Breaking Silence, Rolling the Stone Away

I’m thinking about silence today. My email this morning contains an announcement from Ashon Crawley of Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) regarding the National Day of Silence that will be observed in American schools this year on 25 April in memory of Lawrence King.

This annual GLSEN-sponsored observance is an effort to address school bullying, particularly violence in schools fueled by prejudice against those tagged as LGBT or gender-inappropriate. As I’ve noted before on this blog, in conjunction with the LOGO network, GLSEN has produced an important video announcement about this year’s National Day of Silence and Lawrence King’s murder. For those who haven’t yet viewed this resource, it’s at www.dayofsilence.org/content/video.html.

Ashon Crawley’s email announcement notes that silence takes many forms. It can be the kind of silence that is golden, the moment when we let out a deep breath and relax to take in the beauty of a landscape.

Alternatively, silence can be the deformative silence that is imposed on persons and groups of people by those who do not wish to hear the words a person or a group needs to speak in order to assert humanity, or to combat social norms that deform the person or group. As Crawley notes,

But there are times when silence is not sweet, times when silence isn’t chosen but when it is forced upon us. There are instances when silence bespeaks unhappiness. When a person or group is silenced, the choice to speak is stolen. Silencing of others is an act of coercion, making tangible inequitable distributions of power. So though there may be times when silence is golden, there are many other instances when silence is traumatic and terrifying. LGBTQ people are quite familiar with being silenced: having our lives questioned to the point that we fatigue from speaking; sometimes, literally lacking the words that convey our sense of being to the world; instances where our voices are effectively cut out of conversations.

LGBTQ people are quite familiar with being silenced. We are indeed. I’ve reported on this thread that at my last position as a professional educator in a church-based university, I was charged with the task of leading the faculty in developing a curriculum centered around civic engagement and social transformation.

In that capacity, I mentioned—on a single occasion—that GLSEN’s educational initiatives (among many other initiatives of other organizations addressing social problems) might be a resource for faculty to consider. I did so because the locale in which I was working was one in which violence against both homeless people and youth identified as gender-inappropriate was reaching epidemic proportions, both in schools and outside the school grounds.

Merely for mentioning GLSEN as a possible resource in the project I was charged to lead, I was severely punished. I was told to be silent. I was told I had “put my lifestyle into the face of colleagues.” LGBTQ people are quite familiar with being silenced, indeed.

This is silence that is intended to dehumanize those on whom it is imposed, to suggest that our humanity is less than that of those who are allowed to speak and to define social reality for themselves and the rest of us. It is the silence that is intended to keep our stories from being heard, because in coming to know us as human beings, others may come to see that our humanity is not inferior to theirs—that we offer another way to be human in a world that desperately needs many different models of humanity to match the diversity of the world’s population.

Silence never truly silences those who are oppressed—not when we continue to think, cherish our humanity against the blows of those trying to diminish it, love and dream. As Labi Siffre’s powerful anthem of liberation to which I linked in yesterday’s blog, “Something Inside So Strong,” says,

The more you refuse to hear my voice
The louder I will sing
You hide behind walls of Jericho
Your lies will come tumbling
Deny my place in time
You squander wealth that's mine
My light will shine so brightly
It will blind you
‘Cause there's......

Something inside so strong
I know that I can make it

This is the hope of the resurrection. This is the central message of the resurrection. Every power in the world in which Jesus lived sought to silence him, because his message that the reign of God had broken into the world was intolerable for those controlling the world in which he lived. This message of God’s preferential love for those on the margins, for prostitutes, for social outcasts, for the poor and the downtrodden, was unacceptable to those who profited from things as they were.

As a result, the powers that be in Jesus’s world sought to silence him definitively. They hung him on a cross and watched him breathe his last. They placed him in a tomb, and rolled a rock across the entrance. They left him there in a silence that, in their expectation, would be forever.

The Easter message is that Jesus remains alive beyond all attempts to silence and humiliate him, all attempts to stand athwart history and say “stop!” to movements of hope and progressive change. Far from silencing him, those who humiliated him by consigning him to the lowly fate of a common criminal made his voice louder, strong, universal.

I am not among those Christians who believe that only in Jesus is the voice of the divine accessible to the world. In my view, there are many ways to hear that voice, and followers of Jesus stand to gain much by listening for the voice of God in religious traditions other than their own—and in the lives and witness of those who may repudiate religion altogether, given their experience of the demonic face of religious groups, a face that every religion is capable of displaying.

I use the theological language of Christianity, of death and resurrection, of hope premised on this pivotal event in human history, because I grew up within a Christian culture, and that culture forms the framework of my religious imagination. In using this language, I make no claim that it is the unique, solitary way of talking about the intrusion of the divine into human history. To make such a claim would be to deny what is evident to anyone with eyes to see: that God manifests Godself in the world in many different ways, through many different religious traditions, and that, at the same time that religious communities across the globe sometimes show demonic faces to the world, all religious communities are also capable of being vehicles of salvation.

In my own Christian-framed religious imagination, part of the message of the resurrection is that one lives now as if the reign of God to which Jesus pointed—and for proclaiming which he was put to death—is already breaking forth in human history. Because of our witness to the resurrectional force of Jesus’s life and message, we live now as if the world has begun to change significantly, even when we recognize that our hopes point to dreams that have not yet come to pass.

We live for a more humane world at the same time that we are painfully aware that this world does not yet exist. We commit ourselves to making that world evident in our lives, to creating the conditions for making that world possible in the lives of others. We try to live as Rilke encouraged the aspiring poet to live in his Letters to a Young Poet: “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

It is against this backdrop of the already here but not yet, of crucifixion-resurrection, that I keep seeking to address the social problems that reach my own tiny life, that call forth a concern in my own shriveled heart. It is against this backdrop that I struggle to keep talking in a world that seeks to silence those who speak from the margins, who insist on saying what others do not want to have said.

Only when such discourse can find a way to make itself heard beyond the margins, will the world will ever truly change for the better. As Ashon Crawley’s reflections suggest—as the National Day of Silence indicates—silence about school bullying and its root causes only reinforces the violence that will continue to repeat itself in our schools, unless we find ways to talk, to break silence.

Interestingly enough, after the New York Times posted its article yesterday about the bullying of Billy Wolfe in the Fayetteville, AR, school system, a blog discussion of this story developed on the website of the statewide free newspaper, Arkansas Times. This discussion was fascinating—more for what bloggers did not want to say or discuss, than for what they actually said.

The discussion began with a blogger reporting that he himself was bullied in an Arkansas school in the 1950s. Predictably, those bullying him tagged him as a “fag,” though he is heterosexual. Building on that account, another blogger noted that the same theme is present in the story of Billy Wolfe: though he identifies himself as straight, the Facebook site set up by his bullies (to which I referred in yesterday’s blog) refers to Billy Wolfe as “a little bitch” and a homosexual that no one likes.”

This theme of identifying boys as gay, and then abusing him because they are gay, is omnipresent in patterns of school bullying in American schools. We cannot address—we cannot solve—the problem of school bullying, without confronting this issue head on. In order to address school bullying, our schools have to address homophobia.

And yet, they do not want to go there. The churches do not want them to go there. Parents influenced by the churches often fight tooth and nail to keep any discussion of these issues out of our schools.

The blogger who brought up the omnipresent pattern of homophobia underlying bullying of boys in our schools was met by silence yesterday, on the Arkansas Times blog. Though discussion of the Billy Wolfe story continued throughout the day, other bloggers obviously did not wish to engage the homophobia issue.

This is the sadly typical response to analysis of school bullying as homophobia-incited: silence. Until we break this silence and move beyond it, until we discuss these issues honestly and openly, we will not resolve the problem of school bullying. And that means that more youth will be bullied in American schools. It means, sadly, that we are likely to see more incidents such as the Lawrence King incident in the future.

And, in a country that historian Martin Marty has called “a nation with the soul of a church,” there is no way to discuss the endemic problem of school bullying premised on homophobia without engaging the churches in the discussion. The churches are at the heart of the problem.

As a fine blog posting on the Bilerico Project website last week—Terrance Heath’s “Apology Accepted”—notes, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of American (ELCA) recently issued an apology to the LGBT community for the way in which historic Lutheran teachings have been used to wound, rather than welcome, gay people (see www.bilerico.com/2008/03/apology_accepted.php).

But as Heath also notes, the very way in which the announcement is framed—as part of a validation of the historic teaching that the only acceptable form of marriage is between one man and one woman—continues the wounding and unwelcoming process. Heath insightfully focuses on the way in which Christian teachings about marriage, and about the “natural” order of human sexuality, implicitly diminish the full humanity of gay human beings:

[B]eing gay means that I have to expect less and accept less from life. Being gay means I deserve less from life. I don’t deserve love, I don’t deserve family . . . . Of course that means understanding that as queers we must accept less and expect less from life than our heterosexual brothers and sisters, because we are less than our heterosexual brothers and sisters.

Churches cannot become welcoming spaces for LGBT persons as long as their teachings frame gay humanity as somehow less than the full humanity of straight human beings. And the problem of violent assaults on young people tagged as gay or gender-inappropriate will not be successfully addressed until the churches examine their own homophobia, and call on their members to cope with the homophobia that is inside all of us and is all-pervasive in American life.

There is hope. In this Easter season, I celebrate the prophetic witness of people like Sister Jeanine Gramick, on whom a Clerical Whispers blog posting focused last week (see http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/03/supporters-of-latin-mass-will-use.html).

Jeanine Gramick has been a longstanding fighter for gay rights in the Catholic church. She has suffered for standing up and speaking out. The Vatican has sought to silence her. Fortunately, it has not succeeded.

As Jeanine Gramick notes, her conscience does not permit her to remain silent. As the Clerical Whispers interview notes, Jeanine Gramick agrees with the observation of a Catholic bishops’ conference which says, "Prejudice against homosexuals is a greater infringement on the moral norm than any kind of sexual activity.”

Yet Jeanine Gramick wants to push the conversation further. As she notes: “Well, let's put this into practice. Instead of the Vatican making all these pronouncements about homosexual activity, let's make the pronouncement about the evils of prejudice and violence against the gay community. That's what we should be teaching."

Amen. Thank God for those who refuse to remain silent when the powers that be choose to silence them. Thank God for those like Jeanine Gramick, who choose to speak truth to power within the churches in which they remain active.

Easter Church, Welcome Spaces, and School Bullying

So. Easter leaves us with the obligation of returning to the everyday.

No easy task, that. The precise obligation is to live the everyday as if it is more than ordinary. If Easter has any meaning, that’s its central message: transfiguring the everyday, so that it is shot through with significance transcending the “mere” ordinary.

Such highfalutin’ language. Poor chatty little Christianity, E.M. Forster said. Always relying on one more word to limp along, to try to get its message across to a new group of believers.

And I understand that critique, and share it, so that I don’t belong—not on the churched side of the line, not among the respectable. I can’t be there, because I don’t see a lot of transfiguring going on. I completely understand—and agree with—Nietzsche when he says that if anyone is going to buy the Christian message of salvation, Christians need to look more saved. Or with Gandhi, when he observed that he found Christ exceedingly attractive, but did not find Christians attractive.

I write, think, live out of a specifically gay perspective and gay experience with the church. That experience is, brutally and frankly, one of unwelcome. There is no other word to describe what happens to us who are gay, vis-à-vis the churches.

I know that many churches have sought to create welcoming spaces in their midst for gay believers. The Episcopal church in the U.S. has ordained an openly (emphasis on “openly”) gay bishop.

And yet that bishop is not being invited to the coming Canterbury Conference. The mere acknowledgment that some priests and some bishops and many believers are openly gay (emphasis on “openly”) is intolerable for some members of the Anglican communion. A communion in which a leader of a ministry, Changing Attitudes, in Nigeria to build bridges of acceptance between the church and the gay community was savagely beaten last week: see http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/03/anglican-groups-leader-condemns.html. News reports indicate that violence such as this towards LGBT people and their supporters in Nigeria is actively being encouraged by some Anglican church leaders in Nigeria, including Archbishop Peter Akinola.

The churches are, at their best, tolerant. They are not welcoming. Not yet. They are not affirming, accepting, capable of blessing gay people and our lives and our relationships. They are not transfigured. They are not places in which gay people can experience transfiguration—the Easter experience or the Easter message.

And so we live our spiritual lives on the outside, those of us who care to salvage any vocabulary of spirituality from our brutal encounters with the churches. And, ultimately, it’s not precisely the brutality, the savagery of the churches towards gay persons that is the all-determining factor in my inability to commune: it’s the stolid refusal of church people even to admit that the inability to welcome—to welcome anyone at all—undercuts everything about church, everything about its message.

A church that is unable to welcome—anyone at all—is simply not church. A church that is incapable of becoming a welcoming space for anyone in need of compassion and healing is not truly church: such a church is not living the gospel message in a sacramental way which allows that message to be understood and accessed through the life of the church itself.

I say all of this today against the backdrop of ongoing conversations with some of my co-religionists at the National Catholic Reporter blog café—conversations that leave me extremely frustrated. The struggle to establish some common ground for dialogue with people who appear to share one’s conviction that our culture desperately needs ways to talk about becoming a more humane society—that struggle seems impossible when one of the dialogue partners refuses to occupy that common ground, that shared dialogic space.

When people already have all the answers (and some Christians persist in thinking this way), there is no point in dialoguing. From the standpoint of the catechizer, conversation becomes an act of imparting nuggets of truth to the poor soul who needs those nuggets. It is not an exchange in which each dialogue partner offers insights from her own life experience, in a shared journey towards a truth that transcends both conversationalists.

And for those who have all Truth in their hands and are intent on dispensing nuggets of The Truth to the rest of us, it is fatally simple to arrive at an imagination of one’s dialogue partner as fundamentally defective. In my “dialogues” with my co-religionists at the NCR café, I find myself continuously up against the brick wall of others’ definition of me as less than human.

Again, this is the persistent experience of gay human beings in relation to the church. The churches, at their best, imagine us as rather pitiful objects of charity, who need those nuggets of truth to make us more stalwart followers of the Lord. If only we could understand that there is a plan for the world, God’s plan, and that it’s premised on getting everything in its place: men here, women there; male and female God created them; men as guardians and protectors, women as homebodies and cheerfully obedient servants. If only we could understand the basic plumbing of human sexuality, that everything fits in its proper place—at least, from God’s perspective.

How simple life would be for us poor misguided gay souls, and for the church itself, if people would just understand The Truth, remain in their places, cooperate and believe—and submit and obey.

This is the approach of some of my co-religionists with whom I have sought to talk about our shared interest in a more humane society. It is an approach that demeans me, an approach that—ultimately—reduces me to silence by reducing me to an object, something these conversation partners imagine, rather than a complex human being with human depth, intense human feelings, human questions.

It is so easy to “place” the other when we imagine him as Other, when we reduce her to a stereotype, to an object. And placing the Other is what Christianity seems all about, in the application of its truest adherents today.

In taking that path, the churches are forfeiting the chance to become real agents of change in postmodern culture. In taking the path of making placement of the Other the central task of Christianity, the churches forfeit the claim to be places of a welcome that makes any real difference in the lives of their members, places in which real transfiguration of the ordinary and every day occurs.

In taking this path, the churches cause many LGBT persons simply to shrug our shoulders and reject the language of spirituality altogether, because that language has become so tainted with disdain for our gay humanity that it is toxic for us.

And meanwhile, the task of creating truly welcoming spaces in our culture continues: today’s New York times reports on a boy, Billy Wolfe, who is being bullied on an ongoing basis in a school in Fayetteville in my state (see www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/us/24land.html?th&emc=th). This is a school system in which, a decade ago, William Wagner was bullied for being gay, and beaten so viciously that he still suffers from the aftermath of that beating.

Not much seems to have changed in a decade. Though Billy Wolfe is not gay, his attackers—who have now assaulted him repeatedly—use the gay tag as an excuse to assault him. The NY Times reports that one of the bullies created a Facebook site several years ago entitled “Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe,” on which a picture of Peter Pan was superimposed over Billy’s face, with the statement, “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”

This is a persistent problem in American schools. It should not be happening. The pattern repeats itself over and over: a boy is identified as gay or gender-inappropriate, or he himself identifies as gay. He is then assaulted. The response of the school system and of parents is all too often faint-hearted. Sometimes the boy himself is blamed for “causing” the bullying.

The violence escalates. The beatings continue. Murder is sometimes the outcome.

This must not happen again. The churches lose all credibility when they provide the conditions for such violence in any shape, form, or fashion. The churches in places where such school bullying occurs must stand against violence and for acceptance. Churches that take seriously and live the Easter message must commit themselves to becoming welcoming places in which social divisions are healed and social wounds are staunched.

If the Easter message means anything at all, it has to mean that Lawrence King did not die in vain. Churches, are you listening?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And for those of us who stand outside, but still sing Easter songs, an anthem for this Eastertide, Labi Siffre singing his powerful "Something Inside So Strong":
www.youtube.com/watch?v=otuwNwsqHmQ&feature=related.

Francis of Assisi and Mother Birds: The Story of Jesus Always Renewed

I’ve begun my Holy Saturday listening to Paul Robeson sing “Were You There.” And thinking about rivers, about Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan. About vocation, and about how crucifixion and resurrection is everyone’s story.

Paul Robeson: that deep, rich voice that sounds like something emanating from the center of the earth. And which, for the same reason, has the power to touch the depths of one’s soul, such that the words of the spirituals he sings becomes the song of one’s own soul. The genius of African-American spirituality is to take biblical texts, read them through the prism of historic injustice, historic unmerited and imposed suffering, and cause them to shine as though the texts had been written just the day before yesterday.

The bible as our story. This is one of the many significant contributions of African-American culture to American culture at large, this genius for making the text meaningful here and now, so that the call and response of the text implicates us, implicates me, and is not simply a perplexing word from a strange, unfathomable past with no obvious significance for the here and now.

At a time in which American culture seems curiously, willfully amnesiac about the manifold contributions of African-American culture to the nation’s culture at large, Paul Robeson—and the spirituals—bear remembering. And bear hearing anew.

The immediacy of the biblical story in the spirituals’ rendition is a reminder that the story of Jesus is not simply his story, but everyone’s. I think today of a remark that I believe Henri Nouwen makes in one of his books—that, when John plunged Jesus under the water of the Jordan River, the river took Jesus.

In submitting to baptism by John, in going into and under the waters of the flowing river, Jesus let go of leading his life as if it were his life. His life became the life handed over to God. The river took him. From the Jordan to Calvary, Jesus lived out the consequences of a vocational decision to live utterly and completely for God, for others, and not for himself.

The river takes us. The river takes us when, in the depths of our own souls, we somehow lay hold of our unique calling in life. The river of vocation runs through each human life, giving depth meaning to the shallows of everyday existence. When we reach into the depths, when we reach the rivers flowing at the depths of our own being, and when we give ourselves to those depths, the river takes us. Our lives become not our own, but the life lived in the sway and current of the river flowing through us.

A river that leads inevitably, in every human life, to crucifixion. Crucifixion is part and parcel of the human experience of life. It happens to us over and over again. It is where the river takes us, if we plunge into the river and allow ourselves to be taken: if we give in to vocation.

But inherent in that giving up of our own command of our destiny is the simultaneous—and insane—hope that the self-abnegation will become a fruitful gift: not for ourselves, but for others. This is the resurrection half of the diptych that forms the central mystery of Christian faith: in dying we are born to eternal life; in death, we rise again. We live to become the grain of wheat sown in the ground, which produces sheaves of wheat in abundance for others we will not see, who will come after us.

Or, as Maya Angelou puts the point, “When we cast our bread upon the waters, we can presume that someone downstream whose face we will never know will benefit from our action, as we who are downstream from another will profit from that grantor’s gift.”

A certain kind of distorted piety has often led Christians to think of the story of the crucifixion and resurrection as unique to Jesus. And yet the implication of the four gospels’ account of Jesus’s life is clear: this story of grappling with the voice of God, with a calling to submit to the river, to be plunged beneath it, to let it carry us where it will, to die in order that others may live—this story of Jesus is our story, as well. This is the raison d’etre of the gospels, the reason they were written: to link our human stories to the story of Jesus, such that the story of Jesus becomes our own story, and our story part of the story of Jesus.

We do not dishonor Jesus and his memory when we appropriate the story to our experience, or when we use our human experience to hear and understand the story of Jesus. In doing these things, we show that this story has become paradigmatic for us, that it casts ultimate meaning on our lives: that it has become the hinge story of our own vocational lives.

This recognition that the story of Jesus belongs perennially to the people of God, and not to the hieratic classes that, in any church and any culture, keep claiming the story as the unique possession of the guardians and purveyors of the sacred mysteries, is a recognition that, again and again, enlivens the churches with reforming experiences. This recognition again and again calls forth reformers whose task is to point to the possibility of living the story of Jesus in a new way in new cultural settings.

I have been thinking in this vein this week as I finished Linda Bird Francke’s On the Road with Francis of Assisi (NY: Random House, 2005). Francke writes about a pilgrimage she and her husband took several years ago, in which they sought to visit every place of significance to the life of Francis of Assisi that they could discover.

Francis lived at a turning moment in European history, a time of urbanization in which the traditional monastic patterns of spirituality no longer reached the lives and cultural experiences of the newly urbanized masses of European nations. Part of Francis’s genius—part of his unique calling to rebuild the church—was his ability to act out, with a band of followers, the gospel story in a way that made this story fresh to those living in a new cultural setting.

Much has been written about the charism of Francis and his followers, and the ways in which they reframed the story of Jesus to fit new socio-economic patterns. Something that I have not seen discussed much, however, and which crops up here and there in Francke’s re-telling of the life of Francis, is an interesting gender-transgressive tendency of Francis and the early friars.

Francke notes that, in a letter to Brother Leo now held by the cathedral of Spoleto and dated sometime before 1220, Francis refers to himself as Leo’s mother. “I speak to you, my son, as a mother,” the letter begins, after Francis has greeted his devoted companion (as cited, p. 25).

The use of the maternal language is also found in Francis’s 1217 rule for hermitages. In the rule, Francis called for each hermitage to have three or four friars, in which two would be the mothers of the hermitage, and the other(s) the son(s) (p. 129).

My posting yesterday noted that, from the first creation narrative in Genesis, through the prophets, to the gospels and the words of Jesus, God is continuously imaged as a mother bird seeking to bring her chicks under her wings, to enfold them with love and protection. Francke notes that Francis also employed this imagery (p. 176).

As his community struggled over the question of how or whether it was possible to live Francis’s ideal of absolute poverty, Francis dreamt of himself as a hen spreading her wings to enfold and protect her chicks. Francke indicates that this dream is depicted in paintings in southern Italy, with Francis holding his cloak around his followers.

What to make of these whispers of an alternative view of God and gender in medieval Christianity? First, the whispers can’t be dismissed. Francis’s goal was to tell the story of Jesus in a way that reached those living in an entirely new cultural setting. Like Jesus himself, he acted out his message in dramatic ways—disrobing and handing his clothes to a father who sought to make him over in the father’s image, dramatically repudiating the paternalistic vision of his life. Francis acted out the Christmas narrative in a way that has radically influenced all subsequent generations of Christians. It was he who developed the idea of staging nativity scenes to make the story real (and human) to Europeans of his day.

Francis’s kissing of lepers, his sitting on the floor to eat scraps with lepers and other dispossessed wanderers of the roads of a Europe in which urbanization was widening the economic gap between rich and poor, also brought the gospel message home to his countryfolk. Francis is known as alter Christus because, in so many radical ways, he sought to enact the life of Jesus in a new cultural setting, to keep the story alive, and as a result, his own life is seen as an exemplary emulation of the life of Christ.

This being the case, Francis’s choice to echo Jesus’s use of the maternal imagery of the Genesis creation narrative must not be dismissed or taken lightly. This choice may have been ignored for generations, as Christians focused on other aspects of the story.

Today, however, when currents within the churches seek to use distorted interpretations of scripture and tradition to force women (and men viewed as feminized) into submission, the story takes on a new, portentous, radical (and radically important) significance. If we take Jesus seriously, if we take Frances as alter Christus seriously, we must also take seriously the willingness of both to bend traditional gender lines by using maternal imagery to refer to themselves.

At the very least, the story of Francis illustrates that those rooted firmly in Christian tradition should not find it shocking—as many Christians do today—to see a male assuming what is thought of as a “female” role, when the nurturing role is warranted for a male. There is a quicksilver quality about the varied gender appropriations within the Christian tradition that makes our current fixation on using religion to assure that men be real men and women be real women seem outright bizarre. It did not bother Francis to assume the “female” role of nurturer, of mother, of the mother hen drawing her chicks beneath her wings.

It does bother many Christians today to think in these terms. To the extent that it does so, perhaps we have lost sight of some central strands of the scriptural text and of Christian tradition. And Easter is about remembering that the most central strands of all—the message of ongoing dying/rising—belong to all of us and have to be lived by all of us here and now.

Manly Men, Homophobic Churches, and the Washing of Feet

Christians of late have invested a great deal of time and energy in making sure that men be men and women be women. The largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., the Southern Baptists, have considered the issue central enough to the core of Christian belief to create a confessional statement (a highly unusual step for Baptists, who believe in the independence of each church) requiring good Baptists to profess the subordination of women.

Catholics influenced by neo-conservative political ideas are also making much these days of the “complementarity” of men and women—which is to say, the “natural” subordination of women to men. For many such Catholics, the “theology of the body” of the late John Paul II, which elevates this purported natural complementarity to a quasi-mystical level, has become a rallying cry for men to be men and women to be women.

Theology-of-the-body Catholics see in the Holy Family a perennial example of right and proper male-female relationships. Joseph guards and defends, goes out to labor and bring home resources for the family. Mary stays home and nurtures their child, keeps the home fires burning. Joseph is all man—outwardly turned, scanning the horizon for threats to his woman and his son, standing in the breach between the cozy household and the external world of competition and conflict.

Mary is woman par excellence—inwardly turned, forever tidying the household, making it cheerful for her man and her child, finding utter significance in cooking, cleaning, and nurturing. And so should every Christian household be, theology-of-the-body Catholics maintain. And so should every man and every woman be.

Obviously, these politically driven theological interpretations of the roles of men and women have much to do with resistance to the rise of women’s rights, one of the most significant global political developments of the twentieth century. Many men have chosen to regard this development as so threatening, so portentous with maleficent possibility for their lives and roles, that, as they seek to stand athwart history and shout “stop!”, they simultaneously attempt to freeze male-female roles for all time.

For such men, many of whom have not previously had much invested in church-going or in churchy matters, the churches and what they preach have suddenly become all-important. It has become imperative that the churches be made to teach the subordination of women to men, the need for men to be real men and women to be real women. Neo-conservative reasoning sees tremendous significance in the churches' role here, the role of holding the gender line. For neo-conservative thinkers, allow the churches to transgress that line, and all hell will ensue. The future of civilization hinges on keeping men and women in their proper places, in using scripture and tradition to assure that men remain men and women remain women.

Unfortunately, the scriptures are forever subversive, when we try to use them to freeze history. The Jewish and Christian scriptures are far slyer than we like to imagine in very many respects. This is proven true when we try to force them to support our preconceived notions of what it means to be male and female. When we try to mine scripture for perpetual law about how proper men should behave and how proper women should comport themselves, the scriptures prove refractory indeed.

The scriptures begin, after all, with that breathtaking image of the Creator as a mother bird spreading her wings over the vast untamed cosmic nothingness, to brood it into being. The divine Mother, the Mater, brings matter into existence, in the first creation account of Genesis. All has its beginning in the womb of the divine.

This image is echoed by the prophets, who speak of God as a mother hen grieving for her flock to be gathered beneath her wings. Jesus himself uses the image in speaking of Jerusalem, identifying himself as one who would gather the city beneath his wings as a biddy her chicks, though the inhabitants of the city refuse to respond to his invitation.

For Christians today who wish to hinge all revelation on the need for men to be real men and women to be real women, the scriptures and the tradition of the churches will always disappoint, since they refuse to be beaten into submission. Scripture and tradition slip and slide from our grasp, when we try to shape them to fit our pet theories about social arrangements, and subordinate them to our need to stand astride history and shout stop.

A case in point: last night, churches around the world staged a liturgical celebration that commemorates the last supper. The gospel stories of this event begin with a striking symbol of Jesus’s choice to be a servant of all. Throughout the gospels, Jesus teaches and preaches in a kind of point-counterpoint style, alternately speaking the lesson he wishes to impart, and acting it out in symbolic deeds.

To illustrate to his followers what he means when he calls on them to become servants, at the final supper prefiguring his death, he takes water and kneels before each disciple, washing the disciple’s feet. This symbolic act had rich resonance in the culture of the ancient Near East.

It was an act normally relegated to slaves, to the lowest of the low. It was an act preferably undertaken by a female slave or female family member in households of substance. In bending to the floor to wash and dry the feet of the apostles, Jesus takes on “the” female posture, the posture of submission, of obedience, of humility, of self-abasement.

His doing so shocks the disciples. John’s gospel—which prefigures the footwashing of the last supper with the story of Lazarus’s sister Mary washing Jesus’s feet with her hair—has Peter blustering in protest at Jesus’s choice so to abase himself, to take on the role of a slave, of a woman, in order to illustrate what it means to be his follower. In John’s gospel, one cannot read the story of Jesus’s washing his disciples’ feet at the last supper without linking that story to the story of Mary washing the feet of Jesus: in kneeling before his followers at the last supper, Jesus adopts the posture of Mary, sister of Lazarus, kneeling before him in the house of Lazarus, to wash his feet.

Why do these stories, which are so central to the remembrance of the ritual that is at the very heart of Christian worship—the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper—appear to have so little import for Christians who are intent to freeze for all times the roles of men and women, of men as dominator and women as the dominated, in Christian thought and practice? They do so, I would propose, because we have chosen to forget the anthropological, sociological significance of the act of footwashing in the culture in which Jesus lived.

Though Christian iconography is replete with symbols that, if looked at dispassionately, would make it abundantly clear to us that Jesus’s washing of his followers’ feet is a gender-bending, gender-subverting symbol, we choose not to look, not to see.

It is easier for us to take our cultural presuppositions, our cultural givens, about what it means to be a real man and a real woman, and impose these on scripture and tradition, than vice versa.

In doing so, however, we lose the right to claim that we are defending tradition or the pure interpretation of scripture. And, unfortunately, that is a claim that is dear to the heart of Christians who live under the influence of neo-conservative political ideologies today. These Christians have practically developed a cottage industry around the claim that they are the unique defenders of an embattled orthodoxy that is being whittled away by modernity and secularity.

If their most central tenets do not hold water when examined in light of scripture and tradition, what will these neo-conservative defenders of orthodoxy do? When their political penchants have allied them with leaders whose social and economic platforms can hardly be justified in light of scripture and tradition, where will they turn for political heroes, as critical examination of the disconnects continues to show a large gap between neo-conservative politics and traditional Christian belief?

It seems to be back to the drawing board today for the religious right, if it really does want to take scripture and tradition seriously . . . .

History, Hope, Gospel: Politics in America Today

What’s that you say? Silence?

Well, yes, it does sometimes seem preferable—to talking that is just clamor, ships hooting at each other as they pass in the fog. Yes, that’s how I’ve been feeling lately, as Holy Week gets underway and what passes for discussion and debate in my nation’s political process becomes ever more clamorous hooting.

“And I say, ‘Oh for the wings of a dove to fly away and find rest.’ ” That line from psalm 55 has been constantly in my mind this week, as Good Friday and Easter approach.

And then there were the stuffed peppers. No, not at all—not any kind of Easter tradition I know about. But there they were, in the Kroger bins last Saturday, bags and bags of wizened smallish bell peppers, culled out from amidst the large, heavy, unwrinkled ones, marked down to a very modest price.

Given the cost of peppers these days, how could I pass them up? What’s a kitchen without a ready supply of bell peppers—for spaghetti sauces and chilis, Spanish omelets and creole dishes, lentil soups and baked beans, pepper slaw and stuffed squash, salade Niçoise and ratatouille . . . .

Naturally, then, when Penny and Philip invited us for Easter dinner, I proposed stuffed peppers. I had the peppers, and something about stuffed peppers as a counterpoint to ham, potato salad, deviled eggs, and ambrosia seems meet and right—piquant green tang to enliven traditional pastel Easter food.

Then there were those dratted pecans, local, organic ones, no less, that have been eyeing me reproachfully from the sideboard in the dining room ever since Christmas. Anything not eaten from the Christmas dessert table inevitably stays there, from Christmas day forward. On St. Pat’s day, as I rummaged in the sideboard for a bottle of Irish whiskey to make Irish coffee, I was surprised to find two tins of those stodgy molasses cookies I made this Christmas, which no one much liked unless they were dunked in coffee.

No, no better with age. In fact, the opposite. Even drier and mustier tasting. From Christmas to Easter, I haven’t wanted to look at a nut, a spice, a bar of baking chocolate, a dried fruit. My fast—at least from certain foods—begins far earlier than Lent (and in Lent, I never fast, anyway, or at least, not from food).

So. It was time to crack those pecans or discard them, and who can throw food away with a good conscience? Hence the vegetarian stuffed peppers that will now be my contribution to Easter dinner: basmati rice mixed with grated parmesan, coarsely chopped pecans, eggs to bind the forcemeat, a few spoons of tomato paste, and a mix of finely chopped celery, onion, parsley, and garlic sautéed in olive oil with touches of cinnamon and marjoram for seasoning. All done, mixed, stuffed into the peppers, baked and stored for re-heating on Sunday morning.

And I just haven’t felt like blogging. What’s there to say that hasn’t been said to death? And more to the point: what’s there to say that will really change anything? In a political process dominated by the gotcha politics of the religious right, what really can be said? When the parameters of conversation are so constructed that one must always be answering an accusation either overt or implied, never moving towards a hope-engendered vision of social life that comprises many more options than those permitted by the status quo, words become swords. Nothing more, nothing less.

Not instruments to forge new, more humane visions of how we might live together, but swords to lop off each other’s limbs, heads, hopes.

I grow weary of such political “discourse.” I sometimes wonder if the readers of this blog from places outside the U.S.—my statistics counter tells me there are such readers—can even begin to appreciate how narrow, claustrophobic, and ultimately devoid of hope our political conversations in the U.S. have become in the past few decades, under the controlling impulse of the right, and, in particular, of the religious right.

One doesn’t have to be a majority to control a conversation, and thus the future of a relationship or of a social contract. All one has to be able to do is shout no loudly enough to keep the conversation forever stalemated—to keep hope at bay. He who says no ultimately controls any relationship.

And saying no—stopping the conversation, keeping hope at bay—has been the raison d’etre of American conservatism for a number of decades now. As one of the chief spokespersons and ideological founders of neo-conservatism, William F. Buckley, once said, the quintessential neo-conservative impulse is “standing astride history, yelling ‘stop!’ ”

Neo-conservatism is not about building. It’s not about moving forward. It’s not about enlivening imagination. It’s not about spinning new ideas for better, more humane arrangements for communitarian life. It’s not about hope. It’s not even about respect for tradition and the past, since any such respect inevitably spots in previous human social arrangements ample reason for new social experiments that will carry forward the suppressed hopes of the past.

Neo-conservatism is about saying no. As Buckely himself said in response to Pope John XXIII’s brilliant encyclical of hope, Mater et magistra: Mater si, magistra no!

No, no, and no again: to change, to hope, to any social arrangement in which I and my tribe will not prevail. No to any vision of the future that will include others in a way that challenges my own dominance—as a white male, as a straight white man from the upper echelons of American society.

Neo-conservatism is about trying to stop history, because history inevitably means Something Else, and I do not want to imagine anything else, not in a world in which I am the primal link in the socio-economic chain, the pinnacle of social evolution. History is over and done with, as far as I am concerned. The most I will permit in the political and economic sphere is the kind of tinkering that keeps drastic change at bay, by balancing competing interest groups. As a neo-conservative, I am perfectly willing to work with liberals (since neo-conservatism is itself a variant of classic liberal ideology) to keep the status quo in place. If that means handing a crumb to this group here while denying the claims of that group there—all in the name of balancing interest groups and claims to justice—I’m happy to cooperate.

Just don’t expect me to entertain any nonsense about imagining other social arrangements in which conflict would be less omnipresent because more folks had access to the basic stuff of human existence. Don’t clatter on about human rights and justice. I’m not listening, not even if Jesus himself should walk through the door and announce the reign of God, or if the church claims that this was Jesus’s mission: mater si, magistra no!

A political landscape dominated by those whose only and ultimate word to history is no quickly becomes scorched earth. We in the U.S. occupy such a political landscape today. This landscape is the deliberate construction of the naysayers of the right—and the religious right—for several decades now. It is a landscape deliberately constructed to make hope (and history) impossible.

Declining empires always end up occupying such landscapes before their final demise, with court theologians to advise the emperor about how to negotiate the process of decline, so that he remains, as long as possible, at the top of the heap. The leaders of the religious right, churches that have not decisively distanced themselves from the religious right in this period (and few have): these are all part of the process of decay, of decline, of last-gasp imperialism, of the glozening lies of court theologians.

Insofar as our churches have implicated themselves in the social arrangements of declining imperialism—arrangements in which spying on citizens becomes routine, in which growing inequities between rich and poor become not shocking but taken for granted, in which the practice of torture of innocent people meets with shrugs, in which police and civil authorities are permitted to taser even school children, in which unjust war and carnage of despised Others is not merely justified but celebrated in our media—insofar as our churches accept these social arrangements, and never raise their voice against them, they lose the right to proclaim the gospel.

They have stopped doing so. The gospel is good news. The very center of the gospel is hope. Hope for history: the gospel is about a vision of human existence in which history is always possible, always mandated, because hope has not yet had its day. Hope has not yet been fulfilled. There is more to be done. History cannot be stopped, from a gospel-oriented standpoint, because there is more to hope for.

I have been heartsick this week as I have watched the mainstream media and many liberal Democrats participate in the pillorying of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. I am heartsick for a quite specific reason: there is a shocking, clear, undeniable double standard in how we have chosen to treat this African-American preacher of the gospel, and how we choose to treat the court theologians.

Who are everywhere, but whose influence is never acknowledged or discussed by the mainstream media. The Alternet blog today carries a posting from Cenk Uygur at Huffington Post on the double standard the media applies to Rev. Wright and to the white preachers who are the court theologians of our declining empire—see www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/80253.

As Uygur notes, Rudy Giuliani’s priest has been accused in grand jury proceedings of having abused children and covered over the abuse of other children, but no one has ever asked Mr. Giuliani to denounce his pastor or disavow any relationship to him. Mitch Romney belongs to a church that, into Romney’s thirties, actively discriminated against people of color. Romney never disavowed his church then or now. The media have not hounded him to make statements about the racism of his church.

John McCain has accepted the endorsement of Jerry Falwell, who blamed the 9/11 attacks on America’s purported acceptance of gays, feminists, and liberals. Is Mr. McCain being savaged by the media for accepting this endorsement, or asked to address the warped theological views of Rev. Falwell?

Brent Childers of Faith in America released an open letter this week about Mr. Obama’s speech re: his relationship to Rev. Wright. The letter is at http://faithinamerica.info/blog/religious-wright-a-stomach-virus-for-the-religious-right.

As it notes,

How many talking heads are made sick when the Religious Right, day after day, condemns America for its anti-discrimination laws for gay and lesbian Americans or its policy on abortion?

Week after week, right-wing religious organizations work to shore up the Republican Party base and use America’s pulpits to condemn not only America but good, decent patriotic Americans. It’s not just religious leaders spreading a message of religion-based bigotry. Many elected officials and candidates are doing the same.

No one sought to give any context that Wright’s words were spoken from an interpretation of Holy Scripture. Poor presentation of the story, indeed. Even less context.

A nation where corporate greed holds sway over hard-working Americans? A nation that goes to war under false pretense? A nation in which political forces cater to prejudice and racial division? A nation in which gay and lesbian teenagers are being sacrificed on the alter of religion-based bigotry.

Would Wright’s God frown on such practices?

What hope is there for a nation in which hope itself is held at bay by the court theologians, by the preachers that advise (and support and excuse) the powerful of the land? What hope is there for a nation in which hope itself has become a dirty word, a taunt in the mouths of those left and right who want to stop history?

Not much, I think, until someone, somewhere, begins to expose the treachery and lies of the court theologians. Not much, until churches that really want to proclaim the good news openly, decisively repudiate the treachery and lies of the religious right.

We will, in coming weeks, see more and more treachery and lying. The ultimate intent of those engaging in these underhanded political games is to stand astride history and shout, “stop!”

The only hope to stop the games is for those with connections to faith communities to call for an end to the political games, to the treachery and lying, to the attempt to stop history by saying no rather than yes (which is God’s word to the created world). For the faith communities that claim to speak in the name of Jesus, hope lies in remembering that the crucified one was not the success all court theologians claim to be.

He was, instead, a dismal failure, hung to die upon an instrument of torture reserved for the lowest, most powerless of criminals in his society.

His resurrection is premised on his death, on his failure, on his humiliating death. The failure and death are, in fact, the precondition for the resurrection. Anyone who preaches otherwise—who preaches the bizarre "gospel of success" of which the court theologians are so enamored, who allies the Christian church with wealth and power—departs from the very warp and woof of the gospel, the good news that it is in dying that we rise.

What’s that you say? Well, you did ask. And I did tell.

Evangelical Catholicism: Who's at the Table?

Today’s my nephew Patrick’s name day, so a celebration is in order. Steve and I cooked an enormous pot of stew yesterday—enough to feed armies. I would have written "Irish stew," but it’s not precisely that. Though it does contain lamb, onion, and potatoes (as well as carrots and celery, a bit of thyme and parsley), I’ve added whispers that would be out of place on a traditional Irish table: tomatoes and paprika, for instance, to enrich the sauce and give it deeper color.

We’ll enjoy the stew with my Southern-American Irish (and English, Scottish, Welsh) family’s version of soda bread, aka cornbread, along with cole slaw and a cake and pie my aunt Billie has baked for the occasion. My brother Philip, his wife Penny, and sons Luke, Colin, and Pat will be with us. Beautiful, brilliant Kate is, alas, pursuing her fortune in the big cities in which she’s interviewing for jobs—and may she be offered all of them!

The Internet brought me an unexpected St. Patrick’s gift early today: a clip on the Towleroad blog of Rosie O’Donnell talking to young Danny Noriega on the cruise to which she invited him after “American Idol” dumped him. People have strong feelings about Rosie, pro and con. Mine are decidedly pro

Seeing her talking to Danny Noriega today, no make-up on, face plain as an ungarnished potato, made me warm to her all the more. That, to me, is the face of the Irish at their best: free-handed, open-hearted, lacking in pretense, capable of subtle cutting irony or the grandly embellished verbal wallop that will knock the offending party off his feet. Even when Rosie says what is clearly outrageous, I admire her for the honesty that sears through every word she utters. I’ll take such honesty any day, over the mealy-mouthed liberalism that calculates every word to assure that the speaker ends up always on the winning side—about which more in a moment.

As I listen to James Galway’s heart-rending ballad of the perpetual exile that attracts the Irish imagination so powerfully—“Steal Away”—I’m thinking through an account I read this weekend of a recent session at which three luminaries of American Catholicism discussed evangelical Catholicism. Evangelical Catholicism is a phrase coined by reporter John Allen to describe the restorationist tendency of the last two popes: the assertive, in-your-face retrieval of a supposedly waning Catholic identity, which imagines the modern world as antithetical to Catholic identity, because its secularism and pluralism erode the distinctives of said identity.

I’m not buying: either the restorationism (which is not restoring a beleaguered Catholic identity, at all, not seeking to restore the tradition, but trying to revitalize the sectarian, highly clericalized ecclesiology of Trent and Vatican I), or the various justifications of it provided by people such as the Catholic gentlemen who recently discussed the rise of evangelical Catholicism at an American Catholic university.

Reading the discussion makes me itch: with unanswered questions; with discomfort about the unvarnished shilling for restorationism under the guise of objectivity that runs through not a few reportorial and theological presentations of evangelical Catholicism today. I’m itchy with thought about where really innovative and promising currents of new theology come from: the centers of power, or the margins?

The three distinguished Catholic gentlemen discussing evangelical Catholicism at an American Catholic university recently are, well, all gentlemen, all men. All married men. All heterosexual males. All white men.

Yet, in their comments about the rationale for evangelical Catholicism, several of these men apparently focused on the wild, free-wheeling pluralism that is threatening Catholic identity in American culture today! Three white, heterosexual, married (middle-class) American men talking about the unfettered pluralism that fritters away Catholic identity?

What pluralism, dare I ask? Where is that pluralism, when the official (officious) voices for Catholicism continue to be men—ostensibly straight men, white men?

Would the discussion of evangelical Catholicism have been any different if the wives of the gentlemen discoursing ponderously about Catholic identity had been on stage? What would women say about Catholic evangelicalism—if asked!—I wonder? What might they say about their lives of stirring pots and cleaning bathrooms, while their husbands pen weighty articles? What might women throughout history have said about Catholic identity and its retrieval—if asked?

And what might people of color say, if they were invited to the table? Or some of the people Catholic Worker houses feed each week? Or gay and lesbian Catholics?

It is really difficult to convince me that pluralism is eroding Catholic identity today—such that we need an assertive movement to retrieve that supposedly fragmenting identity—when the official spokespersons for Catholicism continue to be, overwhelmingly and without a whisper of apology, men, straight men, men who come from the power centers of world cultures.

Is the pluralism of which the clerical centers of the church and its spokesmen are so afraid primarily the pluralism that would result from inclusion of the voices of women—or males imagined as feminized, which is to say openly gay men? One surely has to wonder . . . .

I’m also impatient with the pretense to objectivity running through these analyses of evangelical Catholicism. I’m impatient because I have strong reason to suspect that the Catholic gentlemen who are supposedly describing what is merely happening—the triumph of the restored clericalized church—have something vested themselves in that triumph. They have their own male power vested in the clerical system of the church.

I question the objectivity of presentations of evangelical Catholicism such as the one that recently took place at a roundtable discussion at an American Catholic university. While the Pew Foundation’s report on the state of religion in America recently reported that a vast number of American Catholics—including many younger Catholics—are walking away from the church, some of the advocates of evangelical Catholicism who expounded on that theme at this recent workshop speak as if a majority of young American Catholics are buying into restorationist Catholicism today.

Really. Where? Who are those young American Catholics? And why do they not show up as a significant trend in the Pew report’s statistics? Is what is being objectively described really a fantasy of those describing it—the church they would like to see restored, in which male (straight male) power is never questioned in any way that threatens the dominance of that power?

In the interest of full disclosure, I do have to say that I am writing here out of my own experience—as a gay, and thus marginal, Catholic. In fact, I know one of the gentlemen who expounded at the workshop. When I came out of the closet in a public way as a gay theologian, I became curiously invisible to this gentleman. Where before we would greet each other at academic conferences, after my coming out, I found that when I walked past him, his eyes would suddenly glaze. I was no longer there.

To those in the center, I no doubt write and think as I do because I am bent on destroying.

From where I stand, I write and think as I do because I am intent on listening to voices that promise hope—hope for the truly new, for the novum, for tendencies in history that move toward the reign of God. I care deeply about the church. I want to see it thrive in the future. I want to see it capable of speaking a truly evangelical word to the world—a convincing, transformative, affirming, redemptive word.

The voices for which I am listening come not from the center, though, but from the margins. They are not the voices that continue to define (and represent) the center of American Catholicism in such roundtable discussions. They are not yet at the table. They have not been invited.

Week in Review: Catholic Bishop Denies Holocaust

In this week’s news review, I’d like to draw attention to two stories I haven’t yet mentioned. One is the Holocaust denial—statements denying the execution of gays by Nazi Germany—this week by a Scottish bishop. The other is the astonishing appeal of a Vatican official to the re-elected Socialist government of Spain for the Spanish government to mend fences with the church—after the church itself attacked the Spanish government prior to the 9 March election.

On 11 March in Glasgow, the Catholic bishop of Motherwell, Joseph Devine, used the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day to lambast the gay community for claiming that gay people have been or are persecuted (see blogs linked to this blog, especially Clerical Whispers).

In his remarks, Bishop Devine decried a “huge and well orchestrated conspiracy” operating through an “ever-present” “homosexual lobby” intent on undermining the church. In the good bishop’s considered opinion, “It is all about a lifestyle alien to the Christian tradition. There is a giant conspiracy against Christian values, an agenda here."

Bishop Devine further opined that gay people are riding on the coattails of Holocaust remembrance, seeking to give “the impression . . . . that they have been equally persecuted” and to “create for themselves the image of a group of people under persecution." In an apparently nostalgic hankering for a time when gay people could be thrown into jail in the British Isles merely for being gay, Devine also offered the following bizarre aside, as he spoke in remembrance of Holocaust victims: “I saw actor Ian McKellen being honoured for his work on behalf of homosexuals, when a century ago Oscar Wilde was locked up and put in jail.”

What to make of such arrant nonsense?

First and foremost, it’s evil. Cutting words designed to cow and whip. Ignorant words. Words hurled like missiles by a man of God at a group of people who do, in fact, still face oppression, regardless of whether the bishop chooses to recognize this oppression or not.

Words hurt. Words cut deep. Words rationalize and gloss over and foment hate. Words incite people to do more than throw more words at others: they incite violence that goes beyond mere verbal violence.

In speaking as he did at this Holocaust remembrance, the good bishop places himself where a minister of Christ should never place herself: at the center of the circle from which violence emanates.

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting violence.

Second, the bishop has apparently not learned his catechism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “They [i.e., gay persons] must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting violence.

Finally, the bishop is apparently ill-informed. Before addressing Holocaust remembrance groups, he should perhaps make it his business to learn what actually occurred in that horrendous event. An undetermined but not insignificant number of gay persons—estimated at between five and fifteen thousand—were executed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The system used to classify those targeted for extinction in Nazi Germany included a designation for gay persons: just as Jews were required to wear yellow stars of David, gay people were forced to wear pink triangles.

Gays need not give the impression that we were persecuted in the Holocaust. We were persecuted during the Holocaust. We were put to death because we were gay.

No man of God should hanker for the days in which it was possible to jail (or otherwise abuse or torment) a human being simply because she is gay. If headlines about Bishop Devine’s talk are to be accurate, they should read, simply, starkly, “Catholic Bishop Denies Holocaust.”

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting anti-gay violence.

And in that ever-astonishing category of victimizer seeking to paint himself as victim, this week, in comments to the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, the undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Msgr. Melchor Sanchez de Toca, called on the newly re-elected Socialist government of Spain to “work to restore serenity” with the Catholic church.

I’ve blogged before about the attempt of some Spanish bishops and of Pope Benedict to influence the 9 March Spanish elections. As I’ve noted, on the Feast of the Holy Family at the end of December, some of the Spanish bishops organized a mass demonstration in Madrid, to which the pope was beamed by satellite. The pope spoke on wide-screen t.v. about “the” Christian model of family—one man, one woman married for life—as the crowd cheered. This “pro-family” demonstration, along with subsequent remarks of some Spanish bishops, was widely understood as a signal to the Spanish electorate to repudiate the Socialist government, which has legalized gay marriage, in the March election.

The church now finds itself in an awkward position, following the elections, in which the Socialist government was returned to power by a comfortable majority. Now the church is seeking to depict itself as the victim rather than the aggressor in the electoral process. Msgr. Sanchez de Toca reproaches the Socialist government of Jose Luis Zapatero as “excessively harsh” towards the church, confrontative in its stance regarding the church. He denies that the Spanish bishops sought to instruct the people in their voting choices, but “offered a reflection” on the choices confronting the Spanish electorate in March. He states that the pope and bishops routinely offer such political “reflection” everywhere in the world, but thinks that “in Spain, there was a disproportionate response on the part of the government.”

Umm, I don’t think so. The obtrusive attempt of the church to influence the Spanish election goes quite a bit beyond the church’s attempt to wield political influence on other governments. This was a direct attempt to get the Socialists thrown out of power in Spain. It was overt political meddling. It represents a last-ditch effort of some sectors of Catholicism that have not repudiated the medieval model of Christendom to hang onto that model in one of the last European countries in which the church has recently had more or less direct control over the government.

The attempt to influence the Spanish election was a rather despicable attack on a fragile democracy whose human rights record is already vastly preferable to that of the Franco regime, to which the church was long wedded.

It’s time for the Catholic church to refrain from such meddling—to stop hankering for the days of Franco or jailing gays in England. As the world moves toward postmodernity, the church is still struggling to accept and interact with the modern world.

And in the process, it’s losing adherents right and left.

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting violence. And if it wishes to retain the respect of its followers and the world at large, it also must refrain from crying foul and playing the victim, when its hands get burned as it plays political games.