Media Begin Filling in Picture of Those Orchestrating Viganò's Attack on Francis: Predictable Players with Predictable Anti-LGBTQ Agenda

Thanks to @nwinfield, @elizabethjdias, and @lauriegnyt we now know of two of Archbishop Vigano's ghostwriters: Italian journalist @MarcoTosatti and American lawyer Timothy Busch

— Joshua McElwee (@joshjmac) August 28, 2018

As I've been saying, the Viganò press event is and has been orchestrated: completely. We have increasing evidence of this, and of how it parallels what a cabal of hard-right anti-LGBTQ political and religious players sought to do to Francis with Kim Davis in collaboration with Viganò in 2015. As in that débacle, the current events being orchestrated by Viganò and his cabal involve some of the worst figures on the American Catholic scene, collaborating with European ones, all intent on topping Francis' papacy and mounting an ugly anti-gay purge within the Catholic church, reasserting as decisively as possible that the Catholic community hates and intends to attack and exclude LGBTQ human beings from God's redemptive plan:

Homophobic Right-Wing Catholics Push Meme That Francis Is Responsible for McCarrick: Please Remind Me Who Made McCarrick Archbishop & Cardinal?

I'm confused. There's a big "bombshell" being pushed hard this Satruday evening by homophobic right-wing Catholics like Rod Dreher claiming that Francis knew what McCarrick was doing and did nothing.

James Alison on Homosexuality Among the Clergy, the Anatrella and McCarrick Stories, and the Trap of Clerical Dishonesty

Someone else who understands and has recently commented on the significance of the Anatrella (and McCarrick) story for those trying to revive the gay-bashing "lavender Mafia" theme about gay clergy and gay bishops in the Catholic church: the gay priest-theologian James Alison. Here's his recent commentary in The Tablet, entitled "Homosexuality among the clergy: caught in a trap of dishonesty":

It's Never About Racism: White Catholic Voters, Abortion, and How the Religious Right Culture Wars Began (Hint: It's About Racism)

In 1958, Jerry Falwell wrote the following:

“When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line,” and said that integration of “blacks & whites...will destroy our race eventually.”

This is the root of today’s #MAGA movement. They haven’t changed.

— Chris (@goingglocal) January 27, 2018

It's never about the racism with white Catholics who have signed onto the culture wars of the U.S. Catholic bishops, and who vote — or so they say — primarily on the basis of the single issue of abortion (with same-sex marriage also often thrown into their calculus as they choose predictably to vote Republican). It's never about racism with the alliance those white Catholics made a long time ago with white evangelicals who got the religious right ball rolling because of overt racism.

Quote for Day: The Current Trans-Panic and "A Process Which, If Followed to the End, Will Make Us Into Devils"

Fred Clark at Slacktivist, commenting on a lurid fantasy being peddled by conservative Christian commentator Rod Dreher, about gangs of "transgendered" thugs who are, we're told, terrorizing upstanding theater-going Texas suburbanites:

Quote for Day: Leah Mickens on "Benedict Option" and Need for Control on Part of (Straight) White Men

Leah Mickens on the "Benedict option" (countercultural, combative Christian withdrawal from mainstream society) and how this option (curiously) seems to appeal primarily to straight white men — so that it cannot be adequately evaluated without noticing its gendered and racialized roots:

Rod Dreher on Nienstedt Story and Jennifer Haselberger Affidavit: "In the Present and Future War on Religious Liberty . . . the US Catholic Hierarchy All Too Often Behaves Like a Fifth Column"

Conservative columnist Rod Dreher, who left the Catholic church due to the disclosures about the abuse situation when the crisis broke wide open in 2002 and afterwards, weighs in on the Nienstedt story and Jennifer Haselberger's affidavit. Dreher stands with the bishops in their attacks on gay folks and women, and he agrees with them in their claim that religious freedom is under attack in the U.S. today. He reads the presidential executive order defending gay folks from discrimination in federal programs as an attack on religious liberty, as the U.S. Catholic bishops do, too.

Panti Bliss on "Good" People, What Just Happened in Kansas, Parallels to Civil Rights Movement, and Club Catholic: In Summary

Two days ago, I puzzled, as I frequently do here, over the seeming inability of the "good" people of the world to hear the kind of testimony that Irish drag performer Panti Bliss recently offered in Dublin. Testimony about what it's like to live life in gay skin in a society whose norms are established and parsed by the good people she identified as ministers, senators, barristers, journalists, and nice middle-class folks like herself . . . .

Rod Dreher Again: Gays as the Culmination of the Sexual Revolution

Andrew Sullivan continues to post updates about the recent exchanges between Rod Dreher and Damon Linker re: homosexuality (here). (For my take on Dreher’s position, see here).

I’m particularly struck by one of Dreher’s central claims in his exchanges with Linker. Dreher argues,

If homosexuality is legitimized -- as distinct from being tolerated, which I generally support -- then it represents the culmination of the sexual revolution, the goal of which was to make individual desire the sole legitimate arbiter in defining sexual truth. It is to lock in, and, on a legal front, to codify, a purely contractual, nihilistic view of human sexuality (here; see also here).

This is a noteworthy argument not because it’s novel or especially profound, but because it is common: it is foundational to (though often not clearly articulated in) much centrist Catholic thinking about gay people and gay lives. Its damning fault is a damning moral fault. It does what is never ethical to do: it turns gay human beings and gay lives into objects, as it pursues political ends that ultimately have little do with those human beings and those lives. It objectifies gay people by proposing that we who are gay bear the weight of fallen creation in a unique way. And it does that without any reference to—any invitation for—the actual lives and actual stories of gay human beings, or to our own testimony about what our lives and stories mean.

As I say, Dreher’s argument that we who are gay are somehow “the culmination of the sexual revolution,” and are all about individual desire that is merely hedonistic and devoid of generativity, is not a new argument. This presupposition about what it means to be gay runs through the thought of a large number of centrist Catholic theologians who have written about the morality of homosexuality. I have engaged this argument in published academic essays that critique the proposal of some moral theologians that gay persons are most correctly viewed as unique signs of the brokenness of creation.

What is most important to note about this argument is that it entirely prescinds from—it completely glides over and elides—the testimony of actual gay human beings. By its very nature, it objectifies gay persons, because it does not invite gay persons to participate in defining ourselves. It defines us apart from our own lives, stories, and testimonies, and it does so in a way that not only objectifies, but demeans us.

This argument turns us into fetishized, demonized representatives of “the” sexual revolution, as the sexual revolution is imagined by heterosexist males who are threatened by that revolution’s suggestion that the sexual lives of women ought to be controlled by women, and may legitimately be divorced from heterosexist male definitions of the “natural” purpose of human sexuality.

Note what the argument implies about the sexual revolution: this revolution is about “individual desire” (as opposed to sex for procreation) that solipsistically turns in on itself in a masturbatory, self-gratifying way insofar as it ignores the judgment of legitimate (male, heterosexist) authority about the meaning of human sexuality, and makes itself the only legitimate arbiter of right and wrong. This breaks the “natural” link between sexuality and generativity, and turns the sexual life into “a purely contractual, nihilistic” thing abhorrent to people of genuine moral purpose.

(Interestingly enough, this argument is never advanced against the longstanding Christian practice of marrying people of the opposite gender who cannot bear children, either because they are beyond child-bearing age or because one or other spouse lacks the ability to conceive. The male heterosexist argument against same-sex relationships selectively targets only one group of human beings whose genital expression is non-procreative. It also completely ignores the decision of many opposite-sex couples capable of bearing children to limit their offspring. Which is to say, it completely ignores—and, one has to conclude, deliberately so—the ways in which heterosexist males attacking gays as the culmination of a threatening sexual revolution have themselves benefited from and taken advantage of the very revolution they are decrying.)

This is a slippery-slope argument, which premises everything in the social contract on “natural” sexuality, on sex-for-generativity, on male control, on female subordination, on heterosexual normativity and homosexual perversity. This argument assumes that to let gay human beings through the door of the social contract in a final and definitive way—as free agents of our destiny, as arbiters of what is good and moral on a par with heterosexist males—will dissolve the social contract.

It will lead to social anarchy and decay. It will turn society upside down. (It will place the final stamp of approval on what heterosexist males intend to resist at all costs—women’s unfettered control of their own reproductive lives, women’s claim to full personhood apart from heterosexist male definitions of women’s lives. It will call into question the right of heterosexist males to project their experience of the world onto nature itself as “the” clear and obvious definition of natural law. It will call into question the longstanding historic tendency of heterosexist males to equate their understanding of scripture and tradition with “the” meaning of scripture and tradition.)

I have no doubt at all that permitting gay human beings to walk through the door of the social contract as free agents of our destiny and as arbiters of what is good and moral on a par with heterosexist males will lead to the kind of revolution Rod Dreher so patently dreads. What I doubt is his interpretation of that revolution as the end of everything. It is a revolution that represents the end of his control of his world, the end of control of everything by the men with whom he has cast his lot, and by those women whose power is invested in allying themselves with such heterosexist male control.

Note how closely this apocalyptic demonizing argument about what will happen if we allow gay people to define their own lives parallels what the churches have done to and thought about various other groups who have also been asked to bear the weight of all fallen creation in the past, for reasons that had little to do with those being used in this way, but everything to do with consoldiating the control of the men on top of church and society. Jews were perfidious. They were provocative agents of corruption within Christian culture, masquerading as “normal” and like the rest of us while spreading contagion from within. They needed to be contained, driven out, and, if possible, eliminated.

Women were the daughters of Eve, the very embodiment of sin, who listened to the wily serpent in Eden because their rationality is less than that of men, and their propensity to sin is greater. Women corrupt everything unless they are firmly under male control. Women need to bear children in order to pay for the sin of Eve, and to redeem the world through their suffering in recompense for Eve’s infatuation with the serpent’s voice.

Women are misbegotten males who lack the full fange of male rationality, and who therefore positively demand male definition and male control to keep them from causing social decay. If women threaten to get out of control, they had better be harnessed again—if necessary, with violent technology such as ducking stools and scolds’ bridles, or, in ultimate cases, with the stake or the gallows, when their self assertion has turned them into witches. Keep the laws strong against female self-assertion, or who knows what might happen.

People of color were the cursed children of Ham, whose ancestor uncovered his father’s nakedness and who was, as a result, doomed to draw water and hew wood for his brothers throughout eternity. Keep them in subjugation, and you will be doing a noble and scripturally ordained thing. They are, after all, childlike in comparison to the rational men of the West. They are weak, lacking in intelligence, prone to emotion in the same way that women are.

People of color have not yet evolved to the state of rationality in which men of the West live, and they need the firm guiding hand of Western white men to keep them from making a mess of things. If their servitude happens to enrich Western men, then this is a felicitous reward to those who undertake the onerous task of assisting people of color to meet the mark of rationality and morality set by the white (heterosexist) men of the West.

These arguments no longer hold water for many Christians today (though they still hide inside the souls of a surprising number of believers, and would even now assert themselves again strongly, given half a chance to claim the light of day). Many Christians now recognize that what Christian people have done to and said about these scapegoat groups in the past, in the name of God and with the avowed purpose of defending Christian morality and combating the decay of Christian culture, is totally unjust. It is cruel. It is indefensible.

Unfortunately, many Christians have not yet come to the point of seeing that arguments like the one Dreher sets forth in the preceding quote are the contemporary version of the arguments that Christians once used against Jews, women, and people of color, and which they now rightly repudiate. To say that gay human beings uniquely represent fallen creation and portend the triumph of a cultural revolution noxious to authoritative morality is to say that perfidious Jews corrupt Christian culture from within, that unbridled women are the downfall of everything, and that people of color have been chosen by God to draw water and hew wood for their white brothers to atone for the sin of Ham.

It’s time for some new arguments in the cultural debates about homosexuality—some compelling ones that finally permit those of us who are gay to speak in our own voices, and to challenge ludicrous caricatures of our experience and our lives by those who create such caricatures in order to disguise and defend their claim to the unjust privilege of dominating others.

Follow-Up: Benedict on Condoms, Dreher on Authority

I wrote recently, “People of good will around the world find this position [i.e., Pope Benedict’s statement that condoms make the AIDS crisis worse] incomprehensible and even malevolent" (here) (see also here) (and here).

And now the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet has published an editorial on Benedict’s statement (here), which sums it up as follows:

When any influential person, be it a religious or political leader, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record. By saying that condoms exacerbate the problem of HIV/AIDS, the Pope has publicly distorted scientific evidence to promote Catholic doctrine on the issue.

To repeat my point: despite what many American Catholics of the center appear to believe, people of good will around the world find Benedict’s position on condoms and AIDS incomprehensible and malevolent. And with good reason.

A pastoral leader of a Christian church has no business distorting scientific fact to uphold dogma, when human lives are at stake.

And I also blogged recently, re: the patriarchal underpinnings of Rod Dreher’s neocon ideology with its heavy emphasis on “authority,”

What does not seem to occur to these neoconservative thinkers is that not everyone may be so ravenous for authority—for male authority, for paternal authority—as they are. Or that not everyone in the world and in the churches may think that everything hinges on authority—and male authority in particular. And that not everyone shares their analysis of a world hurtling to destruction through its denial of authority and tradition and its thirst for information (here) (H/T to Andrew Sullivan here) ( and also here).

And now, in a recent New Republic posting entitled “The Gay Fixation of Rod Dreher,” Damon Linker has the following to say about Dreher and authority (here):

. . . Rod has shown in his work as a journalist writing about the sex-abuse scandal in (and its cover-up by) the Catholic Church that he's perfectly willing to aggressively challenge religious authorities when he believes them to be acting immorally. Good for him. It shows that he's modern -- that is, he chooses which authorities to obey based on his own subjective judgment. So when Rod obeys the authority of orthodox (in his case, Eastern Orthodox) Christian teaching on homosexuality, he does so because he chooses to obey -- because he makes the subjective judgment that that teaching is true, is right, is worthy of being obeyed.

But why? Does Rod have any non-question-begging answer to this question? An answer that doesn't just amount to saying, "because the church says so"? That would be the answer of someone who really lives and thinks in (pre-modern) obedience to church authority. But we've already determined that this doesn't apply to Rod. So what's the answer? Why are the orthodox churches right to condemn homosexuality? Or in Rod's own words, what, precisely, does he "know to be true" about homosexuality? And, perhaps more importantly, how does he know it?

It is illogical and inconsistent to argue for authority as the basis for moral custom only when it is expedient to play the authority card. It also dangerous to argue in this way, particularly when one seeks to make one’s own subjective judgment of what is and is not authoritative binding on everyone else—in the absence of sound argumentation to convince those being bound that they ought to be bound.

Rod Dreher and Faith in the Church: People Need Church Too Much to Know Full Truth

I’ve been following with interest a thread at Commonweal (here) discussing a recent USA Today article by neocon columnist Rod Dreher (here) explaining why he has chosen to leave the Catholic church. Dreher’s piece is entitled “How Much ‘Truth’ Is Too Much Truth.”

Dreher credits the clerical sexual abuse scandal with shattering his confidence in the Catholic church. As the wide parameters of that scandal became apparent from 2002 forward—and as it also became apparent that the hierarchy, all the way to Rome, had long known about this scandal and had covered it up—Dreher “lost the will to believe and became profoundly spiritually depressed.” And so he and his family made the trek out of the Catholic church and into the Orthodox Church of America—a church whose scandals he does not intend to investigate, for fear of deligitimating the religious authority on which his faith now rests.

Dreher’s analysis pushes an interesting question, one he batted about with Richard John Neuhaus before that leading neoconservative Catholic figure died in January. This is whether people need to know and how much they need to know: hence the title of Dreher’s piece, how much truth is too much?

Neuhaus was unambiguous—unambiguously on the side of suppression of information that (in Neuhaus's judgment: an important qualification) people do not need to know: “There are things (Catholics) really don't want to know about their church," he maintained. Neuhaus censored information about the abuse crisis in the journal First Things, noting that "we thought there were some things people didn't need to know and didn't want to know, and for good reasons."

Dreher, by contrast, is conflicted. His conservative convictions lean in Neuhaus’s direction—that is, in the direction of censorship:

I do not believe Father Neuhaus was a cynic; he really did believe that there were certain things that ought to be concealed from the public for the greater good. And though it might be heresy for a journalist to say, as a matter of general principle, I agree with him.

But on the other hand, as Dreher notes, Jesus informed his followers that they would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. And God knows, if neonconservative Catholics talk about anything at all, it's about truth, and Truth: that rock on which they imagine everything is so solidily founded.

We also live in a culture that values the free exchange of information—an exchange premised on people’s right to know—and, as Dreher notes, institutions that seek to cover up damaging information about themselves court further damage when that information (and their deception) becomes public:

But any institution — sacred or secular — that has to depend on deception, and the willingness of its people to be deceived, to maintain its legitimacy will not get away with it for long. These days, the attempt to withhold or suppress information doesn't work to protect authority, but rather to undermine it.

Even so, Dreher concludes, the claims of authority figures and authoritative institutions (the terms “authority” and “authoritative” loom large in Dreher’s thought: on which, more in a moment) are implicitly undermined when we allow the free exchange of any and all information. The free flow of information is inherently corrosive to authority and “full transparency can harm society — and even, perhaps, our souls”:

Societies cannot survive without authoritative institutions. Societies cannot survive without authoritative institutions. But which authoritative persons or institutions can withstand constant critical scrutiny? In our culture, we are predisposed to see damage done from failing to question authority. We are far less capable of grasping the destruction that can come from delegitimizing authority with corrosive suspicion. How much reality must we choose to ignore for the greater good of our own souls, and society?

In the final analysis, Dreher concludes, “People need the church too much to know the full truth about her.”

I appreciate Dreher’s candor. Conservative (and neoconservative) thinkers do not always admit something that is strongly apparent to their critics: their penchant for censorship, and the authoritarian philosophical claims that underlie that penchant. The desire to suppress information that discloses less than admirable behavior or motives in institutions they admire is woven deeply into conservative ideology and conservative souls. As is the desire to attack and disempower those who promote the free exchange of information that they consider damaging to their authority figures and authoritative institutions . . . .

For a number of reasons, I find Dreher’s argument entirely unconvincing and even dangerous—and for that reason, I’m surprised at the sympathy it appears to receive among those centrist Catholics who form the knowledge class of the American Catholic church. It’s an argument that is all about enshrining authority—that is to say, certain authoritative figures and authoritative institutions—in a cultural location that places them beyond criticism.

And that’s something that Christians cannot and must not do with any person or institution, including the church and its leaders. Constant critique of all social structures and all institutions (and their leaders)—including the church and its leaders—is a fundamental obligation of Christians, an obligation inbuilt in the call to discipleship. It is our obligation and our call because the failure to critique leads to idolatry. What is beyond criticism—beyond the free flow of information, no matter how damaging that information may be to the claims of the institution or person being critiqued—is an idol. And idols exact flesh: we pay a high price for forming them.

If Dreher is correct in his claim that “people need the church too much to know the full truth about her,” then the price we must pay to make the church credible—to enable it fulfill our needs—is a steep price, indeed: it’s the price of turning the church into something fixed and beyond critique, which we end up serving in the end, even as we claim that the church exists to meet our needs and to serve us.

This is one of the theological points I wanted to make in my initial posting about the ecclesiology of Vatican II the other day (here). One of the key implications of the traditional patristic and biblical ecclesiology Vatican II retrieves is that, as the pilgrim people of God within history, the church never finds a permanent place in history. It is always on pilgrimage, always critiquing every social structure in light of the vision of the reign of God that urges the church forward throughout all historical periods.

And applying that vision of the reign of God and its critique of all social structures to itself: as an institution on pilgrimage, which refuses to settle down in history and canonize (and idolize) any particular social or political structure, any particular moment, any particular way of being in the world, the church has a constant obligation to be self-critical. To admit that its present and past ways of being in the world simultaneously move towards and betray the vision of the reign of God that is the engendering center of the church as it moves through history . . . .

As I read Dreher and Neuhaus, I wonder what those who accept these thinkers’ ideological penchant for censorship do with the many “inconveniences” of the history of the church. And I’m afraid I do know very well what their tendency is, as they deal with these “inconveniences”: the principle of censorship is applied not just to troubling information in the present, but to information from the past, as well.

The abuse crisis is horrific. I’m appalled that so many Catholics seem content to live with it—to carry on business as usual, to act as if we can continue being church in the same old untroubled way, without a fundamental analysis of what this crisis means for us as church. Without a revolution. Without, it often seems to me, much awareness at all of the many lives shattered by the leaders of a church with whom many of us are still content to live all too cozily, without demanding more—of them. And of ourselves.

Even so, I’m also painfully aware that this is hardly the first time the church has so betrayed its fundamental mission and identity that it is exceedingly difficult to know how to place one’s faith in the church, because of what it has done. There have been other dark moments, after all—the Inquisition, holy wars, the witch hunts, pogroms and ghettoes, blessing of troops and burning of heretics, slavery, welcome of Nazis, the never-ceasing abuse of women century after century and all the theological arguments developed to legitimate that abuse.

The church’s history is replete with damaging information that undermines its claims—and this is true of all churches, and not merely the Catholic church. Those of us who remain in any way connected to an institution that can behave in such shameful, anti-gospel, anti-Christian ways need to be constantly aware of the propensity of the church to do evil, to trample on people, to turn human lives upside down and harm human beings dreadfully.

We need to be aware of that tendency so that we can struggle to keep the church from doing this again in our day. And to stop ourselves from doing so, with the same unthinking abandon of believers in the past, who often assaulted other human beings because they felt entitled to do so—precisely as believers.

I am surprised, in short, that those who want to shield us from accurate (and damaging) information about the church and its leaders seem to have a strong doctrine of the sanctity of the church while lacking an equally strong doctrine of the sinfulness of the church. History would seem to indicate the need for both doctrines—and for those two doctrines to be held in tension with each other, at every period of the church’s history.

I understand the nostalgia for an institution beyond critique. At the same time, I find that nostalgia ultimate ly childish. Running through so much neoconservative argumentation about the need to preserve cherished institutions in the face of rampant social change and social decline is the belief that there are—or should be—unquestionable “authorities” behind it all. Authorities to whom we should submit, so that we are not engulfed by the changes around us . . . .

Scan Dreher’s writings, and you’ll find the words “authority” and “authoritative” everywhere. A particularly interesting (and, to my mind, revelatory) piece is an essay Dreher published in Dallas Morning News back in January, entitled “What Child-Men Need Is Some Tradition” (here). Dreher characterizes the tradition-denying men of the baby boom generation as “child-men,” men wrapped up in themselves, without traditional norms of manhood to instruct them about how to behave, how to become real men.

And in this cultural abandonment of manhood, authority is everything.

For 40 years now, we have been living through a cultural and psychological revolution that has rendered young men (indeed, most people) incapable of recognizing and submitting to authority . . . .

Which brings us to our latter-day child-men, the wayward sons of a generation that crawled on purple and never got over the experience. Quintillian and his successors through the ages knew that the process of becoming a man requires a juvenile male to subordinate his own desires to an objective code of conduct – which is to say, some sort of higher authority . . . .

They have deprived their sons of authoritative tradition, both in word and example, and with it the ability to transcend the adolescent state . . . .

Sad, isn’t it? Plaintive? Get out the handkerchiefs: the heart-rending cry of a generation of boy-men who feel they have lost their way as men, and who cannot find the trustworthy authority figures to shape them as men that they assume men of the past had. Men hungering for an authority figure to whom to submit. Men looking for an authoritative tradition to assure them that they are real men.

Men looking for a father.

One cannot read Dreher’s analysis of religion and the role that the flow of information plays in religious bodies without hearing that same plaintive cry there: the cry for a father that will not betray our expectations of a bona fide authority. The good father.

Built into the emphasis on authority in neoconservative ideology is patriarchy: a determination to make everyone else submit to the paternal authority figure on whom I have hinged my self-worth and my belief that the world has order, and is not headed to hell in a handbasket. What does not seem to strike Rod Dreher and did not seem to trouble Richard John Neuhaus is the possibility that not everyone in the world may share their psychodrama.

What does not seem to occur to these neoconservative thinkers is that not everyone may be so ravenous for authority—for male authority, for paternal authority—as they are. Or that not everyone in the world and in the churches may think that everything hinges on authority—and male authority in particular. And that not everyone shares their analysis of a world hurtling to destruction through its denial of authority and tradition and its thirst for information.

And to return to a theme I cannot seem to drop on this blog (here): isn’t it interesting that a centrist American Catholic publication like Commonweal and the members of the knowledge class of the center of American Catholicism that maintain the Commonweal blog are so attuned to the plaintive cry of Mr. Dreher as he is dispossessed of his church home—yet seemingly so tone-deaf to the cries of millions of other equally dispossessed brothers and sisters who never seem to have a hearing at the center? Kathleen Caveny characterizes Dreher’s piece about his struggle with the church as “anguished.”

Yes. And so, for years, have been the wonderful cries from the heart of John McNeill. And Andrew Sullivan. And James Alison. (And I have cited the names of gay men here, to make a point about the kind of male pain the center seems to notice, and the kind it refuses to notice, knowing all the while that I could also cite names of woman after woman, both gay and straight, whose story also deserves attention). And millions of other gay and lesbian Catholics to whose suffering at being excluded and having our faith shattered those at the center seem curiously inured.

As if we are not there. Not there at all. While child-men struggling with the loss of the good father—a predictable psychodynamic for those seeking adulthood, and one that is, on the whole, to be welcomed as we come to maturity—occupy center stage . . . .