Abstract
A response to the article ‘A reply to Gerard Loughlin’s “Catholic homophobia”’ by Teofilo Pugeda highlighting the dichotomy between the welcome and rejection of LGBT people within the Catholic Church.
Teofilo Pugeda is of course right to insist that the Catholic Church is more than its magisterium and to draw attention to the diversity of its members. It is constituted of people who vary with regard to age (young and old), marital status (single, married and divorced), gender and sexuality. This list of characteristics could be extended – say, to include race and class – but it comes from my own Catholic parish, where it prefaces every Sunday Mass, in the priest’s welcome to all, to those who are LGBT as well as those who are cis and straight. The parish priest welcomes everyone, but especially those who might otherwise feel excluded if they had heard only what the Church has taught – what it formally teaches – and had not encountered the pastoral realization of a different imagination. It is the difference so well figured in Pope Francis, as between his spirit of welcome and the letter of his formal teaching, which on the matter of homosexuality has not departed from that of his predecessors.
Such a welcome is extended and lived elsewhere, with many gay men and lesbian women finding themselves welcomed to the Lord’s table the world over. But they do so despite and not because of magisterial teaching. They are graced in having found such a welcome, a generous invitation to come and eat. But not everyone is so fortunate, and it is a fortune that might as easily pass away as it has arrived. This is not to say that its arrival was necessarily easy, but it is to say that it depends on the contingency of people and not on the stability of structures. It depends on the charisms of particular priests and the permissions (or blind eyes) of their bishops, and not on formal teachings and hallowed practices, written into canon law. The existing structures remain homophobic in the ways detailed in my earlier article, 1 and their persistence is evidenced by the fact that their abeyance – as in the parishes and sanctuaries just indicated – is so often experienced as a surprising grace.
One can find priests such as Father James Martin SJ who work tirelessly to make the Church a more welcoming place for LGBT people, and bishops who support them in this. But equally one can find bishops who are not so supportive, Catholic organizations that are not so welcoming, and the intensity of these oppositions varies between countries – as, for example, between Poland and the UK. It is good that there are bishops who stand up for ‘at-risk LGBT youth’ in the USA. But one of the reasons why such youth are at risk is precisely the teaching of other bishops in the Church. This dichotomy between welcome and rejection is well illustrated in Pugeda’s quotation from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2 Pugeda thinks it tells against my analysis of church teaching. But I think it tells for it. It is an almost perfect example of the Church’s institutional homophobia and of that doublespeak to which I drew attention, following Mark Jordan’s critique of such pronouncements. 3
Pugeda notes that the second sentence of the quoted paragraph from the Catechism will be a ‘stumbling block’ for those who do not share ‘the same worldview as the magisterium’. Indeed it is, but Pugeda does not stumble and moves on to the following two sentences. These refer to those who have ‘deep-seated homosexual tendencies’, referring to them as ‘they’ and so marking them as not ‘us’ – the authors and readers of the Catechism. (There is no suggestion that they might be some of us.) We must have ‘respect’ for these ‘objectively disordered’ people, treat them with ‘sensitivity’ and show them ‘compassion’, for their disorder is a ‘trial’ to most of them. (No suggestion that what might constitute the trial is not so much their ordering of desire as church teaching about it, as in the Catechism.)
‘Unjust discrimination’ against homosexual people should be ‘avoided’ (not resisted). But what about supposedly just discrimination? Discrimination is not ruled out. Indeed, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who guided the issue of the Catechism, as Pugeda reminds us, warned that when ‘civil legislation’ is passed that protects homosexual behaviour, then no one ‘should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground and violent reactions increase’. 4 Though quoted in my previous article, 5 this text is not mentioned by Pugeda, and yet it precisely tells for ecclesial homophobia and not against it. (Happily, the cardinal’s warning was ignored by many legislatures that sought the flourishing of their homosexual citizens.)
Finally, the Catechism urges that those burdened by the ‘trial’ of their homosexual ‘condition’ (rather than the trial of a homophobic Church), though treated with ‘respect, compassion and sensitivity’ (but denied fundamental rights), should unite their ‘difficulties’ with ‘the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross’. 6 There is an irony in this final injunction, for with their suffering so united with that of Christ, his passion becomes one of people suffering at the hands of the Church. Thus, the Church’s homophobia tells against its commitment to Christ.
What the Catechism gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. It is all very well to appeal to what Pugeda calls the Catechism’s ‘mandate on respect, compassion and sensitivity’, but what LGBT people want and need is to be granted the same dignity and rights as everyone else. Such rights and dignity are now granted in many societies, but rarely because of and usually despite church teaching and intervention. 7 (I have already indicated how Ratzinger sought to thwart such rights.) And such rights and dignity are never a foregone conclusion, for what is given can always be taken away. A Church that genuinely respected its LGBT members would not describe them as disordered, not have those who are clerics closeted. 8 It would happily acknowledge that they are already us, that we include them. It would tutor our ministries, bless our relationships, and recognize our marriages.