The Catholic Struggle With Homosexuality

For churches and synagogues, homosexuality is the guest that will not leave. In the last several months, United Methodists, Southern Baptists, Presbyterians and Reform rabbis have been compelled to make pronouncements on issues of homosexuality. Episcopalians will deal with them beginning next week.

Throughout these debates, the Roman Catholic Church’s hierarchy has remained resolute in its position: Homosexuality is “objectively disordered.” Homosexual acts are “intrinsically evil.”

These views are “definitive,” the church has declared. As such, they are to be followed by Catholic faithful. Theologians, priests and nuns who have challenged them, or even equivocated, have been disciplined.

If ever there was a church that seemed unequivocal on the issue of homosexuality, the Roman Catholic Church would be it. The recent experience of Father Robert Nugent and Sister Jeannine Gramick is a case in point. They were involved in an outreach ministry to gays and lesbians. Last August the Vatican permanently barred them from their ministries because, the church said, they failed to impart the church’s full teaching on homosexuality.

Nugent and Gramick taught that gay men and lesbians are, indeed, loved by God and that homosexuality is, in and of itself, not sinful. So far so good. But the Vatican said these two ministers failed to also convey the church’s declaration of the evil in homosexual acts and the “objectively disordered” nature of homosexuality.

Reconciling these two views--God’s love for homosexuals and abhorrence of their sexual intimacies--makes ministering to gay men and lesbians an excruciatingly delicate task for priests and others. That, at least, is how gay advocates see the dilemma. Traditionalists argue that homosexuality can be overcome by an exercise of moral will and God’s help. Those “enslaved” by this sin--like those enslaved by all sorts of other sins--can be freed through repentance and prayer.

The tension between acceptance and condemnation of homosexuality that plays out in the lives of gay Catholics and those who minister to them mirrors an institutional schizophrenia, according to author Mark D. Jordan in his latest book, “The Silence of Sodom.”

Ambient homophobia coexists with a homoeroticism that is tolerated and encouraged by the church’s culture, including its all-male priesthood, its male religious orders, its power structures, even its “feminized” clerical vestments and the way seminarians are selected. Remarking about the cassocks that some clerics wear, an Episcopal priest once remarked, “We look like mother and they call us father.”

But suppose, Jordan asks, the Holy Spirit breathed on the hierarchy and there was an overnight change in attitudes? What if even the pope himself awakened tomorrow morning, absolutely convinced that the church’s long history of repression and vilification of homosexuality was both untrue and unjust?

Would things change? Not right away, says Jordan, who is gay and is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and professor of religion at Emory University. The church’s moral teachings, he suggests, are but the tip of an iceberg of what he calls a larger failure.

The church culture must change, he says. Catholic theologians will have to be able to speak freely about homosexuality for many years before they can offer thoughtful and serious moral assessments. Gay and lesbian Catholics must be able to lead their lives in the open, Jordan says. Only then will others be able to see God’s grace at work in their lives, and the lives of those they touch. And, one might add, only when committed homosexual love is seen as love and not simply as sex.

Jordan urges that theological concepts be examined, such as the “indissolubility of procreative and unitive ends,” another way of saying that sexual unity is naturally intended between a married man and woman and that such unity must be open to conception. In a lighter vein, a lesbian recently told a Pasadena teach-in that she hoped for the day when heterosexuals would realize that “our sex lives are as boring as theirs.” Jordan says the church will have to recognize homosexual saints, and by that he means those who have known sexual intimacy.

Jordan’s book may offend some. He is, after all, an advocate for change. His reference to homoeroticism inherent in the liturgy may be especially troubling. Those looking for a definitive work may be disappointed. But, says Jordan, that was not his intent.

He has offered glimpses, anecdotal stories and scholarly observations that are a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Here the reader will find knowledgeable and generally dispassionate observations melded with the sensitivity and insight that a gay man can bring to the table. If homosexuality is the guest that refuses to leave the table, Jordan has at least shed light on why that is and in the process made the whole issue, including a conflicted Catholic Church, a little more understandable.