Dominican Priest-Theologian James Alison Receives Affirming Phone Call from Pope: When Will the Call Come for the Rest of Us?

Pope Francis’ call and respect for Alison’s path rights a major injustice inflicted by the Vatican. It should give all Catholics encouragement to follow their consciences and do the work to which God calls them, even if church leaders condemn or exclude. https://t.co/RAMkMOmZiD

— New Ways Ministry (@NewWaysMinistry) September 29, 2019

I am delighted for James Alison's sake. He's a first-rate theologian.

Mary Hunt on Royal Wedding: Theologically, "Stabilizing for the Status Quo"

As with everything she writes, Mary Hunt's recent commentary at Religion Dispatches on the royal wedding is well worth reading.  Hunt's take: in key respects, the symbolism woven into the recent wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was "stabilizing for the status quo," in a theological sense.  And more's the pity.

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.

Starting the Conversation

This blog is, in part, an outgrowth of discussions that have been taking place on the blog threads of the publication National Catholic Reporter. The posting that follows is an edited version of one I've just posted on a thread there. The thread is entitled "The Intrinsic Disorder Question Revisited (Again)" (http://ncrcafe.org/node/1337). I started that thread on 17 Sept. 2007, to discuss the Catholic church's treatment of LGBT persons. I'm now beginning this Bilgrimage blog to continue the discussions that have arisen at the NCR Cafe, following my 17.9.2007 posting:

"Sylvester, thank you from the bottom of my heart for a heartfelt response that acknowledges the painful passages we have to negotiate to arrive at truth. Particularly when we're walking across a field covered in shards of broken glass, where there's pain for all of us.

There is much I'd like to say in response--too much for this format. What I would like to draw attention to, briefly, is your statement about hurt and self-defense.

You're right: out of self-defense, those whose humanity is trampled may be pushed to extremes in defending themselves. They--we, I--may strike out and hurt in return. I think it is possible that the subtext of your observation here (and it's a wonderful observation) may be that some of my critiques of our current pope's statements about gay persons have an edge of self-defense that others may perceive as extreme, as hurtful in return.

Before we go there, though (and I always want to remain open to critiques that help me see myself better, especially if I am returning hurt for hurt), I'd like to explore one point. It's difficult to make, precisely because of the double bind to which your analysis alludes: the double bind social groups place stigmatized others in, when they force us to be viewed through the lens of otherness and difference.

The truths we speak, the observations we sketch of the world around us, inevitably reflect our social location. This is a point my initial posting starting this thread tried to discuss. We speak from where we have been put by social structures.

A corollary of this recognition is that two people at different social locations may make precisely the same observation, in precisely the same words, and their observation will be heard with radically different ears by the social mainstream, because of the social location from which it arises. A male (straight, white) asserting himself in a meeting will be perceived as forceful. A woman saying the very same words the male has just said, in the same tone of voice, may be perceived as arch or b----y. In some cultural contexts, including the one in which I grew up, a black man asserting himself in any way at all has, until not very long ago, been seen as threatening and uppity, fodder for lynching.

A gay man asserting himself is often perceived as laughable, since gay men are women in disguise. Overt anger and forthright truth from gay men is often seen as an assault, a form of the most extreme b-----ness possible, since it has to be arising out of malicious intent to overthrow all social structures. I'm sketching here the social context within which we often hear and filter people's words and actions, not the actual intent of those actions.

To be bluntly autobiographical, I struggle constantly--more than it's possible to describe--with figuring out how to say what I see very plainly, for fear that what I see and say will be perceived as malicious, as tinged with unwarranted anger, as plain b-----ness rather than plain truth. As I near the age of 60, with publications to my name, with a career of academic leadership, I still question every word I say or write, because I have no choice except to see myself through the lens of otherness and difference that society has imposed on me and uses to interpret me.

I would like for things to be otherwise. I tried to make them otherwise. When I began my career as a theologian, I did so with the naive expectation that my "personal life" would be treated as separate from my vocation as a theologian. I told myself that the personal lives of others who taught theology in the academy, in Catholic universities, seemed to be respected. Why not the same in my case, as long as I toed the line and remained very circumspect about the fact that I was gay and living in a long-term relationship?

Unfortunately, things did not work out as I had hoped. My partner Steve and I soon discovered that our life together did matter--tremendously and ineluctably--in the polarized context of the church of the latter decades of the 20th century. It did not matter whether we worked hard, remained silent about our shared life, achieved, published, lived upright lives, mentored students and received outstanding evaluations. What mattered, in the end, was that we were gay and living together unapologetically, though quietly and without any self-assertion.

I did not want my being gay to matter. I simply wanted to respond to what I have long felt as a deep calling in my life--to be a theologian--a calling that keeps running like a mighty river underneath everything I do and think, even when I try to turn away from it. By inclination, I am a scholar, writer, introvert, perhaps a bit of an artist. The last thing I have ever wanted is to be on the front lines. Had I had my druthers, I'd have spent my life in libraries poring over Latin texts.

But I have not had a choice. Because the church has made it matter--that I am gay, that I am living in a relationship of nearly 40 years with another theologian--I have been forced to respond. I have been forced to think and write about who I am, about how the church relates to me and to other gay people, about how being gay affects my outlook as a theologian.

I am now what I would prefer not to be: a gay theologian. I am not merely a theologian. I cannot any longer address an issue like, say, abortion or birth control or the war in Iraq, without having people filter what I say through the lens of gayness.

I also have, somehow, to find a way to see what has happened in my vocational life as part of the mystery of vocation itself. My vocation has unfolded as I did not expect or want it to unfold. There are times when I look at the lives and careers of those with whom I was in school with frank (and shameful) envy. It has seemed much easier for many of them, and because of one central fact: they are not gay; I am.

Given what has been done to Steve and me, we/I have no choice now except to write from where we have been placed. I now seek the truth from a social context I did not anticipate having, when I entered academic life. My vocation has not afforded me the ivory tower, the quiet libraries, the dusty books, the afternoon teas in the faculty lounge lazing by the fireside, about which I dreamt when I entered academic life.

Instead, Steve and I have again and again met inscrutable dispossession, sudden twists in our careers in which, despite glowing evaluations and very hard work, an inexplicable damning flaw suddenly emerges in a supervisor's report. In one case, one of us received unanimous approval from a seminary faculty and its students to be tenured. When the interview with the rector to grant tenure occurred, we were told that the seminary could no longer pay the pitiful salary one of was receiving as a lay theologian. \We were denied tenure unilaterally by this rector, who has now gone on to be a bishop. We discovered when this happened that any money we had invested in the diocesan retirement fund was absorbed back into the diocese's coffers. This was done to us just as the academic year ended, when it was well-nigh impossible to find another position. The following year, two priests were hired to replace the one of us to whom this was done, at much higher salaries than the one the seminary could not afford if it tenured us.

This has happened to us repeatedly. Perhaps we deserve it. But what makes us doubt that is a recurrent pattern whereby church-based institutions prescind from evaluations as they do this to us--either avoiding giving us an evaluation at all, or ignoring positive evaluations to trump up specious grounds on which to terminate us (and, in one case, seven other "unmarried" faculty at the same institution, in what the local gay community regarded as a purge of LGBT faculty).

Interestingly enough, we now find ourselves approaching 60 and back in the same situation again, jobless and without health coverage, unable to afford health coverage because of our lack of jobs. If I write about hurt, then, and if my critiques seem to reflect hurt, it's real hurt, and not simply the hurt of being slighted by bigoted co-workers. It's the hurt of not having an income, not being able to save for retirement. It's the hurt of not being able to go to a doctor even when one is ill, because one simply can't afford to do so.

It's the hurt of recognizing that one's humanity counts for very little, in the end, if this can be done to one for no sound reason at all. And by church institutions....When church institutions do this, the knife does cut much deeper.

Not all LGBT persons experience this kind of discrimination any longer. For some people, things are changing. If nothing else, laws increasingly protect people in many areas of the world against such overt discrimination. In the U.S., much depends on where you live, whether there are local support structures for gay persons, what your profession is--and on the churches.

I would submit that it's precisely in church institutions that the discrimination lingers, and it grows perhaps even uglier as the ban lifts elsewhere. It grows uglier, in part, by becoming subtler. The reasons provided for discrimination in church institutions grow more and more specious, because overt homophobia is not longer socially acceptable. One can be told, as my initial posting states, that one is not 'aggressive' enough to do a good job, or that one 'pouts': code language to say that a man is perceived as feminine. One can be told that it's not the fact that one is gay that is problematic, but the fact that one is in a relationship and won't hide it: that one spends lunch-hour time taking one's partner to the doctor, when married employees in the same church-affiliated institution routinely take time to do the same, without reprimand.

In going underground in church institutions, homophobia now uses these and similar reasons to marginalize, discipline, and even disemploy LGBT employees. As when such tactics are used in the case of people of a different color or gender, such discriminatory treatment become harder to fight legally, since it becomes harder to put one's finger on the discrimination at the heart of the specious reasons. At the same time that this goes on, many church institutions still don't even have any regulations forbidding discrimination against gay employees. At least those discriminated against on racial or gender grounds have federal protection from discrimination, and churches and church institutions have to respect federal mandates in those areas.

Arriving at the truth--plain truth--is quite a process, I'm finding. As my initial posting notes in the NCR thread on intrinsic disorcer notes, one of the perplexing experiences with which I have to content as someone who has claimed the identity of a 'gay theologian' is suddenly finding that people seem willing now to believe of me easily disproven defamatory statements.

Nothing in my upbringing has prepared me to know how to deal with this experience. I'm having to revise my understanding of how we discover plain truth. I'm having to recognize that what I now experience because of my social location as a gay person is very similar to what people without power all over the world and throughout history have always experienced: that I have very little power to determine my own destiny; that I am an object rather than the subject of my own story, in the eyes of the power structures of the world.

There's much more to be said about that, and I welcome dialogue with anyone interested in journeying with me on my blog."