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<div class="">June 15, 2013</div>
<h1>The Pope’s Gay Panic</h1>
<h6 class="">By
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<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by FRANK BRUNI"><span>FRANK BRUNI</span></a></span></h6>
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<p>
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?
</p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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. </p>
<p>
“That’s not original,” she quickly confessed, referring to her analogy. “It’s been around awhile.” </p>
<p>
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. “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/world/europe/pope-is-quoted-as-acknowledging-a-vatican-gay-lobby.html?pagewanted=all">Gay lobby</a>”
was the phrase he used, according to the group’s notes, but it wasn’t
clear whether he meant a political faction per se. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
Let’s leave aside the legions of <em>straight</em> people, Catholic and otherwise, who aren’t tucking their sex lives into a box that tidy, tiny and fecundity-minded. </p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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 <a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/104/hr3396">Defense of Marriage Act</a>,
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. </p>
<p>
And so we gay and lesbian people will be told: you’re O.K., but it’s up to states to decide just <em>how</em> O.K. There’s an asterisk to your supposed equality, a margin of difference between what others deserve and what you do. </p>
<p>
That’s not really acceptance, and that may explain some of the findings of a <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/06/13/a-survey-of-lgbt-americans/">Pew Research Center poll</a>
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. </p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
AND yet many such men have been ordained. <a href="http://americamagazine.org/users/james-martin-sj">The Rev. James Martin</a>,
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
Last year he took a leave from ministry, amid accusations of affairs with several women. He <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/us/popular-priest-fathered-child-and-says-hell-step-aside.html">admitted to one of them</a>, and to fathering a child. </p>
<p>
The friends with whom I’ve shared that story invariably ask: “Doesn’t that make you angry?” </p>
<p>
No. Just really, really sad. </p>
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