Catholics, gays and mixed signals

WORD HAS leaked from Catholic Church sources that the Vatican may soon harden its policy against ordaining homosexuals, even those who promise to remain chaste.

Aha! some Catholics will say, the church is finally dealing with the root cause of the pedophilia scandal -- homosexuality.

As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Ann Rodgers reported recently in an article about a Vatican evaluation of American seminaries, the pedophilia-homosexuality connection is a matter of faith with some church officials.

“The fact that 81% of the [child-abuse] victims were male, coupled with reports of a ‘gay culture’ at some seminaries, led some bishops and Vatican officials to conclude that the underlying problem was homosexuality,” Rodgers wrote.

But she added that “there have been mixed signals. In April 2003, top Vatican officials heard presentations from eight international experts on pedophilia who said that homosexuality did not cause men to molest minors.”

“Mixed signals” has long been an apt description of the church’s attitude toward homosexuality, and it isn’t just the hierarchy that is caught in contradictions.

Look up “homosexuality” in the English version of the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” and you will read that people with “homosexual tendencies” must be accepted with “respect, compassion and sensitivity.” While they are “called to chastity,” they “can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.”

If the reports are true and the church is about to bar even celibate homosexuals from ordination as priests, then the position would seem to be that homosexuals can attain Christian perfection if they remain chaste but cannot aspire to the priesthood -- which for many Catholics is the epitome of Christian perfection.

That isn’t the only incongruity. The 1994 edition of the catechism says: “The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. They do not choose their homosexual condition; for most of them it is a trial.” That seems to align the church with the conventional psychological wisdom that sexual orientation is inborn, or at least established early in life, and is, in either case, resistant to change.

Not so fast. Conservative Catholics point to the fact that a 1997 revision in the catechism replaces the reference to a lack of choice with phrasing that is more equivocal. The revised version says: “The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial.”

This new language creates a wedge for the notion that homosexuals can, through therapy, be induced to change their sexual orientation -- they can, if they try hard enough, “join the other team,” as Elaine memorably put it on “Seinfeld.” “Reparative therapy” for homosexuality is usually associated with evangelical Protestants, but it has its Catholic adherents too.

“Homosexuality and Hope,” a statement by the conservative Catholic Medical Assn., says that therapy for homosexuality can have two acceptable outcomes. It claims: “For a Catholic with same-sex attraction, the goal of therapy should be freedom to live chastely according to one’s state in life.” But it also states: “Some of those who have struggled with same-sex attractions believe that they are called to a celibate life.... Others wish to marry and have children. There is every reason to hope that many will be able, in time, to achieve this goal.”

This Catholic “position” is also hard to get a grip on. One reasonable reading of the first option suggests that gays, if they choose to be chaste, should be eligible for the celibate priesthood. But the second possibility -- heterosexualization -- is even more of a curveball for those who want to ban even chaste homosexuals from holy orders.

The columnist Timothy Noah once quipped that conservatives believe everything is inherited except sexual orientation, while liberals believe everything is caused by environmental factors except sexual orientation.

In the spirit of the first presumption, conservative Catholics might consider abandoning the objective of banning gays from the priesthood in exchange for adding a few reparative therapists to seminary staffs. Granted, this conjures up a surreal scenario in which gays are encouraged to develop heterosexual desires only to be told not to act on them!

On the other hand, to jump aboard the reparative therapy bandwagon, Catholic conservatives would have to give up the equation of homosexuality and pedophilia that -- however inaccurate and insulting to gays -- has provided them with a potent point in the debate about banning gays altogether from the priesthood. After all, isn’t the lesson universally drawn from the scandals in Boston and elsewhere that pedophilia is incurable?

It might be better for conservatives in the church to take another look at the argument that the pedophilia scandals are an indictment of homosexuality -- and liberal Catholics might want to dismount from their hobby horse that the scandals amount to an argument for a married priesthood.

Perhaps the pedophilia scandal was about pedophilia.

As for gays in the priesthood -- whatever one thinks of the church’s insistence on celibacy, if it is enforced evenhandedly, sources including the catechism and the conservative doctors seem to indicate that a blanket ban on gay seminarians is unnecessary as well as un-Christian.