Franziska Jäggerstätter, Widow of Franz Jäggerstätter, Eulogized by Tom Roberts at NCR

The widow of Austrian martyr Franz Jäggerstätter--Franziska Jäggerstätter--died in March, and I like very much how Tom Roberts describes the ceremony in Linz's cathedral when Franz Jäggerstätter was beatified in October 2007, as Roberts notes Franziska Jäggerstätter's death:

Joan Chittister on Expulsion from Family and Minority Wisdom: Critical Questions for the John Paul II Era of Catholic Apologetics

When I posted yesterday about the recent NCR editorial re: the story of Bishop Morris in Australia, I had planned to post a follow-up about Joan Chittister's latest NCR essay, "Expulsions from Religious Orders, Family, and Minority Wisdom."  I thought of posting a comment about Chittister's piece because it's, to my mind, a perfect counterpoint to the discussion of what Benedict is doing to Bishop Morris, and of the inexorable, draconian logic of patriarchal hierarchy that underlies the pope's actions in this case.

John Paul II and the Unfinished Eucharist of Oscar Romero: Questions for the Church in Our Day

It’s my birthday, and I may let my heart out today. I keep it so often in a box.

I’m sitting in Steve’s chair facing the south window of the sunroom. Outside, the redbud leaves, tiny green-yellow laminated hearts, have just begun to peep out, as the last blossoms of the redbud cling tenaciously to black branches now tipped with hearts. A few lissome canes of the Lady Banks rose have grown across from their east-facing trellis and dip through the redbuds, adding more yellow to accent the surprising mauve of the redbud blooms. As the southeast wind blows today, they bob up and down like game pieces in a carnival booth, daring you to hit the mark and claim the prize.

In my heart: Oscar Romero and García Lorca. My memory tells me Romero was martyred sometime around the feast of the Annunciation on 25 March.

But he’s in my heart these days because of a passage I read recently in David Yallop’s The Power and the Glory (NY: Carroll & Graf, 2007), a searing, damning analysis of the papal reign of John Paul II. Yallop notes that when Romero was martyred, an Italian doctor wrote Corriere della Sera and pointed out that John Paul II loved to travel. He then asked,

Why did this travelling Pope not immediately set out for San Salvador to pick up the chalice that had been dropped from Romero’s hands and continue the Mass which the murdered archbishop had begun? (p. 77)

That question will now not leave my mind or my heart. Why not, indeed?

I know the answer, of course. Leaders just don’t behave that way. They calculate. They do the prudent thing. They seize the main chance. They must represent the center.

And Romero was on the margins. And the people with whom he cast his lot, and whose fate he shared, were on the margins.

Just as Jesus lived.

Yallop writes, in fact, that John Paul II kept his distance from Romero, and humiliated the Salvadoran archbishop when Oscar Romero came to Rome desperate to see him, carrying a huge folder full of documentation about the atrocities the government was committing, with active U.S. complicity, against the poor in El Salvador.

John Paul had become convinced, Yallop thinks, by advisors in the Curia that Romero was a Communist agent. After Romero’s martyrdom, he even entertained the thought—following his advisors’ lead—that Romero had been killed by the left in an act of provocation designed to unsettle the government.

It’s my birthday, and I can let my heart out. My heart has never been quiet regarding Oscar Romero, his life, his fate, the church’s continued denigration of him even in death, my government's complicity in his death, which becomes my complicity because it is my government, using my tax dollars to wage war.

And it will not be quiet ever again, after I have read that deeply unsettling question of the Italian doctor following Romero’s martyrdom: why did John Paul II not immediately travel to El Salvador, pick up the chalice that fell from Romero’s hands when he was butchered at the altar, and finish that Mass?

Why do we have popes who exemplify the Christian message less than do bishops like Romero or lay saints like Dorothy Day and Franz Jägerstätter? Why do we have popes whose lives bring to mind Jesus and his life less than do the lives of Mychal Judge or Jean Donovan?

Why will John Paul II be canonized while the church refuses to canonize Oscar Romero?

Why do the people for whom Romero spoke and whose fate he shared count so little in the eyes of Benedict and the men who run the church, while the rich who run everything in the world and in the church count for everything?

I know the answer to these questions. But I cannot accept that answer. It’s my birthday. I have a right to let my heart out, and to follow what it says to me, no matter how insane, how foolish its advice.

And to remember García Lorca on my birthday, García Lorca who was silenced and placed beneath the earth by the same forces—though at a different moment of history—that tried to silence and bury Romero. But who, like Romero, sings beyond the grave, for those who care to listen.

And the wretched of the earth do listen. And will one day have a hearing, in a world in which God’s way of looking at things counts, finally.

On my birthday, I can choose to think this, no matter how impossible it is to believe. On my birthday, I can choose to follow the logic of my foolish heart, even when my hard head knows much, much better.

And I can offer as my birthday gift to anyone listening that painfully disturbing question of the Italian doctor, which needs to reverberate through the halls of every chancery and every episcopal palace and every Catholic school and office building in the world, until it receives an answer.

Why did John Paul II not pick up the chalice that dropped from Romero's hands and finish Romero's Mass? In the answer to that question lies the tragedy of the church in our time.

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.