Newman Canonized, and Talk of His Love for Ambrose St. John Rocks the World of Macho-Heterosexist Clerics: My Thoughts

1/ It has long been a tactic of homophobes to claim that one cannot identify people in the past as gay when they did not identify themselves that way, even when they spoke or wrote about same-sex relationships in their own lives. This tactic wants to invisibilize gay people.

— 𝕎𝕚𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕒𝕞 𝔻. 𝕃𝕚𝕟𝕕𝕤𝕖𝕪 🌈 (@wdlindsy) October 14, 2019

NCR Headline: "Church Teaching Doesn't Change"--Really?!

I wonder who wrote the headline for the article by Cindy Wooden of Catholic News Service that National Catholic Reporter is now running. It reads, "Church Teaching Doesn't Change, but Church Laws Can."

Ongoing Catholic Conversation about Sexual Morality: Two Recent National Catholic Reporter Pieces

And, even as the Catholic hierarchy bash away today, and are willing to divert huge sums of money to the bashing when that money is needed to keep Catholic parishes and schools open, feed the hungry, heal the sick, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, and defend the unwelcome stranger in our land: the Catholic conversation goes on. 

Catholic people keep thinking and talking (and praying and living our faith).  And we increasingly come to conclusions, on the basis of our graced experience, that don't entirely mesh with those of the hierarchy,  particularly in the area of sexual morality.  In fact, we increasingly come to conclusions that actually challenge the claim of our pastoral leaders to speak in the name of God definitively and for all time, in a way that ends all discussion, about these issues. 

Who Knew? What Reading Newman Did Not Prepare Me for When I Became Catholic

I’ve mentioned  before on this blog that one of the motivating factors in my fateful decision to become Catholic as a teenager was John Henry Newman.  I encountered Newman in high school.  Both his Apologia and Development of Christian Doctrine were on the reading list of my school’s accelerated English program—along with, as I think of it, Merton’s Seven-Storey Mountain, Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Pascal’s Pensées, and a rich assortment of other philosophical and religious writings from around the world.  It was a truly catholic reading list, and reading Newman only underscored the commitment to catholicity of thought--the commitment to read widely and think carefully--that I was taught by the best teachers who taught me in high-school.

Mary Lee Settle, John Henry Newman, and Roger Williams: Musings on Authentic Catholicity

Becky Garrison's interview today at Religion Dispatches with Wake Forest's Bill Leonard about Roger Williams catches my eye for a very particular reason.  Yes, I've always been interested in Roger Williams and his contribution to American religious (and political) thought, because that contribution was drummed into me as a child in Sunday School.  As I was growing up, many evangelical churches had not yet abandoned their longstanding commitment to separation of church and state (they've done so now with a vengeance), and still held up for veneration figures like Roger Williams, with his courageous defiance of the attempt of the Puritan majority in New England to suppress freedom of conscience via state control of religion.

The Newman Wars: Papal Visit to England and Battle over Newman’s Legacy

As Benedict's visit to England nears, it's fascinating to watch the drawing of battle lines among Catholic commentators on the visit, re: the legacy of John Henry Newman. Better thinkers and more astute bloggers than I am are already commenting on this topic, including James Martin at America's "In All Things" blog, John Cornwell in London's Financial Times, Colleen Baker at Enlightened Catholicism, Michael Bayly at Wild Reed, and Andrew Sullivan at his Daily Dish site. And then there are Ann Widdecombe at the Telegraph and Michael Sean Winters at National Catholic Reporter.

And More Synchronicity: Newman Again--Misappropriating and Misrepresenting the Facts

More fascinating synchronicity: I learn this morning from blogger Terry Weldon at Queering the Church, an outstanding blog I read daily with great interest, that he, too, noticed the thread about Newman at Michael Bayly's Wild Reed blog yesterday, and he posted a statement about that thread as well. Terry seems to have been writing his posting around the time I was working on mine. I didn't go back to his blog after an early-morning reading of it yesterday, and learned of his statement about Newman only when I saw his comment on my blog this morning.

In his comment on my Newman posting yesterday, Terry states,

One of the key lessons for me is how easily the rightwing sometimes gets away with misappropriating and misrepresenting the real facts of church history - but not in this case. We need to completely vigilant to prevent this, and to do so we must ensure that we have a good understanding of the real history ourselves.

Terry's posting at Queering the Church about these issues also notes,

This highlights for me yet another theme I have become conscious of: so much of our popular perceptions of church history (where we have any at all) are simply wrong. The hierarchy makes no attempt to correct these misperceptions, instead selectively extracting from 2000 years of history that suits and matches their interpretations of what “must” have been, not of what actually was the case.

Then another nugget: In trying to track down the quotation I was looking for, I found another excellent and useful post on McClory, “A Catholic Understanding of Dissent.” This deals with a keynote address McClory gave to a prayer breakfast, in which he spoke (inter alia) about Bishop Nienstedt, and an extraordinary action he took concerning his predecessor, Bishop Raymond Lucker.

“At that time,” said McClory, “[Nienstedt] had done something newsworthy in relation to a book entitled, Revelation and the Church: Vatican II in the Twenty-First Century. This book had been largely written and edited by his predecessor, Bishop Raymond Lucker,” explained McClory, “and, in it, Bishop Lucker said that there were a lot of things that the Church needs to think about. He listed 37 matters of authoritative Church teaching that have undergone substantial change over time – including the Church’s approach to religious liberty, the Bible, slavery, and the Jews. Bishop Lucker’s book also contained a list of 15 teachings that could change in the future, including clerical celibacy, artificial birth control, intercommunion between Protestants and Catholics, condemnation of homosexual activity, and the ordination of women. When Bishop Nienstedt came in and saw that book he said: ‘Take that off the shelf.’”

I heartily second what Terry Weldon says in these reflections. What's at stake in this discussion is separating truth from falsehood. Terry is correct to note that one of the "key lessons" of the recent discussion about Newman on Michael Bayly's blog is "how easily the rightwing sometimes gets away with misappropriating and misrepresenting the real facts of church history."

And so the need to be vigilant and to push back daily against the falsehoods.

In the discussion of Newman and the sensus fidelium at Wild Reed to which my posting yesterday linked, there are two strands of misappropriation and misrepresentation of the facts. I'd like to label these two strands the lie and the equivocation.

The lie is rather easy to detect and combat. People who say that Newman wrote about Arianism to demonstrate that bishops defended orthodox teaching about christology, while the faithful held unorthodox teaching, turn Newman on his head. They grossly misrepresent what Newman said, and why he wrote about this topic.

As my posting about this issue yesterday noted, it's easy to overturn this lie by a reference to Newman's texts. One wonders why anyone would bother trying to tell this lie about Newman's work when Newman's writings about Arianism and the sensus fidelium are easily accessible and easily understood, and when they so clearly say the opposite of what the lie wishes to maintain.

Newman wrote about the Arian crisis to demonstrate that the pastoral leaders of the church can sometimes be wrong in their doctrinal teaching, and that the lay understanding of the faith--the sensus fidelium--can be correct, and can actually save the church from error when its leaders have departed from what the laity hold as the accurate understanding of faith.

Lies about Newman's theology are easily exposed. The equivocation is harder to detect, and for that reason, is more insidious. It masquerades as something other than what it really is. It tells us it is all about concern for statistical accuracy, for correct interpretation of texts, or for legitimation of many readings of the tradition, when its real goal is to discredit this building block of Newman's theology, the sensus fidelium, in order to defend current magisterial teaching as the only possible option for faithful Catholics.

If the question at hand is, for instance, to understand what we should make of the fact that a huge majority of Catholics in the developed nations reject magisterial teaching on artificial contraception (and teachings on sexual ethics in general, insofar as they are based in a biologistic interpretation of natural law), then those dealing in equivocation will propose that this large majority is illusory. Despite hard empirical evidence for several decades now, which shows that the large majority of lay Catholics in the developed world reject magisterial teaching about artificial contraception, and that the trend is well-established and is not diminishing but increasing, those who equivocate about this topic often argue that statistics are misleading.

Or that what the empirical data are capturing consistently over several decades are sporadic "lapses" of the faithful, as they try contraception now and again and then return to the Catholic fold. Or that, if we do admit this trend exists, it exists only for Western Catholics and it is imperalistic to try to impose the concerns of those Catholics on Catholics in other parts of the world.

Since it is clear that what is happening to official teaching about artificial contraception in contemporary Catholicism so closely parallels what Newman wrote about in his work on the sensus fidelium, another line of attack in the equivocating approach is to suggest that Newman's work on the sensus fidelium is only one strand among many in his thought, and that those who focus on that strand misrepresent Newman's work in its totality.

This approach ignores--it equivocates about--the centrality of the sensus fidelium to Newman's entire body of work. It glosses over and equivocates about how Newman's work on the sensus fidelium has now become canonical within Catholic theology and magisterial teaching itself. The documents of Vatican II repeatedly enshrine the concept of the sensus fidelium in their statements about the nature and role of the church.

The equivocating position about Newman's theology of sensus fidelium stands that concept on its head as starkly as the lie does. This position seeks to subvert the plain meaning of the term sensus fidelium. As the term clearly suggests, sensus fidelium is all about the consensus of the faithful, the shared sense of many of the faithful about various Christian teachings, grounded in the lived experience of faith.

To try to twist the meaning of the phrase sensus fidelium to imply that the term means that the magisterium is always correct in its formulation of doctrine or moral teachings at any point in history is to subvert plain sense in the most machiavellian way possible. It is to take a concept that is all about listening to the laity and to use that concept to defend the magisterium when it ignores the laity's voice.

Terry is right. Somehow, how we teach Christian history and Christian theology has gotten twisted, when people of the lie can promote such obvious lies and equivocations and expect to get away with them. In my view, Terry's anecdote about how Bishop Nienstedt handled Bishop Lucker's book on revelation and the church illustrates how we have come to this point.

Though he was a bishop, Lucker had the courage to admit that the church has changed its mind about a wide range of doctrinal and moral issues in the past. Because he refused to ignore the abundant historical evidence which proves this, Bishop Lucker argued that, having done so in the past, the church can change its mind about doctrinal and moral issues in the present and future.

Bishop Nienstedt's response to his predecessor's work? It was to remove Lucker's book from the shelf. We have been living for some time now through a period in Catholic history in which some of our church leaders and some of our intellectual class think that we can control what people think and believe by simply removing contrary evidence from our bookshelves.

We have been living through a less than stellar moment in church history in which people of the lie have claimed the center of the church, and now want to lie boldly (and subtly) about matters all of us can fairly easily see right in front of us, if we open our eyes and look at what is right before our faces. And so the lie has to be supplemented by orders for us to stop seeing what we see, to stop talking among ourselves, and above all, to stop thinking. The lie has to be supplemented by distorted data and subversion of the plain sense of canonical texts.

Fortunately for those who care about the history of the church as an institution, history suggests that such authoritarian tactics of mind control will work only in the short run. They will not prevail in the long run, because people do keep thinking. And noticing the sharp discrepancies between what the official leaders of the institution teach and what they practice. And refusing to put up with those discrepancies, particularly when doing so requires that they sacrifice their own understanding of what the Christian life is all about.

Meanwhile, we are living through a time when the people most inclined to represent themselves as the only trustworthy purveyors of absolute truth are those most intent on misrepresenting and misappropriating the facts. We're living at a moment in Christian history in which Christians of the right are not only trying to outlaw artificial contraception in many places, but are inventing bogus scientific narratives about contraception which suggest that contraceptives are abortifacients and that they harm not only mothers but also children.

If a teaching is true and compelling, it does not need lies to make it palatable. When it has to rely on lies and equivocations to carry the day, something is clearly wrong with the teaching.

A Reader Responds: Standing Newman on His Head

One of the interesting experiences I sometimes have with this blog is an experience of synchronicity involving several other bloggers who talk about issues that engage the passion of all of us as a group. I've just had one of those synchronistic experiences in a three-way dialogue with two other bloggers. I'd like to relate that now, in one of my "a reader responds" postings.

In response to what I wrote yesterday about Archbishop Burke and his anti-Obama political crusade gussied up in fabulous religious garb, Colleeen Kochivar Baker of Enlightened Catholicism writes,

The whole tenor of some voices is really reminiscent of the reign of Pio NoNo. Hell and damnation from the pulpit, promotion of the personal piety of cloistered nuns, siding with the hugely wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class, and the purposeful promotion of creeping infallibility in the Papacy.

No wonder the big push is on to co opt Cardinal Newman. It's almost mandatory the Church bring him in the exalted fold before people actually read what he wrote. Perhaps he is truly the Saint for our time.

As Colleen was sending that comment to my blog, I was over at Michael Bayly's Wild Reed blog, reading and responding to his recent summary of a 2003 National Catholic Reporter article by Arthur Jones, in which Jones interviewed Richard Sipe. Sipe argues that the stage is set for a new Reformation in the Catholic church, because the sensus fidelium, the faith held by "ordinary" lay folks in our "ordinary" everyday lives, has moved in a direction decisively counter to what the church is teaching at an official level in the area of sexual ethics.

A vast majority of Catholics in the developed nations of the world reject the official Catholic teaching on contraception. Increasing numbers of Catholics also do not accept the church's teaching that homosexual acts are ipso facto unnatural and immoral, gravely sinful no matter when and in what context they occur.

I find the response to Michael's posting about the sensus fidelium fascinating, because several respondents completely turn on its head one of the classic sources affirming the sensus fidelium, the theology of 19th-century Catholic theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman. Newman's work noted that, in the period of controversy in the early church in which the Christian community sought to hammer out an understanding of christology (specifically, an understanding of how humanity and divinity connect in Christ), a large number of bishops held the Arian position that was eventually condemned by the church, while the laity held what eventually became the orthodox christological position.

Though Newman is very clear about this issue--in fact, much of his theology revolves around his reflections on what these historical findings portend for the development of doctrine--two posters responding to Michael's posting want to maintain that Newman's theology of the sensus fidelium is actually about the magisterium's inability to be wrong, ever, and that the magisterium (i.e., the bishops) held the orthodox teaching during the Arian crisis, while the sensus fidelium was unorthodox!

And so I responded to these comments on Michael's blog with the following comment:

Great article, Michael. I'm amazed at how a number of respondents in this thread completely turn Newman on his head, when it comes to the sensus fidelium and the Arian crisis.

As Newman repeatedly and clearly points out, it was the faithful--lay believers--who held onto what became the orthodox definition of Christ's nature, when a majority of bishops (the magisterium, to use Liam's term) were Arianists.

As John J. Burkhard notes in "The Sensus Fidelium" in Gerard Mannion and Lewis Seymour Mudge's (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (London: Routledge, 2008), "Newman, for instance, was famous for his claim that during the second phase of the Arian crisis, when many of the bishops accepted Arian compromise formulas for expressing the faith in Christ, the faithful rose to the task of witnessing to Christ's full divinity by refusing to have anything to do with such compromises. Increasingly, then, a doctrine of the role of the faithful as a true source of the church's faith became a part of the Roman Catholic theology of faith" (pp. 561-562).

My God, what are they teaching in these right-wing Catholic colleges nowadays, if they can take Newman's theology of the sensus fidelium and his history of the Arian crisis and try to argue that this theology and that history argue for the perpetual rightness of the magisterium and the wrongness of the laity in matters of faith and morals?

And then I logged into recent comments on this Bilgrimage blog to find that, while I was responding to Michael's posting and discussing Newman's theology of the sensus fidelium, noting that there seems to be a move afoot in some Catholic quarters to turn Newman's theology on its head, Colleen was responding to my posting yesterday by noting that there's a "big push" on to co-opt Newman and to "bring him into the exalted fold" before people actually read his theology.

I call this exchange synchronicity. It's that spark of insight shared by a number of bloggers day by day that keeps me going. It convinces me that many of us who are blogging about these issues are part of a wider community of thought and faith than we often realize, as we sit blogging in our individual locations.

And that's a good thing to recognize, when the odds against our marginal little communities of discourse seem stacked so largely in favor of those who hold the reins of power firmly in their hands.

Thomas Aquinas on the Fecundity of Creation (and the Necessity of Gay Persons to Mirror God's Fecund Nature?)

These are two separate journal entries from the spring of 1990, on a similar theme:

A theological theme keeps popping into my mind. It has to do with the fecundity of creation. I have a notion that some classic theologians—Meister Eckhart? Julian of Norwich? Maybe even Aquinas?—have written on this theme. I don’t know that I’ve ever really seen this phrase: I’ve coined it in my mind to express the idea that the great diversity and richness of the created world points back to the diversity and richness of the creator.

I think this is significant as a theological grounding for Christian acceptance of sexual diversity—in accepting the much richer diversity of sexual orientation outside the bounds of natural law narrowly construed, Christians praise and acknowledge the largesse of the creator. I want sometime to study the theme of creation more specifically.

+ + + + +

I think I’ve written this elsewhere, but I believe Walden could be used as the basis for an interesting article on nature and homosexuality. Thoreau develops throughout the book a concept of nature as diverse, manifold, open-ended, that is at once philosophically profound and typically American (Transcendentalist).

This intersects well with the ideas I’ve sketched in previous journals on the fecundity of nature, as a basis for a gay-affirming ethic.

Brennan Hill, Paul F. Knitter, William Madges, in Faith, Religion, and Theology: A Contemporary Introduction (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third, 1990), pp. 373-4, cite Aquinas, Summa, pt. I, ques. 47, art 1, to say that the multiplicity of life forms is necessary for us to appreciate the grandeur and infinite nature of God, that God brought things into being in order both to communicate divine goodness to them, and be represented by them via all their diversity. Diversity, Aquinas thinks, is necessary because what’s lacking to one in representing God’s goodness is supplied by another.

A biocentric or creation-centered ethic of homosexuality would thus see acceptance of gays as a requisite for appreciating God’s lavish goodness, the fecundity of the divine nature.

Also apropos here is Newman, “Preface to the 3rd Edition,” The Via Media of the Anglican Church: “Still more readily will that true theology, which teaches that He ever was a Father in his incomprehensible essence, accept and proclaim the doctrine of the fertility, bountifulness, and beneficence of His creative power . . . . ” (lxxii-lxxiii).

Thought for the Day: Newman on Relentlessly Reasoned Ideas and Hard Hearts

No ideas are more wild than those which are relentlessly reasoned out by the hard heart and the sober judgement.

John Henry Newman, The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and Certainty (Oxford, 1976), ed. H.M. de Achaval and J.D. Holmes (p. 95, from Newman’s notebook, 1863).

I'll Fly Away: Newman's Exhumation and the Saint's Miracle

So, they’ve dug up Cardinal John Henry Newman.

And nothing’s there—a few tidbits of brass, wood, and cloth, but no body (www.birminghamdiocese.org.uk/ourstandard.asp?pageid=161, thanks to Whispers in the Loggia blog at http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com). Nada. Zilch.

As readers know, I’ve been following this story with interest, because of Newman’s express written request that he be buried beside his lifelong companion Ambrose St. John (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/john-henry-newman-and-ambrose-st-john.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/newman-and-jgersttter-kosher-ethics-and.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/update-on-churches-of-main-street-usa.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/men-who-rule-us-collusion-of-male.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/flying-saints-and-anglicans-crossing.html).

As I’ve noted in previous postings, Rome requested the exhumation of Newman’s body to facilitate his veneration at a new shrine in the Birmingham oratory. The decision to violate Newman’s burial wishes and remove him from his resting place beside St. John has struck some commentators as explicitly homophobic.

The removal of Newman’s body is in preparation for his canonization. In the view of commentators such as human rights activist Peter Tatchell, in separating Newman from St. John, Rome hopes to deflect attention from their relationship, and from Newman’s gay sexual orientation.

Because I share Tatchell’s suspicion that the decision to exhume Newman’s body depends on more than a little ugly homophobia, I’m astonished—and, I confess, delighted—at the unexpected discovery that the body is gone. Vanished. Totally decomposed, it seems.

I see rich significance here. The church will not leave us alone in life. When it can do so, it makes life hellacious for us—defining our personhood and our relationships as intrinsically disordered, making us the exclusive focus of attempts to bar “public sinners” from communion, cooperating with diabolical social forces that try to violate our fundamental human rights (as in the attempt, supported by the Knights of Columbus and Catholic bishops of California, to remove the right to marry from gay couples in California), etc.

In a world in which the institution that claims to be a sacramental sign of God’s redemptive love for the entire world signifies hellacious torment to many gay persons, it is a comfort to know that in death, at least, we are beyond the reach of those who profess to embody the love of God.

That is, it was a comfort to know this, until the church announced oh so cavalierly (and oh so callously) that it intended to violate Newman’s final wishes and dig up his body. That decision seemed to many of us to signify that the church will not leave us alone even in death—that the church will not respect us even after we draw our last breaths, and will continue to violate our humanity even when we lie in our graves, as it violates our humanity while we try simply to make our way through life with dignity and self-respect as the carriers of the Christian message of God’s salvific love for all make our lives living hell.

So Newman has vanished. He is beyond the reach of the church and its ministers. He will not yield his body to be enshrined at the Birmingham oratory. Its atoms have dissolved into the same earth that presumably has absorbed the atoms of St. John’s body. They lie mingled in the cemetery at Rednal in which Newman asked that he be buried beside St. John.

Surely there is a lesson here. And a strong one.

It is most of all a lesson to the church to stop the torment. I imagine Newman speaking now from the grave—speaking as the powerful spirit released by the dissolution of his mortal remains—and saying to the church in which he held high office: Stop. Stop preaching love when you practice hate. Stop calling the world to justice when you yourself practice egregious injustice.

Stop telling people to respect and defend human rights when you refuse to defend the rights of a persecuted minority. Stop trampling on gay people and gay love. Turn yourself around—be converted—and begin celebrating authentic love wherever it is to be found.

Hear the Spirit that lives within the Christian community and learn to discern real love when it stares you in the face: love that is patient and kind; love that is self-giving and generous; love that builds up the Christian community and human communities. That love is present in many gay relationships and in millions of gay lives. In stigmatizing it, in trampling it into the ground, the church stigmatizes and tramples into the ground divine gifts. In rejecting gay love, the church rejects the God who is the author of all love.

These are some of the messages I hear Newman speaking from his empty grave. I wonder if the church will be listening, too?

Perhaps the miracle Newman can now work to justify his canonization is to call the church to repentance for its ugly sins of homophobia. Starting from the top down, from the pope to the cardinals and bishops to the people of God.

What a miracle that would be, a miracle worthy of a real saint. A miracle worthy of a gay saint whose exhumation demonstrates to the world that not even the church can succeed in thwarting his final wish to remain united in death as in life to the man he loved throughout his life.

That's the miracle I'll celebrate if God gives me the grace to go to Rednal and venerate this saint at the final resting place of his human remains.

John Henry Newman and Ambrose St. John: Loving Coupledom

I continue to be fascinated by the discussion of the plans to move Cardinal Newman’s body. In yesterday’s new roundup, I linked to an article and a blog discussion of this matter at the website of the National Catholic Reporter.

There, in the blog discussion about plans to remove Newman’s body from its resting place beside his longtime companion Ambrose St. John, what fascinates me is the response of several bloggers who seem to think that any attempt to depict Newman’s love for St. John as gay love debases that love. As a way of denying that Newman and St. John might have been gay and in love with each other, one blogger points to the well-known phenomenon of male-bonding in situations of stress such as on the battlefield. As if there haven’t been well-documented cases in abundance throughout history, from the days of the Greeks up to the present, of men discovering same-sex attraction while serving together in battle!

Other bloggers pick up on a theme discussed in the NCR article attached to this blog—the theme of “loving coupledom.” As the article notes, English historian Allen Bray applies that phrase to Newman and St. John in a highly regarded study entitled The Friend (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which demonstrates the gay nature of a number of celebrated male “friendships” over the course of history. Bray states that Newman and St. Johns shared a love that was spiritual, and was not the less intense for being spiritual.

In the view of some bloggers, to claim that Newman and St. John loved each other with deep spiritual intensity is to deny that they were gay. These bloggers suggest it is dishonest and inappropriate for current gay believers to claim Newman as a gay role model.

In my view, these attempts to deny the same-sex attraction that was so obviously present in Newman’s relationship with St. John are unconvincing. They miss an important point: namely, that gay partners can be bonded in a spiritual love that may or may not have an explicit erotic physical component. But to say that Newman and St. John may not have expressed their same-sex love physically is not to say that it was anything other than same-sex love.

As the NCR article notes, following the death of St. John in 1875, Newman wrote: “I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband’s or wife’s, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or anyone’s sorrow greater than mine.” Of his beloved’s death, Newman wrote, “This is the greatest affliction I have had in my life,” and “A day does not pass without my having violent bursts of crying and they weaken me, I dread them.”

I’d like to ask those who want to deny that Newman and St. John were gay lovers how they would react if any priest today published statements like this about a clerical friend who had just died. Would church leaders today—would those within the church trying to rid the priesthood of gays—sit by in silence if any priest published such statements following the death of his priest friend?

Frankly, I don’t think so. Given the current crackdown on gays in the priesthood, I doubt Newman or St. John would have been accepted in seminary. And I feel quite sure they would not have been allowed to live together as “special friends” for years, sharing a house and then requesting that they share a grave.

It seems sad, the need to deny what is right before our eyes: the intense, valuable, generative love that two men or two women can have for one another, exemplified so beautifully in this monumental thinker of the 19th century. And pathological to wish to go to such lengths to deny that such love can exist, that we’re willing to ignore the final burial wishes of Newman in order to erase evidence of his lifelong love for St. John.

Newman and Jägerstätter, Kosher Ethics and Hurricane Fay: Ruminations on the News

John Henry Newman Exhumation Story

I’ve blogged several times about the plans underway to exhume the body of the 19th-century theologian and Catholic cardinal John Henry Newman (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/update-on-churches-of-main-street-usa.html,
http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/men-who-rule-us-collusion-of-male.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/flying-saints-and-anglicans-crossing.html). As my previous postings note, since Newman has been declared blessed by Rome (a preliminary to canonization, the step at which a blessed becomes a saint), the Vatican has announced plans to move Newman’s body from its resting place in a small cemetery in Rednal, England, to a shrine in Birmingham.

As I’ve also noted, the ostensible reason the Vatican is giving for this move is to allow the faithful to venerate Newman more readily than they can do at the present burial site—where Newman shares a grave, at his explicit end-of-life request, with his lifelong companion Ambrose St. John. I’ve also discussed the protest of gay activist Peter Tatchell, who views Newman’s exhumation as “an act of religious desecration and moral vandalism.”

The story continues. This past week, National Catholic Reporter published an outstanding overview of the story, including the question of Newman’s sexual orientation and relationship to St. John—Dennis Coday’s “Moving Cardinal Newman’s Body Runs into Controversy” (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1663). Coday’s article notes that the London paper Church Times has an online poll in which readers can vote regarding whether they approve or disapprove of the removal of Newman’s body. The poll is at www.churchtimes.co.uk/previousQuestions.asp?id=222.

Last I checked, the vote was 80% against the exhumation of Newman’s body and his separation from St. John, and 20% in favor. And how this whole thing feels to me? Frankly, as though churches that can’t do enough to make the lives of gay folks hell on earth won’t even leave us alone in death!

There. I’ve said it. And am happy to have that off my chest.

Newman Story in Light of Story of Franz Jägerstätter

As I reflected recently on the story of what the church wants to do with the resting place of Newman and St. John, it occurred to me that there’s an interesting parallel case that, to my mind, represents the disparity between how the churches treat gay relationships and gay human beings, and how they treat straight relationships and straight persons. This has to do with the Austrian martyr Franz Jägerstätter.

Jägerstätter was an Austrian layman who refused conscription into the Nazi army, and was executed for this refusal. He defied the pressure of priest and bishop to enter the army; these pastoral counselors told him that Christians have a solemn duty to obey the dictates of the state. Jägerstätter insisted that Catholic teaching stresses the inviolability of one’s sacred conscience, which one must follow even if church authorities tell one to do otherwise. He was executed because of his defiance of the Nazi regime.

Last October, Pope Benedict declared Franz Jägerstätter blessed. Insofar as I know, Jägerstätter is still buried in his parish cemetery, in a simple grave that is not marked with any conspicuous signs. If I am not mistaken, his elderly widow Franziska still lives, and is to be buried beside him in the rural parish cemetery.

My source for this information is a moving account by Jesuit writer John Dear in National Catholic Reporter of a pilgrimage he made to Jägerstätter’s grave in the 1970s (www.fatherjohndear.org/NCR_Articles/Feb6_07.html). Dear notes that no signs mark the way to the shrine, and that Jäggerstätter is buried in an humble grave outside the chapel in which he attended Mass, his grave marked by a simple crucifix.

And so it should be, in my opinion. And so it should remain—Franz Jägerstätter buried with his wife and family beside him in the simple churchyard where he attended church, to remind us that sanctity is accessible to all of us, is the call of every one of us, who achieve sainthood as he did, by living our “ordinary” lives in the light of the gospel. I would be appalled, frankly, if the church should choose in future to move Jägerstätter from his current burial site, and to separate him from his wife.

With churches, I’ve learned, anything is possible, no matter how outlandish and how obviously cruel to some folks’ eyes. It will be interesting to see if there will be any pressure in future to move Jägerstätter from his current burial site. If not, one cannot help concluding that the churches employ a cruel double standard, when it comes to how they treat gay persons and our relationships.

Discussion of Kosher Ethics

I blogged some time ago about how the federal raids on the kosher meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa (raids that led to the deportation of a large number of Mexican and Central American workers) have resulted in a discussion of the ethics of declaring food kosher (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-god-has-declared-clean-kosher.html). In my previous posting on this topic, I linked to an op-ed article by Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, who quotes 19th-century Rabbi Yisroel Salanter, who is believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher because its workers were being treated unjustly.

I noted my own interest in this discussion: is ritual truly effective (in the literal sense of that word: it effects, it accomplishes) when circumstances in which the ritual is celebrated undercut the fundamental ethical proclamations of the religion mounting the ritual? I’ve noted on this blog that where I find myself vis-à-vis my own church, the Catholic church, and its central ritual, the Eucharist, is a position of alienation.

I am alienated—I cannot participate in the Eucharist—precisely because I believe in the Eucharist. I believe in what it means. I believe that communion in the sacred, ritual sense must be mirrored by the intent to effect communion within the body of Christ, or the ritual contradicts what it proclaims at the most fundamental level.

For me, as a gay person who has been hounded out of a livelihood and career—out of daily bread—by church officials who never have to question where their daily bread will come from, the disparity between how the church behaves and what it proclaims has become too stark to support. I simply can’t stomach that disparity by participating. My very presence at Eucharistic celebrations would be, I feel, a confirmation of the emptiness that surrounds the Eucharistic proclamation, until the church examines the radical injustices it is doing in the name of a clerical system based on power over others who are dominated by clerics. And until those of us at the receiving end of the clerical lash receive a mere apology.

As I have also noted, my gay believer’s experience at the Lord’s Table has not really been any different in some other churches—notably the Methodist church, with which I have had close contact due to my work in two United Methodist colleges. Though, as an alienated Catholic doing administrative work in Methodist institutions, I felt for some time a strong sense of welcome and communion within the Methodist context, that communion ended decisively when I knelt one Sunday at the communion rail beside a Methodist university president who, the following day, told me she/he wished me gone from the campus, and two days later, out of the blue, terminated me in the ugliest way possible.

One cannot believe in Communion when members of the body of Christ grossly violate the most fundamental principles of communion. I have now seen what the “welcome” offered me by the Methodist church really means. The total absence of any protest or pastoral outreach by the Methodist bishop and ministers sitting on the governing board of this university shows me how they regard me as a gay human being, and what that church’s open door slogan really means for me and my kind.

How can someone kneel beside a brother or sister in the Lord on Sunday, intending all the while to do a grave injustice to that same person on Monday—to deny him his daily bread, knowing full well that one’s reasons for doing so are vicious—how can one engage in this behavior, and mean what Communion is all about? My thinking about this issue has long been decisively shaped by German Lutheran martyr-theologian Dietrich Bonhöffer, who notes,

In the Eucharist . . . we receive not only Christ, the Head of the Body, but its members as well. . . . Wherever there is suffering in the body, wherever members of it are in want or oppressed, we, because we have received the same body and are part of it, must be directly involved. We cannot properly receive the Bread of Life without sharing bread for life with those in want.

When Christian institutions deny employment to people unjustly—in the cases I am addressing, solely because those people are gay—they radically undercut all they proclaim about the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion. The current pope echoes Bonhöffer’s analysis of Communion and communion when he notes,

The consequence is clear: we cannot communicate with the Lord if we do not communicate with one another . . . . Fellowship in the Body of Christ and receiving the Body of Christ means fellowship with one another. This of its very nature includes mutual acceptance, giving and receiving on both sides, and readiness to share one's goods . . . In this sense, the social question is given quite a central place in the theological heart of the concept of communion.

All this as a preliminary to noticing another story about the fascinating discussion now going on in the American Jewish community following the Postville raids. Last week, Julia Preston reported in a New York Times article entitled “Rabbis Debate Kosher Ethics at Meat Plant” that a debate about the meaning of kosher regulations is now underway among rabbis (www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/us/23kosher.html?scp=4&sq=kosher&st=cse).

To be specific: while some rabbis are urging the creation of a set of “social justice criteria” to accompany the koshering of food, others resist the proposal to add to the criteria by which food is koshered considerations about the social ethics of the food plant in which food is declared kosher.

This debate mirrors, in a theological context different from the Christian one, the discussion I have highlighted above. Is it possible for church or synagogue to keep engaging in ritual actions whose fundamental significance is belied by the behavior of those mounting the actions?

For me—and, I suspect, for many alienated believers—these are real questions, and profound ones. If communities of faith expect to be taken seriously when they call us to worship, they need to reflect much more seriously about the ways in which the lives of the members of the worshiping community either proclaim the message imparted in worship and ritual action, or impede that message.

And they need to listen to those of us who have been seriously hurt by communities of faith, and who can easily point to the areas in which the message is definitively broken by the behavior of the bearers of the message.

The Weather and God’s Wrath

This is another have-to-get-it-off-my-chest item. Following the California Supreme Court’s decision to legitimate gay marriage, not only blogs, but the mainstream media buzzed for weeks with stories about the “unprecedented” lighting strikes in California and the fires those lightning strikes caused.

The subtext was clear, and was particularly gross, when it appeared in “unbiased” “secular” media statements from places like the AP: God is hurling lightning bolts on Californicators because of their recognition of gay marriage. “Christian” blogs, of course, made the subtext very clear, as they jubilated about the wildfires even as the red states of the heartland were being inundated by unprecedented floods.
And now along comes Fay. And soaks Florida. Another red state, one in which a lesbian not too long ago was denied access to visiting her partner as the partner died, while hospital workers told her that she was in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws and had better just accept it.

And news reports are noting that Fay’s constant twisting and turning around the peninsula of Florida, and its drenching rains, are highly unusual and unprecedented events. But never a peep of that ugly subtext of God’s wrath raining down on Florida.

Double standard? Indeed. This selective use of the weather to underscore God’s wrath has been going on a long time among the religious right. It’s really time for it to stop, and for the AP and other “unbiased” “mainstream” media outlets to stop taking talking points from people who not only predict monsoons as punishments for areas that try to be merely humane to gay folks, but who actually crow when any weather disaster occurs in a state they have targeted.

To say that such behavior is unbecoming among people of faith would be a gross understatement. Might be better, in this age of capricious weather when God seems to send rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike, to stop claiming that you can call down God’s wrath in the form of bad weather on anyone at all.

Theological Reflections on Gay Marriage: Prologue

Yesterday the Huffington Post blog site posted a link to a Ruth Gledhill article in the Times (London), which publishes some of Rowan Williams’ 2000-2001 letters to a member of his former diocese in Wales (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4473814.ece). The current Archbishop of Canterbury wrote the letters while Archbishop of Wales.

In the letters, Rowan Williams states that after two decades of study and prayer, he had reached a “definitive conclusion” about gay marriage: “I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness.”

It is hardly accidental that this correspondence is being released now, as the Lambeth Conference has just closed. There are incredible, terrible pressures from all quarters for the Anglican communion, and, in particular, its American Episcopalian branch, to “repent” of its welcome of gay* persons. Media coverage during the conference noted that some members of the Anglican communion are taunting other members for allowing the Anglican church to be known as the gay church—as if any church standing in solidarity with Jesus should find it embarrassing to be ridiculed for standing with any despised and marginalized group.

As I have noted before, in my view, future generations of believers, as well as historians, will look back on this period of history in bafflement that this issue above all—the need to define gay human beings as the despised and excluded others—should have energized the Christian churches at the turn of the 21st century. Believers of the future and historians will surely ask how it was possible for large numbers of those who claim to follow Jesus to have imagined that excluding anyone—in ugly, obtrusive, taunting, demeaning ways—could be not merely the prerogative but the holy duty of a follower of Jesus.

If civilization perdures beyond the current period, then civilized people will have to ask, as Rowan Williams himself does in his 2000-2001 correspondence, why Christians ever thought it possible to make persecution of gay human beings “the sole or primary marker of Christian orthodoxy”—when Jesus himself never once mentions homosexuality. And when Jesus himself preaches constantly that practical compassion, the kind he practiced by sitting at table with despised sinners, is the hallmark of true religion.

Reading about Rowan Williams’ honest, carefully and painfully discerned, assessment of gay unions (as opposed to the official stance he is pressured to take as an archbishop trying desperately to hold the Anglican communion together) encourages me to try to capture some theological reflections about gay marriage that I have been developing since the recent California Supreme Court decision. These musings reflect ongoing discussions at the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) blog café, in which some contributors defend the traditional hard line of Catholic teaching that all homosexual acts are intrinsically evil because they are not ordered to procreation, and others propose that marriage exists primarily to resolve social issues that arise when couples have children (see http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1046, http://ncrcafe.org/node/1968, http://ncrcafe.org/node/1919, http://ncrcafe.org/node/1816).

My musings also reflect the predictable, but nonetheless disappointing, decision of the California Catholic bishops to release a statement on 1 August calling on Catholics in that state to throw their weight behind Proposition 8—the amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage (www.cacatholic.org/news/proposition-8-on-californias-november-ballot.html). (Can conferences of bishops be wrong, even immoral in their conclusions? The Austrian bishops’ endorsement of Hitler in 1938 certainly proves that they can be spectacularly wrong—even defending morally indefensible positions.

When conferences of bishops are spectacularly wrong, and defend immoral positions, can faithful Catholics reject those positions? Franz Jäggerstätter certainly thought so—and paid the ultimate price for following his conscience against the moral advice of the priests and bishops who advised him to serve the Nazis.)

Before I launch into the theme of gay marriage, a proviso: I may very well be offering thoughts here that have been worked through a lot more systematically by other theologians, including other openly gay ones. I need to confess that I simply don’t read a lot of theology these days—haven’t done so for some time.

This has everything to do with the experience of marginalization, with feeling pushed beyond the boundaries of what is considered right and proper within the church and the theological academies that continue to dance to the church’s tune. But it also has to do with what feeds my theological imagination and my heart: truth be told, that never has been theology, except in the case of a few classical authors whose prose I find irresistible, including Augustine and John Henry Newman.

No, I’m not much of a theologian. I am, though, a reader. Always have been; always will be. I read indiscriminately—history, novels, poetry, drama, blogs, diaries, cookbooks, the backs of cereal boxes. And many of those sources fire my theological imagination far more than does any theological work I’ve ever read. I’ve learned more theology from Jane Austen than I’ll ever learn from Lonergan.

There was a time in which I read a few gay theologians—notably John McNeill. I did so during the period in which I was struggling to decide how to deal with the brute and immovable fact that my first, and decisive, experience of falling in love was not “right”—it was oriented to the direction of intrinsic disorder, and nothing I sought to do could change that direction.

Yet the direction resulted in such gifts in my life that it seemed downright ungrateful to the Creator to reject those gifts—and myself—when the gifts were precisely what Paul calls the fruits of the Spirit: the love I experienced brought me joy, peace, a generosity of soul that I did not have when I cramped myself into the self-hating box the church calls sanctity for gay people. And the more I came to terms with myself and the recognition that God was the giver of these gifts, the more the gifts seemed to abound—though, at the same time, the more the outright rejection and scorn of many in the Christian community also seemed to grow, in direct proportion to my struggle to claim my identity and my love as God-given.

I did read John McNeill in this period, and benefited greatly from his work. My ignorance of other gay theologians has nothing at all to do with disdain for their work. It has more to do with my inability to find much that feeds my spirit in a great deal of the theology published today. It also has something to do with a kind of test I set myself during that coming-out struggle: a test to find my own path without allowing the arguments of openly gay theologians to sway my conclusions, should those conclusions be flat wrong, and should the church be right in its condemnation of me and my ilk.

(I have always deplored ghettoization. I resisted the label of ‘gay theologian’ for a long time, not because I wanted to remain closeted, but because, at some level, it simply shouldn’t make a difference, one’s sexual orientation. I’m a theologian who happens to be gay. Just as I happen to be Southern, Anglo, a pretty good cook, an exceedingly impatient human being, and so on. Nonetheless, if part of the price the mainstream makes me pay for claiming and celebrating who God makes me and the love God has given me, then I am happy to be known as a gay theologian.)

Finally, I haven’t really read other openly gay theologians carefully in recent years, because Steve and I donated our entire theological library—which did include quite a few books by gay theologians that I had bought without ever reading—to Philander Smith College a few years ago. Philander Smith is a small, struggling Methodist HBCU. It needed to build its library in the years in which we worked there, because its accrediting body had cited the library’s weakness on a previous accreditation visit.

Since Steve and I collaborated with several other faculty members on an NEH grant that resulted in a hefty gift to the college to buy books in the field of humanities, it began to seem right and just to us that we put our own money where our mouth was, and give our cherished theology books to the library. For Steve, this was a more painful sacrifice than for me, because he had collected very good books systematically over a period of years.

For me, the sacrifice came more from losing a few books that were old friends—in particular, the social gospel collection I had gathered for my dissertation work, in the margins of which I had made copious annotations I’d like one day to see again.

And here I think I’ll break this lengthy posting into two, so that my reflections on gay marriage form the second part of the posting . . . .

* Generic use of the term to include LGBT persons in general.

Flying Saints and Anglicans Crossing the Tiber

Wow. The saints are really getting around these days. First the Vatican up and flies Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati from Italy to Sydney for World Youth Day. Party on down, Bl. PG!

Now, there’s talk of exhuming John Henry Newman and moving him to a more veneration-friendly site inside the city of Birmingham. Newman is now buried at Rednal Hill outside Birmingham, at his oratory’s country house. Sharing the burial site with him is his lifelong friend Ambrose St. John, regarding whose death Newman wrote, "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine."

In the year after St. John’s death, Newman made a written statement of his own express wishes for burial. The statement declares, “I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John’s grave—and I give this as my last, my imperative will.”

St. John was buried in a coffin draped with a pall bearing Newman’s cardinal’s motto, Cor ad cor loquitur. The lifelong friends share a tombstone with the inscription Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.

It will be interesting to see whether Newman’s express wishes to be buried with St. John will be honored when Newman’s body is moved for wider veneration. Somehow, I doubt that St. John will be making this particular trek into Birmingham with Newman.

All this against the backdrop of the current deliberations in Lambeth. I have refrained from blogging much about what is going on with the Anglican communion, (hough it fascinates me) for two reasons. One is that I flatly do not trust all the publicity being generated by the media about Lambeth. The other is that there are so many facets to the story of what is happening in the Anglican communion today (in my view), that one can easily miss the real treasure for the bright bits of tinfoil over which the media wish us to twitter.

The untrustworthiness of media accounts: I blogged extensively about this issue during the recent United Methodist General Conference. Simply put, the mainstream media are in the pocket of well-heeled special interest groups like the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD). This and other groups deliberately working tensions within the worldwide Anglican communion to try to stop forward movement on ordination of women bishops and gay clergy have been adroitly successful at planting media soundbites about the dissolution of the Anglican communion.

As Lambeth begins, some blogs are reporting that IRD is jetting hold-the-line Anglicans to Lambeth from dioceses around the world. At the last gathering of the worldwide Anglican communion, a bishop in attendance told me, IRD and its allies set up a state-of-the-art media center in the conference grounds. From that center, instant messages could be beamed out around the world, to elicit instant pressure from the interest groups among the faithful seeking to hold the line on women and gays. The center also connected to delegates on the scene, to assure that they were bombarded with constant instructions about how to vote on various issues.

Or so I was told, and I do not doubt the word of the bishop telling me about these activities. Very similar reports arose at the latest United Methodist General Conference. The right wing of these churches is well-funded, and is intent on manipulating the consciousness of the public (and of church members) regarding issues such as women bishops and ordination of openly gay clergy and bishops.

And because IRD and its allies have abundant money and strong ties to important neoconservative political leaders in many places, the media listen,when IRD issues statements. Much of the fanfare about schism in the Anglican communion is a media frenzy emanating directly from IRD—which wants to divide the Anglican and Methodist (and Presbyterian) churches, insofar as it cannot force these churches to toe the neoconservative political line.

This is not to say that there are not strong divisions in worldwide Anglicanism. It is not to say that some kind of fraying will not occur in coming months. What I do want to underscore, however, is that anyone following the story of what is happening in the Anglican communion would be well advised to go beyond media soundbites, in trying to understand all the ramifications of this story.

In my view, when saints start jetting around the world and when their bodies are exhumed for easier veneration, something momentous is happening. The wish to move Newman is clearly linked to the Anglican story. This move is, in some respects, an in-your-face declaration on the part of the Roman Catholic church to the Anglican communion: see, we have the saint (and the sanctity); is it any wonder that those concerned to maintain fidelity to the ancient ways are now crossing the Tiber back to Rome?

When saints fly and jump from grave to grave, one can be assured that Christianity is, well, in a state of flux. The problem is to understand the precise nature of this flux.

There are dimensions to the story of the proposed move of some Anglican/Episcopalian bishops and whole parishes to Rome that are as baffling as the choice to make Blessed Pier Giorgio fly to Sydney or to dig up Newman’s body. Not a few of these bishops and parishes represent precisely the kind of macho-homophobic Christianity that tormented Newman throughout his life.

Newman was nelly. The muscular evangelical Anglicans of his day—the Greg Venables—made no bones about it. In their view, the whole Oxford contingent, with its love of ecclesiastical lace and its infatuation with the smell of incense, had more than a little lightness in its loafers. In Newman’s period, the muscular Christians, for whom God made male and female and thus it ever shall be, would have as lief gone over to lace and incense as they’d have condemned the rapacious capitalism of captains of industry during the Victorian period.

And yet, today, it’s supposedly going to be these very folks—the saviors of Christianity from decadent, limp-wristed, lisping clergy—who are going to swim the Tiber. It’s supposedly going to be these folks who now kiss the ruby slippers of Benedict XVI and who flock to Birmingham to pray at Newman’s tomb—at the tomb of the saint their forefathers repudiated in his lifetime.

There are, of course, other Anglican contingents purportedly ready to go over to Rome. Those opposing the ordination of women bishops not uncommonly include many Anglo-Catholics who have always felt strong sympathy for Newman. If defections occur—if both Anglo-Catholics and muscular macho-homophobic Anglican evangelicals head to Rome—it will be very interesting to see how the tensions between the two play out once they are united in a new Roman Catholic configuration.

And how those tensions affect the Roman church itself. After all, one of the effects of taking in these refugees fleeing women bishops and (openly) gay clergy will be the implementation of more and more Anglican rites within the Roman communion. Which is to say, people will be praying differently than other Roman Catholics do—at a time when the Vatican is stressing the need for liturgical conformity and the return to older rites.

And the Anglicans will bring with them the pesky question of married clergy—to be specific, the pesky question of why Rome eagerly accepts married Anglican clergy defecting from Canterbury, while absolutely slamming the door against married clergy in the Roman rite.

A prediction: not a significant number of Anglicans will defect. But the exodus will be painted in media accounts as highly significant, as the splitting up of the Anglican communion. And another prediction: some of those who cross the Tiber will regret having done so, when they see how things work in the imperial system they are willingly reimposing on themselves. As Newman himself said after his conversion, those who want to ride serenely in the barque of Peter had best not look too closely what goes on in the engine room. If the worldwide clerical abuse crisis should have taught us anything, it is that imperial systems of governance, even in churches (or especially in churches?) all too often act imperious: they blithely ignore the will of those they govern; they willingly dupe when the imperial system is at stake—they willingly lie and dissimulate—and collude with worldly powers whose hands are not always immaculate.

Catholicism is, unfortunately, not the high-minded, morally upright business Newman dreamed it was, when he turned to Rome. And for that reason, one wonders about the unforeseen consequences of the choice to move his body. This choice is, of course, part and parcel of the same media-circus mentality that led the Vatican to jet Pier Giorgio Frassati to Sydney. It’s part and parcel of a strategy of image management that reduces the Christian message to easily appropriated soundbites—the kind of crude, instant, reduced and packaged-for-consumption information the clergy imagine the laity need in order to stay faithful.

But in the case of Newman, wider veneration may open up some unanticipated interest in the theology of a man who has not been canonized, in part, up to now precisely because his theology is simply so inconvenient for Rome. It was Newman, after all, who pointed out that in the Arian crisis, the sensus fidelium preserved orthodox understandings of the divine-human nature of Christ, when the clergy by and large had abdicated orthodoxy.

It was Newman who wrote that doctrines are not true if they are not received by the faithful. It was Newman who insisted that when the sensus fidelium differs significantly from a position handed down by the magisterium, the proper approach of the magisterium is not to enforce conformity, but to ask why the Spirit is speaking in such a different way among the people of God.

And it was Newman who once raised his glass at a banquet and proposed the following toast: to the Pope, yes. But to conscience first! These are hardly theological sentiments now governing the polity Rome wants to push on the faithful. What moldy, inconvenient theological ideas might we now cause to tumble forth, when we open Newman’s grave?

And, once again, what to do with St. John? Newman explicitly asked to be buried with his lifelong friend. It is no secret that another reason the Vatican has not moved forward quickly with Newman’s canonization cause is that he was thought to be, as a graduate-school classmate of mine once said, a bit of a homosexual.

What strange new energies might the Vatican be releasing now, in exhuming Newman and making him a saint, just as it receives converts from Albion’s shores fleeing the gaying up of the Anglo churches? What will it mean to the gay community to have, at last, one of us—one who wrote about the sorrow of losing a companion as deeper than the sorrow of losing a spouse—canonized at this strange, interesting moment in Christian history?

Ironically, Newman is just the nightmare so many of those muscular Christians now fording the Tiber are trying to escape . . . . Even as Rome opens it arms to the muscular Anglicans, it shoves the icon of a gay saint into the hands of those now arriving on Tiber's eastern shores. Perchance this will give gay-fleeing Anglicans a chance to pause and reflect more carefully about what it means to live within an imperial structure that brooks no opposition and conducts no polls to ascertain how its teachings are being received by the faithful.