Revisiting Cahill and Wilkinson's Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church As Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report Is Released

Dallas Morning News, June 2002

This is a posting from this blog dated 20 October 2017 that I'd like to re-post this morning, as we wait for the Pennsylvania grand jury report to be made public. When Cahill and Wilkinson's Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church was published last year, it was widely applauded as the most comprehensive report ever published on this subject. In recommending the Cahill-Wilkinson study  with that assessment, the noted authority on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic church Kieran Tapsell also stated that this study is of paramount importance because of the attention it directs to the systemic causes of the abuse crisis in the Catholic church.

Cahill and Wilkinson's Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: "Most Comprehensive Report Ever Published on the Systemic Reasons Behind Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church"

Several days ago, when I blogged about Desmond Cahill and Peter Wilkinson's study Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: An Interpretive Review of the Literature and Public Inquiry Reports, I told you I planned to say a bit more about this ground-breaking study after I had read it thoroughly. My previous posting looked at one of the systemic roots of the abuse crisis in the Catholic church: how the encyclical Humanae Vitae has undermined the credibility of any official Catholic teaching about human sexuality by ignoring the wisdom of lay Catholics as it seeks to impose, from the top down and with no consultation of lay Catholic experience, a ban on contraception widely rejected by the laity. 

Cahill and Wilkinson's Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church on How Humanae Vitae Undermines Sexual Ethic of Catholic Church

As a complement to what I just posted about how the U.S. Catholic bishops and Republican party brought right-wing white evangelicals on board the anti-contraception and anti-abortion bandwagon, I'd like to share a posting I made yesterday to my Facebook friends. I'm now reading the recent ground-breaking, exhaustive study of child sexual abuse in the Catholic church entitled Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: An Interpretive Review of the Literature and Public Inquiry Reports by Desmond Cahill and Peter Wilkinson's of Melbourne University's Centre for Global Research. (Thanks to Sarasi1 for inviting me to do that). When I've finished reading it, I'll have more to say about it, but for now, here's something that leaps out at me as I read:

Wijngaards Declaration: Catholic Scholars Respond to Humanae Vitae on Use of Contraception — Implications for Gay Catholics

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Catholic encyclical Humanae Vitae, which reiterated the Catholic magisterium's ban on the use of artificial contraception, approaches, Wijngaards Institute for Catholic Research has released a statement of a group of Catholic theologians calling on the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church to reassess this teaching, which has not been received* by lay Catholics. Regarding the natural law argument that Humanae Vitae makes as its primary reason for ruling that the use of artificial contraceptives is gravely wrong, the statement notes:

Readers Write: Pope Francis, Fox News, and Image Management; Humanae Vitae and Catholic Left's Sell-Out; Following Christ as Screaming the Catechism

Here are four valuable comments from conversations on Bilgrimage in the past week or so (conversations about different topics) — comments that continue to ring in my head after I've read them, so that I want to lift them into a posting where more readers can discover them and benefit from them:

Robert Mickens on Pope Francis, Contraception, and Neo-Malthusian Schemes of Developed Nations: My Response

And then, of course, there's Robert Mickens's interpretation of Humanae Vitae and the ban on use of artificial contraceptives as being about protecting the poor in developing countries from neo-Malthusian policies of family planning forced on them by affluent developed nations, who don't want the poor breeding like rabbits. At least, that's Mickens's reading of HV through the optic of Popes Paul VI and Francis in the NCR article linked at the head of the posting.

Patricia Miller, Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church — Excerpts

I'm now reading Patricia Miller's book Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church (Berkeley: Univ. of CA Press, 2014). Here are several snippets from it that have caught my attention as I've read (all of which seem to me clearly pertinent to major stories still unfolding in American Catholicism):

Andrew Brown: "The Church Is Now Run by Men Who Have Solemnly and Deliberately Affirmed a Position That Makes It Impossible to Think Honestly or Clearly about Homosexuality"

Andrew Brown

Last week, I highlighted a statement of Andrew Brown, Kate Connolly, and Liz Davies in The Guardian about the "huge task" that Pope Francis now faces, following his remarks to reporters on the plane about those who are gay (and about women and women's ordination)--the huge task of "opening towards honesty" in Catholic discussions of these matters. Here's more from Andrew Brown on the same theme, also from The Guardian: 

Reforming the Catholic Church from Margins to Center: A Response to Michael Sean Winters

I had not met James Carroll until last night and he is about the nicest man on the planet and he tells a story with grace and flair to which few of us can even aspire. But, I confess I do not recognize the Catholicism he sees, a Catholicism where the hierarchy is, if not insignificant than at least more negligible than our tradition suggests, a Catholicism that is socially engaged but only on issues that concern the Left, and finally a Catholicism where the primacy of conscience and the spirit of the Council are used to justify almost any stance imaginable. I cannot feel any sense of affinity for his vision of Catholicism anymore than I can with the reactionary and nostalgic Catholicism of EWTN. But, Catholicism is a big Church and there is room for Carroll as there is room for Mother Angelica. Still, I could not resist putting in a good word for Humanae Vitae with Mr. Carroll seated just on my left.

(Michael Sean Winters “CACG’s Panel at the Press Club”, America’s “In All Things” blog)

Sometimes it’s the small things that stick with you—the seemingly inferential observation that turns out to illuminate wide swatches of experience, the off-the-cuff remark that results in a life-changing insight. I’ve been meditating all week on a comment Jayden Cameron made during the recent papal visit to the Czech Republic. Jayden maintains the Gay Mystic blog from Prague, and was on the scene during the papal visit, posting brilliant reports about the event on his blog.

On Monday, Jayden published a response by Sri Lankan theologian Fr. Tissa Balasuriya to Benedict’s encyclical, “God Is Love.” Jayden and I exchanged comments about Balasuriya’s reflections, and the exchange ended with Jayden telling me,

Just finished reading a slew of articles posted on Clerical Whispers which left me feeling a bit daunted and depressed, but then for some reason I remembered the time of Francis of Assisi - massive corruption and scandal in the church, and yet there was life on the margins in this extraordinary charismatic man and the movement he started. Today I feel something even more radical is called for.

Massive corruption and scandal in the church, and yet there was life on the margins. I needed to hear that observation this week. It has remained with me, a constant hum in my head as I go about my business each day. It seems significant to me that Jayden formulated this insight right in the midst of the papal visit to his country—and in the same week in which there is widespread discussion of Archbishop Silvano Tomasi’s remarks at the U.N. trying to absolve the Catholic hierarchy of responsibility for the crisis produced by our growing awareness of the problem of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests.

In the midst of such corruption, one needs to hear words of hope. In the midst of death, one seeks for reminders of life.

The essay of Tissa Balasuriya, “Companion to the Encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI on ‘God is Love,’” which Jayden excerpts at Gay Mystic, reinforces Jayden’s observation that there is life on the margins—even in the midst of massive corruption and scandal in the church. Fr. Balasuriya calls on the church, and on Pope Benedict, who (as Cardinal Ratzinger) had Fr. Balasuriya silenced and then excommunicated in 1997, to listen to the voices of the margins, as he speaks about love.

Fr. Balasuriya writes,

While acknowledging a variety of viewpoints, the Encyclical remains firmly grounded in a traditional Western context. Adherents among the many strains of contemporary Christian theology may thus find much to take issue with here. Feminist theologians will object to its occasionally sexist language, along with its arguments with respect to reproductive rights. Liberation theology in the Latin American grain receives no acknowledgment of its unique contribution to the development of Christian teaching over the past several decades (e.g, love as it relates to compassionate activism and efforts at constructive social change). Proponents of liberation theology in its Asian and African incarnations will have much to say about their experience of the "Christian love" imposed on them through Western colonialism. Those seeking inter-religious dialogue may wish to remind the Pope that the traditional Christian interpretation of "God is love" seems not to have applied to them throughout much of Catholicism's history. And those concerned with inter-racial justice, global ethics, and ecology may also find fault with Christian theology and spirituality as they experienced it.

It is impossible to talk about love univocally in a global church and a world of many voices and many cultures. It is impossible to talk convincingly and transformatively about love (and reform of the church) from the center.

Reformation will come from the margins, when we finally listen—and listen effectively, in a way that causes us to change our lives—to the voices of those who understand, celebrate, and articulate the experience of love from where they have been placed. On the margins.

As Fr. Balasuriya says, if the church expects to speak convincingly of love at this point in history, it can do so only by giving authentic voice to women, to liberation theologians in Latin American, Asia, and Africa, to those promoting dialogue between world religions, to those working to fashion a global ethic centered on human rights, and to those responding to the global ecological crisis. And I would add that the church must give authentic voice to gay and lesbian people of faith. It is impossible to talk convincingly and transformatively about love (and reform of the church) from the center.

The center cannot and will not be the source of reformation in the Catholic church for the following reasons:

▪ Those at the center do not see fully or clearly. They/we see with the partial and self-interested perspective of those who believe they/we have our fingers on the pulse of power, knowledge, and control in the world.

▪ These are fallacious assumptions, ones rooted in the hybris (and blindness) of power and of one’s position at the center of power. The one residing at the center has to see only what concerns the inner circle of power which intends at all costs to stay in power.

▪ But the one living at the margin has to see everything, how it all fits together, how it interconnects. She has no choice except to see in that global, comprehensive way because, unlike him at the center, she must negotiate all the levels and aspects of power, if she is to find any place at all in the world—as well as protection from the malicious operations of power emanating from the center.

▪ The experience of marginalization produces perspectives that not merely correct the limited, partial perspective of the center, but which eclipse that perspective through their accuracy and comprehensiveness.

▪ Centrists pretend to be disinterested, standing somewhere between right and left, with a superior and objective outlook that sees the faults of both sides.

▪ Centrists inevitably stand, however, with power. The centrist pretense to disinterest and objectivity, the refusal of those at the center to take a stand and engage, has everything to do with the desire to remain in power, with whoever happens to be in power at the moment.

▪ Because they cast their lot with power, centrists inevitably fail to foresee significant cultural and political shifts, and are caught off-guard by these, succumbing to the very shift they believed they could avoid by serving the powerful.

▪ American centrists, including American Catholic centrists, have for some time now been completely at the service of the right, as the center of political and cultural discourse has moved ineluctably to the right in several decades of neoconservative political dominance.

▪ Because Catholic centrists are mesmerized by power, because they speak with the cadences and employ the perspectives of geographic and cultural power centers (e.g., the D.C. beltway), they find unending room for their brothers and sisters of the right (Prince, Gingrich, Brownback, Hudson), but almost no room at all for their brothers and sisters of the left (e.g., James Carroll, Mary Hunt, Frances Kissling, and countless other names that might be listed here).

▪ Effectively, Catholic centrists do the right’s work for it. Blogs and journals serving the Catholic center in the U.S. are so intent on taking seriously, listening to, and analyzing the discourse from the right—including the far right—that they effectively serve as tools of legitimation and dissemination of that discourse and analysis, even when they critique it.

▪ Much of what has come to represent itself as the Catholic centrist perspective in the U.S. is all about watchdog work: Catholic centrists do the right’s work by keeping out of the dialogue voices to the left of center, by refusing to listen to or take seriously or engage those voices, while bending over backwards to grant legitimacy to the voices of the right, even when those voices obviously deserve no credibility because they have lost contact with reason and compelling analysis of the world.

▪ Catholic centrists pursue this watchdog work by deciding who will be allowed inside “significant” dialogues—church-shaping dialogues—and who will be excluded, who has the right pedigree and whose pedigree is unworthy, who lives in the right place and speaks with the right accents, and who does not.

▪ One of the primary (and subtle, but highly effective and impossible to challenge, precisely because subtle) ways in which this watchdog work is accomplished is by ruling some forms of discourse and some subjects off-limits through unwritten canons of taste.

▪ Issues like the abuse crisis in the church are routinely relegated to the margins in centrist discussions—including discussions of why people are leaving the church in droves—because those issues are, in the unwritten judgment of centrist Catholics, too “personal,” too rooted in personal narratives and first-person (therefore interested) discourse, rather than in the objective, disinterested discourse of the center.

▪ Ditto for issues like homosexuality, and, increasingly (in contrast to the period immediately after Vatican II), artificial contraception, despite the fact that studies show a huge majority of Catholic adults in the Western world either practicing artificial contraception or approving of this practice.

For me, one of the biggest scandals at this point in the history of the Catholic church is the refusal of my brothers and sisters of the center even to discuss the abuse crisis—openly, honestly, and above all, as a theological datum without which it is impossible to talk about anything meaningful at any theological level today, whether the anything is ecclesiology, soteriology, ecumenism, theodicy, and so forth. It is scandalous enough that my brothers and sisters of the center can respond to the pained voices of their gay brothers and sisters as though our voices mean nothing and come from nowhere—and have no import at all for any of those important theological discussions.

But it is even more scandalous that my brothers and sisters of the center can, for almost a decade now, have heard (or at least had the opportunity to hear) one anguished voice after another of adult survivors of clerical sexual abuse, and can go on talking about the church and its future and mission in the world as if those voices have simply not spoken. As if they are not there. As if they do not count and as if what they say does not matter. Not at the center.

As if they have not completely interrupted the comfortable discussions of the center. As if they have not and should not make talk about God, love, salvation, communion, etc., well-nigh impossible for Catholics today. As if they do not make being Catholic well-nigh impossible today.

Until we do something to listen and respond. And to change the church from the ground up, and radically so.

To return to the epigraph that begins this meditation: I cannot feel any sense of affinity for the vision of Catholicism that my Catholic brothers and sisters of the center promote from their beltway enclaves. That vision of Catholicism seems to me about as adequate to the experience of a global church as the Donatist vision was to the Catholic experience in the time of Augustine. As Augustine wrote, the Donatists liked to sit around their tiny pond croaking that they were the church, never dreaming that their pond was not the wide Mediterranean Ocean that is a more adequate symbol of a church catholic.

I am not merely unmoved by, I am repulsed and scandalized by a vision of Catholicism that equates the hierarchy and its political maneuverings with the substance of Catholic faith, and that is socially engaged but only on issues that concern the right, while it is persistently hostile to issues that concern the left—or even the real center of American Catholicism, for that matter.

Where the overwhelming majority of folks in the pews are not in any shape, form, or fashion governed by the Humanae Vitae encyclical that Mr. Winters was recently so gleeful to recommend to Mr. Carroll. And where they are likely to be unmoved, as well, by accounts of parties at which Catholic movers and shakers share cigars and scotch with Catholic nabobs within the various cultural enclaves of American Catholicism that imagine themselves to be the whole church, while they represent merely the voice and perspective of centers of power.

Remembering Humanae Vitae: Whose Voice/Experience Counts?

The 40th anniversary of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae, continuing the Catholic condemnation of artificial contraception, is eliciting a lot of commentary, some of it frankly unbelievable. After the national American Catholic weekly the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) published a judicious assessment of the encyclical and its effects (a growing gulf between official church teachings and Catholic practice, overwhelming rejection of the encyclical by Catholic laity, sexual morality teaching out of sync with the experience of lay Catholics, an ongoing cycle of disbelief and dysfunction), the NCR blog for the editorial was blanketed with orchestrated right-wing Catholic statements accusing NCR of undermining orthodoxy (see http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1466).

What strikes me as so strange about the right-wing commentary is its attempt to deny plain truth: Humanae vitae’s position on artificial contraception is a teaching that is not being received by the people of God, and for sound, rather than capricious, reasons. The teaching does not fit the deep intuition of Christian layfolks that human sexuality means more than cattle-like reproduction. Marital sexuality is as much about expressing and building love between spouses as it is about desiring to conceive.

And it is clearly possible to separate the two meanings of marital sexuality, despite the continuing insistence of right-wing Catholics that the attempt to do so undermines the “natural” meaning of human sexuality. When a teaching about something as central to human experience as the meaning of marital sexuality is widely rejected as flawed by the people of God, something is awry. And no amount of blustering and bullying is going to change that reality.

One of the most puzzling statements I’ve read about Humanae vitae in this period commemorating the encyclical's 40th anniversary is John Allen’s op-ed statement “The Pope vs. the Pill” in last Sunday’s New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/opinion/27allen.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin). Allen argues that Humanae vitae has demonstrated “surprising resilience” and is still “in vigor.”

What can those claims possibly mean, in light of well-founded research demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that the vast majority of Catholics reject this teaching—and not for capricious, but for considered, prayed-over, thought-through reasons, reasons that constitute sound discernment of the Spirit? Allen even admits the data showing that the encyclical has not been received.

What can it mean to claim that a statement of church teaching is “in vigor” and “surprisingly resilien[t]” when the large majority of believers not merely ignore but repudiate the teaching? The implication of Allen’s analysis—a nasty implication, I would propose—is that the faithful’s reception of doctrine means nothing at all, when Rome speaks. One can claim that Humanae vitae is still lively and effective only if one totally discounts the perceived effect of church teaching on real human lives and real human experience.

This is a problem I’ve had with Allen’s work for some time. When the Vatican began to make menacing threats about purging gays in the seminary, Allen wrote a fawning piece for the Times that sought to present this ugly scapegoating tactic (a diversionary tactic designed to convince us that the crisis of sexual abuse of minors in the priesthood is due to the considerable presence of gays in the priesthood) in the most favorable light possible.

When the Times published Allen’s piece, a number of theologians—including the well-respected lay theologian Paul Lakeland—as well as leaders of American religious communities objected to Allen’s thesis. Their responses noted the clear scapegoating of gay seminarians going on with the Vatican initiative, the refusal on the part of church leaders to admit what everyone knows: that this is a crisis of abuse of clerical power, a crisis of clericalism, not a crisis due to the sexual orientation of priests and seminarians.

I have long been perturbed by Allen’s tendency to be an apologist for Rome. I understand that one does not have entrée into the old boys’ club of the Vatican if one is not capable of seeming to be an insider. I realize that Allen’s analysis is devoured particularly by clergy, who find it “balanced” (read: non-threatening), in contrast to more incisive ecclesiological analysis such as Paul Lakeland’s.

Nonetheless, when one attains insider status only to speak with the voice from the center, one’s journalistic analysis is in danger of becoming special pleading and not “balanced” or “objective” reporting. Above all, I am perturbed by Allen’s elision of the effects of church teachings about sexual morality on the real lives of real human beings. I find Allen tone-deaf to the well-warranted expressions of pain on the part of gay Catholics, who experience church teaching about our human natures and lives lived under the impetus of the Spirit as destructive and unjust. I can no longer read any of his presentations of the Vatican inside story without sensing his strong inability to cope with the shadow side of church teachings such as the teaching on artificial contraception or on homosexuality.

Given the witness of theologians such as Paul Lakeland and of leaders of American religious communities about the shortcomings of Allen’s ecclesiology—a witness that concurs with my analysis, I believe—one has to wonder about the use of John Allen by the mainstream media to present “the” Catholic voice on the Vatican. The letters of protest to the Times following Allen’s glowing presentation of the Vatican initiative against gay seminarians and gay priests didn’t make a dent in the Times’ choice to continue publishing Allen’s pieces as authoritative analyses of Vatican events.

And Allen has now been picked up by CNN to be its Vatican correspondent. One can only conclude that the mainstream media have a vested interest in seeing moderately conservative analysis of Vatican politics and of church teachings as authoritative analysis.

This mainstream media assessment of Allen’s work overlooks—and, it would appear, deliberately so—the strong and justifiable critique of his work by those who experience church teaching on issues such as sexuality differently than Allen himself evidently does. The implication: our voices and our experience, painful though it be, simply does not count, in the eyes of those who determine whose voice counts and who doesn’t, in the halls of power.

From Paul VI to Gene Robinson: Judging Sexual Morality

The Clerical Whispers blog today posts a reminder of the upcoming anniversary of the encyclical Humanae vitae (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/07/debate-over-1968-encyclical-rages-on.html). It’s hard to believe, but 25 July will mark the 40th anniversary of this encyclical of Paul VI reiterating the Catholic prohibition against the use of artificial contraception.

One line in the Clerical Whispers summary of the debate about this controversial encyclical leaps out: this is Paul VI’s insistence that, to be moral, "each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life." On the basis of that unambiguous norm, Paul VI judged the use of artificial contraception as “intrinsically disordered”—the same term the present pope, Benedict XVI, has sought repeatedly to use to characterize gay persons.

There are links, in other words, between the Catholic church’s condemnation of artificial contraception and of homosexuality. And I’m not sure how many people who look to the Catholic church as a bulwark against gay rights understand this. Many evangelicals have made common cause with the Catholic church when it stands against gay human beings and our rights. But I suspect that not a few of the Christian right allies of Catholicism when it comes to gay rights have not a clue about what the Catholic church teaches re: artificial contraception, and why it teaches what it does. And I also suspect that they’d be appalled if they did encounter this teaching in its unvarnished state, the state in which Catholics are expected meekly to receive it.

I could say a lot about Humanae vitae and why it was a colossal mistake on the part of Paul VI to issue this encyclical. As critics have noted, the theological commission the pope put together to advise him advised him not to issue a condemnation of artificial contraception. The mind of the church, in other words, what Cardinal Newman called the sensus fidelium, rejects the stance against artificial contraception. And nothing the church has said or done in the intervening period has convinced Catholics to change their minds. Polls indicate that something over 90% of married Catholics in the global North practice artificial contraception. And with a good conscience.

As the Clerical Whispers article notes, one of the primary reasons Paul VI decided to reject the advice of his theological commission (and thus, of the sensus fidelium) about this issue was that he feared he’d bring disrepute to the church by appearing to acknowledge that church teachings can change—that they can be wrong, and can need to revise in light of historical developments. And yet, ironically (again, the Clerical Whispers post notes this), perhaps no other event in the history of Catholic church after Vatican II (except, I’d argue, the clerical sexual abuse crisis) has so undermined public confidence in the Catholic church’s teaching, than “Humanae vitae.”

Which brings me back to the norm Paul VI uses to determine the morality of sexual acts. It’s so logical. It’s so lucid. It’s so plain wrong.

Think about it: "each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life." The word “act” leaps out immediately. A whole sexual morality built on measuring acts, on determining if they are “intrinsically disordered.”

The Catholic approach to sexual morality conjures up visions of someone—a priest; the Pope; the couple having intercourse—in the bedroom of a couple, measuring acts . . . . As if the morality of sex, a drive that unites two people at deep levels of their beings, can be summed up by measuring an act!

The whole approach to sexual morality in Catholicism—and I’m saying nothing thousands of other theologians haven’t said for years now—is simply wrong-headed. It’s off on the wrong track, from the get-go.

Insofar as it tries to hinge the judgment of the morality of human sexuality on acts, and insofar as it premises its judgment about said acts on whether they conform to some purported biological purpose of sexuality, it is simply not looking at what really deserves attention in sexual morality. This is quality of relationships, not acts, and, particularly, acts judged by biological yardsticks.

To illustrate: in Catholic sexual morality, a rape in which the male succeeds in ejaculating inside the female is far less immoral than a rape in which the coitus is interruptus. Which is to say, rape receives much less attention in Catholic sexual morality—the quality of the relationship between two people having sex receives much less attention—than the kind of act done, and what happens to that act when it is consummated. Is the penis inside or outside? Did at least some semen reach the vagina? Did the man intentionally or unintentionally ejaculate prematurely? If non-penis-in-vagina foreplay occurred, and the male climaxed prior to consummating the sexual act, did he (or she, wanton temptress) intend for this to happen?

Insane. Who “does” sex this way? Who thinks about sex this way? Who wants to think about sex this way? Why are ostensibly celibate male clerics, who have no experience at all the bedroom, entering the bedroom via the confessional to measure, photograph, judge, question? (Priests do ask the kinds of questions I asked above, in the confessional. They’re expected to do so. This is why many Catholics no longer go to confession. And can you blame us?)

And so from artificial contraception to homosexuality. Most people get it, when it comes to artificial contraception. Most people get that this way of thinking about human sexuality is just plain foolish. It does not reflect what people mean when they live their lives as erotic beings, when we express ourselves erotically. It is moral analysis imposed on human experience, and therefore extrinsic to human experience.

Why, then, I wonder, do people who reject the absurd teachings about artificial contraception not feel equally indignant about the equally crazy Catholic teaching that gay human beings are intrinsically disordered? Why do evangelicals who decidedly do not buy into the biologistic natural-law theology that frames all Catholic teachings about sexual morality, and who do not buy into the prohibition against artificial contraception, accept and promote Catholic teaching against gay human beings?

I could advance all kinds of reasons for this disconnect in the popular mind. I may well do so in future postings. Here, though, I’d like to think this problem through by thinking about a video clip that has been circulating on the internet these past few days. A link to it is, in fact, on the same Clerical Whispers webpage I cited above for the link to the commemoration of “Humanae vitae.” It’s at http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/07/heckle-that-symbolises-church-split.html.

The clip shows openly gay (and partnered) Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson preaching at St. Mary’s in Putney (London) this past Sunday. As Bishop Robinson preached, a man in the audience stood up to heckle, calling him a heretic, shouting that he (and the congregation, who clapped and sang to drown out the heckler’s voice) needed to repent.
High drama for an Anglican church. And interesting drama. The question I keep asking myself as I watch this clip is, “What motivates someone to do something like this?” What motivates those who feel so urgently compelled to preach to gay human beings that we need to repent?

It’s not as if there aren’t a lot of other heinous sins around that need condemning. Just read the accounts of the round-up of hundreds of illegal Mexican and Central American immigrants in Postville, Iowa, recently, and you’ll likely wonder what kind of human beings can treat other human beings this way.

Why Bishop Robinson’s sin? Why “the” sin of the Anglican communion, insofar as it will not repudiate all gay persons and their supporters? What drives people (usually men) to take such extreme action to prevent gays and our supporters from going to hell?

I can’t help thinking this has far more to do with the desire to control than it has to do with the desire to save. It’s not about love at all. It’s about the need of a social group that feels its power over others may be waning, to find a juicy scapegoat group and to use that group to the maximum to shore up its waning control.

I find it very hard to believe that many of the preachers and hecklers I’ve encountered, who are so earnest about saving gay souls, read much of the bible at all. If they did so, they’d find that the overwhelming weight of the Judaeo-Christian scriptures, when they address the moral life, is about love. And justice. And living in a way that embodies mercy and justice.

Not about sex. And certainly not about sexual acts. And that ravenous need to control? It seems to be what the whole biblical narrative reflects on, from Adam and Eve forward, when it reflects on our human reluctance to place our lives at God’s disposal. Those moved by the Spirit—the Spirit that Christian traditions identify as holy—are far less intent on controlling others than they are on opening their own hearts and minds to the influence of the divine. And in responding to that influence through acts of practical compassion in a world starved for the milk of human kindness.