afraid of conflict when it came to prioritising the good of people,” said Korditschke, who was baptised Lutheran, converted to Catholicism aged 16 and has no plans to return.
“I don’t see myself at odds with the Catholic Church and, unlike Martin Luther, I pray every day for the pope and serve my church. This is my home.”
After lighting a fuse in Germany two years ago, Kötter sees neither the structural means nor political appetite for reform among German Catholic bishops. She dismisses the synodal path as a “simulation”.
“They haven’t heard the sign of the times, the demands for change. Their ears are trained to hear nothing except their own hymns.”
Declan Henry’s new book,Forbidden Fruit, speaks to gay priests about the hypocrisy and homophobia of the Catholic Church. It also looks at the issues, which he writes, have led to the crumbling of a once-mighty institution. Declan speaks about the creation of the book, the high percentage of gay priests in the Church and how he, as a gay man and a Catholic, has managed to reconcile his faith.
What was the impetus for writing your book?
“I wanted to explore the changing face of Catholicism in Ireland over the past 30 years post the cleric abuse scandals. I want to find out why the Church has never adequately addressed the reasons why paedophilia occurred among priests – and question if this malaise is still present – and why. I wanted to explore the hypocrisy of the church towards gay people – given that such a high percentage of Catholic priests are gay. I also wanted to explore compulsory celibacy and question if it is emotionally healthy to expect any man – gay or straight – to live a life devoid of intimate personal relationships and sex.”
Did your research surprise you?
“I met two very different – yet both happy priests during my research. One was an openly gay (celibate) priest in Dublin who is much loved and respected by his parishioners for being so honest. The other was a married priest in London (converted from the Anglican Church many years ago). It was so refreshing to be shown around his church and to be introduced to his wife and children. This clearly showed two things – a) that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being gay and a priest… b) being a married Catholic priest is not the slightest deterrent in fulfilling the role of a priest.”
Declan continued, “Research last year from the French author (Frederick Martel) found that 80% of the Vatican’s top clergy are gay. And yet, despite these high statistics, the Catholic Church is very homophobic. Why?”
How do you balance your affinity for the Catholic Church alongside your findings?
“I believe that most people in the LGBT+ community must transcend their belief system beyond the Catholic Church and find their own faith, their own God, their own Jesus. In the end, this is not too hard to do. Remember that you can read all the Gospels and you will find that Jesus never once condemned homosexuality.”
“In one sense, I smile when I think back about my earlier years growing up gay in Ireland – how vulnerable I was, how naïve I was. In the book, I recall how once I was feeling down and went to see a priest – but he refused to see me because he had just started to prepare his dinner. His dinner was far more important to him than seeing me. And so, I left and never returned. But I’m lucky. I left all that behind. I’ve had a good life, so any bitterness is forgotten. But there was pain and rejection. On one hand you had this unrivalled sense of belonging but on the other hand rejection, fear, shame and guilt for being gay.”
Do you believe the Catholic Church has alienated LGBT+ people to the point of pushing them from their faith?
“Yes, absolutely. Pope after Pope has helped to reinforce this message. Take the current Pope for example – he is not a stupid man, he is well informed and very knowledgeable about what is going on around him, yet he can say the most foolish of things. In December 2018 he stated, ‘There is no place for gay priests in the clergy’. Who is he trying to fool when the horse has well and truly bolted on that one?!”
“The truth is the church is full of homosexuals at every level. But unfortunately, most of these gay priests have a very unhealthy attitude towards their own sexuality – which is not alone very damaging to themselves but damaging to the wider LGBT+ community.”
As the Catholic Church prepares for its contended review, the Commission for Marriage and Family of the German Bishops’ Conference came to the consensus that being gay is a “normal form of sexual predisposition.”
Moreover, church organisers committed to “newly assessing” topics such as sacraments of ordination and marriage, with another revision being that adultery will not longer “always be qualified as grave sin”, the Catholic News Agencyreported.
For centuries, Church leaders have been rattled by the thought of people being sexualities other than heterosexual. But as public attitudes and governments overwhelmingly sway in favour of letting the LGBT+ community exist, the church has steadily caught up to speed.
German bishops call for homophobia to be ‘rejected’ in the church.
The German Catholic Church’s statement comes ahead of a two-year ‘Synodal Process’ by the Germans which will see a national reform consultation. Although, Vatican leaders have warned against this.
In a press release detailing the conclusions of the conference, it detailed how a panel of bishops, sexologists, moral theologians and canon lawyers deliberated how to discuss “the sexuality of man […] scientifically-theologically, and how to assess it ecclesiastically.”
The experts, consisting of bishops from four diocese, agreed in the Berlin conference that “human sexuality encompasses a dimension of lust, of procreation, and of relationships”, the release stated.
“There was also agreement that the sexual preference of man expresses itself in puberty and assumes a hetero- or homosexual orientation. Both belong to the normal forms of sexual predisposition, which cannot or should be be changed with the help of a specific socialisation.”
The panel also said that “any form of discrimination of those persons with a homosexual orientation has to be rejected.”
However, the panel did not reach a consensus across all battle lines. There was no consensus on “whether the magisterial ban on practiced homosexuality is still up to date.”
Furthermore, the experts also disagreed on whether or not both married and unmarried people should be allowed to use artificial contraceptives.
Pope Francis has helped open the door to allowing married men to become priests, albeit in just one region of the Amazon for now. He has made environmentalism a major focus of his papacy. Yesterday he gave a shout-out to Greta Thunberg and thanked journalists for doing their jobs, rather than calling them enemies of the people. He’s decried income inequality and nationalism and spoken out on behalf of gay people, Muslims, immigrants, and the poor.
This pastoral approach has made him one of the clearest and most humane voices crying out in the wilderness today. Has it also made him a revolutionary?
Yesterday, Francis wrapped up a month-long synod, or meeting of bishops, at the Vatican dedicated to the Amazon, a region the bishops called “a wounded and deformed beauty, a place of suffering and violence.” Their list of recommendations to the pope is nothing less than an environmentalist manifesto, in which they recommended that destroying the environment should be considered a sin. (Their requests are nonbinding but set a tone; Francis said he will try to respond to them before the end of the year.)
The bishops also asked Francis to lift the 1,000-year-old ban on priestly celibacy to allow married men who are already ordained as deacons to become priests in some areas of the Amazon. There, a priest shortage means the faithful can go for long stretches without receiving Communion and other sacraments that only priests can deliver. This could very well revolutionize the Church worldwide. If a door opens in one country, it might open in another. (Or it could be limited to the Amazon.)
Francis’s method, and the method of the synod, is one of listening and reflection, then some consensus, and charting a path forward through discernment. The path Francis has been taking, though, leads directly into a larger culture war, one that pits progressives against traditionalists.
And so the synod offered ample opportunity for Francis’s many vocal critics—including conservative Catholics in the United States, who are intertwined with the political right—to accuse the pope of breaking orthodoxy and watering down Church doctrine, such as the bishops’ recommendations to allow more room for indigenous traditions in Catholic ritual. These critics also see Francis’s papacy as flirting dangerously with paganism, pantheism, and even Marxism, because they view the pope’s emphasis on attending to the poor as often at odds with the exigencies of global capitalism.
The environment was the central focus of the meeting. In their final document, the bishops warned of the risks of deforestation, which they said now put almost 17 percent of the Amazon forest in danger, and also of the displacement of indigenous groups because of the deforestation. “Attacks on nature have consequences for the lives of peoples,” they wrote.
They defined what they called “ecological sins of commission or omission against God, against one’s neighbor, the community and the environment.” They called these “sins against future generations … manifest in acts and habits of pollution and destruction of the harmony of the environment, transgressions against the principles of interdependence and the ripping of network of solidarity among creatures and against the virtue of justice.”
In practical terms that means better coordination in the region for advocacy against environmental catastrophes, such as toxic spills related to mining, Bishop David M. De Aguirre Guinea, one of two special secretaries overseeing the synod, said at a news conference yesterday. “This has become part of the social doctrine of the Church, taking care of our common home,” he said.
Francis set the Amazon as the theme for the meeting three years ago, long before the devastating fires that swept through the region in August, the result of targeted deforestation to clear farmland. “The fires brought the thing home to us in a way that graphs or other visuals didn’t,” Cardinal Michael Czerny, a Canadian Jesuit and the other special secretary behind the synod, said. “If we insist on tearing up the trees and digging up the land because we can’t live without the metals and the gold and the wood for our fancy furniture, you can fill out the rest.”
Czerny is one of 13 new cardinals whom Francis appointed this month and who will one day elect his successor, the clearest way any pope shapes the future of the Church. Czerny, for instance, runs a Vatican office dedicated to migrants and refugees at the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and his promotion is a clear sign of the importance Francis places on migration.
The pope also appointed other cardinals from the global South, making the College of Cardinals less white and less Italian. (One of the constant tensions of the Catholic Church is that it’s a global community of a billion souls governed at the top by an Italian village.)
Francis isn’t the first pope to open the door to some married priests. A decade ago, his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, created a special structure to allow married Anglican priests to join the Catholic Church. It was aimed at attracting Anglicans distressed by that Church’s ordination of women and gay priests, and it infuriated the then–Archbishop of Canterbury.
For the synod, Francis and the bishops framed the issue of married priests as stemming from a ground-up desire from some communities in the Amazon, not a top-down rule imposed by Rome, Alberto Melloni, the director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, told me. “It’s not a revolution,” he said. “It’s a late remedy to an evident call.”
The bishops didn’t vote to allow women to be ordained as deacons, but Francis, in his concluding remarks yesterday, said the Vatican would study the role of women in the early Church. “Women put out a sign that says, ‘Please listen to us, may we be heard,’ and I pick up that gauntlet,” the pope said to applause.
Francis also gave a special mention to Greta Thunberg, who has already become a kind of Joan of Arc for her time, and drawn no shortage of hatred—this month, police removed an effigy of Thunberg that had been hung from a bridge in Rome. In his concluding remarks yesterday, the pope spoke about the recent climate strikes by students around the world. “We’ve seen the demonstrations of young people, Greta and others, and they walk around saying ‘The future is ours, you can’t gamble with our future.’”
In one of the stranger sideshows of the synod, a handheld video circulated on a traditionalist Catholic website showing unidentified men removing several wooden figurines representing an Amazonian fertility figure from a Roman church and tossing the statuettes into the Tiber from the Ponte Sant’Angelo, lined with statues of angels and saints, against a perfect Roman sunrise. Some of Francis’s critics, such as Cardinal Gerhard Müller, a former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal office, seized on the video, and called the statuettes tantamount to idolatry. “The great mistake was to bring the idols into the church, not to put them out,” Müller said in an interview with an American conservative-Catholic TV channel, EWTN.
Francis, as bishop of Rome, apologized to his fellow bishops for the vandalism, and one of the statuettes was on view in the synod hall during the pope’s concluding remarks. A Mass today ending the synod included indigenous peoples from the Amazon. Francis’s approach to indigenous rites is “a very profound characteristic of the Jesuit missionary attitude,” Melloni told me, in which the Jesuits would try to convert native populations to Catholicism while also respecting the native traditions. “These rites express a culture and not a religion,” Melloni said.
But for Francis’s many critics, the statuettes, and the pope’s posing for photos in a feathered headdress, were further signs that the pope was watering down Church doctrine. These critics tend to be defenders of Benedict, a brainy disciplinarian who advocated a smaller, more doctrinally pure Church, rather than a more flexible and inclusive one.
“This synod is truly the most politically correct meeting of all time. It’s a relief that Greta Thunberg has not yet been chosen to be a cardinal,” Bishop Robert Mutsaerts of the Netherlands wrote in a blog post translated by LifeSite News, a conservative Catholic website that has been fiercely critical of Francis. “Is there anyone left who is actually worried about saving souls? But isn’t that why Christ died on the cross?”
“The bishops and cardinals are discussing the environment, the rise of the sea level; they are saying that above all, we should listen. They speak like politicians, using the same slogans, the same cheap rhetoric,” Mutsaerts wrote. Why? he asked. “It is not the specialty of the Church, it is not our core business and it is not our perspective.”
In the culture war between traditionalists and progressives over the future of the Church, the pope may be on the progressive, inclusive side, but his traditionalist critics have access to social media, which has an outsize influence in shaping perceptions. “We have a small, noisy minority and a large silent majority,” Melloni told me. “The noisy minority is struggling, with a certain success, to represent themselves as half of the Church, and they are not. They’re not even half the College of Cardinals, not even half the episcopate.”
In short, the Catholic Church on Twitter may not be the same as the Catholic Church writ large. Francis seems confident that he has the latter on his side, but will his efforts—on married priests, on environmentalism—spread beyond the Amazon?
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/BSTLLC6MWUR5C4MK7YX45VUX3Q.jpg)
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/5GTDSUOCGPRXRFPQCWTFZVYZEA.jpg)
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/LBMIFZRCACFL4NNMKN7IFFWVGM.JPG)
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/2CVCJRKBIUBKX224F6BT2ORY74.jpg)
