Brebeuf Jesuit vs Indianapolis Archdiocese: Electric Boogaloo

All extremes except extreme devotion to the Enemy are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at the present period. Some ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them. Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tends to develop towards the outer world a great deal of pride and hatred which is entertained without shame because the ‘Cause’ is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal. Even when the little group exists originally for the Enemy’s own purposes, this remains true. We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique. 

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

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You’ve likely heard of the clash between the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and the Jesuit-run Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School over the latter’s refusal to fire a gay teacher for entering a same-sex marriage. Cathedral High School, run by the Holy Cross brothers, did fire a gay teacher for similar reasons at the request of Archbishop Thompson, shortly after the Archbishop declared that Brebeuf would no longer be permitted to describe itself as Catholic. Given the ticklish situation, a.k.a. utter shitshow, that is Catholic-LGBTQ relations, evaluating this stuff is a delicate business, and this piece turns on a dime more than once in trying to sort out the details. I hope you’ll bear with me.

I waited a bit to weigh in on this because I wanted to have more facts at my disposal. Stories are easy to twist; I’m not an expert in canon law; I haven’t met any of these people; and certain relevant details to making a judgment have been, quite reasonably, kept private—even the names of the teachers in question, I believe, have gone unreleased, probably to protect them from harassment. The hate mail or even the loathsome ‘charity’ doled out by some Catholics even to avowed celibates who come out as gay is revolting enough.

For instance, one very pertinent detail that has gone unexamined (as far as I know) in the assorted hot takes on the dispute is: how do the two men in the civil same-sex marriage understand their union? I know more than one Side B couple, committed to chastely celibate lives, who are married in order to be able to extend legal benefits to their partner (insurance, hospital visiting rights, etc.) and who don’t consider this arrangement equivalent to the sacrament of matrimony. If the teachers at Brebeuf and Cathedral were in partnerships of that kind, surely there can be no objection to that? except, possibly, that it risks scandal, but that is easily addressed by just explaining the situation to the people whose business it is. I don’t consider this a likely description of the teachers in question—not because it’s intrinsically implausible, but because the Side B community is in fact fairly small; small enough that I might have heard about this through the grapevine instead of the news, if the teacher in question were connected with one of our groups—but it isn’t something that either the Jesuits or the Archdiocese seem to have considered.

The takes I’ve seen from Fr James Martin and co. have mostly focused on primacy of conscience, which, yes, is a vitally important Catholic moral doctrine. But conscience does not entitle people to their jobs, and disagreeing with Catholic moral teaching (as we may probably, though not certainly, suppose the teachers do) seems like a good enough reason to resign from teaching at a Catholic school. On the other hand, that is a reason to resign, which is not the same thing as cause to be fired. [1]

On the third hand, well, it isn’t intrinsically unreasonable for a Catholic school to ask its teachers to exemplify Catholic beliefs and values, about marriage as much as anything else. This last has, in substance, been the line of argument taken by the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. And canon law itself states that ‘teachers must be outstanding in … uprightness of life’—so the argument goes that since homosexuality is held by the Church to be contrary to natural law, i.e. that sphere of conscience which can be discerned by human reason without the special assistance of revelation [2], entering a gay marriage is ipso facto disqualifying to the ‘uprightness of life’ clause, even for a non-Catholic or non-Christian.

Here’s why I don’t buy that. For background, the text of the canons about Catholic schools, in a little more context, reads thus:

Canon 803 §2. Formation and education in a Catholic school must be based on the principles of Catholic doctrine, and the teachers must be outstanding in true doctrine and uprightness of life.
Canon 804 §2. The local Ordinary [normally a bishop] is to be careful that those who are appointed teachers of religion in schools, even non-Catholic ones, are outstanding in true doctrine, in the witness of their Christian life, and in their teaching ability.
Canon 806 §1. The diocesan Bishop has the right to watch over and inspect the Catholic schools situated in his territory, even those established or directed by religious institutes. He also has the right to issue directives concerning the general regulation of Catholic schools: these directives apply also to schools conducted by members of a religious institute, although they retain their autonomy in the internal management of their schools.

The thing is, Catholic schools habitually hire non-Catholic and even non-Christian employees, up to and including teachers, and the Archdiocese of Indianapolis hasn’t make a peep about that, to my knowledge. I’d be surprised if they had, given that it’s a longstanding practice of Catholic schools, hospitals, charities, and even parish offices. Yet if beliefs that are, you know, Catholic are key to being ‘outstanding in true doctrine’—and I’d hope most Catholic bishops would feel that they are—then how in the name of Elvis is it okay to violate one aspect of Canon 802, but then trot it out as a reason to fire someone for transgressing a different aspect of the exact same canon? How come having a teacher who denies Catholic doctrine as a Protestant or an observant Jew or even an atheist is fine, but having a teacher who denies Catholic doctrine [4] as a gay man is not?

Someone could argue that, e.g., Jews and Protestants are of different faith traditions, and faith is a supernatural gift rather than a matter of natural law, so it isn’t fair to hold them to the same standard. Fine. But why do the beliefs of a gay man (perhaps devoutly religious; look at Pete Buttigieg) count for nothing in this equation? If his religious tradition and convictions inform him that gay sex is intrinsically innocent, then of course we as Catholics disagree, but are we also saying that his religion has somehow ceased to be a religion for that reason? Are we saying that it’s okay to hire Jews and Protestants as long as they’re Catholics? And what about the agnostic or the atheist employee, whose absence of belief or positive disbelief are also described by the Church as being contrary to natural reason? If there are any (and it’s not unlikely), has Archbishop Thompson come down on them?

Maybe canons can be applied with prudent, pastoral consideration by bishops; maybe they can even bent as long as they’re not broken; I don’t know, I’m not a canonist. If they can, I think the Archbishop has in fact acted with great imprudence and in a profoundly unpastoral manner. Applying canons strictly only when it targets LGBTQ people is homophobic, even in the very restrictive definition I gave to it in this post from a few years ago (dating to before I’d lost all moral confidence in the hierarchy). The Catholic tendency to scapegoat gay men is unjust and unreasonable, contrary to the explicit teaching of the Church, and damaging to LGBTQ people in general, especially young people.

Moreover, it causes the exact thing it’s typically framed to avoid: scandal. The world at large already knows the Catholic Church thinks gay sex is wrong. It’s often one of the few Catholic doctrines they do know, in contrast to little things like the Real Presence. Accenting the teaching on homosexuality is not nearly such an urgent necessity as people who are extremely comfortable with that teaching tend to insist. But what a great mass of those outside the Catholic Church do think, is that the Church hates gay people, and that that’s where the teaching comes from. The latter is, I believe, false. Is the former false too?

Think about it. When an archbishop singles out gay people who live out of line with Catholic beliefs and ignores straight people who do the same thing, what message does that send? Not just to gay people and to the world at large, but to the very students they are trying to form as Catholics? Doesn’t it matter that they’re being presented with a decision that, at the absolute best, is going to look like a homophobic double standard? and in the exact, perfect situation where they could have been given a beautiful example of how to respect and embrace people whom we deeply disagree with?

It’s been said that when the Vandals invaded Africa, St Augustine remarked, ‘God has called us to evangelize the nations, and he has just brought the nations to our door.’ How much more is that true of people who aren’t marauding through the countryside in full Conan-mode?

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[1] Kindly don’t come to me with any ‘He wasn’t going to be fired, they just wouldn’t have renewed his contract!’ nonsense. When you’re relying on a job, losing it is losing it, and the pedantic reasons offered by your ex-boss for why it isn’t his fault do not matter.

[2] For instance, the obligation not to murder people is an obligation we know by natural law [3], an extension of the morally intuitive Silver Rule (do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you); it comes from God like all right and wrong does, but it didn’t need to be specifically revealed to us by supernatural means: the natural witness of conscience and intellect are enough. By contrast, the obligation to get baptized is something we could never get to just by thinking it out. It was revealed by the personal command of Christ, and has since been passed on from one person to another. The Church claims not only that having gay sex is wrong, but that we can know it’s wrong apart from revelation, by natural conscience and reasoning.

[3] I don’t actually subscribe to natural law theory myself, but I’m trying to articulate the argument as well and fairly as I can.

[4] Always supposing the teachers in question do deny Catholic doctrine. Again, that’s plausible and statistically likely, not certain.

Review: "I'm Gay" by Eugene Lee Yang

Every single courageous act of coming out chips away at the curse of homophobia. Most importantly it’s destroyed within yourself, and that act creates the potential for its destruction where it exists in friends, family, and society.

—Anthony Venn-Brown, A Life of Unlearning

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Photo by Noam Galai

Eugene Lee Yang of the Try Guys (a foursome who try weird new experiences on YouTube) recently released a coming out video, simply titled I’m Gay. It tells his story wordlessly, through dancing and music, and while ‘interpretive dance’ sounds … well, put bluntly, pretty fucking stupid to anybody who grew up in my generation, this video floored me. I first saw it on Saturday and I’ve already watched it six or seven times, as well as his making-of video. It’s stunning. And I am not the first to observe that, of the possible ways, an intricately designed, visually spectacular internet video of interpretive dance is arguably the gayest way to tell people that you’re gay.

The story is arranged in six scenes, corresponding to the six colors of a typical Pride flag: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Yang tells his archetypal yet fairly complex story with incredible economy—only a single scene (the red) lasts longer than one minute, and every movement is choreographed to communicate its meaning vividly. The best way I can review it is just to describe it, pointing out a few of the symbols that stood out to me. I’ll take the scenes one by one, adding the keywords from the making-of video.

The Red Scene: Nature

This presents Yang in a family setting. A coffee table surrounded by a couch and two chairs sits in front of a red wall, with father, mother standing behind, brother and sister on the couch on either side of Yang; he is dressed in an androgynous red costume representing his different-ness, while his family are in grey, suggesting that they have not yet taken a side, perhaps not recognized a conflict. Childhood, playfulness, and innocence are the salient characteristics of most of the children’s movements. At first their playfulness is not gendered, their mother’s beauty and their father’s rigidity are equal ingredients in all three; but their play soon begins to be an imitation of the same-sex parent—except Yang, who begins imitating his mother more than his father. The camera pulls out more and more, away from the wall, showing that its confines are artificial and belie the real shape and size of the room and that there are large windows letting in bright light further off. When Yang is about to use his mother’s lipstick, his father slaps it out of his hand and hits him; then the family marches offscreen into the next scene.

The Orange Scene: Nurture

A large crowd of people dressed mostly in grey, American clothing (save for Yang, who is in orange-colored clothes that seem to be some variety of hanbok, traditional Korean garb) are marching into a room full of benches. This is stated in the commentary to represent school and work as well, but the primary imagery chosen is that of a church, with a cross-bearing pulpit and two candelabra full of bright orange candles. The main mass of people march in an ordered pattern, sometimes covering their eyes or grabbing their heads as if in pain or anger. Yang’s dancing and leaping become wilder and more joyful as he goes, until one of the grey-clad people stops him, moving his body into a rigid, pious posture like the others, then forcing him to bow and dismissing him. Yang takes a seat in a pew with a toothy smile, and the grey clothes of the others shift to white and black: sides are being taken, opposition expressed. The man behind the pulpit is in white, as are the people on the far side of the aisle from Yang, whose side is in black; the pastor figure begins making violent gestures like a fundamentalist preacher, and the camera zooms in on Yang’s face as he looks away.

The Yellow Scene: Love

This scene is particularly complex in its action. The music shifts suddenly to a lighter passage, building gradually through the scene. Sitting on a bench in front of a stand of trees and sunflowers and golden streetlamps, dressed in a vest and yellow trousers, Yang sees a girl in black dancing. The floor is covered in yellow leaves, as if signifying the organic change that is about to take place. He gets up to dance with her, and they leap and swirl for a while, until he sees another figure, a male, also dressed in yellow trousers. He moves into a pas de deux with him, with acrobatic, extraordinarily graceful movements. At first the two men move away from the girl and she moves more slowly after them. Then the men briefly move back: Yang reconnects with her, and she gives a kindly gesture connecting the two men again. (Yang describes her as representing the genuine ally, helping him discover and accept himself.) The other man lays himself on the ground, catching Yang in a suspended hold and slowly lowering him onto his body. They are about to kiss as the scene changes.

The Green Scene: Community

Here Yang appears in an elegant, sequined, deep green drag costume with a large pompadour wig, going down a set of stairs, greeting and embracing other drag queens and women as they head down to a dance floor. Their costumes are in an assortment of rainbow colors, but green predominates, at once dark and lush. The music has become energetic again, and characters dance for a few moments—then a figure in white, shown only from behind, approaches them, his fingers in the shape of a gun: likely a tribute to the mass shooting at Pulse three years ago. The dancers pause; then the outer ring ducks out of sight, then the rest, leaving only Yang visible, his face fearful as he raises his hands as if to stop the shooter, but then arms reach up from below and pull him out of the frame.

The Blue Scene: Hate

This is maybe the toughest part of the video to watch. We see Yang from above, in a crowd of anonymous white-clad people, bloodied and being kicked from every side. He is dressed only in a pair of jeans that are much longer than his legs; he cannot walk, cannot escape. The brutalizers disperse suddenly, and the camera moves down, showing him pulling himself along the ground, a blue dumpster and garbage bags behind him. Suddenly his family reappears: his mother and brother are now in black instead of grey, and his father and sister are now in white. His mother and brother move to help him up, but his father and sister begin fighting them, and before long his family are all fighting each other and slide out of the shot; Yang is pushed onto the ground again as they leave, and lies there, convulsing, trying to get up. Darkly echoing the first scene with the red lipstick, Yang touches the red blood on his mouth as he finally manages to sit up, then stand.

The Purple Scene: Pride

Yang is again in an arresting drag outfit, indigo shading into violet. He rises from the ground, at first with his back to the camera, but he quickly turns, anxious in his beauty. Crowds of people, some in white, some in black, surround him; some of those dressed in black reach out as if to caress or encourage, some of those in white shove or paw him, but most are busy yelling at each other as he slowly walks forward, finally reaching a point beyond the crowd; as he does, the shot switches to a distant and unfocused one that slowly pulls back in to his face. The music climaxes and stops, and we hear the angry arguments behind, but the shot lingers on Yang’s face: uncomfortable, anxious, defiant, the lips moving slightly, the eyes going back and forth uncertainly and then—just a couple of seconds before the scene ends, it all smooths out. Yang’s mouth is set, his eyes steady, his brows un-knotted. A peaceful, self-assured dignity closes the scene.

Credits

The credits play over a final, narrative-less scene. Yang is dressed in a luxuriant robe, apparently an open-breasted version of the shenyi (a traditional Chinese robe for men), silver and turquoise in color with what looks like a tea-green obi (a Japanese garment that’s a little reminiscent of a corset), seated alone in the room from the red scene, now with the encroaching wall removed. He rises, gesturing with the magnificent trailing sleeves that had at first appeared to be a gown; as if in response, six figures from the green scene—one in each color: red, purple, blue, orange, yellow, and green—file in. When they have all taken their positions, mirroring the arrangement of the family from the beginning, Yang sits down again in the center, and the legend For the LGBTQIA+ Community appears on the screen.

This is one of the most powerful and visually captivating short videos I’ve ever seen. I rank it with the music videos for Hunger or Spectrum by Florence + the Machine. I recommend it to anyone with a taste for dance or design, or anyone who cares about LGBT issues. Or really, anybody who’s open to watching it. Hats off to Eugene Lee Yang for a beautiful piece of art.

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Five Quick Takes

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Readers may have noticed I’m posting more often; I’m trying to adjust to the schedule and volume Patheos is going to want from me (two or three posts a week at five hundred words minimum). No fixed date yet for the change-over, but I did want to suggest to my Patreon sponsors (thank you for your support!) that now might be a good time if you want to make adjustments to your pledges, since supporting three or four posts a month at $X is quite a different thing from supporting a dozen posts a month at the same rate.

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I’ve heard about the clash between the Jesuit school that won’t fire a gay-married teacher and the Indianapolis archdiocese that won’t let the school call itself Catholic so long as it perseveres in its refusal. My initial impression is ‘unimpressed with the archdiocese,’ but I’m waiting to weigh in until I have more facts at my disposal. For the present, I’ll say only that the archdiocese seems to have a better case, canon-law-wise, than it is being given credit for in some quarters; and that I am not mollified by this.

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Yours truly with the inimitable Grant Hartley, whose workshop on queer culture for Christians was a delight.

Revoice’s second year continues to release its effects into me. On the positive side of things, Johanna Finegan’s excellent keynote is now available on YouTube, Eve Tushnet’s excellent workshop on celibacy has been posted on her blog, and I bought three copies of Lead Them Home’s excellent book Guiding Families of LGBT+ Loved Ones and gave one to my pastor.

On the more melancholy side, a number of friends of mine left the Side B community shortly after the conference, and that’s been hard for us. It’s always a little gloomy to see a fellow laborer leave the field you’re in, even if you’re confident they will continue to do good work.

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Today is the memorial of SS John Fisher and Thomas More: Fisher was the sole dissenting voice among the English bishops, imprisoned and eventually martyred, for refusing to sign the Act of Supremacy; Sir Thomas More, martyred on similar grounds, was actually executed on 6 July, but I think they slated the two together to give Fisher a little more notice.

The film A Man For All Seasons was my introduction to St Thomas More, and his story was a major element in my initial opening to Catholicism; I encountered it at a time when I believed that sincere, consistent Catholics went to hell, and it was mighty hard to maintain that belief in the face of his obvious devotion to Christ. Who could forget that simple and magnificent last confession: ‘I die the king’s good servant; but God’s first.’ I nearly took him as my patron saint for Confirmation—St Joan and St John of the Cross were strong contenders as well, and they remain part of my little family of favorite intercessors.

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Tomorrow being Corpus Christi and also my parish’s picnic, I made cupcakes in honor of the Real Presence: red velvet—first time making them!—for the Precious Blood, with white frosting to represent the Host, and silver foil wrappers for the chalice (I couldn’t find golden ones). I also have some white and red sprinkles, with which to make white cross designs on the frosting, and to dot them with red spots of blood as if they were Eucharistic miracles, because Catholicism is just that metal.

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Sometimes You Really Need a F***ing Break From This Stuff

CW: Sexual abuse, homophobic imagery

It has been a grueling few days.

The day before yesterday, I went with a friend of mine to the Waterfront Marriott in Baltimore. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is meeting there, and my friend was asked at the last minute to help provide music for the Mass; I went along to look after my friend's baby during the evening Mass. Being surrounded by bishops was itself something of a trial for both of us: my friend had been horribly mistreated while working for the Archdiocese, badly enough to need therapy (and badly enough that the Archdiocese footed the bill for said therapy). For myself, the revolting, myopic conduct of the bishops over the sex abuse crisis had me seriously wondering whether I'd get hauled out of the hotel if I just spat in one of their faces. (I didn't, so I guess we'll never know.)

Yesterday, I went to the same place with a different friend, the lovely and talented Eve Tushnet. The Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests held a press conference outside the hotel that evening, and she and I went in support. SNAP had apparently sent a letter to Cardinal DiNardo, the current president of the USCCB, asking him to come out and meet them. Neither he nor any representative of the episcopal conference was in evidence. The little group, about half a dozen people, read stories of their own experiences of abuse; the one that hurt the most to hear was from a man singled out and groomed by a priest whom his family adored, until one night when he and the priest were having dinner alone together. The young man was excited to have such an important, attentive friend. Then the priest drove them to a secluded area and assaulted him. After some groping, the young man told the priest to stop. Eventually the cleric complied, telling him angrily that 'I thought you were ready for my special attention,' and that he was a disappointment to God.

I tried to take today slow and easy, to detox from all this. And then, for no reason, in a group devoted to discussing Aquinas, this:

The Nazi Party imprisoned, tortured, and killed gay men. And yes, some of the early Nazis were gay; that is, until Hitler betrayed them, having them murdered en masse on the Night of the Long Knives, up to and including the man who had been maybe his only real friend, Ernst Roehm. But sure, we're a bunch of fucking Nazis because we put a rainbow on something.

I am sick to death of all of this.

I can't write any more right now. Pray for me, and for the people who behave this way.

The Forked Tongue of Bishop Tobin

He is the son of one Saywell, he dwelt in Prating-row; and he is known of all that are acquainted with him, by the name of Talkative in Prating-row, and notwithstanding his fine tongue, he is but a sorry fellow. … Religion hath no place in his heart, or house, or conversation; all he hath lieth in his tongue, and his religion is to make a noise therewith.

—John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

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CW: Sexual abuse and sacrilege.

Bishop Tobin of Providence (of whom I had not heard before) tweeted several days ago that Catholics must not attend gay Pride events, since they are incompatible with Catholicism and harmful to children. He was promptly hung, drawn, and quartered by half the internet.

He deserved it. This is the man also had the gall to say, about a year ago, that back when he was the auxiliary Bishop of Pittsburgh, he did know about cases of child abuse but didn’t do anything about them because ‘My responsibilities … did not include clergy assignments or clergy misconduct … I was not contacted by the Grand Jury, interviewed, nor mentioned in their report [well have a fucking cookie Your Excellency] … In my experience, the Diocese of Pittsburgh has been very responsible and transparent in responding to allegations of sexual abuse’—which is why, when four priests of that diocese took photos of a fifteen-year-old boy stripped naked and posed as Christ crucified, we all learned about it at the time, and not decades later when the truth was forcibly extracted by the pressure of the law and incorporated into the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report. The responsibility and transparency of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, we have these to thank for the fact that Fr Richard Zula was removed from ministry and reported to the authorities the first time a complaint was made about ‘violent sexual activity with a minor,’ as opposed to, say, letting him rake up one hundred and thirty criminal charges and two confessions of his own before informing the authorities. The snake who learned about cases just like these and decided ‘Not my area’ wants to warn us about other people’s conduct being ‘harmful to children.’

Is Bishop Tobin the most hypocritical and corrupt member of the USCCB? I doubt it. Have another cookie.

I was frankly outraged to see Bishop Strickland of Tyler speaking in Tobin’s defense, given that Strickland was one of the few American bishops for whom I had any respect left, since he seemed like he was going to practice some real, public repentance and reform. [1] That list is now down to pretty much just Bishop Persico of Erie, who actually met with the Grand Jury and has made some concrete effort to deal with his diocese’s guilt. Whether Tobin's right (which, no) is irrelevant. After the way he's behaved, he, like many, many other Catholic bishops, should be deposed and degraded yesterday.

I remain a Catholic (one with sins of my own that I cannot take back) by God’s grace. Nothing else. As Flannery O’Connor said, the one thing that makes the Church bearable is that she feeds us Jesus. Literally, and in spite of herself.

It rips me up inside to think of people who lose that because the behavior of her priests was so sick and sadistic, and that of her bishops so self-centered and cowardly, that they couldn’t bear to be near it. Those for whom a golden cross evokes memories not of the gift of the Eucharist or the tender Heart that endured the Passion, but of unwanted hands and tongues and eyes. And it disgusts me that there are still Catholics willing to go to bat for the same bishops who allowed this stuff to go on unchecked, these hirelings that care nothing for the sheep, and blame those who leave for being driven away.

I’m staying. I’m staying for the Eucharist, which is Jesus. I hope those who have been driven away come back for Jesus. But I don’t blame them for running from the wolves; nobody should. Nor do I blame them for not trusting shepherds (hell, I don’t trust shepherds), when they know shepherds chiefly as men who bring wolves into the fold and tell everybody they’re sheepdogs.

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[1] In fairness to Bishop Strickland, perhaps he didn’t know about Bishop Tobin’s atrocious remarks last August. They weren’t front-page news.

"Stop Crying."

His feet among the tulips, his hands brush the roses and the lilies.

‘This is love,’ he says, laying his fingers on my throat,

Forcing me down to bow.

‘I know it hurts, I know it’s harsh,

I know it feels nothing like any loves you know,

But you have to trust me,’

As I writhe and gasp and my eyes blur:

‘This is what real love is.’

The thorns scrape on my skin

And I cannot feel my knees or my wrists.

‘This is love. Stop crying.’

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The New York Times ran a profile of gay priests recently, with the tagline: ‘It is not a closet. It is a cage.’ The response to it from a number of spokesmen for Catholicism, via blogs and social media has been, shall we say, cool. Jennifer Fitz (of whom I had not heard before, but I gather that she is a generally and justly respected blogger in conservative Catholic circles) wrote a reply that has been shared a good deal.

I’ve been reading about your plight in the New York Times. So let’s go ahead and clear something up right now: Most Catholics don’t give a rip who it is you’re not having sex with. We know that abstinence is hard. Those of us practicing NFP probably don’t have a ton of sympathy for you, because at least you aren’t obliged to spend all night lying in bed next to the person you’re not having sex with, but when we can get over ourselves, sure, we get it. … Also, when you took your vows, the whole ‘celibacy’ thing wasn’t exactly foisted on you by surprise. … Those of us doing the Catholic thing know very well what it’s like to wrestle with temptation. Honestly we don’t give a crap about your tormented coming-out story, because we know it’s a distraction. Satan wants to keep you constantly looking inward, gazing at your story of shame and pity … You don’t have to be part of the angst-obsessed intelligentsia who show off how erudite they are by daring say in the NYT words that make 6th grade boys snicker. You could just be a Catholic. … I know it’s a struggle. I know this because everyone struggles with their vocations. That’s how life is. Come struggle with us.

In a similar vein, Fr Thomas Petri OP of the Dominican House of Studies down in DC, which I’ve had the pleasure of visiting more than once, had the following to say on Twitter:

I have no patience for priests who ‘come out’ as gay and insist that the priesthood is some sort of cage. Nobody forced you to become a priest. The faithful don’t need to deal with your issues, pal. They don’t deserve to deal with any of our issues. We serve them. Period. … The last thing the faithful need are priests who make their sexuality their primary identity. ‘Being gay’ and ‘coming out’ may seem to you, Father, as being true to your authentic self, but that’s contrary to your ordination, which makes your authentic self a person in persona Christi in the service of the people of God. If you can’t live that way, if you can’t give yourself freely, without making your sexuality ‘a thing’ in this equation, then be a man, be noble, and as our Holy Father Pope Francis says: leave the priesthood. … A Father cannot help his children if he’s a broken distracted mess of a man requiring them to pick him up and set him aright.

Let’s take a second look at those responses, in the context of the aforementioned New York Times piece. The NYT:

Gregory Greiten was 17 years old when the priests organized the game. … Leaders asked each boy what he would rather be: burned over 90 percent of his body, paraplgeic, or gay. Each chose to be scorched or paralyzed. Not one uttered the word ‘gay.’ They called the game the Game of Life. The lesson stuck. Seven years later, he climbed up into his seminary dorm window and dangled one leg over the edge. ‘I really am gay,’ Father Greiten, now a priest near Milwaukee, remembered telling himself for the first time. ‘It was like a death sentence.’ … Many priests have held the most painful stories among themselves for decades: The seminarian who died by suicide, and the matches from a gay bar found afterward in his room. The priest friends who died of AIDS. The feeling of coming home to an empty rectory every night.
… Father Greiten decided it was time to end his silence. At Sunday Mass, during Advent, he told his suburban parish he was gay, and celibate. They leapt to their feet in applause. … His archbishop, Jerome E. Listecki of Milwaukee, issued a statement saying that he wished Father Greiten had not gone public. Letters poured in calling him ‘satanic,’ ‘gay filth,’ and a ‘monster’ who sodomized children.

And Mrs Fitz:

Most Catholics don’t give a rip … We know that abstinence is hard. Those of us practicing NFP probably don’t have a ton of sympathy for you, because at least you aren’t obliged to spend all night lying in bed next to the person you’re not having sex with … But same-sex attraction? Yawn. … We don’t give a crap about your tormented coming-out story …

Concluding with the valediction:

Your Real Catholic Friends

Returning to half a dozen selections from the NYT:

Father Bob Bussen … was outed about 12 years ago after he held Mass for the LGBTQ community. ‘Life in the closet is worse than scapegoating,’ he said. ‘It is not a closet. It is a cage.’
Today, training for the priesthood in the United States usually starts in or after college. But until about 1980, the Church often recruited boys to start in ninth grade—teenagers still in the throes of puberty.
‘My family does not know that I struggle with this. I’ve never told them. I believe the Church’s teaching on marriage, sexuality—just trying to understand what it means for me. It may sound kind of strange. I feel like, what I struggle with, I hope I can help other Catholics not lose their faith.’ [From a gay priest who asked not to be identified]
‘This is not the whole story of who I am. But if you don’t want to know this about me, do you really want to know me? It’s a question I’d invite the people of God to ponder.’ — Father Steve Wolf
All priests must wrestle with their vows of celibacy, and the few priests who are publicly out make clear they are chaste.
‘Why stay? It is an amazing life. I am fascinated with the depth and sincerity of parishioners, the immense generosity. The negativity out there doesn’t match what is in my daily life, when I see the goodness of people. I tune into that, because it sustains me.’ — Father Michael Shanahan

And returning to Fr Petri:

I have no patience for priests who … insist that the priesthood is some sort of cage. Nobody forced you to become a priest. The faithful don’t need to deal with your issues, pal. They don’t deserve to deal with any of our issues. … ‘Being gay’ and ‘coming out’ may seem to you, Father, as being true to your authentic self, but that’s contrary to your ordination … If you can’t give yourself freely, without making your sexuality ‘a thing’ in this equation, then be a man … : leave the priesthood.

I would have hoped no thoughtful Catholic could write anything so callous. My cold comfort is that maybe people like Mrs Fitz and Fr Petri who are making these unfeeling remarks didn’t actually read the article with any serious attention; their scorn, ignorance, and cruelty may be far less deliberately malicious than they appear. And it does afford some small encouragement to think that there may be less deliberate malice in the world than a glance would suggest.

But let’s analyze the outlook these reactions represent.

First, Mrs Fitz and Fr Petri both display a startling inattention to what this New York Times article was actually about. It wasn’t about gay sex. Yes, the article does deal frankly with the fact that not all priests observe the vow of celibacy that they made; but—as intrinsically important and wrong as that infidelity is—it isn’t the point. Nor does any one of the priests in question, named or anonymous, make any complaint whatever about celibacy. That isn’t what they’re focusing on, still less what they’re objecting to. They say in so many words that it is being forced to keep silent about their orientation that is painful, isolating, and (in some cases at least) deeply damaging. The cultural demand of secrecy, not the canonical demand of celibacy, is what they are talking about.

Second, the confident assurances Mrs Fitz gives that married lay Catholics like herself entirely understand the difficulties of celibate gay priests. These assurances are so astonishingly off-base that, for me (and I dare say for many other gay people), they completely wreck her credibility. Comparing the temporary difficulty of being unable to have sex with your spouse, with a hopeless dread of one’s own sexuality that’s so severe it leads some men to consider suicide, is worse than insensitive; it is revolting. Speaking for my own adolescence—and I was spared more than many gay teens—there were mornings when I woke up, and the first thing I felt was bitter disappointment that God hadn’t killed me in my sleep. Because then I wouldn’t have to face another day of being gay, and dealing with the ceaseless torment of being caught between my deepest desires and my deepest convictions. And Mrs Fitz has the gall to answer that, not only with a yawn, but with the statement that she and those like her, who say in so many words that they care nothing about these years of agony, are our real friends.

[I'd usually put a picture here for spacing, but suicide pictures are creepy as fuck, so no.]

More exactly, it probably never occurred to her that these years of agony exist. How should it? Straight people don’t usually have to deal with the doubt, self-hatred, and anxiety that gay people do. And she’s already said she neither intends nor wants to listen to us about those things: she’s already decided what is and isn’t important in our lives. What we feel, think, or say doesn’t matter.

I take this to be the fruit of a deeper and equally misguided idea: that, because we each have a cross to bear, therefore everyone’s cross is equally heavy, or at least that my neighbor’s cross is as heavy for him as mine is for me. What this would amount to in practice, would be that nobody really suffers more than anybody else, at least not proportionately. And somehow, a theoretical equality of suffering always seems to open the sluice-gates for those who want to tell others to stop complaining: if I’m enduring my suffering, and yours can’t really be worse than mine, then I don’t have to be any more compassionate to you than I feel like the world in general is to me. That's not the truth. Our crosses are tailor-made and, therefore, undemocratic in the highest degree; so that pity, courtesy, humility, generosity, solidarity, and gratitude would have a place to flourish.

Nor do Mrs Fitz or Fr Petri once touch on the fact that so much of the pain of being gay in the Catholic Church comes not from inside us, but from outside. Christian culture in America frequently treats us as legitimate targets for everything from tasteless jokes to scapegoating for terrorist attacks. And Catholic subculture is not an exception. No matter how emphatically or how often Catholics talk about intrinsic human dignity and the importance of avoiding bigotry and being mindful of the difference between a person and their actions, we’ve seen you talk on Facebook about how agents of the gay agenda are trying to corrupt schoolchildren. We’ve heard your chuckling remarks about faggots when you thought no outsiders were listening. Look at the example the NYT article opened with. What do you think it does to a person, to be told that everyone you know would rather be paralyzed than simply happen to be gay? To be told that just feeling attraction to other boys instead of girls is as bad as, worse than, being tortured with fire over your entire body?

Maybe they think that rehearsing the point that ‘You are more than your sexuality’ is what’s called for here. I would like to assure them that LGBTQ people are in fact very well aware of this. We did not need well-meaning heterosexuals to obtain this information. Like Fr Wolf said in the article, of course this doesn’t exhaust who we are; but when fellow believers can’t stand to hear about it at all, when the mere mention prompts lectures and even rebukes, that sends a message too.

Think for a moment, straight reader. Maybe you don’t think of yourself as bringing up your sexuality all that often. Maybe you aren’t dating anybody currently; maybe you prefer to be private about your personal life. But if you did want to talk about an ex, would you hesitate to do so because of how others might react? Would you try to think of neutral language you could use to disguise your former partner’s gender? Would you be ashamed or scared to comment, just conversationally, that a member of the opposite sex is attractive? Would you feel the need to disguise your natural, spontaneous sympathy with art or entertainment that depicts heterosexual relationships? Would you be frightened to tell your coworkers, your friends, your own family that you had a crush on somebody?

It’s this that starts to reveal why so many of us find the closet suffocating. ‘Coming out’ and ‘not coming out’ aren’t the options presented to LGBTQ people, priests or otherwise: the options we’re presented with are ‘coming out’ and ‘staying in.’ And staying in is quite a different thing: it is actively concealing, avoiding, minimizing, and distorting all discussion of our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. How can anyone be expected to develop a healthy sense of self or normal, mature relationships while at the same time gagging one whole side of their character? Some people do manage to thrive even under those conditions, thank God; but I do not believe that we should be imposing those conditions, even as cultural standards. And maybe sexual orientation shouldn’t be that important, considered in a vacuum. But human beings don’t live in a vacuum. We can’t.

If Catholics truly want to support us in our lives of faith, they need to be prepared to hear about the actual content of those lives. The solidarity that Mrs Fitz and Catholics like her seem prepared to offer, will have nothing to do with that uncomfortable, unattractive, alien content; it will not be challenged to consider the privileges it enjoys which some do not, nor be called upon to make a deliberate effort to imaginatively empathize. That kind of ‘real friendship’ is worthless.

Fr Petri’s categorical objection to priests sharing their trials with parishioners was disquieting as well. Priests devote themselves to the service of God and the laity, yes; but priests are not supermen, and every Christian needs the support of other Christians, including those whose state in life is unlike his own. Would any Catholic seriously propose that a priest cannot learn from the holiness of the stay-at-home mother of six, the teenage girl with untreatable leukemia, the grandfather who just hit his seventeenth anniversary of sobriety? This desire to segregate the clergy from the laity is, precisely, clericalism: a snobbishness that sees in the laity only children to tend, and not brothers and sisters who may far outstrip their fathers, and who, in any case, have their own gifts from the Holy Ghost which were given to them for the good of the Body—including the good of priests. (St Catherine of Siena, a Dominican sister, remonstrated with the Apostolic See until it returned to the apostolic city.) Holiness does not only move ‘downward’ through the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Nor should priests who serve a God conceived in the womb of an unwedded peasant girl, living in a backwater of an unimportant province of a long-dead empire, expect it to.

Not that any of the priests in the NYT article actually said that the laity needed to be available as a support network for priests. Unless the mere mention that a priest is gay places such a colossal emotional burden on the laity, that it implicitly constitutes a priest abdicating his pastoral responsibility. Personally, I don’t think gay people are quite that defined by our sexuality; I think many laymen get it, and are willing to struggle alongside us, like real Catholic friends.

But this caste-like idea of superiority aside, such hostility to priests sharing their struggles (or their peace) is still misguided. Priests who seem unapproachable will not be approached; priests who seem inimitable will not be imitated. Catholics can rattle on all we like about needing people to model chastity, but without concrete examples of, for instance, gay chastity, the idea won’t land. Without the context that makes the model inspiring, it won’t inspire. How are young Catholics who begin to recognize their own attraction to the same sex supposed to recognize also that they could have a future, if the only people that they know have that same desire are people who have abandoned the Catholic faith?

I venture to add that, for some people, a veneer of perfection can be repellent rather than attractive: in the naïve it can provoke despair (‘How could I ever be like that?’), while in the cynical, it prompts suspicion (‘What’s he hiding?’). An authentic person is far more attractive, allowing the former to overcome his shyness and the latter to give trust a chance.

Chris Damian confronted another problem with this approach, one that is equal parts moral and practical.

Any priest who asserts that we both need greater transparency in the Church and also condemns those opening up about their particular experiences of sexual integration, is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. … This creates the present situation of hierarchical schizophrenia in responding to the Church’s crises. How can we expect the clergy to be honest about what is happening in their parishes when we expect them to dance carefully around what is happening within themselves?

This doesn’t mean that every gay priest must come out, which Damian acknowledges. It is certainly a personal decision. But it does mean that automatic rebuke for coming out is nonsensical. He goes on:

The laity want more honesty and transparency from priests. But over the last several decades, many in Church leadership have actively worked against this. … Father Petri is participating in the very practices that have perpetuated our crises: he is a priest in authority ridiculing other priests for being honest. Rather than resolving the problem, he is perpetuating it. I suspect that Father Petri means no ill will, but malice is not required to create harm. … The fact that Father Petri misses that the article is directed toward those like him and, instead, claims that the article makes demands on the laity demonstrates the manipulative blindness of a bureaucrat.

One thing the Church needs as a prerequisite to the reform she so badly requires today is unflinching honesty. And you cannot simultaneously encourage and punish the same quality. If you reward dissimulation, secrecy, and bald-faced lies about same-sex attraction, which isn't even a sin, how on earth is anyone supposed to find the courage to be sincere, forthcoming, and accurate about sins and crimes?

The toxicity of the closet, and of the priestly culture of hush that it’s interwoven with, is something I don’t believe most Catholics have faced, not because they’re completely heartless, but because they don’t want to; and I suspect they don’t want to because they are afraid that if they think about the closet simply in terms of what LGBTQ people want and need, it will threaten their faith. And not many Catholics are ever in the mood to have their faith threatened, especially right now, when threats to the credibility of the whole hierarchy are daily features of the news. But that’s not good enough. Not facing problems doesn’t make them go away. And castigating gay people—even when we go out of our way to affirm our orthodoxy and our chastity—for asking to be known and loved as we are, does less than nothing to confront the sins, or heal the wounds, of deceitfulness and corruption that the Church is in the throes of.

Do you want to show us genuine friendship, Catholic? Genuine love, support, and affection, of the kind that every person (gay or straight) needs to thrive as a Christian, as a human?

Then listen to us. Talk with us. Pray with us. Laugh with us, eat with us, weep with us. Go to art galleries with us, invite us to your eight-year-old’s birthday party, watch cheesy fifties sci-fi movies with us, have us over for poker night. Do the normal stuff that life consists in, and include us in it; and let us tell you what’s on our hearts when that’s what we need. Because, now and again, every one of us needs that.

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An Open Letter to Archbishop Aquila

Then Fear said: I am Pity that was dead.

And Shame said: I am Sorrow comforted.

And Lust said: I am Love.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Ballad of Life

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To the Most Reverend Samuel Aquila, Archbishop of Denver;

from Gabriel Blanchard, a layman of the Ordinariate of the Chair of Peter.

I trust Your Excellency will excuse my boldness in writing to you, despite the fact that we have no personal acquaintance, and that I am no one in particular ecclesiastically speaking. Yet I write nevertheless, hoping against hope that Your Excellency may read it and consider what I have to say; and, additionally, with the more ordinary hope that others may read it and get some good out of it.

Last month’s event ‘Gender Matters,’ as Your Excellency doubtless knows, drew criticism from gay activists and sympathizers, not least because of its prominent featuring of Andrew Comiskey and his ministry Desert Stream, generally classified as an ex-gay organization promoting reparative therapy. The opening remarks that ‘the power and authority of Jesus Christ can heal any wound, forgive any sin, heal any disorder, if we truly put our faith in him,’ especially taken together with the caution that ‘the healing may not be immediate,’ certainly suggest SOCE (sexual orientation change efforts) to anyone familiar with the literature of the ex-gay movement.

I am familiar, since I was involved in the ex-gay movement in my teens, trying to rid myself of a persistent and almost exclusive attraction to other men that (I was told and believed firmly) was inconsistent with a Christian life. Though they seemed productive at the time, and though I most certainly needed counseling for a host of reasons and profited by it accordingly, my attractions finally proved intractable. Nonetheless, this did not alter my beliefs about Scripture; and when I was received into the Catholic Church a few years later, I embraced the whole of her teaching, including her teachings about chastity and marriage and homosexual sex. Without feigning any degree of heterosexuality, I confessed, and confess, the Catholic belief that God made marriage for one man and one woman to unite as one flesh, and that no other kind of union can licitly include sexual intimacy.

I offer this apologia, because I want to establish my complete orthodoxy as the ground of the following. I affirm the whole of the Catholic faith, including §§2357-2359 of the Catechism. Speaking thus as a son of the Church, and as a sheep to a shepherd, I implore Your Excellency to reëxamine SOCE and to disassociate the Archdiocese of Denver from it.

There are many reasons to do so. My own fruitless experience of SOCE says something; given my familial relationships and some experiences of abuse (even though my same-sex feelings predated the abuse, not the other way around), I should have been an ideal candidate for change, since I fit their mold so perfectly, but no change was effected. Even so, the primary negative of my experience was that it wasted so much time. There are those who have been involved in ex-gay ministries for years, decades even, and come away with stories that alternate between the ludicrous and the nightmarish; there are deep scientific and theological flaws in the whole ex-gay substructure; and SOCE is, after all, entirely unnecessary for any person to lead a virtuous life animated by the Spirit of God.

Samuel Brinton, the son of Baptist missionaries, attempted SOCE for two years, beginning at ten years old when he realized he was attracted to other boys rather than to girls and confided in his parents. The counselor to whom he was taken tried such techniques as aversion therapy: specifically, freezing or burning the child’s hands while displaying pictures of men touching. Twenty years later, he remained sexually attracted to men, but so terrified of physical contact with them that he could barely contemplate a friendly hug. He was also plagued by ongoing psychological issues such as thoughts of suicide, which, according to a 2009 study released by the APA, is almost nine times more common among people who have been through conversion therapy.

Matthew Shurka and Michael Ferguson, two other men who went into SOCE programs, report other toxic techniques. Shurka was forbidden to interact or even speak with his mother and sister for three years, on the ground that they were ‘feminizing influences,’ and was prescribed Viagra at the age of 18 to facilitate sexual intercourse with women—which, far from diminishing his same-sex impulses and despite his achieved popularity with other men, left him depressed, gaining weight, reluctant to leave the house, and abusing drugs. Ferguson was encouraged to cultivate rage against his parents, whose flawed upbringing methods (he was told) were responsible for his homosexual attractions; the notion here was that a sufficient degree of anger would allow him to break his attachment to his parents, and realize the heterosexuality they had effectively suppressed in him. And these are normal practices and narratives in the ex-gay world—the late Dr Joseph Nicolosi, head of NARTH (which Desert Stream recommends), told his male patients that their sexual desires came from flawed family dynamics, and that healing involved socializing with other men and trying to cultivate interest in typically masculine pursuits like sports, and to avoid the interests and company of women except for intercourse.

Love In Action (a ministry which no longer exists—solely because it has adopted the name Restoration Path) was founded in 1973, three years before Exodus International. However, one of LIA’s founders, John Evans—who is conspicuous by his absence from the ‘History’ section of Restoration Path’s current website; such omissions will become a theme—dropped out of the organization after his close friend and fellow member, Jack McIntyre, committed suicide when he could not change his orientation. John Smid, who ran LIA from 1986 to 2008, eventually dropped out of the ministry as well; in 2011 he stated publicly that he did not know of a single case in which someone had experienced a change from homosexuality to heterosexuality. 

Similarly, Exodus, which had been the biggest ex-gay organization in the world (serving largely as an umbrella group), was shuttered in 2013 by its head, Alan Chambers, a self-professed ex-gay man. In the apology that he issued upon closing down the ministry, Chambers too stated that he did not know of any successful cases of SOCE. This was a man who left an active gay lifestyle behind for the sake of Christ, married a woman, and devoted his career and his whole reputation to Exodus. He was not a man uninformed, prejudiced against ex-gay efforts and groups, or merely flowing with the times. He was personally, professionally, and theologically invested in SOCE. He wrote:

Our ministry has been public and therefore any acknowledgment of wrong must also be public. … It is strange to be someone who has both been hurt by the church’s treatment of the LGBT community, and also to be someone who must apologize for being part of the very system of ignorance that perpetuated that hurt. … 

I have heard many firsthand stories from people called ex-gay survivors. Stories of people who went to Exodus affiliated ministries or ministers for help only to experience more trauma. I have heard stories of shame, sexual misconduct, and false hope. … And then there is the trauma that I have caused. There were several years that I conveniently omitted my ongoing same-sex attractions. I was afraid … They brought me tremendous shame and I hid them in the hopes that they would go away. … The good that we have done at Exodus is overshadowed by all of this. 

Friends and critics alike have said that it’s not enough to simply change our message or website. I agree. … I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly ‘on my side’ who called you names like sodomite—or worse. … I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine. 

More than anything, I am sorry that so many have interpreted this religious rejection by Christians as God’s rejection. I am profoundly sorry that many have walked away from their faith and that some have chosen to end their lives.

These examples are not exceptional, Your Excellency. They are not statements that no person experiences some fluidity in their attractions, nor that a same-sex attracted person could never sacramentally marry someone of the opposite sex and lead a happy, holy life. These things are rare, the latter particularly so, but they do happen. But the history of these groups—including Desert Stream specifically—is not one of changed sexual orientations. It is a history of fruitless efforts culminating in resentment and despair, of psychological and physical torments, of promises broken, of double lives and clandestine abuse, and of perhaps the second-grossest scandal to the world that Christianity has produced in our age.

Turning from the sorry long-term results of most ex-gay ministry to its theoretical basis in theology and medical science, we may look to NARTH, which as noted before is suggested on Desert Stream’s website as an additional, specifically psychotherapeutic, resource. In addition to criticisms from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Psychological Association, and the revocations in 2011 and 2012 of its right to provide continuing education credits to therapists and of its tax-exempt nonprofit status, NARTH’s theory of the development of sexuality is not accepted by the broader medical, psychological, or psychiatric communities (in this country or abroad). Furthermore, the APA has declared that the practice of SOCE—the entire purpose for which NARTH exists—has shown no sound experimental evidence of working, and notes that some patients have later claimed to have been harmed by NARTH and its therapies. According to this APA document, studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s (when SOCE were still fairly mainstream) showed a high correspondence between these efforts and such negative effects as anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide.

The theory that ex-gay organizations usually advance of the etiology of homosexual attractions is that young men, growing up with an emotionally distant father and an overbearing mother, form an unmet need for male-male intimacy and an unduly feminine self-concept, usually exacerbated by peer rejection over ostensibly un-masculine traits. In puberty, this need becomes sexualized—a development that may be accompanied by same-sex sexual abuse and concomitant confusion—and attraction to men rather than women develops accordingly.

Now, there is no doubt that family and peer dynamics, and even a history of abuse, can influence a person’s sexual experience. But as a general account of the origin of homosexuality, this theory is quite useless. To begin with, plenty of heterosexual men share many or all of these experiences without developing any sexual interest in other men; conversely, there are many homosexual men who lack one or more of these supposedly key elements in the development of homosexual interest. Nor, to my knowledge, is there an explanation provided by any prominent SOCE advocate of why an unmet need for male intimacy should consistently be transformed into sexual attraction at puberty. After all, everyone experiences unmet needs and grave wounds in childhood, without necessarily looking to sex as a solution once we discover it. (This relates to the fact that many claims of ‘father wounds’ and the like in SOCE literature are phrased so generally that they amount to being Barnum statements: assertions that most people, on a casual reading, would tend to say were true of themselves.)

When we turn to female homosexuality, the argument becomes even muddier. Explanations of lesbianism from SOCE proponents include: a distant mother and an over-identifying father, mirroring the explanation for males; an abusive father and/or a timid, complacent, or complicit mother, leading to a loathing of men and a longing for authentic female intimacy; an experience of sexual assault from a man, causing fear and hatred of men and a compensatory turning to women; or an experience of sexual assault from a woman, prompting self-blame, curiosity, and experimentation. The explanations of lesbianism multiply to the point that almost anything seems apt to cause it. One begins to think that the explanations do not explain!

The point here is not to discredit, still less to embarass, individuals who personally report a change in their attractions; some people do experience natural fluidity, or find a single person who does not match their normal pattern of attraction but with whom they find a deep and lasting connection. The point is, these things cannot be compelled, cannot be reduced to a psychological technique, cannot be ‘prayed away.’ And organizations or individuals that claim to be able to deliver people from homosexual attractions are, at best, making a claim that hasn’t been demonstrated, and at worst is flatly false.

These therapeutic approaches are not only based in a theory of the origin of homosexuality that the professional mental health community does not endorse; the rhetoric that accompanies them is profoundly misleading, and frequently very damaging to young people. Take the banner saying that Satan delights in homosexuality. How many adolescent Catholics, perhaps just discovering same-sex feelings, saw that banner and thought, I am so disgusting I make Satan happy, or The Church doesn’t want me because I feel like this, or If I ever fail I’ll go to hell, or I can never tell anybody what a monster I am? Did Your Excellency stop to consider this? The shame, terror, and hurt that phrases like this—phrases practically never used of other sins at least equally grave—cause in young people is neither healthy nor holy. How many parents, frightened by the prospect of the devil getting his claws into their children, have pursued this line of thinking to the extreme, resorting to transgressions of privacy, threats, rejection, physical abuse, even expelling their children from their homes, in a desperate attempt to get them to ‘repent’ of something they never chose? These concerns are not alarmism; these things happen. I know young men and women who have been disowned or beaten, who have attempted suicide or cut into their own flesh. Hatred and violence directed at gay-identified people are not rare phenomena, nor harmless ones, as we learned all too bitterly in Orlando in 2016, and language like the language on this banner emboldens them.

Furthermore, the language of ‘healing’ and ‘victory,’ though rarely spelled out in so many words, all but invariably means ‘becoming heterosexual’ in the ears of those listening to this rhetoric. The speakers do not spell it out, because they know very well that homosexual desires do not simply go away—but rather than honestly acknowledging this, they continue to imply a radical change in attractions and ‘leaving homosexuality behind.’ Yet if challenged, they admit that a change in self-concept is what they really meant all along, and that there will still be ‘residual’ interest in the same sex. Which prompts two questions: first, what this ‘healing’ is of, if it is not of homosexual desire; and second, why they did not make themselves clear in the first place.

The frank, sorrowful renunciations of men like John Smid and Alan Chambers show that ex-gay ministers did not make themselves plain at first, because they have quietly moved the goal-posts: forsaking an orientation change that they realized they could not alter by effort, in favor of a new frame of mind that could be accomplished in an afternoon. Not that it would make anybody’s life easier if it were so accomplished. Call same-sex attractions what you will, the difficulty of living chastely with them will be much the same; save that, if one has to be secretive and dissemble and evade authentic discussion of one’s real feelings, that added burden may well break the proverbial camel’s back.

I beg Your Excellency: reconsider, investigate, and break off the archdiocesan connection to these so-called ministries. They will hurt your flock. I am speaking from my own experience; I am speaking from the experience of friends; I am speaking from the bulk of the psychological and psychiatric professions, who have rejected SOCE. The deliverance promised by these groups is a lie. The grace of chastity is possible, and the hope of glory, and strength to carry the crosses God gives us all. But that is not what these organizations have to offer; they are concealing a history of tears and even of blood, shed over a sexual orientation our Lord neither commanded nor promised. Please, Your Excellency, seek the truth and find it. Many hearts are depending upon you.

Of your charity, pray for me; I have prayed for you, and shall. The Lord be with you.

Gabriel I. M. Blanchard

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