Following Papal Statement About Apologizing to Gay People, U.S. Lay Catholic Leader John Gehring Calls for Listening Sessions with LGBTQ Catholics

When I posted several days ago about Pope Francis's statement that the Catholic church should apologize to gay people (and others it has targeted and harmed), I wrote that the Catholic institution "has a quite serious problem on its hands," adding,

Hans Küng's Can We Save the Catholic Church?: On the Complicity of Theologians in the Church's Sickness Unto Death

A theme that emerges at several points in Hans Küng's book Can We Save the Catholic Church? (London: William Collins, 2013), and which catches my eye, is the inability or refusal of far too many Catholic theologians in the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI (and still today) to stand against and correct the megalomaniacal claims of both popes — claims that have seriously damaged the Catholic church at this point in its history. I like the fact that Küng does not let us, the people of God, off the hook as he surveys the dismal state of a Catholic church sick unto death today. The problems are not all due to mismanagement at the top of the institution, by any means.

To Readers: Do You Have Evidence That Catholic Theological Society of America Repeatedly Shows Concern to Include LGBTI Voices?

Michael Sean Winters wrote yesterday that the Catholic Theological Society of America has "repeatedly been concerned about including . . . different sexual orientation voices within its fold." And I confess that I'm surprised to read this.

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "Equating Marriage Equality with a Loss of Religious Freedom . . . Is Utter Nonsense"

This is one of the good ones, and not the kind that need to go into the compost heap because they're so noisome there's no other place to put them--David Hart responding to an article by Brian Roewe on how various states are propelling the push for marriage equality in the U.S.:

Why I Keep Blogging: People Are Suffering (and Notes on Margaret Farley's Vatican Condemnation)

My reasons for thinking it's important for everyone to think about these issues is because people are suffering. All over the place, people are suffering.

Sr. Margaret Farley, addressing members of the Catholic Theological Society of America Friday evening and explaining why she wrote the book Just Love, for which the Vatican has just condemned her.

Mary Hunt on U.S. Bishops' Condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson: All about Power

In her inimitable, straight-to-the-point way, theologian Mary Hunt dissects the U.S. Catholic bishops' recent action against theologian Elizabeth Johnson's book Quest for the Living God.  Hunt's analysis doesn't contain any information that hasn't already appeared in other accounts.  But as always, better than other tellings of the story, it drives right to the heart of the matter, framing the USCCB's condemnation of Johnson as an assertion of naked power at a time when the bishops' moral and teaching authority could not be in more disrepute, due to their handling of the abuse crisis.

Kicking It Old School: Cardinal Burke, The Galero Wars, and the Revival of Real Catholicism

In response to my posting about Cardinal Burke and Fr. Andrew Hamilton yesterday, Kathy Hughes made the following scintillating comment:

I think Bully Burke undercuts his argument with his photos in clerical bling.

O Tempora, O Mores: On the Politico-Religious Uses of the Calvinist Myth in American Culture

I blogged yesterday about an emerging neoconservative meme represented in yesterday’s op-ed piece by David Brooks in the New York Times. As I noted, this meme celebrates the good old-fashioned Calvinist work ethic, with its stress on self restraint and delayed gratification.

It does so by way of commenting on our current cultural and economic crises, and what—in the view of this perspective—has brought us to this crisis. Brooks appears to believe that at some unspecified point in the past (well, before the government intervened in our lives by setting up safety nets that mitigate the consequences of lack of self restraint), we adhered to Calvinist virtues that made us great as a nation, and brought us wealth without causing us to wallow in the self-indulgent luxury of nations with a more pliant moral fiber.

Brooks calls for a new moral revival to return our nation to its Calvinist roots. He urges neoconservatives to transfer the moral fervor of their culture-wars fixations to the economic sphere, and to help bring in this moral revival of our nation.

Having analyzed Brooks’s thoughts about these matters yesterday, I was intrigued later in the day when I picked up a book I had ordered recently through interlibrary loan and discovered it promoting the same religio-political analysis of American culture that Brooks makes, at an entirely different period of American history. The book was written in 1930, when Hoover was president, and when the nation was on the brink of an economic crisis created by several presidencies that gave big business free rein while doing little to assure that the corporate sector served the common good. That crisis would require the visionary leadership of FDR—and strong government intervention—to set the nation back on track politically, culturally, and economically.

Because this book is not in copyright, I’m going to cite it without providing a title or publication information. My primary reason for going that route is that I do not want to cause pain to any living members of the family of the person who wrote the book. I see no reason to do so. What I make of the book might well appear to them to be critical in a way that slams the legacy of their family member—though that is not my intent. My intent is to juxtapose analysis of the mythical hard-working, morally upright Calvinist past of our nation from two different periods of our history, to show how persistent (and how predictable) this theme is in conservative cultural commentary at times of cultural crisis.

The book in question focuses on the colonial history of a family that happens to be one of my own family lines—one of those Ulster Scots families who left Ireland in droves in the first decades of the 18th century to begin new lives in the middle colonies. Like many of these families, the Kerrs moved from Pennsylvania into the Valley of Virginia prior to 1750. The book focuses on their lives and legacy in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia.

As Ulster Scots, the Kerrs were intense Calvinists. Since they were among the first Scotch-Irish families to make the move from Pennsylvania to Virginia, they played a founding role in setting up an historic Presbyterian church, Tinkling Spring, near their homeplace. The family’s progenitor, James Kerr, is on a 1741 list of settlers in the Shenandoah Valley petitioning for the formation of Tinkling Spring church, and a 1742 list of founding members of the church. My ancestor Samuel Kerr was baptized in 1741 in the church, soon after his birth.

It would be hard to find a more prototypically Calvinist family than the Kerrs—the kind of stiff-backbone, hard-working, morally upright family that Brooks’s mythology about the American past celebrates. Through blood, marriage, and shared religious ties, the Kerrs connect to several noted Ulster Scots families who have left long political legacies in the United States, including the Pickens and Calhouns.

It’s interesting to see what one family member made of that celebrated Calvinist heritage just as the Depression hit in 1930. His interpretation of this heritage sounds remarkably similar to Brooks’s thesis as we struggle through the economic downturn of the first decade of the 21st century.

As he writes about the house James Kerr built in Virginia between 1730 and 1740—a house still standing in 1930—the author looks back at his family’s Calvinist heritage and compares the values he believes the Kerrs held in the past to those he sees dominating the culture in which he lives in 1930. He’s appalled at the discrepancy:

As we pen these words we think of the hardships our parents and ancestors bore in their fights with the Indians and British to protect their families and homes and crops they labored so hard for, cutting down trees into wood and mauling rails for fences, and hewing logs to build houses and barns, raising flax and scotching it and their wives spinning it for clothes. And of the bearing of children of which my grandmother and mother each had a dozen, and what awful pain, anxiety, and care! And now we fuss about hard times while riding around in automobiles and reaping their labors, without shame, and boys and girls having a good time, smoking cigarettes and going to movies—and that is not all, by a long shot. And we are taxed heavy for schools to teach them to play baseball, football, basketball, and ball-room, etc., and a larger tax to build fine macadam roads for lovers of pleasure, more than lovers of God; and for Scripture on the perilous times, read 2nd Timothy, 3rd chapter, and 24th chapter of Matthew; and it reads, “Except those days should be shortened no flesh will be saved.” And this fast, wicked life is ushering in these last days. I think of days when they went to church on horseback and took their wives and children and sweethearts on behind the saddle, and cut their hay and wheat and rye and oats with scythe and cradle, and when I was fifteen or sixteen, I was one of two that cradled seventy acres of wheat my father had on his 300-acre farm. . . . . Part of that land is idle now, and men are idle and won’t work it.

Past good, present bad. Calvinist past good, decadent secular present bad. Self reliance, wonderful; government intervention, not so much. Horses fine; paved roads and automobiles deplorable.

You get the gist. This is a timeworn trope of American thought, this comparison of the mythic past of hard-working (white, patriarchal) Calvinist families with what we have now. It is a trope that uses religious language to decry current developments (the book also lambasts those who drink liquor and vote wet) that the myth-maker sees as morally abhorrent. And it links that moral abhorrence rather predictably to attacks on government “interference” in the lives of sober, hard-working (white, patriarchal, Christian) families.

Much that the book says about moral decay of (white, patriarchal, Christian) American society in the 1930s sounds precisely like what conservative groups in the Christian churches are saying today about gays and the effects of gay-affirming attitudes in our society. There is a clear carryover from the political intent of this myth-making rhetoric about our Calvinist past to the current cultural and religious debate about welcoming and affirming gay human beings. In the past, the moral crusades focused on prohibition and resistance to public funding for schools and roads. Today it centers on resistance to gay folks.

Same rhetoric: different targets. Same players: different enemies at different moments of American cultural development. And the same scripture verses are used by these groups to decry whatever is their current object of moral ire. The section of the book attacking those who drink alcohol cites Timothy, as does the preceding passage, lambasting lovers of pleasure who reject God, lead “silly women” astray, and usher in the last days.

I grew up hearing sermons that applied all these texts to African Americans and the socialists and communists who were said to be collaborating with black folks to bring down Christian civilization in the United States, and precipitate Armageddon. In my growing-up years, I heard stories about how those same texts and that same rhetoric had been applied a generation previously to women who sought employment outside the house, bobbed their hair and used make-up, and dressed in men’s clothes (i.e., slacks).

I recently read a fire-and-brimstone condemnation of railroads written by a late-19th century American evangelical writer. The writer claimed that when railroads were introduced, the culture went to hell in a handbasket and natural disasters began to proliferate as God tried to get our attention. God’s beef about railroads? That they ran on Sunday, breaking the Sabbath.

Given the way this religious rhetoric about our purported golden Calvinist past and our purported current decadence keeps cropping up in both American religion and American political commentary—always with the same political goals, though the objects of the moral wrath vary at different periods—one wonders why anyone continues to try to promote such religio-political analysis. It wasn’t right in the past. It didn’t stop necessary social changes in the past.

Why would anyone imagine it is suddenly right today and that it will succeed today in blocking social changes that have long been overdue in a land committed to democratic ideals and human rights?

Living in Hope: Petition of German, Swiss, and Austrian Theologians Supporting Vatican II

Several days ago, in a comment I made on a previous blog posting (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/what-benedict-knew-when-gods-rottweiler.html), I recommended a petition in support of Vatican II that has been circulating among German, Austrian, and Swiss theologians on the heels of Benedict's rehabilitation of SSPX. As that comment indicates, Terrence Weldon has helpfully provided a link to this petition at his Queering the Church website, which links to this blog.

Since I signed the petition last week, I received in today's email an update about it from Christian Weisner, one of the theologians organizing this initiative. The update notes that the petition is now circulating in 10 languages and receiving signatures daily. The German media is following this initiative with great interest.

Christian Weisner's email contains a link to the English version of the petition, for anyone who might wish still to read, sign, and/or forward this petition to others: see www.petition-vaticanum2.org/pageID_7327623.html.

The petition calls for the Vatican to adhere to the second Vatican Council. It notes that the gross, public anti-Semitism of Richard Williamson and several members of the Society of St. Pius X violates the decrees of Vatican II, which called for dialogue between the Christian and Jewish communities, and a renunciation of anti-Semitism by Christians.

The petition interprets the move to rehabilitate SSPX as a "turn around" on the consensus of Vatican II, particularly on its consensus about the need for ecumenical outreach among Christian churches and from the churches to the other religions of the world. The petition notes the fear of democracy underlying these attempts to deconstruct an ecumenical council of the Catholic church.

What this petition makes clear is that the attempt to rehabilitate SSPX is sparking a new determination among many Catholics to defend the second Vatican Council. As my posting about the thinkability of papal resignation yesterday noted, theologians have felt powerless for years now, as we have watched what Vatican II accomplished chipped away, bit by bit, by this pope and his predecessor.

German, Austrian, Swiss, and Dutch theologians have been, on the whole, resolute about protesting this attempt to deny Vatican II--far more than American theologians and American bishops, with their tradition of deference to Rome, have been. The petition now circulating in defense of Vatican II is one in a long line of similar initiatives by theologians in those nations, to keep the public informed of how the second Vatican Council is being undermined by powerful groups at the center of the church in this restorationist moment.

These initiatives have had little success in stopping the destruction of Vatican II. In Austria, there has been a deliberate move on the part of Rome to appoint right-wing bishops who are uncritically and unthinkingly loyal to Rome, and who suppress theological freedom and lay solidarity. These efforts to deconstruct the church of Vatican II in Austria have been successful, if one regards the loss of millions of Catholics to the church a success.

The Austrian Times reported on 22 January that 40,595 Catholics formally left the Church in 2008, and 36,858 in 2007 (http://austriantimes.at/index.php?id=10732; see also http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/continued-extrusion-of-religious-rights.html). These are only those who have chosen to submit formal resignations; the figures do not include the large number of Austrian Catholics who have simply stopped attending liturgy or engaging in church activities.

The German newspaper Deutsche Welle reported two days ago that Catholics are now exiting the Catholic church "in droves" in response to the rehabilitation of SSPX. Father Eberhard von Gemmingen, the head of Radio Vatican's German service, notes a new "wave of exits" in German-speaking countries following Benedict's action.

It is impossible to see the price that John Paul II and his point man, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, have made the church pay for their agenda of "restoration" as a good price, when one looks at the concrete effects of this restorationist agenda on the life of many national churches. Demoralization; loss of enthusiasm for worship, community, church-sponsored social outreach programs; cynicism about church leaders; the silencing of those called by God to exercise the ministry of theological reflection in the church; the alienation of people of good will both within and outside the church: the price the entire Catholic church is paying to turn back the clock on Vatican II is an enormous price.

It is simply too high.

I hope, along with many other theologians and Catholic bloggers around the world, that the current determination to defend Vatican II against the restorationist agenda that holds sway at the church's center presages a new age in the life of the church. I have my doubts. Under John Paul II and Benedict, those appointed bishops around the world are, in many respects, those least qualified to give good pastoral leadership to the church today. Through these bishops, John Paul and Benedict have assured the continuation of their agenda in the church long after these two popes will have gone.

John Paul II and Benedict have made being a yes-man the most important--the all-qualifying--criterion for being named to episcopal office. This attempt to subordinate the entire church to an autocratic centralized regime saps local churches of vitality. It will take generations of healing to alter the situation that John Paul II and Benedict have created in the Catholic church through their strategy of extending the restorationist program through episcopal appointments.

The deliberate assault of both restorationist popes on theologians around the world also leaves the church bereft of some of its most important, faithful thinkers at precisely the moment in which the need of the church for critical thought, as Catholic tradition engages postmodernity, is most acute. No institution that wants to have a bright future muzzles and decimates its knowledge class. The Catholic church has been systematically doing that, in the person of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, for several decades now.

It will take much healing and much work to repair what these two popes have accomplished by their attempt to deconstruct Vatican II. And that work will have to be done in the absence of some of the most gifted members of the community, who have been told that their gifts are not appreciated or needed.

I do hope for renewal now, and I do believe it is possible--to live in faith is to live in hope. But I also foresee a long road ahead, for those struggling to bring the church out of the pit into which its present leaders have hurled it. And I also remind myself of the power those leaders have among privileged economic and political elites who have a vested interest in keeping the Catholic church in their pockets, and in defending the politically and socially regressive tendencies of Catholic leaders at this point in the history of the church. Those powerful elites still retain the ability to assist the church's leaders in marginalizing critical voices, and I expect them to continue demonstrating this ability through their strong influence in the media and the political sphere.

One must always set forth on the journey of hope with clear eyes. And when one does that, extraordinary things may happen, despite all the signs on every side which tell one that one's journey is futile.

Reflections on the Pope's Christmas Message to LGBT Persons

So, Christmas draws nears. Every other window has a candle burning bright to invite us in from the cold and dark. Churches are spiffing themselves up, putting out crèches, decorating trees, printing bulletins and welcome messages for the Christmas services.

And for this occasion—this homecoming occasion to which many alienated Christians look as the one time in the year when they may feel truly welcome in the church—how does the head of my church, the Catholic church, choose to issue the welcome? He uses his Christmas address to his staff, “on the great Christian celebratory festival of universal love,” to remind LGBT Catholics that we are the enemy (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/12/popes-comments-on-homosexuality-must.html).

He speaks of us as a threat to the human ecology of the world—a threat insofar as we do not submit to his biological imperatives for us.

And, in response, the major American Catholic “intellectual” blogs, at America Magazine and Commonweal, drone on and on. When I first added both blogs to my daily online reading list, I did so with some misgiving. I had dropped in on both occasionally and found their discussion turgid and, even worse, inbred. I knew full well that, reading regularly, I'd be tempted to contribute. I also knew that these discussions weren't for the likes of me.

The discussion on these blogs is the discussion of the self-conscious intellectual elite served by these magazines (and yes, journals to which I subscribed faithfully for many years of my own life). These are the movers and shakers of the Catholic journalism world and the Catholic academy.

And they are so far from where I live and move and from my own experience of the church, that they and I might as well be talking about two different churches altogether. Too many of these members of the elite U.S. Catholic intellectual cadre just don’t get it. They still think atrocious statements such as Benedict’s Christmas address to the Curia are redeemable, discussable, capable of being wrested into some logic that disguises the mean, hard heart inside the statements.

Or worse, they think, many of these movers and shakers of the American church, that Benedict is right in what he says about and to their gay brothers and sisters. They think he is, as one blogger at Commonweal recently noted, “brilliant.”

For this blogger, who is responding to a good posting by David Gibson regarding Benedict’s Christmas welcome to gays, the African-American civil rights cause is “clearly righteous,” whereas “gay causes of all kinds” are “much morally murkier.” Where to begin in addressing such an astonishing viewpoint, with its unconsciously gleeful willingness to defend the human rights of one group as a way of bashing another group and denying rights to that group?

I wonder as I read the statement if the poster has any awareness at all of history, of the history of American Catholicism. Does she really not know that slavery was “morally murky” for Christians of all stripes prior to the middle of the 19th century—for American Catholics as well as their evangelical brothers and sisters? Is she unaware that American Catholic religious even owned slaves—that the wealth of the Jesuits who founded my alma mater, Loyola in New Orleans, for instance, rested on the ownership of sugar plantations operated by slaves?

The cause of civil rights for people of color may seem “clearly righteous” to us today. It did not seem so to Christians of previous eras. We were just as convinced in the past, a majority of us, that subjugation of people of color and their enslavement was as biblically warranted and morally acceptable as we are convinced today that the savage exclusion of gay persons from the churches and society is a righteous cause.

Knowledge of history ought to chasten us, to curb our oh-so-certain sense that we have it right now—especially when we use what we believe to wound others. And that is what is going on with these conversations. As David Gibson astutely notes towards the end of this particular thread,

These are tough topics, and I can only imagine what it must be like for GLBT folks who read this, as we put them under a microscope like a frog on a dissecting tray. I think what is lost, from Benedict’s talk to so much of this discussion, is that these are real God-created people, not concepts to fit into categories.

You think?! Why is it, I wonder, that only a smattering of LGBT Catholics ever even try to discuss these issues on forums like the Commonweal blog or the America blog? Why is it that we do not attend and participate in the forums of the Catholic Theological Society?

From my experience, the answer is clear: we have no place in such discussions. We have been told in manifold ways that we are not welcome. These are, for the most part, discussions of our heterosexual brothers and sisters about us—not discussions with us in which we define ourselves and have a voice in deciding who we will be in the church context. I have sat through countless sessions at Catholic Theological Society of America in which one speaker after another speaks about the church’s responsibility to safeguard the human rights of all oppressed minorities, in which those minorities are enumerated, but in which gays and lesbians are never mentioned.

As if we do not even exist. As if we are the unmentionable. As if threats to human rights and human dignity do not concern us, the “murkier” contenders for human status and human rights among all oppressed minorities. As if there are no hidden gay or lesbian persons in the Catholic church, in its leadership structures—and, yes, in CTSA. We do not have a voice at Commonweal or America, any more than we do in CTSA.

Here’s what I wonder, as I scan the comments about Benedict’s Christmas message at Commonweal and America: what do my Catholic brothers and sisters who defend Benedict’s exclusionism want to do with us? What do they want us to do with ourselves? How will they themselves handle Christmas, knowing that outside the church doors which have enfolded them in a warm, welcoming, lit-up space for sacred celebration and communion there stand many LGBT brothers and sisters who are not welcome in that space? In the dark. In the cold.

I raised these questions yesterday in a response to a posting by Michael Sean Winters at America (http://americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&id=6406242F-1438-5036-4F7C822DBD1D27E6). The comment has yet to be uploaded to the site.

Winters is impatient with gay anger at the church, and is defensive on behalf of Benedict. He notes (rightly) that we should focus on the Christmas message, rather than picking away at Benedict’s Christmas statement. He says, “This Christmas, like last Christmas and next Christmas, the grace and love of Christ move the hands of His Church to care for all God’s creation . . . .”

And as my yet-to-be-published response says, this is precisely my concern with Benedict’s message. With his unwaveringly negative—his unrelentingly nasty—message to me as a gay believer (on this, see Colleen Baker’s insightful comments at http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2008/12/benedict-gives-glbts-coal-for-christmas.html).

Who in his or her right mind could hear what Benedict has just said to LGBT human beings—in his remarks commemorating the “great Christian celebratory festival of universal love”—and hear any echo of the “grace and love of Christ moving] the hands of His Church to care”? That is not what Benedict’s statements about LGBT persons are all about.

They are about putting us into our places. They are about slapping and punishing us. They are about excluding us. They are about scapegoating us and eliciting scorn of us—even violence against us.

Care is not what they are about.

I have thought long and hard about these matters, because I have had to do so, as a gay Catholic and a gay theologian. I am not coming only now to the question, What do you want to do with us, as you preach universal love? I have wrestled with that question year after year for some time now.

Christmas after Christmas, as the large family that is church invites all its smaller families to celebrate the birth of the savior. The savior sent to the world by a God who loves everyone. Unreservedly. Who welcomes everyone unreservedly.

Shortly before Christmas, on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe eleven years ago, I wrote a bishop of one American diocese to ask some questions from the heart, as a gay Catholic who had experienced savage exclusion in his diocese. I said the following:

On this feast of our Lady of Guadalupe, I ask you as one of the wounded members of the flock to remember those of us whom the church has savaged, and who never hear any words of apology from our pastors. As Christmas comes, please remember that many of us will be outside looking in at the light and warmth of your liturgical celebrations, wishing that those celebrations had real meaning for our lives, and that our gifts and talents might be included by a church that truly cherishes the Mother of the Poor, whose face has been made so plain to us in the Guadalupe story and the Christmas narratives, and the poor Son she holds close to her heart.

May our Lady and her Son send the church in Diocese X outspoken truth-tellers and holy trouble-makers, who will continue to call the church to live the gospel it preaches, and to be more concerned with the substance of the message than with its appearance.

I never got any response to this or the several other letters I wrote that gentleman of the cloth. He seemed content with shrugging his shoulders and consigning me to the outer darkness. He has seemed content to go on donning his liturgical vestments for the Christmas feast, knowing as he does so that many of his gay brothers and sisters will not be in the church this Christmas.

Because we are clearly not welcome. And statements like Benedict’s this past week do not make things any better. In fact, they confirm for us who happen to be gay or lesbian that the church does not welcome us—not as we are, not as God has made us.

And that our brothers and sisters celebrating God’s universal love in those warm, brightly lit churches, are happier not to have us in their midst as they celebrate. Since our “murky” presence calls on them to grapple with questions they apparently do not want to entertain. Including questions of what universal love is all about, in this concrete place, in this day and time. And questions of what being a welcoming community are all about.

Questions on which the salvation of the church and its believers ultimately depend.