John McNeill has outstanding commentary on Pope Benedict's remarks in Portugal last week at his Spiritual Transformation blog. And Jayden Cameron has posted a valuable summary of John's analysis at Open Tabernacle.
As I did in my posting about Benedict in Portugal at the end of last week, John McNeill wonders about the disproportionate emphasis of the current pope on gay marriage as an incomparable threat to the human race, one of the “most insidious and dangerous threats to the common good” faced by the human community today. John notes that Benedict makes such proclamations (seemingly with a straight face--my take), while ignoring the nuclear arms race, environmental destruction, disease, poverty and starvation in much of the underdeveloped part of the world, and the increase in genocide, violence, murder, torture, and enslavement at this point in history.
John notes, "Which leads me to wonder what alternate universe the Pope lives in; what alternate reality is he dealing with?"
I'm particularly struck by John McNeill's continued stress on the gifts that gay believers offer to communities of faith, and which gay human beings offer to the human community in general. As he notes, perhaps the most serious threat faced by heterosexual marriage today is the patriarchal framework in which we've come to view and to do marriage.
That model requires continued subordination of females (and of the feminine) and continued domination of males and of the masculine. Gay people and gay relationships offer a valuable gift to faith communities and to culture in general by seeking to balance the male and female traits we all carry inside us, and by developing balanced and non-hierarchical marital relationships.
I'm absolutely convinced that John McNeill's analysis is correct, and that a day will come in the history of the Catholic church when these insights will be seen as prophetic, even as they begin to be incorporated into the life of the church. As the Catholic church continues to deny the humanity of gay persons and trample on the rights of those who are gay, it makes a tragic preferential option for the male which threatens its own future as a religious organization proclaiming moral values to society large.
A preferential option for the male at all costs, for any male over any female. For the phallus and its power, to put the point bluntly. For the masculine and its domination, and against the feminine and its gifts.
This preferential option has locked the church into increasingly destructive modes of behavior and increasingly destructive decisions about whom it (and its institutions) empower and whom it sends packing. To link to my posting earlier today about homophobia in the life of American Catholic institutions of higher learning: one of the concrete effects of homophobia premised on the preferential option for the heterosexual or heterosexual-posturing male in Catholic institutions of higher learning is that men who are singularly ill-equipped to be academic leaders receive preferential treatment, while women and gay men are excluded from power.
This undermines the academic integrity of many Catholic institutions of higher learning and assures that their scholarship--and the quality of their dialogue with culture--is second-rate. It places the church in an increasingly reactive stance towards a culture that rightly pushes against one's claim to automatic preferential treatment simply because one is endowed with a penis--which one presumably uses in the "ordered" way of heterosexual intercourse and not the disordered way of gay genital activity.
I'm struck, these days, by the extent to which those now carrying the torch for Benedict in this period of embattlement of the papacy are heterosexual males. Follow the negative comments on this blog and blogs like Open Tabernacle, as a few readers taunt those of us calling for church reform, and you'll quickly see that 99.99% of those doing the taunting are males who profess to be heterosexual.
Who demand that we equate the church itself with its embattled leaders, and who inform us that if we call for church reform while criticizing the church's leaders we must not expect to be taken seriously. I was struck by the fact that at this weekend's organized demonstration of support for Benedict (which the pope called, astonishingly, "spontaneous"), Rome's center-right mayor Gianni Alemanno, who took part in the demonstration, told the media,
We want to show our solidarity to the pope and transmit the message that single individuals make mistakes but institutions, faith and religion cannot be questioned. We will not allow this.
The pope is the church. Question the pope and you question religion itself. We will not allow this.
This is the quintessentially fascist message that many men who continue to defend patriarchy intend to give anyone calling for reform of the Catholic church today: we will not allow this. Question our leaders, and you are questioning the faith itself.
But the questions will not go away, no matter how fierce the fascist blowback. And as John McNeill concludes, one of those questions, one that increasingly demands to be asked as Benedict focuses with laser-beam precision on gay marriage as the incomparable threat to world civilization, is a question about the psychological framework out of which many members of the Catholic hierarchy operate when they face the gay issue.
To many of us, it seems increasingly apparent that the fact that many Catholic church officials are closeted, self-hating gay men plays a huge role in the disproportionate attention those same church leaders give to the issue of homosexuality. And to the hostility with which they approach their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.
No amount of repression, no number of staged demonstrations and "we will not allow this," will make that question go away now. Because it deserves an answer.
