End-of-Week News Selection: Donna Freitas on Abuse Story, Joshua Alston on Facebook and the Closet

A handful of articles as this week ends, which have caught my eye in the past week and I want to recommend to readers.

First, Religion Dispatches recently interviewed Donna Freitas, author of a new novel entitled This Gorgeous Game, which tells the story of an adolescent girl stalked by a Catholic priest.  Freitas formerly taught religion at Boston University, and has just taken a position at Hofstra University.

Tom Roberts on the Purge of Gays from Catholic Seminaries: Start of Honest Conversation about Sexuality Issues and Priesthood?

Ever since reading Tom Roberts' National Catholic Reporter reflections on this week's New York Times article about the gay purge of Catholic seminaries (and here), I have felt itchy.  Something in Roberts' response to the purge and the process by which gays are being weeded out of Catholic seminaries has made me itch with questions I couldn't quite put my finger on.

Now that I've thought about precisely what troubles me in Roberts' analysis, I've just posted a response at NCR.  I'll append it below.

The Gulf Disaster and the Search for Ethical Insight: Where Are Answers to Be Found?

I haven’t blogged yet about what’s happening in the Gulf because this story is painfully personal for me.  I still have not returned to New Orleans, following Katrina.  I do not know that I can do so—that I can see the aftereffects of the destruction of that city—and cope with what I see.  Photographs and videos have been enough to show me the horror.  Enough to let me know that I am still not prepared to see it first-hand.

New Orleans is, in key respects, my spiritual home.  I went to college there, found love there, nurtured soul there.  As I finished my graduate work in theology, providence returned me, fatefully, to teach at Xavier University, and the same providence found Steve a job in the same city the following year.  When we had entered graduate school, we had taken for granted that we would not likely find jobs in the same place when we graduated—that finishing our doctorates would mean the end of our life together. 

Walt Whitman on the Failure of the Institution of the Father, and the Catholic Abuse Crisis: Are Manly Men Really the Solution?

This links to what I posted yesterday about Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami and the search for manly men to lead the Catholic church today—a search premised on bias and myth that has dominated the outlook of many Catholics in recent years, as attempts are made to pin the abuse crisis on gay priests.  A persistent subtext in the hagiography of John Paul the Great has been that, as a manly man, he did not countenance clerical sexual abuse of minors.  (And how wrong that subtext has been proven by the Maciel story!)  And that if we could only begin attracting more manly men like him to the priesthood, the abuse situation would be a thing of the past.

I’m troubled by the fit between that subtext, based on bias and myth, and the rhetoric of the violent right-wing extremists who are well-represented in contemporary American culture.  Justine Sharrock tracks this rhetoric at Alternet today, noting that right-wing extremist groups are increasingly using Facebook and other networking sites to organize and gain adherents. 

Richard Sipe on Sex, Obedience, and Disclosure: Getting to the Roots of Catholic Clerical Abuse Crisis

For the sound of a really prophetic voice in American Catholicism today (no vroom, vroom, vroom here), I recommend Richard Sipe's latest article at National Catholic Reporter on sex, obedience, and disclosure in the Catholic church.

Its conclusion:

The Bishop Has a Hog: The New Archbishop of Miami and the Future of American Catholicism

The old boys are loving them some Tom Wenski.

He’s got a hog.  Vroom, vroom, vroom!  And he rides that Harley all over the place.

Vroom, vroom, vroom!

The I-Believe-Everything-Approach to Catholic Orthodoxy: Critical Reflections

Terry Weldon has a very good posting now at the Open Tabernacle site, looking at the place of the Catholic catechism as an answer book for those who need answers—all the answers—to the pop quiz we’re presumably going to be given at the end of our lives.   About our orthodoxy, don’t you know. 

About whether we’ve informed ourselves as to everything there is to know about what the Catholic church teaches.  And whether we’ve accepted everything the church teaches, and implemented all of that teaching in our actions.