[Vision2020] The Pope’s Gay Panic

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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June 15, 2013
The Pope’s Gay Panic By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html>

I HAVE many questions for and about the “gay lobby” in the Vatican, but
I’ll start with this: How can you be so spectacularly ineffective?

You wouldn’t last a minute on K Street; the Karl Roves of the capital would
have you for lunch. Despite your presence in, and presumed influence on,
the upper reaches of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, church teaching still
holds that homosexuality is disordered, and many church leaders still send
the preposterously mixed message that while gay and lesbian people
shouldn’t be admonished for, or ashamed about, their same-sex attractions,
they should nonetheless elect cold showers over warm embraces. Look but
don’t touch. Dream but don’t diddle.

“It’s like saying, ‘You’re a bird, but you can’t fly,’ ” cracked Sister
Jeannine Gramick, an American nun who has long challenged the church on
this issue, when we chatted recently.

“That’s not original,” she quickly confessed, referring to her analogy.
“It’s been around awhile.”

I called her after the news reports last week that Pope Francis, in a
private meeting with a Latin American religious group, had wrung his hands
about a network of gay clerics at Catholicism’s command central. “Gay
lobby<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/world/europe/pope-is-quoted-as-acknowledging-a-vatican-gay-lobby.html?pagewanted=all>”
was the phrase he used, according to the group’s notes, but it wasn’t clear
whether he meant a political faction per se.

What was clearer was his acknowledgment — rare for a pope, and thus
remarkable — of the church’s worst-kept secret: a priesthood populous with
gay men, even at the zenith. And that underscored anew the mystery and
madness of the church’s attitude about homosexuality.

If homosexuality is no bar to serving as one of God’s emissaries and
interpreters, if it’s no obstacle to being promoted to the upper rungs of
the church’s hierarchy, how can it be so wrong? It doesn’t add up. There’s
an error in the holy arithmetic.

The answer that many church leaders now give is that homosexuality isn’t in
fact sinful, not in and of itself, not if it’s paired with chastity, which
Roman Catholic priests of any persuasion are supposed to practice. Church
leaders also stress that they don’t mean to disparage gay people or deny
them full human dignity.

“The first thing I’d say to them is: I love you, too,” Cardinal Timothy
Dolan, the archbishop of New York, told ABC News earlier this year. “And
God loves you. And you are made in God’s image and likeness. And we want
your happiness.”

“You’re entitled to friendship,” he went on, laying out the ground rules
for same-sex longings and pairings. As for sexual love, he added, “that is
intended only for a man and woman in marriage, where children can come
about naturally.”

Let’s leave aside the legions of *straight* people, Catholic and otherwise,
who aren’t tucking their sex lives into a box that tidy, tiny and
fecundity-minded.

Let’s focus on something else. There’s no way for a gay or lesbian person
not to hear Dolan’s appraisal as something of a condemnation, no matter how
lavishly it’s dressed in loving language. It assigns homosexuals a status
separate from, and unequal to, the one accorded heterosexuals: you’re O.K.,
but you’re really not O.K. Upon you there is a special restriction, and for
you there is a fundamental dimension of the human experience that is
off-limits, a no-fly zone of the heart.

It’s two-tiered thinking, which is present as well in American political
life, where many people who say that they have no problem with gays and
lesbians and no intent to discriminate against us also say that we
shouldn’t be allowed to marry, because, well, that’s the tradition, and
marriage is an accommodation too far.

The Supreme Court is poised to weigh in on the matter in the next two
weeks, and while the smart money is on a toppling of the Defense of
Marriage Act <http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/104/hr3396>, which
forbids the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages
performed in any of the 12 states that have legalized it, there’s little
sign that the court will compel all the other states to get with the
program.

And so we gay and lesbian people will be told: you’re O.K., but it’s up to
states to decide just *how* O.K. There’s an asterisk to your supposed
equality, a margin of difference between what others deserve and what you
do.

That’s not really acceptance, and that may explain some of the findings of
a Pew Research Center
poll<http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/06/13/a-survey-of-lgbt-americans/>of
gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans that was released
last
week. About one-third of the respondents said that they’d not told their
mothers the truth of their lives, and an even greater fraction had not told
their fathers. In other words, fear and secrecy — not to mention the
potential psychological damage associated with each — persist. And you
can’t divorce that from marriage inequality’s insinuation that gays and
lesbians have less honorable relationships, and are lesser creatures all in
all.

Nor can you divorce it from the Catholic Church’s wildly contradictory
signals. Although the church doesn’t deem homosexuality paired with
chastity to be sinful, the Vatican decreed in 2005 that men with
“deep-seated homosexual tendencies” shouldn’t be ordained as priests.

AND yet many such men have been ordained. The Rev. James
Martin<http://americamagazine.org/users/james-martin-sj>,
a Jesuit and an editor at large at the Catholic magazine America, told me
that he’s seen thoughtful though not scientifically rigorous estimates that
anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of Catholic priests are gay. His own best
guess is 30 percent. That’s thousands and thousands of gay priests, some of
whom must indeed be in the “deep-seated” end of the tendency pool.

Martin believes that the vast majority of gay priests aren’t sexually
active. But some are, and Rome is certainly one of the many theaters where
the conflict between the church’s ethereal ideals and the real world play
out.

I lived there for nearly two years, covering the Vatican for The Times, and
while I got no real sense of any “gay lobby,” I was given my own lesson in
the hypocrisy of clerics who preach one set of morals and practice another.

Every so often, I’d have lunch or dinner with the Rev. Thomas Williams, who
was the dean of theology at a pontifical university and belonged to the
Legion of Christ, a conservative order. He liked to expose secular news
organizations to the order’s philosophy, and over time his classic,
square-jawed good looks — he resembled some ecclesiastical man of steel,
ready to star in “Superman Genuflects” — led to television time as a
Vatican analyst.

Last year he took a leave from ministry, amid accusations of affairs with
several women. He admitted to one of
them<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/us/popular-priest-fathered-child-and-says-hell-step-aside.html>,
and to fathering a child.

The friends with whom I’ve shared that story invariably ask: “Doesn’t that
make you angry?”

No. Just really, really sad.

•

I invite you to visit my blog <http://bruni.blogs.nytimes.com/>, follow me
on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on
Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/frankbruninyt>
.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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