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.

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.

"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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The Next Catholic Reform, Part IV

‘Give your evidence,’ said the King.

‘Shan’t,’ said the cook.

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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A few ideas for reforming the Catholic Church that I personally think are bad, or at any rate unhelpful. I may of course be mistaken, but, in case I’m not (or in case I am but a smarter person can show me where I’m wrong), here is a list of them and why I believe they’re unwise.

1. Categorically banning gay men from becoming priests. There are a myriad of problems with this idea. First, considering the cultural hostility of the Church toward LGBT language and self-identification, there are strong social and psychological pressures against young men even recognizing themselves as gay (or same-sex attracted or whatever, I seriously don’t care, as long as you just pick a word and are honest about it). On the other hand, there is no surefire gay test. So what this policy would actually do, is allow only those gay or bisexual men who are either sufficiently in denial about their attraction, or unscrupulous enough to lie about it, to become priests; those who have processed their sexuality and aren’t willing to be dishonest will be the ones excluded. The problems of abuse and Machiavellian secrecy would be exacerbated by a policy like this.

Besides this, while it’s true that something like four-fifths of clerical abuse has been homosexual in nature, it doesn’t actually follow that homosexuality is causally linked to abuse. Most mass shootings and terrorist attacks on American soil have been the work of white men, but it doesn’t follow that whiteness causes terrorism—although it does justify investigating why the statistical link exists. Likewise here: the pattern exists, but that calls for analysis of its causes, and targeting gay people or gay priests is not only unjust, it’s unproductive. There are other factors at work, and if they are not properly accounted for then more people will be victimized. It is the difference between discovering the guilty, and simply burning the accused; the latter is more immediately satisfying, whereas the former requires persistent, intelligent work.

2. Ordaining married men and/or allowing priests to marry. I say in all seriousness that it would be nice if the solution were this straightforward. The problem here is that it isn’t, not that the proposed expedient is unattractive.

The notion here is that the celibate life either causes a tendency to act out sexually, or attracts people who already have such a propensity (whether through a naïve belief that celibacy will fix them, or maliciously, as cover for their appetites). There’s no doubt that that is true in individual cases. But it doesn’t match the facts about sex offenses in general—a category of criminal that’s very poorly understood in the popular mind. There are two typical profiles of sex offenders, what you might call the acute and the chronic; the recidivism rate for sexual offenses is lower than that for any crime except murder, because sexual crimes are largely the work of acute offenders who are reacting to specific, temporary stresses in sick ways, and who mostly respond to treatment. Chronic sex offenders are to the acute what a serial killer is to an ordinary murderer: apparently incurable as a rule, and very rare. They dominate the popular idea of what sex offenders because their victim-to-criminal ratio is far higher and their deviant behaviors tend to be much more dramatic.

But the thing about both categories of sex offender is, many perpetrators are or have been married, more than half (in direct contrast to violent crime in general). As far as I understand, acute sex offenses are usually about relieving some kind of stress, and chronic offenses are usually about power and ego—neither of them is necessarily about sexual appetite just as such. If they were, we would expect a majority of sex offenders to be unpartnered, but that prediction is contradicted by the observed facts.

3. Ordaining women. According to Catholic (and Orthodox) doctrine, this is impossible, whether it would be desirable or not. Female accountability or even oversight are not necessarily impossible, as I addressed in my third post; and given that the principal function of the clergy in general is to provide the faithful with the sacraments, which is not simply the same thing as canonical governance, intimately entwined though the two things are. The abuse scandal should not be made a pretext for deforming the doctrines of the Church—but equally, the doctrines of the Church should not be made a pretext for protecting a diseased system of discipline.

4. Violating, altering, or abolishing the seal of Confession. More than one government has attempted this recently: some districts in Australia have passed laws this year that would compel confessors to violate the seal in cases of abuse, and Ireland passed such laws in 2015 (though they have yet to be implemented). The problems here are two: one is the religious liberty issue, and the other is that, like trying to exclude gay men from the priesthood, it would certainly be ineffective. As to the first, the whole notion of the separation of Church from state is that neither should have the power to interfere in the affairs of the other—which is one of the reasons that so few states have really attempted the separation. And Confession is most certainly the Church’s affair. Her belief is that the priest himself is only lending his body to Christ’s personal action of forgiveness, and the seal exists because the penitent’s sins and secrets were not being told to him except, in a way, accidentally.

The impracticality, however, is even more obvious. Who would confess these things sacramentally if they knew they would be reported to the civil authorities? Only somebody who was prepared to face confessing to the civil authorities anyway. It is like the riddle in Wicked about what a dragon looks like while it’s inside its shell; nobody knows the answer because the only way to get inside it is to break it.

5. Turning into a snake. It never helps.

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The Banquet

The Pope has laid a princely feast

Upon the Church’s board:

In files each cardinal, bishop, priest—

The chosen of the Lord.

No expense spared, each place is set

With cups of gold and gem,

Napkins of silk as black as jet,

White plates of porcelain.

The joint is carved, the wine is poured

(But the fish would not fry);

Bishop with bishop firm concord

Holds, over roasted thigh.

Their charities have got them fame,

As promised in the Law.

A Virgin in a silvered frame

Smiles blind at their foie gras.

They their vexatious Church affairs

Delicately discuss:

How laws oppress, tithes are impaired,

And how the laymen fuss.

Their programs they accept and bless,

Their institutes exalt,

Sitting serene as stone grotesques

Or statues made of salt.

The Pope rises, and calls a toast:

‘The Body and the Blood.’

The college nods. The white-clad ghost

Imbibes the scarlet flood.

The tipsiest are talkative,

The sober ones are mute:

All eye each other, secretive,

While the maid serves the fruit.

Little is left of their repast

Below the Mother mild:

They licked the rib-cage bright as brass,

The rib-cage of a child.

The Next Catholic Reform, Part III

[Saint] Francis wanted to call the outcast, ready to revolt, to be part of the people of God. If the flock was to be gathered again, the outcasts had to be found again. Francis didn’t succeed, and I say it with great bitterness. … Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear, or to produce, every sermon that, harking back to the word of Christ, would condemn the behavior of the shepherds and would promise their punishment one day. The powerful always realized this. The recovery of the outcasts demanded reduction of the privileges of the powerful …

—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

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Brass tacks, then. If my evaluation of how the Catholic Church got into this mess is mostly or even largely accurate, then we can identify a few reasonable, workable ways to confront the mess and clean it up. The summary is: we have a hierarchy that feels embattled and defensive, trying to maintain its authority with its members and its prosperity and influence in the general culture; this has led to a deformed attachment to appearances, which rewards dishonesty and evasion and punishes complaint regardless of its legitimacy; and this in turn results in a clerical culture that fosters unhealthy approaches to sex and gives substantial cover to predators.

The focus of most traditional Catholics in accounting for this scandal has been upon sex (and especially homosexuality), but I think that’s mostly a red herring. It is the diseased dynamics concerning image and power that brought the scandal into being—if the hierarchy had not been trying to protect both, it would probably have dealt with the problem openly and as it was discovered, and there would have been far fewer victims. These are problems with pride and avarice, not lust.

Conversely, progressivist Catholics have long been talking about the all-male, celibate priesthood and the Church’s doctrinal stances on issues like divorce and homosexuality as contributing factors to abuse. Personally I’m a little skeptical of this, partly because there are other institutions consisting largely or entirely of celibate men—for instance, there are monastic orders among Buddhists and Hindus, as well as Eastern Orthodox Christians—which, so far as I know, don’t display the same problems that the Catholic hierarchy does. However, to the extent that factors like an all-male environment intersect with image and power issues (and I strongly suspect they do), they’d be relevant, though not necessarily in the way progressivists claim.

The thing to do, I believe, is to hack at the roots of pride and avarice, rather than plucking the flowers of lust. There are several ways this could be done, none of them mutually exclusive.

1. Impose poverty on clergy. There’s nothing wrong with having a beautiful church building, indeed there’s everything right with it: we should give God our best, materially as well as otherwise, and it’s a more creditable (and more public) use of gilding and marble than a billionaire’s private gym or a shopping mall. But chanceries, rectories, and episcopal residences could be cut down to size. A chancery office does not need chestnut panelling and Tiffany chandeliers to serve its purpose, and outside of the liturgy, bishops do not really need to appear in state. Even if they are receiving dignitaries, what could be more appropriate than requiring an official who wants to deal with the Church to deal with her in her poverty? the poverty in which her Lord entered, lived, and died in the world? An inverse relationship between ecclesiastical stature and secular prosperity would not only help rein in pride and greed, it would be deeply apostolic.

2. Introduce laity, male and female, into the official operations of the Church. Of course there is some of this already. But it can be ramped up. Sacramentally speaking, qualified laymen and laywomen could be made eligible to fulfill almost any function in the Church except for celebrating the sacraments: teaching seminarians, running hospitals and schools, serving as diocesan officials. Even the office of cardinal could be reöpened to laymen—it was not restricted to clergy until 1917, though most cardinals were in fact priests or bishops; and indeed, the ancient electoral form included the right of the laity of the diocese of Rome to confirm or reject the papal candidate whom the clergy had picked, a system which was not changed for the first seven hundred years of the Church’s existence. [1] It’s particularly important that seminarians should be formed with constant (not periodic) contact with laymen: these are the people they’re devoting their lives to serving and they should understand them.

Introducing women into these official functions seems to me like a good idea, too, up to and including appointing female cardinals. (This is a different matter from conferring Holy Orders on women, which has been pronounced theologically impossible by the Church. Celebrating the sacraments and making authoritative doctrinal definitions are the powers attached to Order, but most business the Church conducts is not directly either of these things.) This is not because women are any less fallen than men, but because, in a number of ways, they aren’t likely to make the same kinds of mistakes that men typically do. The obvious example in our current situation is that women are far less likely to be sex offenders, and, to judge from the last two or three years, less likely to ignore or minimize reports and evidence of sexual abuse. But the peculiarly feminine genius, which I don’t claim to understand very well, is one half of the human experience, and I think it’s accordingly foolish to exclude it from the human governance of the Church. She is far more than her human governors; but she is not less, nor is she immune to their faults and limitations.

3. Encourage all Catholics, and require clergy and other officials in Catholic institutions, to be thoroughly educated on sexuality. I’ve said several times that this is a power problem more than a chastity problem, but chastity is obviously involved—partly because, in both healthy and unhealthy ways, sex is easily experienced as power. [2] Now, we have the doctrines of chaste conduct, marital and celibate, pretty well outlined. We have some acquaintance with psychology and sexual development. We have the beginnings of a mystical theology of sexuality, e.g. in the work of St John Paul II. But, to be perfectly blunt, what we need is sex ed.

Dishonesty about contraceptives, ‘discreet’ silence on sexual matters, defamatory portraits of the queer and kink communities, and an alarming lack of clarity about consent, are all familiar in Catholic circles. But none of them should be, nor do they need to be. Many of them are fostered by a desire to protect the Church’s teaching; but, as Kallistos Ware pointed out in The Orthodox Church, ‘Christianity, if true, has nothing to fear from honest inquiry.’ 

Catholic teachers and apologists should be prepared to acknowledge that, yes, condoms work to prevent pregnancy and STDs most of the time, and our reasons for objecting to them lie elsewhere; Catholic parents and pastors should be prepared to speak frankly about things like masturbation and porn, without hiding behind euphemism or manipulating people through shame and guilt; Catholic theologians and journalists should be willing to learn about gay, trans, and kink people from their own lips, rather than repeating quack science and stereotypes and excusing their prejudicial ignorance as fidelity (as if understanding a community entailed approving of everything about it); Catholic teenagers and confessors should be able to identify the difference between genuine consent, abuse of authority, coërcion, intoxication, and predatory acts. Addressing these issues intelligently is not an obstacle to chastity. It is the subject matter of chastity. Knowledge is the natural ally of integration, and that, not abstinence just as such, is what chastity is.

4. Establish total financial transparency, at both the parochial and the diocesan levels. This is going to get some significant pushback from the hierarchy, but I think it is one hundred percent necessary to any substantial reform. Money is what allows abusers and those who cover for them to get away with what they do—rarely, I think, through direct bribery or embezzlement, though that doubtless happens, but rather because money can purchase two things that those who wish to keep shaming secrets want: privacy and lawyers. ‘Uncle Ted’s’ notorious beach house was a splendid little thing for keeping his indiscretions away from the public eye, and Cardinal Wuerl’s legal team enabled him to be transferred from Pittsburgh to the second see of the nation despite his ghastly record; privacy and lawyers may be seen operating together in the squalid behavior of the Archdiocese of Baltimore over the half-revelations of The Keepers. None of that can be dealt with unless there’s total openness about how much money is coming in and what it’s being spent on.

And when I say total, I mean total. Gross income [3] for every parish, school, hospital, diocese, and so forth; the wages of every person paid by the Church, whether salaried or hourly and irrespective of their work; every expense footed by parochial or diocesan accounts or by institutions they govern and fund, including both the amount paid and what the payment was for; every yearly surplus or deficit; and legally binding statements that the information provided is both true and complete. Websites would be the easiest way of making this information publicly available, though letters might be preferable for that very reason—I’m not certain.

5. Restore the liturgical ritual of degradation for serious offenders among the clergy. This may be the least important of the proposals I’m putting forth; but I think it would be worthwhile. Considering the sometimes liturgical character of many of the offenses the scandal is about (e.g., abuse happening in the confessional), and the publicity it has entailed, a public and liturgical response is called for. Degradation, the ritual removal of the privileges of ecclesiastical office, fulfills these requirements exactly, and helps symbolize how seriously the Church needs to take these things. I think it might help reassure the faithful, too, insofar as the liturgy is the principal business of the Church and also the context in which Catholics are most likely to deal with fellow Catholics and with the hierarchy, and placing these issues in that liturgical context is therefore an act which directly, officially addresses the majority of Catholic Christians.

Doubtless other measures would also be reasonable, and many of these things would help to heal the gravely wounded trust of the laity in the hierarchy. Still, these five points seem to me like a very good place to begin. But, remember, any effort to implement them must begin in prayer. Partly because it is going to take a lot of prayer to get the clergy to accept such a reform—I mean, if I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t much want to give up my possessions and stature. But also because it would (perhaps will) be very easy for these acts to become merely malicious. Few of us can quite truthfully say that we don’t enjoy seeing someone who hurt us being taken down a peg. And there is little, if anything, of heaven in that pleasure. Only God can purify our hearts and the pleasures they harbor, and guide all our deeds to a wholesome end.

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[1] It was changed in 769, through a synod convened to deal with electoral abuses and a number of disputed elections that resulted in antipopes. For the time, this was probably a wise decision, but what is wise changes according to circumstances.

[2] This is a huge topic that I am only hinting at here. A guy I dated for a little while a few years back used to say, ‘Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.’ I don’t think he was right exactly, but the maxim is, I think, more oversimplified than wrong. In particular, the pleasure of male strength (in both heterosexual and gay male sex) is an obvious way in which sex is experienced as power, as too in a different way is the compelling beauty of the female (in heterosexual and lesbian sex). Most forms of kink, like BDSM, involve much more explicit or ritualized power games. I don’t think these things are intrinsically unhealthy, although their development and expression certainly can be.

[3] Gross income, not net income. Net income is, approximately, synonymous with profits. Gross income is the total amount of money received into an account, before any deductions or payments are made from it.

The Next Catholic Reform, Part II

‘Isn’t it a fact that, having more or less made up your mind to a spot of celibacy you are eagerly peopling the cloister with bogies? If you want to do without personal relationships, then do without them. Don’t stampede yourself into them by imagining that you’ve got to have them or qualify for a Freudian case-book.’

‘We’re not talking about me and my feelings. We’re talking about this beastly case in College.’

‘But you can’t keep your feelings out of the case. It’s no use saying vaguely that sex is at the bottom of all these phenomena—that’s about as helpful as saying that human nature is at the bottom of them. Sex isn’t a separate thing functioning away all by itself. It’s usually found attached to a person of some sort. … The two great dangers of the celibate life are a forced choice and a vacant mind. Energies bombinating in a vacuum breed chimæras.’

—Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

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So! How do we respond to these scandals prayerfully, without partisanship, concretely, publicly, and in sustainable ways? To answer that, we need to determine exactly what disease shows this particular range of symptoms: i.e., abuse, unchastity, concealment, vow-breaking and deceit, and a sense of entitlement to escape consequences. All kinds of flaws show up in all kinds of cultures; but every culture has sins and blind spots that flow from its history, and outlining that context can give us an idea of how to remedy the disease.

Now, while I have some confidence in my analysis here, it has to be considered tentative. No one can have exhaustive access to history, and I wasn’t alive during most of the period I’m going to discuss. But the construction I’ve put on the facts seems to me to be plausible in itself, and likelier than the other analyses I’ve run across (to the extent that there’s any conflict). So, rather than lace every sentence with qualifiers, I’ll treat this preface as sufficient and write as if with the assurance of a journalism undergraduate.

The Catholic Church has been losing its practical authority and prestige since about the nineteenth century, if we measure those things by the amount of influence it has in fields such as law, education, and public standards of conduct. The Reformation, coming after the pinnacle of the Church’s societal victory and during its finest period of artistic accomplishment and financial success, was only the beginning. The triumph of classical Liberalism and the rise of Marxism [1] and nationalism [2] in the nineteenth century all encroached on the influence of the Church even in those countries which had remained Catholic after the Reformation, and anti-Catholicism throve throughout the English-speaking world at the same time (exacerbated by ethnic prejudices, e.g. contempt for Irish and Italian immigrants in both England and the United States). The Industrial Revolution pulled families and clans apart into smaller and smaller units, and placed harsh demands on men, women, and children in the name of production, devouring their power to practice any religion. After eleven centuries, the Papal States were conquered and abolished in 1871. And with the dawn of psychoanalysis and sexology, sexuality began to be claimed as the proper domain of medicine and the scientific method, rather than of the theological, legal, and pastoral professions.

The middle of the twentieth century saw three events shake the Catholic Church, each in different ways. The Nazi state and the Second World War involved a large-scale persecution of Christians, and there were many Catholic casualties on both sides of the war; the Second Vatican Council allowed a dramatic revision of liturgical, disciplinary, and catechetical practices; and the Sexual Revolution transformed the ideology and norms of most Western societies with respect to moral authority, marriage and divorce, fertility and contraception, abortion, and (eventually) homosexuality. This left much of the Church feeling defensive, unsure of itself, and increasingly isolated in a libertine and chaotic culture.

A rich soil this, for sins rooted in fear, doubt, and envy—not unlike adolescence itself. A sincere Catholic, placed on the defensive about clerical authority, would easily become clericalist by way of compensation, and more so to silence interior doubts. The recently codified doctrine of infallibility would exacerbate the danger and encourage triumphalism; in the Sedevacantist heresies, we see this produced to the nth degree. Other theological ideas may have played a part, too, as that, in confecting the Eucharist, priests literally control God (a subtle inversion of the true doctrine that would turn the Mass into a kind of witchcraft). [3] 

This same defensive egotism would foster a devotion to the importance of image: if you’re smart enough, charismatic enough, morally unimpeachable enough in the eyes of others, then maybe you’ll get to keep what others are losing. If you claim infallibility, you have to look the part of impeccability. Otherwise they might not believe you—you have to make them believe you. A little reflection might have reminded us that faith is God’s gift; but while he often gives faith, he less often gives security, and prestige almost never. One has to approach other spirits for that.

And so we get a clerical culture whose idea of its own importance is swollen, and a general Catholic culture whose idea of the importance of its reputation is positively cancerous. Any criticism of the Church, any assertion that she is failing to care properly for some group of people, is labelled ‘giving scandal’ and, if possible, shown to be based in heretical ideas of what proper care consists in. Offenses on the part of individual clergy must be hushed up, and the need for hushing up becomes more urgent as offenses multiply.

But why should they be primarily sexual offenses? Well, strictly speaking, we don’t know that they were: there may be, for example, a great deal more financial corruption than we’re aware of in the hierarchy (and considering the lawyers that various Catholic dioceses and institutions are able to pay for, some would argue that there is a pretty huge misappropriation of funds going on regardless). Nonetheless there are a number of possibilities for the offenses that were and are sexual. Envy of the licentious behavior of others is one possibility, especially as celibacy went from being an unusual but ordinary state in life for all sorts of people, to being the almost exclusive preserve of Catholic priests and religious, and licentious behavior itself became increasingly public and provocative. But I seriously doubt that that’s the deciding factor here, because chastity (with its opposite) is a function of the human capacity for relationship, and sex can’t be considered entirely outside of that context. The aforementioned fragmentation of the family and Catholic reticence about discussing sex are both likelier to have a big impact: the one to exacerbate the unmet need for human connection, the other to diminish the individual’s power to understand that need.

And the Church’s teaching on homosexuality does little to correct and much to poison this culture. This is partly to be laid at the feet of the ex-gay movement, some exponents of which (like Monsignor Anatrella) were later revealed to be homosexual abusers themselves. Lip service is paid in the Catechism to the need for ‘respect, compassion, and sensitivity’ towards LGBT people, but the status quo among Catholics does not evince much of those, for, in a culture that rewards image and is honeycombed with sexual indiscretions (because every human culture is thus honeycombed), LGBT people are the perfect scapegoat: most people can tell themselves, truthfully or at least convincingly, that they aren’t interested in their own sex, so at least they’re better than Those People. Such easy victories on the field of self-mastery are all but irresistible.

But the point here is not that this has a negative impact on gay people (though it does, and that deserves to be addressed as well). The point is, a homophobic culture is, if anything, likelier to have problems with homosexual abuse than one that isn’t. Writing specifically about the proposal to ban all gay men from enrolling in seminary, Chris Damian put it perfectly.

What do you do with that seminarian, the seminarian so prejudiced against homosexuality that he can’t even recognize his actual feelings? What do you do with that person, whose prejudices can harden into callousness as he seeks to cover over what he feels? Surely that will enter into the ways he ministers to those with same-sex-attractions, preventing true compassion, mercy, and engagement. He’s never practiced these towards himself, so he wouldn’t be able to fully practice it towards others either. One day he may be overcome by his repressed desires and begin acting out in odd ways, ways that he doesn’t understand and can’t face … Older, manipulative priests may recognize this and invite them into their lives, eventually surprising them with a carefully crafted seduction or assault. Seminarians unaware of how to relate to these desires and unable to recognize such advances (probably because they have been unable or unwilling to recognize much about sexuality generally) will be caught off guard and unable to formulate a response until it is too late. Then, once the seminarian realizes what has happened, a mixture of shame, fear, and desire to serve the Church may prevent him from being open about what happened. The manipulator will know this and will use the fear and secrecy created by a callous ban to further manipulate. … The seminarian will both be stuck in an abusive relationship and will be unable to honestly and vulnerably address great portions of his interior life.

My pastor, in his homily this past Sunday, spoke of non-Catholics embodying Catholic values (like the Catholic notion of the family being more evident among Mormons than among us) as a kind of fulfillment of the text If these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out. It seems to me that the stones of the New York Times, PFLAG, the APA, and Rainbow Railroad have been shouting for an awfully long while. Perhaps it is time we took notice.

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[1] Not to be confused with Socialism, of which it is a specific type. Some systems of Socialism have no conflict with Christianity, or even specifically endorse it; Marxism specifically opposes religion in general and Christianity with it.

[2] I.e., the idea that every ethnic group (in Latin natio, as in ‘native’) should form an independent state. Until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, multi-national states were quite common. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a famous example.

[3] I heard of this bizarre teaching as current in seminaries thanks to a talk given by Dr Lee Podles, a fellow parishioner of mine who wrote an enormous book titled Sacrilege on the abuse crisis, which was published in 2008. It explored the interior rot long before the findings of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury were released, and came to many of the same conclusions, if not sterner ones.