Pope Francis on Families and Their Gifts, John McNeill and Margaret Farley on Fruitfulness of Gay Relationships: Generativity Depends on Ecclesial and Social Support

What Catholic theologian John McNeill is pointing to in the quotation I shared with you yesterday is very much like what Catholic theologian Margaret Farley also pointed to in her recent comments at the Commonweal discussion of whether the church is a fortress or a field hospital. Margaret Farley offered her listeners several examples to illustrate what she means when she speaks of how the tradition of natural law in Catholic moral thinking requires us to attend carefully to concrete reality, to the experiences of others, and to learn from these.

Remembering John McNeill, As Doors Slam Shut on Thousands at World Meeting of Families

As several of you have noted in comments here in the past few days, on the day on which Pope Francis arrived in the U.S., noted theologian and former Jesuit priest John McNeill died at the age of 90, with his partner of 46 years, Charles Chiarelli, at his side. Many of you will know quite a bit about John McNeill, so I don't think it's necessary for me to say more about his life than to remind readers that he was expelled from the Jesuits in 1987 when he refused to stop his ministry to LGBT people, and to cease his theological work in the area of sexual ethics. He attracted the animosity of Pope John Paul II and that pope's theological watchdog Cardinal Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, and was ordered by Ratzinger to choose between his ministry to LGBT persons and his Jesuit vocation.

Gabriel Daly on Irish Vote as "Caring for a Wounded Minority Who Were Strangers in Their Own Community": Contrasting Irish and American Catholic Values

Catholic theologian (and priest) Gabriel Daly commenting in The Tablet on the deeply Catholic theological underpinnings of the recent yes vote for LGBT equality in Ireland: 

Tom Fox: After Avila Debacle, Shifting the Catholic Discussion to Focus on Gifts of Gay Persons

I appreciate National Catholic Reporter editor Tom Fox for publishing his recent statement about how Catholics might begin reframing their understanding of their brothers and sisters who happen to be gay, following the Daniel Avila debacle.  Fox writes,

Telling the Story of Gay Love: Overcoming Internalized Homophobia as a First Step

We're still on the road, though hope to be settled in by this evening--at which point, I will have more time to blog again.

I'm sorry about the formatting problems in my last post, which I only now noticed.  The loss of paragraph markers is something that seems to be happening lately after I publish a post.  Paragraphs are fine until I publish, and then they disappear.  I'll keep trying to work on that problem.

John McNeill on the Elimination of the All-Male, Celibate Priesthood in the Catholic Church

One of the gifts the internet has given us is the opportunity to read blogs by scholars of the stature of John McNeill.  Previously, those following the work of a significant thinker like John have had to wait for articles and books to be published, to benefit from that thinker’s latest insights.

Now, through his blog, we have the benefit of John’s thinking about particular issues on an ongoing basis, as his ideas take shape, and as he responds to events happening right now.  John’s latest posting at his Spiritual Transformation blog allows us, for instance, to see his response to the current witch-hunt for gay candidates seeking entrance to the Catholic priesthood.  We can read this response in “real time,” as it were, right now, as the new inquisitorial system gets underway in Catholic seminaries in the U.S.

John McNeill on Benedict's Most Recent Attack on Gay Marriage: What Alternative Universe Does the Pope Inhabit?

John McNeill has outstanding commentary on Pope Benedict's remarks in Portugal last week at his Spiritual Transformation blog.  And Jayden Cameron has posted a valuable summary of John's analysis at Open Tabernacle.

As I did in my posting about Benedict in Portugal at the end of last week, John McNeill wonders about the disproportionate emphasis of the current pope on gay marriage as an incomparable threat to the human race, one of the “most insidious and dangerous threats to the common good” faced by the human community today.  John notes that Benedict makes such proclamations (seemingly with a straight face--my take), while ignoring the nuclear arms race, environmental destruction, disease, poverty and starvation in much of the underdeveloped part of the world, and the increase in genocide, violence, murder, torture, and enslavement at this point in history.

John McNeill on the Theology of Fallibility and Urgent Need for Catholic Reformation: Judaism and Christianity as Religions of the Collapsing Temple

 John McNeill continues to post provocative (and prophetic) theological statements on his new Spiritual Transformation blog.  The latest in his theology of fallibility series (about which I’ve blogged several times in the past) focuses on the urgent need to reform the Catholic church. 

John grounds his reflections in scripture—particularly in Ezekiel’s call to the Jewish community to look to God as their shepherd when God’s Spirit withdrew from the temple in Jerusalem as the shepherds of Israel focused on their own self-protection and not on safeguarding their flock; and on Jesus’s statement in John’s gospel that his body and the body of all those united to him through the Spirit will become the new temple.

John McNeill on Theology of Fallibility and the LGBT Community: Total Absence of Love and Compassion in Hierarchy's Gay Scapegoating

I just spoke of Hans Küng’s vast learning and obvious love for the church, and of my own determination to keep listening to him for those reasons, even when I do not always agree with each theological conclusion he reaches.  As the crisis in the Catholic church continues to unfold, I’ve been blogging about our need to listen to the many significant theological voices silenced during the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict—a silencing that emanated from the office headed by the current pope, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, when Cardinal Ratzinger headed that office.

John McNeill's "Spiritual Transformation" Blog: Another Absolutely Necessary Voice

 

In the past several days, I’ve been noting voices that are absolutely necessary for us to hear at this moment in which many members of the people of God are calling for reformation and for a new ecumenical council that will be truly ecumenical, in that it will bring all voices—at last—into the conversation about what it means to be Catholic.

Today, I’d like to remind readers of one of those absolutely necessary voices about which I’ve written in the past on this blog.  I’m speaking of Jesuit theologian John McNeill, who, when the church robbed him of his official ministerial position as he insisted on speaking truth about his sexual orientation, has continued to exercise extremely valuable ministry in the church as a theologian, therapist, and spiritual guide. 

Supreme Court Opens Bridgeport Catholic Abuse Files: Putting Broken Hearts Back Together

The U.S. Supreme Court this week turned down the appeal of the Connecticut Catholic diocese of Bridgeport to keep its clergy personnel files dealing with priests who have abused minors sealed. As I have noted previously on this blog (and see postings linked to the “Connecticut” label), the Connecticut Supreme Court had already ruled that the files must be opened.

The diocese responded to that ruling by appealing to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court. When she turned the appeal down, the diocese handed it to Justice Scalia, who presented it to the whole court.

The official statement of the Bridgeport diocese in response to the Supreme Court action is to claim that its first amendment rights are being violated. But the first amendment does not provide churches with the right to hide the identity of criminals, and to suppress information about churches’ complicity in shielding and promoting criminals.

The diocese also claims, “The content of the sealed documents soon to be released has already been extensively reported on.” But that’s obviously not true, and one wonders why a Catholic diocese would even seek to make such a false claim in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. Why would the diocese have spent untold thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars over several years to fight a bitter, losing legal battle to keep files sealed, if the content of those files is already known to the public?

Several points strike me as I think about the Bridgeport situation. First, I remember John McNeill’s prophetic insight that the churches are passing through a moment of profound cultural crisis and transformation at this point in history. In McNeill’s view, that transformation has everything to do with patriarchy and the way in which the churches have cast their lot with that mutable social arrangement.

To the extent that the churches have inextricably bound up their fate with patriarchy and its top-down, hierarchical, male-dominant model of allocating power, the churches will become not centers of transformative energy in a process of global cultural transformation, but focal points for bitter resistance. They will defend outmoded, and increasingly toxic, patterns of social organization and of allocating power, in the face of necessary cultural developments that challenge those patterns.

There is great tragedy—and great evil—in the church’s rear-battle approach to a process of global cultural development that is all about the liberation of human beings from historic oppression. To say that the churches’ defense of patriarchy (and of misogyny and homophobia, as well as of the manifold forms of economic and social injustice interwoven with patriarchy) is short-sighted would be a ludicrous understatement. The choice of many churches to cast their lot with patriarchy at this moment in history is, frankly, a choice for death rather than life. This choice assures that the churches will increasingly have little effectively to do with the primary process of cultural transformation affecting global cultures—little, that is, except to resist. And to do everything in their power to abort necessary processes of cultural transformation pointing to human liberation.

This choice on the part of many churches confronts their adherents with a choice, in turn—and that’s the second thing that occurs to me as I think about the Bridgeport situation. John McNeill has argued (and a number of other openly gay theologians echo him here) that at this point in history, those of us who believe that the churches can and should respond to the demise of patriarchy creatively rather than mournfully need to distance ourselves from the power centers of the churches. We need to do so, McNeill thinks, because those power centers are involved in death throes that will pull us into those throes, if we do not find ways to move away from the power centers of the churches.

I am increasingly coming to think of this dynamic of center and margins in the churches as a dynamic that is more about energy than about power—or, perhaps more precisely, about the kind of power that is based in transformative spiritual energy rather than in domination. There is energy on the margins. The centers are bound up by moribund dominative power, and are incapable of generating spiritual energy—or even of permitting that spiritual energy inside the center in a way that transforms it.

At this point in history, the Catholic church is spending huge sums of money on two projects that are all about maintaining a dying dominative power at the center, rather than welcoming the transformative spiritual energy at the margins. In both cases, the church is concealing from the public the true amounts it is spending, as well as the sources of its funding.

Those two projects are the continued cover-up of the true history of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church, and the ongoing battle of the Catholic church against gay human beings and our human rights. These are interconnected projects. They are interconnected because neither has any legitimate foundation in the gospels. They are interconnected as well because both involve the abuse of huge sums of money—money that appears in many cases to be flowing into church coffers from the same sources—that an authentically spiritual religious organization would spend for other purposes.

And, finally, they are connected in that both battles are part of the overall rear-battle the Catholic church insists on fighting at this point in history to maintain its investment in patriarchy, with patriarchy’s top-down, hierarchical, male-exclusive, and dominative approach to allocating and using power. The Catholic church’s bitter fight to conceal the real history of the clerical sexual abuse of minors, its exceedingly ugly assault on gay human beings, and its attack on women’s rights and women religious, are perhaps the primary manifestations at this point in history of the institutional church’s investment in a model of power that must and will eventually change, in response to liberating global social transformations.

Meanwhile (my third point), as things fall apart and those on the margins distance themselves from the process of decay in order to fashion authentic spiritual lives, creative and transformative energy seems to be manifesting itself everywhere. I’m struck today by testimonies of spiritual transformation amidst struggle on a number of blogs: Jayden Cameron’s Gay Mystic, with its Emmaus Walk posting; Terry Weldon’s Queering the Church, with its statement on the abuse situation to which Jayden is responding; Colleen Kochivar-Baker’s Enlightened Catholicism, with its two recent discussions (here and here) of her experiences at native American holy places in New Mexico; and Geoff Farrow’s blog, with its recent painful but extraordinarily liberating meditation on all that has happened to him in the year after he spoke against prop 8 in California.

Following the story of the Bridgeport Catholic diocese and reading its mendacious statement about the recent Supreme Court decision tears my heart to pieces, as does the ongoing attack of the Portland, Maine, Catholic diocese on the gay citizens of Maine. Reading these powerful blog testimonies to the spiritual energy of lives lived on the margins, by contrast, puts my heart back together and gives me hope.

John Boswell on Christianity and Homosexuality: Antigay Theology as Defense of Patriarchy

From a journal entry dated Sept. 1990:

I've been reading John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1980), and want to summarize some thoughts about this ground-breaking study.

One of the most important contributions of John Boswell’s close combing of the sources re: homosexuality in the classical and early Christian world is that it casts light on why some ancient peoples condemned (or approved) homosexuality. What becomes apparent is that opponents of gay sexuality had a multiplicity of rationales and motivations. The nature argument was not foremost. We retroject that argument anachronistically into our examination of the sources, when we assume that is why homosexuality was, has been, disapproved.

Boswell shows (pp. 133-6) that in societies with no great reservoir of antigay feeling, intense erotic relationships between men (which is not necessarily to say sexual ones) were not looked at askance.

The key, it seems to me more and more: antigay theology has become a conduit for some of the worst impulses in Christianity today—patriarchy, machismo, militarism, pelvic morality as opposed to social concern. One of the tasks of theologians is to disentangle the antigay argument, to show how it is not really about sexuality so much as it is about maintaining patriarchy and the reading of the bible privileged by patriarchy. Underlying opposition to homosexuality today is actually hatred of women.

Can one not propose an empirical argument vs. the homosexuality-as-most-heinous sin idea? That is, don't homosexual people exhibit virtues, and do so conspicuously?

Maybe empirical is not the word. What I’m talking about is discernment: by their fruits shall you know them. Conventional denunciations of gays have attributed all sorts of vices to us—we’re back-stabbing, bitchy slanderers, e.g. But one finds these vices because one begins by assuming that gay people are conspicuous for having them.

No: the point is, if we gay people are engaged in behavior so transparently and outrageously morally wrong, then one would expect all our behavior to be vicious. Not so: gay people have many conspicuous virtues. As John McNeill says, all our institutions of care—hospitals, schools—would cease to function if gays boycotted them for even a single day. To say that gayness is morally wrong is counterintuitive. We know better.

Renegotiating Gender Roles, Building Gay-Inclusive Societies: The Continuing Task

Another of those blast-from-the-past postings, which retrieve material I’m finding in my journals from previous years, as I page through them for various pieces of information I need these days. This entry is from January 1993, a period in which (as I've noted previously) I was coping with soul-searching questions about how to live my vocation as a theologian who happens to be gay in a church that will not permit one to be openly, honestly gay, questions provoked by my expulsion from the small Catholic college outside Charlotte, North Carolina, which gave me an unexplained one-year terminal contract in the same semester:

What threatens many Catholics re: reorienting our understanding of gender is that what seems “traditional” has for so long oriented and shaped social structures. Is the current reexamination and renegotiation and concomitant reexamination of homosexuality merely destructive? Or can it provide an ethos for a new, better society?

As Catholic ethics have always seen (building on Stoic philosophy), ethical decisions are about doing the normally, ordinarily right thing in this or that situation. Thus shift what we think re: the normal itself (and what shift could be more profound than that having to do with gender?), and we seem to call into question the very idea of normalcy, the foundations of society.

Yet Catholicism has also always been re: living tradition, tradition that moves and does not stay static, that corrects and reinvigorates itself by contact with culture, the God who manifests Godself in the world. The appeal to tradition can never be a univocal appeal to an unchanging tradition. It has to be a multivocal appeal to a complex, often richer and fissiparous tradition. The difficulty is thus to know what anyone—you or I—means by tradition.

The question: how to see reorienting gender as a constructive way to build a new social ethos? How to tease out of tradition those strands most useful for building a new world, and discard those that have caused such destructive effects?

+ + + + +

And this analysis seems still timely to me, more than fifteen years after I wrote it. Note, for instance, Greta Christina’s commentary on the recent kerfuffle staged by FOX’s “So You Think You Can Dance” show, which deliberately used two men dancing to make ugly slurs about gender roles and gay people:

It's the aspect of homophobia that's about a deep attachment to rigid gender roles, and that sees homosexuality as upsetting those roles. (Which, in fact, it is.) It's the aspect of homophobia that sees certain kinds of interactions -- in this case, partner dancing -- as being about one person expressing masculinity and the other person expressing femininity, with the two fitting together in some sort of magically ordained way ... and that gets confused at best, and upset at worst, when people call those roles and assumptions into question.

With the FOX network and other pop-culture venues that set the tone for so much of our cultural analysis at the popular level, we still see, even now, even as our culture moves beyond renegotiation of traditional gender roles to acceptance of LGBT persons, blatant attempts to play on fears about this process of cultural change, with the obvious intent to produce backlash against anyone questioning traditional gender roles and calling for inclusion of gays and lesbians in our society.

And then (again, I’m noting the continuing pertinence of my analysis of the searching questions that renegotiation of gender roles raises, in connection with questions about acceptance of LGBT persons) there’s Aaron Traister’s article at Salon today entitled “Dude, Man Up and Start Acting Like a Mom.” Traister analyses how his experience as a stay-at-home father (a “mom”) has made him a better man:

I was also discovering a side of myself I had never really known before. Being Mr. Mom was turning me into the man I had always aspired to be; I was becoming dependable.

Traister concludes,

We keep hearing that women will surpass men in the workforce during this recession. As many of us (for whatever reason) find ourselves in a fiduciary timeout, we should not only think about how to repower the American worker but how to reimagine the American man. The moment our mothers entered the workforce and shattered expectations, the rules about gender roles in this country changed completely, even if our perceptions didn't. Trying to live like our grandfathers is no longer an option.

As I’ve said before, if the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church want to be convincing about their consistent ethic of life, they’re going to have to stop acting like dysfunctional fathers and begin acting like mothers. If Aaron Traister is correct, the best way to become a good father (and a real man) today may be via motherhood: when men adopt and embrace virtues traditionally thought of as maternal, they may enhance and fulfill their own masculinity.

The Catholic church and all the other churches today that are hell-bent on elevating some fictitious “natural” complementary of men and women to the level of salvific truth need to stop trying to bolster a threatened patriarchal system that has done incalculable damage to men, women, and all of creation. The churches need to begin recognizing and cherishing “feminine” and maternal virtues. Their salvation and the survival of their churches may well depend on this massive Spirit-led shift, as John McNeill has so prophetically reminded his readers for quite some time now.

John McNeill's Prophetic Gay Theology: Sex As God Intended (2)

One of John McNeill’s most significant contributions to Christian theology is his carefully worked-out insistence that gay and lesbian human beings fit into God’s plan for the world. McNeill not merely asserts this: he demonstrates why it is the case, and he does so using unimpeachably traditional building blocks of Christian theology to make his case.

McNeill situates the lives of gay persons—he situates our existence in the world, an existence willed by the Creator—within the longstanding Christian tradition that through Christ, God has caught the entire cosmos up into a grand drama of divine salvation, in which all that has been created has a role to play in moving the created world to liberation. Echoing the Pauline insistence that the whole universe groans for salvation, and the declaration of patristic thinkers such as Irenaeus that the Spirit moves within all creation to make it (including human beings) fully alive, John McNeill asks what particular gifts gay and lesbian persons bring to the human community, to assist it in its movement to full life.

To ask this is also to ask precisely what it is that makes the human community fully alive. To ask about the particular gifts that gay and lesbian persons offer the human community is to ask about the eschatological goal towards which we move, as a human community. What is it to be liberated, to be saved? What does this mean, concretely? From what exactly do we seek salvation?

John McNeill’s thought is incisive on this point. In his view, the Western mind (and the mind of the human community in general) has, throughout history, been involved in a constant dialectic interplay between the masculine and the feminine (p. 100). McNeill notes that great religious founders including Jesus and Ignatius of Loyola were, in cultures and historic periods heavily dominated by a masculine mind, “extraordinarily open to the feminine” (ibid.). He attributes the fruitfulness of such religious founders’ vision to their ability to draw on the creative energies of the feminine in cultures and periods resistant to the feminine.

In McNeill’s view, the human community is currently undergoing deep crisis as it attempts to move beyond the crippling strictures of a masculine mindset imbued with heterosexism and driven by feminophobia (pp. 98, 114). McNeill sees inbuilt in modernity itself “an essentially masculine crisis” (p. 105). The modern period joined the fate of the human race—and of the world itself—to men’s domination of women, to the subjugation of the feminine to the masculine, to the denigration of gay and lesbian human beings by heterosexual ones. In doing so, it has brought the human community (and the world itself) to a perilous point, at which we face the annihilation of everything by nuclear war and unbridled ecological destruction (p. 105).

The salvation of the world depends, then, on the ability of the human race to move beyond the intransigent, stubborn defense of masculine domination of everything, in our current postmodern moment. Unfortunately, at this point of peril, the churches, including the Roman Catholic church, have chosen to make the defense of masculine domination of everything so central to their definition of what it means to be a believer in the world today, that many churches view the attempt to correct the exclusively masculine worldview we have inherited as apocalyptic: to question the right of males to dominate is to court the destruction of the world (p. 110). Churches are impeding a necessary movement forward by the human community, by clinging to outmoded, unjust patriarchal ideas and structures, at a point in which those ideas and structures are revealed as increasingly toxic wherever they prevail.

What do gays and lesbians, who are increasingly the human fallout of the churches’ adamantine resistance to the feminine, have to offer in this dialectical struggle for the future of the world? In McNeill’s view, gays and lesbians have a providential opportunity to “model the ideal goal of humanity’s present evolution,” by demonstrating what it might mean to live with a balance of masculine and feminine principles inside oneself and in the culture at large (p. 115). Gays and lesbians can offer, simply by living their lives with unapologetic integrity, an example of “balanced synthesis” that a culture heavily dominated by fear of the feminine and unjust power of the masculine sorely needs, if it is to remain a viable culture.

John McNeill follows his sketch of the dialectic evolutionary process through which humanity is now moving—or, rather, has to move, if it hopes to overcome forces with the perilous ability to destroy the entire world—with a reminder of the special gifts that gay and lesbian persons bring to church and society. This Jungian-oriented analysis of the contributions of gays and lesbians to humanity is one that runs through everything McNeill has written. It sustains his thought, and is one of his most valuable contributions to Christian theology.

Following Jung, McNeill notes that gays and lesbians bring these gifts to the human community and the churches:

1. Deep bonds of love, which bear an often unacknowledged fruit in many social institutions that transcend the gay community itself;
2. A sensitivity to beauty;
3. Supreme gifts of compassionate service evident in the contributions of gay and lesbian teachers, ministers, medical workers and healers, workers in the fields of human service that serve the blind, those with mental and physical challenges, and so on, and many other service-oriented fields;
4. An interest in and commitment to preserving the best of traditions, aspects of tradition that remain viable and are often overlooked by mainstream culture;
5. And the gift of spiritual leadership.

One cannot read John McNeill’s work and not conclude that the church’s decision at this moment of its history to reject—even to seek to destroy—such gifts is tragically short-sighted. One cannot read John McNeill’s work and struggle, as an unapologetic gay person, to live in some connection to the church without feeling the tremendous weight of the tragedy that the churches are choosing to write today for themselves, the human community, and the earth itself by repudiating and undermining the gifts of gay and lesbian persons to the churches and the human community.

The unfinished question with which John McNeill’s theology leaves me, as a gay believer, is the question of what to do about that tragedy. For anyone who is unabashedly gay and who continues to believe that it is important to connect to the churches—for anyone who sees her or his sexual orientation as a gift of the same God whom the churches worship—the tragedy the churches are manufacturing by their cruel rejection of gay and lesbian believers produces existential, vocational crisis today.

How to live with any connection to an institution capable of such anti-Christian malevolence, an institution that not only has the capability to twist the souls of gay human beings, but which all too often gleefully does precisely that—assaults the very personhood of gay human beings in the name of a God who is Love? How to live with any connection to an institution that practices and foments violence against oneself and others like oneself, while preaching a commitment to peace and love? What to do about an institution that both transmits rich spiritual resources of which one wishes to avail oneself, and that functions as a toxin in one's life and history? How to forgive an institution which tells one that it is the way to salvation, and at the same time closes that way to any gay person who refuses to curse God for the gift of his or her nature?

I don’t know the answer to these questions—not fully. I am struggling to write this blog because I am pursuing that answer in my own life, and in my life as it is lived in solidarity with others who share this struggle. As a Catholic layperson, I sense that I sometimes have to look for answers in a different place than the place in which John McNeill (or James Alison, whose theology I also admire and find extremely helpful) finds them, as a former cleric. My experience of the church has been different, and the language I speak out of that experience is different.

This I can say: John McNeill’s prophetic theology opens up for me and for others a way that would never have been opened to us, had he not written books such as Sex As God Intended. For what he has accomplished, and for who he is, John McNeill deserves high honor and gratitude—and not only from the gay community. From the entire church.

John McNeill's Prophetic Gay Theology: Sex As God Intended

I’ve noted several times recently that I have just finished reading John McNeill’s latest book, Sex As God Intended (Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2008). In what follows, I’d like to offer some reflections on a book that, in my view, will richly reward anyone who reads it. Because I have much to say about John McNeill's book and his significance as a pioneer of gay theology, I will write this review in stages. Part one consists of a personal testimony to the power of John McNeill's theology, as a prelude to my discussion of his latest book.

Sex As God Intended gathers a lifetime of prophetic thought by therapist-theologian John McNeill about the vocation of gay persons in church and society. At a point at which a theological discourse by and about the gay experience was almost non-existent in Christian churches, John McNeill crafted such a discourse—in part, out of his own joyous, painful experience as a gay believer, in part, out of his experience working with other gay believers as a therapist. In doing so, he opened a path for many of us who continue to think it important to try to hold our gay experience together with our experience of faith.

I well remember my first encounter with John McNeill’s work. I read his pioneering statement The Church and the Homosexual as a young theologian just finishing graduate school and beginning a teaching career in church-related universities. Though I had lived in a committed gay relationship throughout my years of graduate study—one that reached back, in fact, to my last years of undergraduate study—neither Steve nor I was ready to make any public statement about our identity, as we launched into our vocational lives as theologians.

We were not ready to make such a statement because we had not made it to ourselves, despite our longstanding relationship (and what I knew to be the truth inside myself, though I would not own that truth). We saw no way to do so. There was no path—quite simply, quite starkly—for theologians like us, in the churches. There was no place for us in the churches, period. The only way was the way of denial, a denial of oneself that clove one’s being into painful shards, in which the ground and source of one’s creative and intellectual life—a life shared in love—could not be spoken, examined, claimed as the entry point for an entire vocational life in the church.

Living split hurts. It damages. It produces turmoil that runs through one’s whole life. From the outset of my career as a theologian-scholar, I experienced crippling panic in public settings, which I can now identify as one of the prices I paid for believing that I could cleave my life into public and private domains, and keep my private life separate—and closeted—from my life as a teacher in a Catholic university. It was only when this performance anxiety became so debilitating that I could barely face being in the classroom, that I began to face honestly the cause of my panic—and who I was. And the meaning of my life and my vocation.

During several years of hard struggle with the question of coming out, first to myself, then to friends and family, and then publicly, I contacted John McNeill. His book The Church and the Homosexual had pointed a way to me. This was the way of self-acceptance. I wanted to believe in that way. I wanted to believe in his deep spiritual insight that we who are gay are created as we are for a reason, that we have a place in God’s salvific plan.

But believing in that way and seeing it open before one are not the same thing. There was (and there remains, in my life) the problem of living what one knows to be true in one’s heart of hearts—living one’s vocation as a gay believer, and, in my case, a gay theologian—and existing within churches that refuse to validate the graced insights of gay believers. That refuse to accept gay believers, at all. That open no doors for openly gay believers working in church institutions.

I wrote John McNeill in crisis, then. And he responded graciously, as a priest (although one who had been removed from ministry due to his open admission of his sexual orientation) and a therapist. He assured me of my place, of God’s calling that ran through my life. His words opened that place for me, first and foremost inside myself, even as the church itself slammed door after door in my face and Steve’s.

It was important to hear those words in my coming-out period, as I struggled with both personal and vocational questions, with the impossibility of being true to myself and my vocation and securing a job of any kind in a church-related university. Those words gave me life—literally—as I struggled to deal with the many and forceful (if ultimately empty) claims that bogus therapeutic and salvific organizations make on the lives of gay Christians, with an astonishing sense of entitlement as they single us out among all other sinners to whom they might direct their ministry.

I did, briefly and painfully, flirt with the thought of the "ex-gay" option. I contacted one of the leading ex-gay organizations, asked for help. When I read the literature the group sent me and began a correspondence with a counselor the group assigned me, I realized that I was repulsed not merely by the group's theologically and scientifically fraudulent claims: I was repulsed most of all by its assurance that, not even knowing me, it had the right to reach into my life and the lives of others and dictate. To tell us what God wanted for our lives, without even knowing us.

When I told the group I did not want to pursue its oh-so-tenderly-offered therapy, I saw the mask fall away. I received threatening letters informing me I was and would forever be damned, that I must contact the savior group immediately or risk all kinds of divine punishment, that the group would appear on my doorstep and make a fuss if I did not accede to its demands.

All the while, I was also seeking to avail myself of the ministerial offerings of my own Catholic church. I was going to confession at the drop of a hat and hearing . . . unbelievable . . . counsel and theological balderdash from priests, some of whom I knew, some of whom had taught me as Jesuit professors at Loyola University in New Orleans.

One former professor did all he could to peer through the screen of the confessional as I confessed. He warned me that, if I did not leave behind my sinful ways, I would one day step out of the church following confession, be hit by a bus, and go straight to hell. And then where would I be?

Another confessor hissed in a loud voice that my sins—committed, as I always scrupulously informed each confessor, with the same person with whom I had then lived in a longstanding relationship for over a decade—were the sins that brought God’s wrath down on the world. Another soberly told me my only choice, if I wanted salvation, was to go home, lock the door to my partner in sin, and never open it to him again.

The best pastoral advice I was offered by confessors at this anguished point in my life—the best, shockingly—was to understand that God had given me a unique cross to bear, and that if I bore it faithfully, returning to confession each time I fell, I would assist both my salvation and that of many others. The Jesuit who offered that advice encouraged me to come only to him as a confessor, not to any of his confreres. The others, he said, did not fully understand this gift I had been given.

Eventually, all this began to seem, well, simply silly. After years of theological education, how could I return my psyche and my intellect to the infantile (and exceedingly dim) state that such confessional advice, and the maleficent solicitude of the ex-gay saviors, required me to adopt? I did want salvation: who doesn't? But at such a price?

Eventually, some center of sanity and health deep inside my battered psyche was able to hear John McNeill’s words through the loud, destructive cries of many followers of Christ to me and other gay brothers and sisters at this point in history, and I was able to claim my identity. And my vocation, though that vocation remains mysterious to Steve and me within the framework of churches and church-related schools that have no place for us, and that attack us and use us as symbols of evil to deflect attention from the shortcomings of the churches themselves and of their leaders.

I apologize to readers (and to John McNeill) for this lengthy prologue to my review of his book. It is a story I feel compelled to tell, though, because it illustrates what a powerful, invaluable service John McNeill has done to gay Christians of our time, in providing a way for us to come to self-acceptance within the structures of a church that wants anything but self-acceptance for us. It is a story that creates a frame for a discussion of ideas that have life-and-death significance for many of us, as we struggle to live our vocation as gay believers in churches that are generally hostile and anti-Christian to us.

Open Season on Gays, Catholic Bishops Leading the Way: The Connecticut Debacle

In his marvelous new book Sex As God Intended that I plan to review for this blog and other publications, theologian John J. McNeill states,

The enormous anti-gay campaign going on today, fomented by the religious right with the full cooperation of the Vatican, is clear evidence that they are fearful that they are losing the battle. And with good reason; a whole world is disappearing and it necessarily has to disappear. We must be ready, however, for another moment of backlash. We must have a vision of where our movement of gay liberation is going and of what we can do both for ourselves and the rest of humanity, our brothers and sisters, for we are involved in a process of liberating all human beings to the fullness of life (John J. McNeill, Sex as God Intended [Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2008], p. 122).

We must be ready, however, for another moment of backlash. Prophetic words. We are, in fact, in the midst of that moment of backlash right now, on the very cusp of it, in recent events in the American Catholic church. In the past several days, a number of American Catholic bishops have openly played the gay-bashing card in an ugly, gratuitous way, as they seek to defend episcopal control of parishes calling for lay oversight of parish finances.

The bishops in question are William Lori of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Charles J. Chaput of Denver. I’ll get to what they have said—and done: to their deliberate attack on gay human beings in a political game designed to consolidate their ecclesial power—in a moment. First I want to sketch the context of this attack.

Here’s how I understand what has been going on in Connecticut, from the news reports I have read. A lay Catholic, Tom Gallagher, who sometimes writes for the publication National Catholic Reporter, approached the co-chairs of the Connecticut legislative judiciary committee, Rep. Michael Lawlor and Sen. Andrew McDonald, to promote legislation assuring stronger lay involvement in the oversight of finances in Catholic parishes (here and here and here).

Lawlor and McDonald are both Catholic. Gallagher was concerned about cases of stupendous fiscal impropriety in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, diocese in recent years. On 12 Sept. 2007, Father Michael Jude Fay of St. John’s parish in that diocese pled guilty to misappropriation of what appears to be some $1.4 million of parish funds (here).

Prior to this, in December 1996, Monsignor Charles Stubbs of St. Mary’s church in the same diocese resigned amid allegations that he had improperly spent at least a half million dollars—about which the diocese has apparently never provided fiscal details, though Stubbs was eventually defrocked for molesting a boy (here). Tom Gallager is directly tied to the Stubbs story in that he was appointed a trustee of St. Mary’s parish in the month following Stubbs’ resignation.

What Gallagher sought through the bill he tried to place before the Connecticut legislature was direct lay oversight and control of parish finances. Though there have been precedents for this arrangement in the American Catholic church in the past, for a long time now priests acting under the authority of bishops have directly controlled the finances of all parishes. Lay finance boards are recommended by church documents. They do not exist in all parishes. And in no parishes do they have direct control over church finances.

This produces a series of serious problems for Catholic parishes. Those problems are glaringly apparent in ongoing reports, one following on the heels of another in the media, of fiscal impropriety by priests in parishes. A study done by Villanova University in January 2007 shows that, of American Catholic dioceses responding to its survey, 85% reported embezzlement of church funds in the past five years (here). Embezzlement is a predictable result of any system of fiscal oversight that places all the control of and reporting about money in the hands of one person, who is not accountable to or in any way supervised by those providing the money.

There is nothing at all in Catholic governance rules that requires a parish or a diocese to release to the public or to parishioners detailed and accurate information about the amount of money it takes in and how it uses that money. The system is notoriously lacking in transparency and in accountability. The laity who foot the bill for that system have no right at all to say how their money is being used, and no right to ask for reports to that effect.

This is a problem. It is thickly intertwined with the problem of clerical abuse of minors, which depends for its existence on the absolute power of clerics to do anything they please without lay checks and balances on their power, and on the right of clerics to refuse to be accountable to or to behave with transparency towards the laity.

Tom Gallagher’s solution to the problem may not have been the wisest one possible. It may infringe on the line separating church and state (but every bit as much as, and perhaps far less than, the political websites set up by Archbishop Chaput’s archdiocese during the last election) (here).

Even so, there is a problem, clearly so, and it is not going to be resolved by bishops who put holding the reins of power above all other values—as far too many bishops do, in violation of the gospels. I can understand Tom Gallagher’s frustration and what caused him to try to seek a solution to his problem at the state legislative level, though I may not agree with the approach he has taken.

And the response of some American Catholic bishops to this legislation, which did not even come before the legislature? All-out warfare. With their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters as cannon fodder in the bloody battle.

In a statement on his blog on 8 March, Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport whips up the troops with rhetoric about a direct attack on our church and our faith—as if a bishop’s control of church finances is integral to core Catholics beliefs, and as if questioning that mutable, historically developed financial arrangement is an attack on the church and orthodoxy (here).

And what bloody flag does the bishop wave in his blog posting, to incite the faithful to action? He states that the pending legislation is “a thinly-veiled attempt to silence the Catholic church on the important issues of the day, such as same-sex marriage.” “It is time for us to defend our church!” he concludes.

For anyone following the story up to the point of that battle cry, the allusion to some (entirely bogus) attempt to silence the church on same-sex marriage must sound, well, curious—if not entirely off the wall. The ugly insinuation that Lori is too delicate to spell out here—but entirely willing to make and use, as he whips up the masses—is that the bill being put before the Connecticut legislature is being promoted by—gasp!—homosexual activists.

Count on Archbishop Chaput, however, to go where angels fear to tread—though the legislation in question is in Connecticut and Chaput would appear to have no vested interest at all in intervening in an issue before that state’s legislature. In a statement the day after Lori’s blog entry above was posted, Chaput concurs with his brother bishop’s statement that the church is under attack. Chaput’s angle is that “bigots” who “resent” the church are attacking it through Gallagher’s legislation (here).

And, lest we remain in doubt about precisely who those resentful bigots might be, Chaput’s archdiocesan website helpfully encourages readers of his statement to peruse the coverage of the statement at the Catholic News Agency website. The Catholic News Agency of Denver, Colorado which, for some years now, has functioned to all intents and purposes as an arm of the Archdiocese of Denver and as a means by which Archbishop Chaput’s views on matters of church and state can be represented to the international Catholic media as “the” American Catholic voice on those issues.

Head over to Catholic News Agency and what do you read in its article entitled “Archbishop of Denver Warns that Conn. Bill Threatens Catholics Everywhere” (here; and see Enlightened Catholicism’s commentary here)? You read the following astonishing claim, one to which a bishop who purports to be concerned primarily about the integrity of the church and its leaders would, one would think, not want to be linked:

The Senate Bill 1098 was introduced last Thursday by the chairs of the Judiciary Committee of the Connecticut State Legislature: Senator Andrew McDonald of Stamford and Representative Michael Lawlor of East Haven.

Sen. McDonald and Rep. Lawlor are both homosexual activists, who have opposed the local Church’s efforts to defend marriage between a man and a woman.

There you have it, dear readers, in a nutshell. Bishop Lori of Bridgeport whips up the faithful, informing them that pending legislation that has nothing at all to do with gay issues or same-sex marriage is a “thinly veiled attempt to silence the church” about gay marriage. And in faraway Colorado, Archbishop Chaput, who shares Lori’s view that the church is under siege and that the faithful need to be up in arms, speaks of “resentful” “bigots” attacking the church, and links to a right-wing Catholic newspaper in his own city that informs us—in reporting about Chaput’s press release—that “homosexual activists” are behind the Connecticut legislation.

And it has worked. The media and blogs have been full, all week long, of gay-baiting of the vilest sort, gay bashing that can be laid right at the feet of two Catholic bishops, two men who claim to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, who are called to seek out the wounded sheep and bind up their wounds—not to inflict wounds.

The day after Lori made his blog statement, and the same day that Chaput released his, one Kevin “Coach” Collins posts at the Free Republic website with a headline screaming, "Connecticut’s Homosexuals open a final push to destroy the Catholic Church” (here). In elegant prose and with impeccable logic, “Coach” Kevin nails the homosexual conspiracy lurking behind proposed legislation to add lay folks to financial oversight committees in Catholic parishes as follows:

Since this is a blatant violation of the doctrine of separation of Church and State, and clearly at odds with the 1st and 14th Amendments and is a bill of attainder, it begs the questions: Why would this bill be introduced and cui bono (who benefits)?

Research has provided some possible answers.

Why would anyone back this bill?

Connecticut based gay website, G.A.Y. (Good as You) said this about McDonald and Lawlor:

“The two co-sponsors of the bill, Andrew McDonald and Michael Lawlor, are both practicing homosexuals. While cloaked in the garment of demanding fiscal transparency, the real doctrinal intention of the bill is unmistakable.” Now WHAT could that mean?

These two have also joined forces to introduce and push the state’s Civil Unions law. There is every reason to believe one of the possible “improvements” to the way the Catholic Church in Connecticut conducts Her operations might softening the Church’s position on gay conduct.

What else could it be?

What else, indeed? When priests embezzle huge amounts of money, and lay folks call for financial oversight of such embezzlement, look for a homosexual to be hiding somewhere in the bushes.

Despite the cogency of “Coach” Kevin’s stunning argument here, there’s a wee problem, unfortunately: he seems to have invented—totally—the quote from the Good as You website, an internet site that is not centered in Connecticut as he claims. For GAY’s response, see (here).

If you have the stomach for it, scan the blogs of the Catholic and political right this week, and see what the two good shepherds of the flock have wrought, with their cynical, ugly political use of gay human beings, gay lives, gay bodies, as political footballs in their battle to keep at bay lay oversight of Catholic parish finances. Check out the Pro Ecclesia blog, for instance, and you’ll read a huge WEB ALERT stating,

Senate Bill 1098 was introduced by Lawlor and McDonald (both homosexual activists) as a political ploy and distraction in order to pass Senate Bill 899 with minimal opposition! SB 899 goes far beyond the codification of the Kerrigan decision imposing same –sex marriage in CT. The goal of SB 899 is to strip away important statutory protections in order to pave the way for the eventual state mandated infusion of ‘gay positive’ themes into the public school curriculum. STOP SECTION 17!! (here).

Head back over to Chaput’s Catholic News Agency site and look at the threads commenting on articles about the Connecticut situation and you’ll read one from one Ron Pichlik, “This is nothing short of an attempt by the liberal, homosexual and secular agenda to try to put the Church in its' [sic] place” (here). Homosexuals and liberals and secularists all working together to do in the poor, embattled church . . . .

Go to the website of the National Catholic Reporter and read the article to which I linked previously, discussing the Connecticut case, and you’ll see one CHAYNES linking the homosexual conspiracy to National Catholic Reporter itself: “The bill was provided to the homosexual activists by Gallagher, the NCR's writer” (here).

It’s open season on the gays right now. And Catholic bishops are leading the way. Though the bill that never even made it to the legislative floor in Connecticut had nothing at all to do with gay issues, Bishops Lori and Chaput have not hesitated to play the homosexual conspiracy card, in their zeal to keep lay noses out of parish and diocesan fiscal records.

John McNeill is right, prophetically so. The more we see the structures of the homophobic, patriarchal church and the homophobic, patriarchal culture on which it depends cracking under the weight of their own corruption, the more likely we are to see a new backlash against gay human beings. We will see new attempts of those structures to blame gay human beings for what the leaders of those structures have themselves wrought.

We will see renewed attempts to play the gay scapegoat card when anyone seeks to hold those leaders accountable for their mismanagement of institutions, for their corruption, for their lies. And we will see those attempts working: the hatred that Lori and Chaput whipped up had a strong effect on what happened to the bill in the Connecticut legislature. They succeeded in turning that bill back in its tracks.

And now liberals, National Catholic Reporter, Voice of the Faithful—all kinds of other innocent bystanders—are being linked to the dark homosexual conspiracy behind the bill. Rub shoulders with us who are gay, and expect to be tarred with a mighty big and mighty wicked brush.

And if you think that this hate mongering is inadvisable, unChristian, and destructive to our social fabric, then please get to work. Because we’re going to see it get worse before it gets better, and lots of people who do not deserve to be hurt are going to be seriously damaged, in the name of Christ, before we stop it.

John McNeill's Prophetic Witness to the Churches: Enough of the Denial of Gay Love!

Jesuit theologian John McNeill has long been a hero of mine. When I could not find a vocabulary to name the love I experience as a gay man in a committed relationship, or to claim that love or the grace I experienced in my life and relationship, John McNeill paved the way for me to speak of my experience of love in theological terms. He paved a way for me to claim my love as a gay man love, to welcome my experience of grace as grace.

I suspect that for many Catholics of my generation, as for me, John McNeill's courage in writing about gay love and testifying to the experience of grace in gay lives has been foundational. It has allowed us to respect ourselves in a way that the church as a whole refuses to make possible. Almost singlehandedly in his generation, John McNeill opened up a discursive space within the Catholic church for some of us, at least, to talk about gay love and gay experiences of grace as redemptive, as worth hearing about, as part of the drama of universal salvation.

For this reason, I was delighted to hear from John McNeill lately, and grateful that he drew my attention to a document I hadn't yet read. This is an updated (January 2009) version of an open letter he wrote in November 2000. The first version of the letter was addressed to the U.S. bishops. This version is addressed to Pope Benedict, Cardinals Levada and George, and all the Catholic bishops of the world.

A copy is at the Soulforce website (here). I'm highlighting the following excerpt with permission from John McNeill:

At this point, the ignorance and distortion of homosexuality, and the use of stereotypes and falsehoods in official Church documents, forces us who are gay Catholics to issue the institutional Church a serious warning. Your ignorance of homosexuality can no longer be excused as inculpable; it has become of necessity a deliberate and malicious ignorance. In the name of Catholic gays and lesbians everywhere, we cry out “Enough!”

Enough! Enough of your distortions of Scripture. You continue to claim that a loving homosexual act in a committed relationship is condemned in Scripture, when competent scholars are nearly unanimous in acknowledging that nowhere in Scripture is the problem of sexual acts between two gay men or lesbian women who love each other, ever dealt with, never mind condemned. You must listen to biblical scholars to find out what Scripture truly has to say about homosexual relationships.

Enough! Enough of your efforts to reduce all homosexual acts to expressions of lust, and your refusal to see them as possible expressions of a deep and genuine human love. The second group you must listen to are competent professional psychiatrists and psychotherapists from whom you can learn about the healthy and positive nature of mature gay and lesbian relationships. They will assure you that homosexual orientation is both not chosen and unchangeable and that any ministry promising to change that orientation is a fraud.

Enough! Enough of your efforts through groups like Courage and other ex-gay ministries to lead young gays to internalize self-hatred with the result that they are able to relate to God only as a God of fear, shame and guilt and lose all hope in a God of mercy and love. What is bad psychology has to be bad theology!

Enough! Enough again, of your efforts to foster hatred, violence, discrimination and rejection of us in the human community, as well as disenfranching our human and civil rights. We gay and lesbian Catholics pray daily that the Holy Spirit will lead you into a spirit of repentance. You must publicly accept your share of the blame for gay murders and bashing and so many suicides of young gays and ask forgiveness from God and from the gay community.

Enough, also, of driving us from the home of our mother, the Church, and attempting to deny us the fullness of human intimacy and sexual love. You frequently base that denial by an appeal to the dead letter of the “natural law.” Another group to whom you must listen are the moral theologians who, as a majority, argue that natural law is no longer an adequate basis for dealing with sexual questions. They must be dealt with within the context of interpersonal human relationships.

Above all else, you must enter into dialogue with the gay and lesbian members of the Catholic community. We are the ones living out the human experience of a gay orientation, so we alone can discern directly in our experience what God’s spirit is saying to us.

These powerful words richly deserve a hearing--especially by anyone seeking seriously to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches today. So much hinges, in the final analysis, on love. In the final analysis, everything depends on love. What a pity that the churches today invest so much energy in denying powerful, redemptive love between people of the same sex, in a world starved for love.

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.