Bishop Gene Robinson to Matt Shepard: "Welcome Home"; Catholic Youth Synod to LGBTQ People: "You Will Not Be Named in Our Heterosexual Church" — Questions for Synod Participants and Voters

In his sermon at the interment of Matt Shepard, Bishop Gene Robinson says the following (these excerpts are from about 1:13:48 and 1:19:32 in the video above):

Quote for Day: If Pope to Be Believed, He Must Not Only Talk, but Change Systems of Belief That Victimize Those He Serves

Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson shares his hopes for Pope Francis and his agenda of reform: 

Anglican African Bishops Meet to Fight Western Pansexualism: Anglican Version of Theology of the Body

Here's the polite Anglican version of right-wing Catholic rhetoric about keeping African men men and African women women: this is David W. Virtue reporting on the current Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa's All Africa Bishops' Conference (CAPA): the Anglicans are fighting "Western pansexualists" who do "not hold fast to a biblical view of Christian morality."

Church at the Crossroads: Reflections as Gene Robinson Becomes a Bishop

As I've been going through my journals from the past several years, I've happened on a reflection I wrote in June 2003, as Gene Robinson was made bishop. I seem to have sent this to one of the centrist Catholic publications in the U.S., and, as usually happens when I offer those journals pieces for publication, I received it back.

It still seems pertinent, though, and now that I have this blog, I can share these reflections with others without having to resort to the powerbrokers at the center who have never seemed quite interested in the point of view of many of us shoved to the margins because we're gay or lesbian.

Here's my essay:

On June 7, 2003, New Hampshire Episcopalian clergy and laity nominated the first openly gay bishop in the nation, the Rev. V. Gene Robinson. On June 5, at a news conference in Boston, Rev. Robert Hoatson of the Catholic archdiocese of Newark announced that he had been fired the preceding day from his job as director of two Catholic schools in Newark.

Hoatson viewed the firing as retaliation for appearing two weeks earlier at a press conference in Albany, in which he called for legislators to enact more stringent laws protecting children from sexual abuse. A June 5 Boston Globe article quotes Hoatson to say, ''It appears that the crisis is not getting better. I believe it is getting worse, and I am not sure that we have been straightforward and honest with the victims . . . and with society in general.''

Is there any connection between these two stories? I believe there is. They point to two opposing views of what it means to be church in the 21st century. The stories are signposts to two very different futures for the church, futures that depend on and enact two radically different ecclesiologies.

To gay Christians in general and gay Catholics in particular, the moral depths to which some of our bishops appear to have sunk in their (mis)handling of the sexual abuse crisis comes as no surprise. We have known for some years now that a number of our pastoral leaders are capable of being morally bankrupt; we have known that they can lie to the public, use gay (and other) human beings as pawns in political games as though we are subhuman and without basic human rights, and represent themselves as ultimate moral arbiters while betraying the central tenets of Judaeo-Christian morality.

We have seen bishops who have been most intent to protect and promote pedophiles fomenting hatred of gay people through their utterances and through opposition to gay-rights ordinances in their jurisdictions. We know, too, that some of our bishops have their own secrets, and that some of the bishops who have been most vocal about denying gay people basic human rights are themselves closeted gay men.

We have long since discovered that the pastoral leaders of our church are able to look the public in the eye and not tell the truth. We have seen bishops obstruct justice before now. What is happening in the sexual abuse crisis comes as no revelation to us. It is old news.

For some time now, as we have encountered the demonic face of religion in the behavior of many of our pastoral leaders towards us, many gay Catholic have pleaded with the church to be church—to realize the vision of church enshrined in Jesus’s proclamation of the reign of God. We have asked for the church to function as a healing space in a society that savages outcasts of all sorts.

We have called on our pastors to engage us in honest and open dialogue, rather than evading our questions and using image management spin-control techniques to make themselves appear tolerant and compassionate while their actions belie their words. We have begged priests and bishops to remember that the invitation Jesus issues to his banquet table is one issued to all, not merely to the sanctified and prosperous.

Even while we have been putting such questions to our bishops—usually ineffectually, it seems, since we have been conspicuously ignored and treated as though we have no right to expect answers to our questions—many of our bishops have been promoting and protecting sexual predators, using funds donated by faithful parishioners to silence victims with no accountability for their use of these funds, and obstructing justice. The vision of church that emerges from such behavior is a horrifying one. It is a vision of a church more interested in power than in service, in image than in substance.

It is an ecclesiology that betrays, at fundamental levels, the ecclesiology of the Christian gospels. It is a church of clerics against laity, of an elite club that will defend its privileges at all costs, closing ranks if one of its own is under attack. This is a church in which clerical vocations count more than lay ones, and in which Vatican II’s retrieval of the venerable ecclesiology of church as people of God is mocked and rolled back.

The church today stands at a significant crossroads. The nomination of Gene Robinson and the firing of Robert Hoatson represent forks in a road. One fork leads to healing and justice, to a recovery of a vision of church in which all are equally called and equally welcome at the Lord’s table. The other leads to a vision of church in which raw power trumps transparency, in which image management counts for more than living the gospel honestly and forthrightly, and in which the mighty of the world wield greater influence in the body of Christ than do the least among us.

When the fanfare about the sexual abuse crisis is over, which road shall we find that we have taken?

Gene Robinson Through Catholic Eyes: All about Precious Style

I don’t know America magazine’s political blogger Michael Sean Winters from Adam. I’m far removed from the circles of the power bloggers and power journalists who determine the American Catholic political and cultural conversation—who do so, at least, within the power centers of the American Catholic church.

I know only tidbits of Winters’ biography, insofar as he drops those in postings I have read. If I have read correctly, he has lived in Little Rock and had gay neighbors here. I know, of course, that he has written a book about the relationship between the American left and American Catholics which sees the two as generally at odds due to an inability of the left in its most ideologically rigid manifestations to listen appreciatively to Catholic insights.

I have not read that book, but when I read excerpts from it and reviews of it, I hear a critique that has been around quite a while in Catholic circles, a disdainful critique of the insularity of American leftist intellectuals, along with a barely suppressed glorification of the hard-nosed wisdom of the ethnic working folks lefties purport to represent, but whom the Catholic church represents much more effectively. Of the hard-nosed wisdom of the men of the ethnic enclaves from which American Catholic institutions spring.

As an openly gay Catholic, I have always engaged that critique somewhat cautiously, because I have found that it can harbor no small amount of homophobia, as it relegates gay concerns to the “precious” side of its ledger of cultural critique. I have found that the implicit glorification of the hard-nosed wisdom of workers can also glorify a machismo that is inherently homophobic. It interests me to see that many of the big-name Catholic power commentators of both right and left, who are at war with each other regarding all kinds of other issues, easily find common cause when it comes to this critique of the gay agenda as precious.

I have appreciated Michael Sean Winters’ defense of Douglas Kmiec, who, in my view, promises to open a significant new path for American Catholics in our approach to the public sphere—a path to dialogical involvement with the public square that promises to be far more productive than the conflictual, top-down, haranguing approach we’ve employed for the last several decades. I do have issues with Kmiec’s view on gay rights—as I do with Winters’ views—though I believe that Catholics who want a new approach to the public square can work to find common ground even when we differ on particulars as we engage cultural issues.

I have also found Winters’ reflections on the injustice of Rome’s witch-hunt for gay seminarians to be right on target (www.slate.com/id/2127026). Winters is, in my view, exactly right in his contention that the bishops who have promoted and hidden clerics who have abused minors are the problem, and not gay seminarians. I learn from this piece another biographical detail about Winters: that he was once a seminarian.

I have to part company, however, with Michael Sean Winters’ in his recent reflections on Bishop Gene Robinson and his contribution to Obama’s inauguration (http://americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&id=FF216671-1438-5036-4FC769C0861B3516). In my view, these reflections enshrine a strong subtext of homophobia that runs through much that the movers and shakers of American Catholic political discourse say about and to the gay community. There’s a dismissive, scornful, totally unwelcoming little text running through much that Winters and his colleagues write about gay human beings.

And since I am a human being, and one who happens to be gay, I take that little subtext rather personally, as if it's written about me. That subtext serves as a reminder to me of why I have distanced myself—rather, why I have finally shrugged my shoulders and accepted the distance imposed on me by those at the center—from the Catholic church.

To put the point bluntly, the American Catholic church has made a preferential option for men. For men who can at least pretend to be heterosexual if they are not. For machismo. For a particular kind of masculinity, a particular way of being a man, one that imagines itself as the direct heir of the tough, brawling, plain-speaking, hard-drinking manhood of our ethnic forefathers. For a homophobic construction of manhood that demeans gay men and taunts them for being precious, shallow sissies.

Here’s what Winters has to say about Gene Robinson in his recent posting re: the inauguration:

When Bishop Gene Robinson told the New York Times that he was "horrified" that earlier inaugural prayers had been so "specifically and aggressively Christian" you knew his own inaugural contribution would be precious. And precious it was. The Rt. Rev. of New Hampshire managed to misunderstand the historical resonance of the word "tolerance" describing it as "mere tolerance." He commended the "reconciling style" of Abraham Lincoln, as if Lincoln’s style mattered more than, say, his perseverance in prosecuting a horrible, harsh yet necessary war. And Robinson wished the new President to bathe everlastingly in victimhood ("Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims") even though one of the most remarkable qualities of Mr. Obama’s candidacy was his repudiation of such victimhood.

But, what was most disturbing about Bishop Robinson’s prayer was the image of God he portrayed in his effort to avoid being aggressively Christian. The prayer suggests that instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whom some of us have come to know as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Bishop Robinson prays to a God who bears a remarkable resemblance to a therapist.

Bishop Robinson has become a household name because he is the first openly gay Episcopalian bishop, but that is not my concern: I can’t get over the fact that Anglicans have married bishops in the first place! The real reason to be suspicious of Robinson is that his inaugural prayer was a walking caricature of a lefty theology that perceives the potential for giving offense so comprehensively that the concern for political correctness, normally a canard of the right, actually trumps all else and we are left with a theology that is merely anodyne. I found Robinson’s prayer myopic in the extreme and remain convinced that this man has very little to say.

Subtext galore. Note how everything is framed by the word “precious.” Now that’s not a word one hears often. It's a word one pulls out for very special occasions, to convey very particular cultural references. It means, of course, in this context, affected, excessively refined, given to posturing and preening.

Can anyone say moues? Angry little shakes of the head? Pouting and stamping of tiny feet? There’s a whole world of affective associations that hang on the use of that word “precious” here. And they’re all deeply homophobic. They all reduce Gene Robinson to a figure of ridicule not to be taken too seriously—someone good at acting, but not so skilled at the kind of substantive discourse in which real men engage. Someone very like Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose stay in a Jesuit community in Ireland was turned into torment, some biographers report, by Jesuit confreres who mocked his "ladylike" ways, his fondness for soft slippers, his penchant for moony poetry rather than manlier pursuits.

Lest we fail to get the point, we’re quickly told that Bishop Robinson inappropriately zeroed in on Lincoln’s style, rather than his substance, in his inaugural comments. All style, no substance: show the gays a bright glittering miter and a drab little black breviary, and they’ll grab the miter every time. Because style is what they do, don’t you know. Theater. Prancing and preening on the stage. Where they can act precious to their hearts’ content.

When, instead, they ought to be focusing on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father God we’ve come to know through Jesus Christ—that is, they should be focusing on that Father God when they're assigned to the theater of liturgical enactment as Robinson is. They should be focusing on the male God who is almighty and sovereign, Winters tells us, as he contrasts Rick Warren’s more appropriately Christian (and manly?) prayer to Bishop Robinson’s precious stylistic one bathed in victimhood. Because, as we all know, the gays do victimhood, too, along with the pouting and the moues and the stomping of their little feet. It’s part of the act, of the grand, precious theater of style without substance.

(Unfortunately—and as an aside that’s not really an aside at all—non-paternalistic images of God get short shrift in Winters’ analysis of what constitutes proper, non-stylistic, substantial prayer. Though Jesus spoke of his concern to hug Jerusalem to his heart like a mother bird sheltering her chicks under her wing, the God Jesus taught us to focus on is, we’re told in no uncertain terms by Winter, Father—the God to whom Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob prayed. Miriam, Ruth, Naomi, Judith, Sarah, Rachel, Mary have all apparently vanished from this text whose subtext we’re reading.)

And here’s the difficulty with subtext: it works because it functions at the powerful subliminal level of wink-nudge, of insinuation rather than direct statement. It works its potent magic because it reassures readers already in the know, those who share the world of associations and assumptions enfolded into the subtest, that what they they already take for granted is reinforced in the text's insinuations. Subtexts consolidate the meaning of a text in a way that privileges the perspectives of a group of insiders, who—so the subtext reassures them—will remain in control of the text and its world of meaning, and in control of the meaning the text makes for the public.

There is something inherently exclusive about any subtext. It excludes from its world of discourse anyone who does not possess the key to unlock the meaning of the text—that is, the meaning for those who count. For those who are already inside the circle of power, those to whom the text is really speaking and for whom it is really written.

The nasty subtext that turns gay men into shallow preening peacocks—precious actors all about style rather than substance, about the soft therapeutic (female/feminized) God of the left and not the almighty sovereign Father God of true believers—this subtext absolutely dominates the approach of many American Catholic political and cultural commentators to the gay community. It is a toxic, excluding subtext that reads out of consideration—from the start—the contributions of gay people and gay thinkers (especially of gay men) to religious, political, and cultural life.

Except, of course, insofar as those gay men conform to the stereotypes imposed on us, and allow ourselves to ornament the margins, to prance amusingly on the periphery of the stage while the important actors—real men with women and women with real men—occupy the center. Except insofar as we remain happily ghettoized inside the stylistic disciplines decreed for us by men with power: hair-dressing, designing, singing, and so forth. Or except (and perhaps best of all), we pretend to be who we are not, learn to butch it up, knock back a few rounds of scotch with the big boys, and develop the cojones to talk over a few cigars about what matters to real men—sovereignty, substance, almighty things that interest almighty men who pray to almighty God.

This dominant subtext that is well-nigh determinative of the attitude of key American Catholic intellectuals of both the left and the right towards gay human beings really, really needs to go. It continues to assure that the Catholic church is anything but a welcoming and safe space for gay human beings. It justifies what cannot be justified by believers in Jesus or by Catholics: cruel exclusion, mocking stereotypes, dehumanizing treatment of people who are as human as those doing the dehumanization.

Churches forfeit the right to speak of all-inclusive love, of welcome that turns no one away—of catholic commitments and catholic beliefs—when they continue to harbor unwelcome at their very heart. And when they actively defend those who produce subtexts of demonization, while silencing those who call for open dialogue about those subtexts and their effects.

A Pastor for the Nation: Rev. Joseph E. Lowery

From what I've been reading on various blogs (admittedly, progressive ones, though I scan widely), the response to Rev. Joseph E. Lowery's benediction at today's inauguration was phenomenal. I'm reading that there were loud amens from many in the audience when he finished his benediction.

By contrast, Rev. Rick Warren received a lukewarm welcome at best, according to many blogs I'm reading. A scattering of applause, a few boos, a sense of relief when he had finished orating.

The difference in how the two pastors were received seems significant to me. It has been clear to many observers for some time that Rev. Warren has been positioning himself to inherit Billy Graham's mantle and be the new pastor to the nation.

It's also clear to me that the nation, at least, insofar as it was represented at this inaugural ceremony, has spoken. It wants a very different kind of pastor. The right-wing hate machine has been working overtime in the last few days to depict supporters of Bishop Gene Robinson and critics of Rev. Rick Warren as godless secularists intent on removing religion from the land.

I think what we saw happen today with the two pastors involved in the inauguration is a clear indicator that the nation wants a different kind of religion than that offered by Rev. Rick Warren. People are tired of the religious right and its misrepresentation of authentic faith for political ends. They see through the machinations of this essentially political, not religious, movement and they are tired of those machinations, even in the recycled kinder and gentler packaging of Rev. Warren.

It is not religion people are throwing away when they turn their backs on Rev. Warren. It's his kind of religion. A politicized gospel that thrives on turning some human beings into enemies, and then justifying our abuse of those "enemies" on "religious" grounds . . . . People are sick to death of being encouraged to hate in the name of God.

It seems clear from the very different response given to Rev. Warren and Rev. Lowery that many Americans would welcome the kind of religion Rev. Lowery represents: inclusive rather than exclusive, loving rather than hating, building rather than tearing down, engaging our energy in the political and cultural spheres to make the world better, not to condemn it and to attack those seeking to craft a better culture. A Christianity that opens to the contributions of the other religions of the world--Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, the religions of Africa and Polynesia, and so on. A Christianity that places love and understanding ahead of hate and condemnation.

Two evangelicalisms: that of the largely white religious right, and that of the black church. If the response to the two pastors who prayed at the inauguration today is any indication, the American people increasingly recognize the latter as a more adequate embodiment of the Christian gospel than the former. If we are to continue the tradition of having a nation's pastor, and if that pastor has to be Christian, then I think the verdict is clear: Rev. Lowery. Not Rev. Warren.

And what will the new administration take from what happened today? Perhaps one lesson is to stop trying to appease those on the far right who use religion to divide us. Stop giving power to a movement that many of us want to see fall by the wayside, because it is trying to tear apart our democratic institutions.

Stop calculating, trying to end up on the expedient side. Do the right thing. Stop listening to those who try to take the political pulse of the nation, while ignoring the demands of conscience.

There's still work to be done. While we were permitted to hear and weigh the words of Rev. Lowery and Rev. Warren, "technical" problems and scheduling oversights prevented us from even hearing what Bishop Robinson had to say.

There's a parable here. The evangelicalism of venerable civil rights leaders of the black church has brought us to a very good place, and we need to continue in that place. But to the extent that the black church in recent years has allowed itself to be courted by the religious right, and to sell out its historic commitment to human rights for all when it comes to gay brothers and sisters, there's still work to be done. To the extent that Rev. Lowery's United Methodist church continues to belie its claim to have an open mind and heart and open doors, while it treats gay human beings as second-class human beings, there is work to be done.

The voice of Gene Robinson should count, too. And it is impossible to justify the structures of exclusion that silenced him yesterday, if we take seriously what Rev. Lowery said in his prayer. It's time to stop the hating, and to end all the little self-justifying maneuvers by which we assure ourselves that the way we treat our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters is not really hateful.

It's time to listen carefully to the witness of venerable pastors like Rev. Lowery, who have spent years struggling to make their faith count as they sought to make society better, and to move forward with hope that we can build a more humane world. For all.

Continued Extrusion of the Religious Right's Nose: Further Prognostications for 2009

Cassandra here. Again. Doing her sad old song and dance, warning, warning with little assurance that her warnings will be heeded. At least, as the script I see now unfolding (and no, the Deity has not spoken or shouted or shown his Old Man in the Clouds™ face to me; I just use my head and see what’s before me) does unfold in 2009, you can say you heard some of those prognostications on this website.

As the new year has approached, I’ve been blogging repeatedly about the revamped, ratched-up strategy I expect the religious right to employ in the coming year, to try to recoup its recent political losses and beef up its dwindling numbers. As I’ve noted in posting after posting, I expect the religious right to do all but stand on its head to try to woo new young adherents. I also anticipate a nasty time for both the black and gay communities—and our nation as a whole—as the religious right tries to force the wedge between those two marginalized communities deeper in 2009.

As this agenda starts to play out with the new president’s inauguration, look, too, for the religious right to begin presenting itself as a kinder, gentler version of its doddering old cranky-man self. Watch for Rick Warren’s face to be plastered everywhere, as this claim is driven home. A chubby, smiling, avuncular face, the face of someone you want to hug, someone who can’t be all bad, can he, if he helps babies with AIDS in Africa and recognizes that the environment is endangered. It’s just the gays he’s after, anyway, isn’t it? And doesn’t the bible say . . . ?

With the kinder, gentler religious right, watch for one thing to remain the same: the lies. In fact, expect them to get bolder, more fantastic, the kind that would grow huge noses on the faces of people with any scrap of conscience at all. And look for the mainstream media to continue colluding in these lies, since their bread is buttered by the same folks who butter the bread of Rick Warren and his bedfellows.

In the interest of pursuing truth when falsehood threatens to prevail—a task given to all believers all the time—I’d like to point out some of the brand-new whoppers members of the religious right are telling as the new year gets underway. These lies are perhaps not entirely new ones, but the enormity of the claims now being made to prop them up is new. And that enormity will continue to be in evidence in this period of sharpened conflict between the religious right and the will of the American people in the new political landscape. We are now seeing only the tip of the big nose that will extrude from the religious right in 2009. . . .

Whopper #1: reactionary religion is succeeding in reviving the churches and attracting youth to the churches.

This is one that’s been around for some time now. The media have helped spread it—have played a crucial role in that respect, as a matter of fact. Throughout the papacy of John Paul II, in which the current pope Benedict XVI played a preeminent part as ideological czar of reaction, we were informed again and again by sober media analysts that right-wing Christianity was succeeding at doing what liberal versions of Christianity had failed to do: attract adherents; fill seminaries; bring young folks to religious vocations.* We were told that the yearly World Youth Day circus John Paul II began would fill the churches with card-carrying right-wing Catholic youth, the kind we needed to take the church back for Christ.

It hasn’t happened. The attempt to pitch reactionary forms of Christianity to youth around the world hasn’t succeeded. It hasn’t brought large numbers of youth back to the churches. If anything, it has succeeded in shoving away those who wanted to remain connected to the churches, but who did not want do so by paying the ideological price demanded. These youth have not wanted to join a neoconservative version of the Hitler Youth movement, have not wanted to leave their minds at the church door, and have not wanted to reduce their moral compass to genital fixations.

Many youth who are distancing themselves from reactionary churches today are intently interested in morality, but in an integral morality that applies faith to the wide range of moral problems demanding the attention of people of faith, which transcend the pelvic preoccupations of the religious right. To issues like the destruction of the environment, the exploitation of women by men, the injustice of an economic system that enriches the few at the expense of the man. And yes, to issues like gay rights.

Despite clear statistical indicators that reactionary forms of Christianity are not reviving the Christian churches—as in attracting huge numbers of new adherents—the lies continue rolling forth. From representatives of the religious right. With the collusion of the media.

Shortly before Christmas, mainstream media sources around the world blared forth a boast of the religious right that the downturn in the world economy was sending folks back to church—to their churches, the churches of the right. This is a version of a story that crops up predictably in the media anytime disaster strikes.

After 9/11, we were told that the churches had filled again—with the implication that most of us are a godless lot of secularists who turn our backs on God when things are going well for us, until some disaster urges us back to mother church and father God. To our role of unquestioning, childlike filial piety—the kind of unquestioning filial piety it would behoove us to adopt, as well, vis-à-vis the big men pulling the economic levers, who have our well-being at heart just as mother church and father God do.

What I am suggesting is that, for its own political and economic interests, the mainstream media have as much invested in telling us this lie of the superiority of reactionary religion, as does the religious right. Both are perfectly capable of inventing huge whoppers about the return to the churches (the “right” churches, the ones that preach about sin and hell and condemnation and the need for unquestioning obedience) when times are hard.

Though the preceding story of miraculous new conversions to the churches of the right rolled out just before Christmas, it has now been shown to have been false (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/3043). Gallup polling data in December show no increase at all in church, synagogue, or mosque attendance of Americans at any point in 2008. Polls in other parts of the world indicate the same lack of a new fervor for right-wing religion in the face of economic downturns.

Despite what the data indicate, one of the boldest spin doctors of the Catholic right, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Australia, has informed the media (who dutifully reported Pell’s story without asking for evidence to confirm the claim) that last year’s World Youth Day events in Australia had led to an increase in conversions, as well as to increased numbers of young men entering the seminary in Australia (http://zenit.org/article-24687?l=english and www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=10936). No empirical data support Cardinal Pell’s claims here—claims that are suspiciously matched to statements both he and Benedict made last February, prior to World Youth Day, in which they predicted conversions of Australian youth due to WYD, as well as a rise in numbers of seminarians (www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/188925,pope-hopes-for-religious-revival-in-australia--feature.html).

Pell delivered his pronouncements of the success of World Youth Cay on new year’s day. Two weeks later, Father Peter Kennedy of St. Mary’s church in Brisbane announced that he would lead his parish into schism if the archbishop of Brisbane, John Bathersby, closes his parish (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/01/dissident-australian-parish-threatens.html). The threat posed by this parish? It is actually flourishing, in the real world, not just the world of wish-fulfillment. But it is an innovative parish that crafts inclusive liturgies which energize everyone in the congregation, a parish that invites native peoples to contribute to shaping the liturgy and the life of the community of faith.

It is a success story that directly contradicts the lie of the religious right that progressive religious groups are waning while right-wing religious groups are on the rise. And so it is a story that must be swept under the rug, even as stories of bogus right-wing success, based on no evidence at all, are put forth as gospel truth—with media collusion.

The real story, the factual one, of the “success” of Benedict’s reactionary movement, is quite different from the one Pell wants us to believe. As the Clerical Whispers blog reported on 10 January, Catholic marriages in England have declined by 24% since 2000 (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/01/roman-catholic-church-marriages-fall-by.html). The Vatican itself is admitting that vocations of women to religious life are declining rapidly—though it is seeking to blame that drop in vocations on women’s refusal to adhere to traditional gender roles (www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0900109.htm). And in Austria, despite a high-profile visit of Benedict in September 2007 aimed at reviving Catholicism there, 40,595 Catholics formally renounced their affiliation with the Catholic church in 2008 (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/01/catholic-church-exodus-rolled-on-last.html).

Cardinal Pell is, quite simply, lying. And the mainstream media that assist him in lying have to know this. The reactionary movement in the Catholic church has perhaps succeeded in seizing and holding the reins of power. But it has succeeded in little else. It has not brought large numbers back to the church, to the seminaries, and to religious life.

It has, in fact, succeeded in decisively alienating many of us. And lying about it will not change that fact. And there are strong parallels between the declining membership of the Catholic church and another mainstay of the religious right, the Southern Baptist church, whose numbers have been stagnant for several years now, as the face of congregations grows ever older and as young folks do not choose this and other right-wing churches in large numbers.

People are tired of being told no repeatedly, as if that message is the gospel message in its entirety. People rightly expect something more from authentic religiosity and spokespersons for authentic faith.

Whopper #2: Openly gay bishop Gene Robinson has split the Anglican communion.

That nasty little lie comes from the mouth of Tony Perkins, president of the right-wing Family Research Council. Perkins is reacting to the news two days ago that Obama has chosen out and partnered gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson to give the first prayer of the inauguration ceremonies at the Lincoln Memorial (www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-obama-clergy-webjan13,0,7483819.story).

In response to this announcement, Mr. Perkins states,

I find it kind of ironic that some were adamantly opposed to Rick Warren because he was “divisive,” If you want to talk about somebody that is divisive, look at Gene Robinson. He essentially split one of the oldest Christian denominations in this country.

The truth? The truth that Mr. Perkins knows very well, since he’s a big part of the story? The religious right and its adherents have worked overtime in the past decade to split the worldwide Anglican communion, to the extent that this communion has sought to ordain women and openly gay folks, and to promote social teachings that call neoconservative ideology, with its claims to represent Christian orthodoxy, into question. Well-funded and politically powerful groups such as the Institute on Religion and Democracy have done all they can to sow seeds of discontent in the Anglican communion, by seeking to convince Anglicans of color in developing nations that Anglicans of the developed nations—many of whom are sympathetic to women’s and gay rights—take people of color for granted.

The IRD has exerted tremendous influence on the mainstream media to assure that the mainstream media adopt this script, a script that depicts progressive Anglicans as empty liberals exploiting people of color while abandoning the core truths of Christianity, and Christians of the developing nations as saviors of the creed. I’ve blogged repeatedly about these matters, and for anyone interested in documentation of the points I'm making here, I suggest entering the phrase “Institute on Religion and Democracy” into the blog search engine at the top left of the Bilgrimage homepage. You’ll find a world of links there to substantiate my claims.

Lies told by victimizers who seek to make the victim responsible for the reprehensible actions of the victimizer are particularly nasty lies. That’s the kind of lie Tony Perkins is telling here.

We’re going to see a lot more of this sort of lying by members of the religious right in 2009. For those of us who hope for a renewal of our democratic culture under a new president and a new Congress, it is important to keep monitoring the lies of the religious right—and to challenge them. And, above all, to call the media to accountability, when they sell their integrity to the religious right and turn themselves into mouthpieces for a political movement wearing a religious mask to conceal its real intent, which is destruction of democratic institutions . . . .


* Though the term “religious right” generally refers to a coalition of evangelical Christian religious groups in the United States, in my view, in its stance on family issues and sexual morality, the Catholic church is also a part of the religious right.

From Paul VI to Gene Robinson: Judging Sexual Morality

The Clerical Whispers blog today posts a reminder of the upcoming anniversary of the encyclical Humanae vitae (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/07/debate-over-1968-encyclical-rages-on.html). It’s hard to believe, but 25 July will mark the 40th anniversary of this encyclical of Paul VI reiterating the Catholic prohibition against the use of artificial contraception.

One line in the Clerical Whispers summary of the debate about this controversial encyclical leaps out: this is Paul VI’s insistence that, to be moral, "each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life." On the basis of that unambiguous norm, Paul VI judged the use of artificial contraception as “intrinsically disordered”—the same term the present pope, Benedict XVI, has sought repeatedly to use to characterize gay persons.

There are links, in other words, between the Catholic church’s condemnation of artificial contraception and of homosexuality. And I’m not sure how many people who look to the Catholic church as a bulwark against gay rights understand this. Many evangelicals have made common cause with the Catholic church when it stands against gay human beings and our rights. But I suspect that not a few of the Christian right allies of Catholicism when it comes to gay rights have not a clue about what the Catholic church teaches re: artificial contraception, and why it teaches what it does. And I also suspect that they’d be appalled if they did encounter this teaching in its unvarnished state, the state in which Catholics are expected meekly to receive it.

I could say a lot about Humanae vitae and why it was a colossal mistake on the part of Paul VI to issue this encyclical. As critics have noted, the theological commission the pope put together to advise him advised him not to issue a condemnation of artificial contraception. The mind of the church, in other words, what Cardinal Newman called the sensus fidelium, rejects the stance against artificial contraception. And nothing the church has said or done in the intervening period has convinced Catholics to change their minds. Polls indicate that something over 90% of married Catholics in the global North practice artificial contraception. And with a good conscience.

As the Clerical Whispers article notes, one of the primary reasons Paul VI decided to reject the advice of his theological commission (and thus, of the sensus fidelium) about this issue was that he feared he’d bring disrepute to the church by appearing to acknowledge that church teachings can change—that they can be wrong, and can need to revise in light of historical developments. And yet, ironically (again, the Clerical Whispers post notes this), perhaps no other event in the history of Catholic church after Vatican II (except, I’d argue, the clerical sexual abuse crisis) has so undermined public confidence in the Catholic church’s teaching, than “Humanae vitae.”

Which brings me back to the norm Paul VI uses to determine the morality of sexual acts. It’s so logical. It’s so lucid. It’s so plain wrong.

Think about it: "each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life." The word “act” leaps out immediately. A whole sexual morality built on measuring acts, on determining if they are “intrinsically disordered.”

The Catholic approach to sexual morality conjures up visions of someone—a priest; the Pope; the couple having intercourse—in the bedroom of a couple, measuring acts . . . . As if the morality of sex, a drive that unites two people at deep levels of their beings, can be summed up by measuring an act!

The whole approach to sexual morality in Catholicism—and I’m saying nothing thousands of other theologians haven’t said for years now—is simply wrong-headed. It’s off on the wrong track, from the get-go.

Insofar as it tries to hinge the judgment of the morality of human sexuality on acts, and insofar as it premises its judgment about said acts on whether they conform to some purported biological purpose of sexuality, it is simply not looking at what really deserves attention in sexual morality. This is quality of relationships, not acts, and, particularly, acts judged by biological yardsticks.

To illustrate: in Catholic sexual morality, a rape in which the male succeeds in ejaculating inside the female is far less immoral than a rape in which the coitus is interruptus. Which is to say, rape receives much less attention in Catholic sexual morality—the quality of the relationship between two people having sex receives much less attention—than the kind of act done, and what happens to that act when it is consummated. Is the penis inside or outside? Did at least some semen reach the vagina? Did the man intentionally or unintentionally ejaculate prematurely? If non-penis-in-vagina foreplay occurred, and the male climaxed prior to consummating the sexual act, did he (or she, wanton temptress) intend for this to happen?

Insane. Who “does” sex this way? Who thinks about sex this way? Who wants to think about sex this way? Why are ostensibly celibate male clerics, who have no experience at all the bedroom, entering the bedroom via the confessional to measure, photograph, judge, question? (Priests do ask the kinds of questions I asked above, in the confessional. They’re expected to do so. This is why many Catholics no longer go to confession. And can you blame us?)

And so from artificial contraception to homosexuality. Most people get it, when it comes to artificial contraception. Most people get that this way of thinking about human sexuality is just plain foolish. It does not reflect what people mean when they live their lives as erotic beings, when we express ourselves erotically. It is moral analysis imposed on human experience, and therefore extrinsic to human experience.

Why, then, I wonder, do people who reject the absurd teachings about artificial contraception not feel equally indignant about the equally crazy Catholic teaching that gay human beings are intrinsically disordered? Why do evangelicals who decidedly do not buy into the biologistic natural-law theology that frames all Catholic teachings about sexual morality, and who do not buy into the prohibition against artificial contraception, accept and promote Catholic teaching against gay human beings?

I could advance all kinds of reasons for this disconnect in the popular mind. I may well do so in future postings. Here, though, I’d like to think this problem through by thinking about a video clip that has been circulating on the internet these past few days. A link to it is, in fact, on the same Clerical Whispers webpage I cited above for the link to the commemoration of “Humanae vitae.” It’s at http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/07/heckle-that-symbolises-church-split.html.

The clip shows openly gay (and partnered) Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson preaching at St. Mary’s in Putney (London) this past Sunday. As Bishop Robinson preached, a man in the audience stood up to heckle, calling him a heretic, shouting that he (and the congregation, who clapped and sang to drown out the heckler’s voice) needed to repent.
High drama for an Anglican church. And interesting drama. The question I keep asking myself as I watch this clip is, “What motivates someone to do something like this?” What motivates those who feel so urgently compelled to preach to gay human beings that we need to repent?

It’s not as if there aren’t a lot of other heinous sins around that need condemning. Just read the accounts of the round-up of hundreds of illegal Mexican and Central American immigrants in Postville, Iowa, recently, and you’ll likely wonder what kind of human beings can treat other human beings this way.

Why Bishop Robinson’s sin? Why “the” sin of the Anglican communion, insofar as it will not repudiate all gay persons and their supporters? What drives people (usually men) to take such extreme action to prevent gays and our supporters from going to hell?

I can’t help thinking this has far more to do with the desire to control than it has to do with the desire to save. It’s not about love at all. It’s about the need of a social group that feels its power over others may be waning, to find a juicy scapegoat group and to use that group to the maximum to shore up its waning control.

I find it very hard to believe that many of the preachers and hecklers I’ve encountered, who are so earnest about saving gay souls, read much of the bible at all. If they did so, they’d find that the overwhelming weight of the Judaeo-Christian scriptures, when they address the moral life, is about love. And justice. And living in a way that embodies mercy and justice.

Not about sex. And certainly not about sexual acts. And that ravenous need to control? It seems to be what the whole biblical narrative reflects on, from Adam and Eve forward, when it reflects on our human reluctance to place our lives at God’s disposal. Those moved by the Spirit—the Spirit that Christian traditions identify as holy—are far less intent on controlling others than they are on opening their own hearts and minds to the influence of the divine. And in responding to that influence through acts of practical compassion in a world starved for the milk of human kindness.

Accidie and Running from Whales

Sometimes I feel itchy inside—in heart and soul—and when that happens, I know I’m entering into a period of what early Christian monks of the desert called accidie. They defined this state of soul as a kind of dryness in which it seems that no matter what you attempt, you fall short. And so you slide into a state of not caring . . . .

For me, the spiritual malady of accidie presents as more of an inner itchiness. I can’t focus. I have ideas, but they lead me nowhere. Everything seems too much—too much bother, too much busy-ness.

In this spiritual-psychological state, prayer becomes . . . gruesome. Not that I have ever been much of a pray-er, in the formal sense of the word. I do say my prayers, knowing full well as I do so that words are not ultimately what praying is all about. Praying at its best is disposing our whole selves—mind, heart, soul—to be receptive to God’s influence in our lives. We can (and should) pray, no matter what we’re doing. And we often do it best when we aren’t even mouthing the pious words—when we’re hoeing in the garden or stirring the pot of beans.

Accidie makes you not even want to try. It’s about giving up, succumbing to distraction in a way that you know is all about fragmentation: of concentration, of that disposing of self to be available to God.

I’ve learned to live through these periods. They always do teach me something—about myself, about the very different rhythms by which the world I try to place at my own disposal lives independently of me, and about God. If nothing else, they teach me to be less certain that I know something, that I can control anything, that God is at my disposal rather than vice versa.

They teach me to be careful even about using the name God, which we profane by overuse. When G-d becomes a word we speak oh so glibly, rather than the Word that calls us to life, we have lost all sense of what that word means. When we’ve begun to think that we know what the word G-d means, we’ve lost contact with the Word.

So what’s all this high-falutin’ theological theorizing about, ultimately? In my case, these days, I have a fairly good grasp of what the accidie is about.

First, I’m on information overload. When there’s too much information to take in, process, run by heart and soul so that I can internalize it and mull it over, I go into a kind of shut-down process. Can’t take more in, won’t take more in, don’t ask me to process . . . .

Things are happening fast and furious these days in some of the worlds I feel compelled to follow. Right on the heels of the GAFCON conference, there’s been high drama in the Anglican church as (the English media report) the Vatican has been holding secret meetings with some high Anglican officials who are ill-disposed to allowing women to be bishops.

A significant number of bishops and clergy are seeking to hold the Anglican communion hostage, just after GAFCON fired its volleys at the same communion. In the case of GAFCON, the “presenting issue” (to echo the less than scintillating archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen) is the gay issue: gay people. Our existence. Our expectation to be at the table of the Lord. The choice of the Episcopal Church USA to make one of us a bishop—one of us not hiding his/her identity, that is, but one of us who is out and proud. As Katherine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the ECUSA, said some time ago, it’s no secret at all that the ranks of the episcopacy in the Anglican communion have always contained a significant number of closeted gay men.

For the group now pressuring Rowan Williams on the heels of GAFCON, the presenting issue is the choice to make women bishops. The Anglican communion is faced today with a two-pronged, overlapping set of threats to divide the communion—one group pressing the gay issue, the other the women’s issue.

Though the two groups are not entirely coterminous with each other, and though one is low-church evangelical (GAFCON) and the other high-church Catholic (the anti-women bishops group), they share a certain set of theological and political predispositions. And these theological-political predispositions are being gleefully exploited by right-wing interest groups in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia.

The bottom line is bullying. These right-wing interest groups want to de-fang the mainline churches, to eliminate their political influence within the global North, to reduce that influence to frippery. They’d far rather have “their” churches foaming at the mouth about the length of lace to be worn on an episcopal gown than preaching about the sins of capitalism, exploitation of the environment. Or about the sins of racism and homophobia.

To its credit, the Anglican communion has just chosen to stand up to these bullies. Yesterday evening, a synod gathered in York voted to move ahead with ordaining women bishops in the Church of England (the U.S., Canada, and Australia are already ahead of the curve here).

The Anglican communion will pay a price for its courage here, as the ECUSA has been paying a price for making Gene Robinson a bishop. And this news comes on the heels of a recent decision by the Presbyterian Church USA to overturn its ban on (openly) gay clergy and to move towards blessing gay marriages.

That decision now has to be confirmed by the presbyteries of the church, and in all likelihood, will not be confirmed by many of the presbyteries—particularly in the last big stronghold of ecclesial misogyny and homophobia, my homeland, the American Southeast.

Nonetheless, these are important decisions. They indicate that the power of the religious right (and, above all, of its right-wing puppet masters) to control the conversation of mainline churches is waning. They suggest that the religious right will be less capable of manipulating the consciousness of American voters in future, by playing anti-gay and anti-women cards.

The interaction between the group threatening to leave the Anglican church over ordination of women bishops and the Vatican also points to the continuing ugliness of many ecclesial and political stands taken by the current pope and his cronies. And that recognition (the recognition of the ugliness at the center of my church) in turn points to the growing divisions between the Vatican and many Catholic people, particularly in the U.S. On his return to Australia from his recent American tour, Bishop Geoffrey Robinson recently noted that he was shocked at the amount of discontent he found among American Catholics, and at the corruption of church officials that is producing this discontent.

Indeed. The American Catholic church is a mell of a hess, as my aunt likes to say. And that hess is not likely to be resolved anytime soon—not until a significant number of American Catholics get as mad as hell and determined not to take it anymore. And until those who continue to affiliate publicly with the hess start withholding money from the church, from their church . . . .

And through it all, the United Methodist Church remains, as I predicted it would, once delegates to General Conference had gone home, bafflingly silent about the issues it so hotly debated at General Conference—about the issue, the gay issue, the place of gay human beings in the church and at its table. It appears that, as with previous General Conferences, the United Methodist Church will continue to get away with the claim that it opposes discrimination against gay people, while its own institutions discriminate freely and unapologetically against gay people.

It appears that not even the most recent statement of General Conference deploring discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation will provide some UMC-sponsored institutions to adopt policies stating flatly that they will not discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation. As a blogger on the gay-inclusive UMC Reconciling Ministries website noted recently, while Presbyterians are debating gay ordination and gay marriage, Methodists are still stuck over whether even to admit gay members.

John Wesley must be hanging his head in shame.

So, accidie: all of this quick shifting and turning and buzzing within various churches today, regarding significant issues, leaves me overloaded with information. I need to get a feel for what is going on—at a spiritual level; at a deeper level than that fathomed by media soundbytes. I need some “away” time to take it all in.

I’m feeling accidie as well because, out of the blue, I have a delightful invitation to publish something in a venue I admire. And, again out of the blue, in quick succession, I have received hard shoves recently to publish a book I have long outlined in my head. And have been hesitant to publish.

For all kinds of reasons. The book touches on stories that in turn touch on the lives of people still living, and I want to be careful to do justice (and practice charity) if I do publish anything about those lives.

I’m also plain frightened to try to write this book. Not sure I have it in me. Not sure that what I think is an important story to tell will turn out to be important, once I have done the research necessary to gather narrative detail. Not sure I have the ability to work narrative detail into clean, compelling narrative line.

But aware, at some level, that whatever or Whoever is pushing me in this direction is beyond my own control, and that resisting some Whoevers can be more than a tad dangerous, as witness one Jonah. It’s easier to shut down and scratch my itch, than to go ahead and grasp the live wire of this vocational nudge.

Perhaps there’s a nice quite monastery somewhere that needs a lay gardener? Or a placid little Quaker community that wants a live-in cook to assist the Friends to whom it offers retreats?

But I suspect a whale can swallow a body even in the hills of Pennsylvania or Kentucky—or wherever those refuges are to be found. Particularly when that body is running away from what’s really worth doing in his own life?

And I'm surely not any Jonah. But I suspect that all of us end up getting chased by his whale every now and again, when we try to divert our lives to a direction other than the path set before us . . . .

* Another nudge: I'm intrigued that, in the past day or so, as the Anglican synod gathers in York, my counter for hits on this blogsite shows several log-ins from York. I do not intend to be self-promoting in noting this. I note it because it's another nudge to me not to let the accidie stop me from trying to put word after word, as I gather thoughts and seek with millions of other Christians to hear what the Lord says to the churches today.