ishkabible

« CarChip | Main | How to start a blog network »

December 03, 2005

Homosexuality and the Priesthood

Deep-Seated?: As for the vexed document on gays in the priesthood itself, like Amy Welborn, I'm troubled by some of its language - particularly the exclusion (or suggested exclusion, more accurately, since all of this will be actually decided on a seminary-by-seminary basis) of men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies." If by "deep-seated" the authors mean "desires that the candidate is unwilling or unable to avoid acting on," then that kind of ban makes sense - just as you would probably exclude a proudly lecherous heterosexual from the priesthood. (This seems to be the interpretation favored by, among others, Fr. Joseph Fessio.) But if, as seems much more likely, "deep-seated" is meant to refer to anyone who lives with more-or-less permanent same-sex attraction - well, then as Amy notes, it seems like the Vatican is neglecting "the complex point that men with homosexual tendencies, same-sex attraction, whatever can be good priests, and have put spiritual orientation before sexual orientation, and have put on Christ, becoming new creatures in Him."

There are two ways of looking at this, I think. One is to view the document as a somewhat clumsy and overly-sweeping response to two very real problems facing the Catholic Church, by which I mean 1) the sex-abuse scandals, which were largely a phenomenon of priests abusing teenage boys, not pedophiles preying on children, and which raised serious questions about the influence of homosexuality on the culture of the priesthood, and 2) the presence, within the Church and particularly within seminaries, of a large body of priests who simply reject Catholic teaching on human sexuality. The other way, Andrew and Will Saletan's take, is to assume that this document is another step in Ratzinger/Benedict's supposed decades-long campaign "for a purge of homosexuality," as Saletan puts it. To this, I would say two things. First, while there's little question that Benedict takes a more stringent line on homosexuality than some Catholic theologians, it's easy to overestimate the extent to which every document that emanates from the Vatican is a reflection of "the Pope's take" on a given issue. As John Allen points out, "the new instruction was not explicitly issued in forma specifica, meaning with the weight of a papal act, and hence it carries the authority of a Vatican office rather than the pope himself" - which among other things, makes it more likely than other documents to be revisited and revised at a later date. (That's exactly what the Vatican did, he notes, with the question of admitting alcoholics to the priesthood - issuing a blanket ban in the early 1990s, and then revising and softening it later.)

Second, if Benedict has a long-running obsession with homosexuality, he's got a pretty funny way of showing it. Fr. Jim Tucker, a priest-blogger, puts it best:

If a person were to sit down and read the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, the journal in which all the official acts of the Vatican are recorded, he would probably find that about 1% of Roman pronouncements -- actually, probably less -- have to do with sex. If you were to read through all the statements and addresses and public discourses delivered by Pope Benedict since he took the throne in April, you could probably count the statements on sex on a single hand -- two hands at the most. The vast, vast majority has nothing to do with sex.

The problem, of course, is that . . . most people get what they know about Vatican pronouncements from the mainstream media, and the media (which are in the business of selling information -- nothing wrong with that) offer the kind of information that is most likely to grab people's attention and interest them enough to look at the TV for 15 seconds or read the first paragraph or two of a newspaper article. And, like it or not, sex, violence, and controversy are a whole lot more interesting to most people than the nature of Christian charity, building wells in sub-Saharan Africa, or the basis of the New Evangelization in the vows of baptism. So, the market wins out, and your daily bit of Vatican information is about sex -- preferably something controversial about sex.

The same thing goes for Papa Ratzinger's supposed fixation on homosexuality. After twenty years in the Holy Office, Cardinal Ratzinger signed off on, what, two (very short) documents that dealt with the subject? Whatever one happens to think about that handful of pages, one could hardly call it an obsession. And if you set aside those official documents and look solely at his published work as a theologian and writer -- all those heaps of books that none of his harshest critics seems to have opened -- there is next to no sex in them at all. There's a great deal about beauty, about worship as the inner longing of man, about the saving wounds of Christ, about the Cross as the Tree of Life, about faith as a light in life's darkness, about the unity that emanates from Christ's Body, about our brotherhood in Christ's Church, but off the top of my head I can't remember ever having read any passages about sex in general, or about homosexuality in particular. Many of us bloggers and comment box denizens have already written more about sex in the last two months than Ratzinger has in his entire career.

It would be better, perhaps, if Benedict had written more about sex, and particularly homosexuality. Too often, I fear, conservative Catholic intellectuals, including many writers I admire, have avoided coming to grips with the complexity of "deep-seated" homosexuality - as opposed to the more opportunistic variety - and the particular difficulties it creates for otherwise faithful Christians.

"Deep-Seated?" by Ross Douthat, The American Scene, November 30, 2005 (many links in original post)

Posted at December 3, 2005 04:26 PM | Categories: Catholicism

Comments

Post a comment