Łukasz Leja

Feeling sorry for gay Catholics?

Graphic: The Catholic Project

One's tempted to feel sorry for gay Catholics. But as the above graphic (from the Catholic Project's latest survey) demonstrates, "liberal" Catholicism - in America at any rate - is increasingly an old person's game. The National Catholic Reporter has been trying to cope with this, of course. But the problem they simply cannot solve is the way the Catholic Church works - and has done since apostolic times! - which is that whither the clergy lead spiritually, the laity will inevitably have to follow. 

Arguably the biggest malfunction* of the Catholic clergy in North America during the latter half of the twentieth century was the gross abuse of their clerical office in the cause of bringing the Catholic Church into line with various secular political agenda. And what was worse was that those secular agenda weren't so much freedom and democracy, or indeed the New World Order, or Make America Great Again. By the end of the twentieth century they were nonsense like Third World debt, immigration, climate change... and of course (in the final analysis) buggery and baby-killing.

In other words there was no way the centre was going to hold. Sooner or later the Church's "official teaching" = not to mention simple socio-political reality on the ground - was going to have to reassert itself. Priests who had literally grown up with the JPII/Ratzinger Catechism weren't going to have the same theological opinions as those who'd cut their teeth in the heady days of Papa Montini. And those who'd voted for Reagan and/or the Bushes (or even the Donald!) weren't going to have the same secular politics as Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi.

The conspiracy theory here of course is in fact more of a lone gunman theory: the individual behind all this appalling "conservatism" was none other than Cardinal Ratzinger, who chased all the liberal theologians out of the seminaries. And alas, if you believe that you simply have no understanding of how all political fashions - be they secular or spiritual - eventually revert to the mean. Because of course in real life Ratzinger was himself a liberal - albeit one of a sensitive, fair-minded, and ultimately nostalgic temperament. And in practice he cracked down on fewer heretics and schismatics than had any of his predecessors in his office. Genuinely, to get yourself excommunicated under Ratzinger you had to be an absolute scoundrel on the scale of, er... Archbishop Lefebvre!

(The take that the clergy are "out of sync" with the laity, meanwhile, depends on a genuinely duplicitous sleight of hand: in theory all the Catholics who never darken the door of a church from Advent to Christ the King are all Catholic laity in good standing; in practice everyone knows there's a world of difference between being a "practising" Catholic and a "lapsed" one.) 

And of course there's also the simple problem that even the most carefully calibrated decline is never going to be a smooth straight line. Michael Sean Winters, writing for the NCR, actually puts this quite eloquently:

Most of all, conservative families still encourage and produce vocations to the priesthood. The Catholic left has failed by comparison to produce vocations, and some live in a fantasy world that thought fewer vocations would lead to a greater push for ordaining women. If the ordination of women is desired by the Holy Spirit, having fewer priests, and thus fewer opportunities for the unique grace the Eucharist provides, is not likely to help the Spirit achieve anything.

I'd put it even more mechanistically than that. The unintended consequence of having fewer priests in the Church (in line with the anticlerical agenda of "liberalism") is that the few who survive will be more likely to be natural introverts who can survive on their own - and thus more likely to be men of study, meditation, and perhaps even prayer! In other words, it becomes more difficult to weed out the "conservatives" when all the "liberal" young men you wanted to replace them with have gone off to become schoolteachers, journalists and community organisers.

And that brings me back to Catholic gays. Where are they? Why aren't there fabulous young men telling us how much they LOVE saying the Rosary? (It's a-MA-zing!) Where are the gorgeous twinks singing the praises of Solemn Benediction? (It's literally di-VINE!)

Because with one or two exceptions, gay Catholics do tend to be of the dreary, elderly, liberal baby-boomer generation, with the same tedious, secular/protestant attitude to religion. How things look doesn't matter to them. What's more important is your boring "theological" opinions about what Jesus really meant when he said love your enemies. Or, indeed, your impenetrable Neoplatonist humbug about what Good and Evil really mean anyway.

Well frankly bottoms to the lot of them! In reality, gay Catholics don't need liberal Catholics - or indeed other gay Catholics - to reconcile their sexuality with the teachings of the Catholic Church. And the simple reason for that is that it's already been done.

It was done for all of us two thousand years ago by a man dying on a cross.

And we should all be thankful for that.

*Apart from covering up kiddie-fiddling, I suppose!

Sascha Schneider, 'Tobias and the angel'

 Hugues de Wurstemberge, 'Swiss Guards in the Sunbath' (1981)

[H/T: Gay Cultes]

"Go away, Cordelia! We're not decent!"

Andrew Wheeler, Hey Mary

According to the author, this is 'not an autobiographical work'.

You don't say.

This isn't just cringe. It's depressingly cringe. Wheeler is supposed to have written a comic book about what it's like to be a gay Catholic teenager, and yet he clearly knows nothing about Catholics - either what Catholics believe, or even how they speak.

Something tells me this is just self-justification (and of course the normalisation of one's own peccadilloes) masquerading as a plea for tolerance, whilst at the same time exploiting a sort of American anti-Catholic bigotry that is very old and very nasty indeed.

Alonso Sánchez Coello, John of Austria in armour (1567)

Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,

Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,

Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,

Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,

Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea

White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.

Vivat Hispania!

Domino Gloria! 

Don John of Austria

Has set his people free! 

[G K Chesterton, Lepanto]

Caravaggio, The Ecstasy of Saint Francis (c.1595)

Saint Remigius baptizes Clovis I, by the Master of Saint Gilles, c. 1500 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

Ellen Borggreve, 'Pilgrimage'

Raymond, Card Burke

Cardinal Burke, by Terry Nelson

Like many gay Catholics, I have mixed feelings about Card Burke. He dresses the part from time to time and occasionally walks the walk. But even so, one feels reluctant to put one's trust in princes, including Princes of the Church. In the past certainly he's proved less sound than some may have liked, and his bust-up with Steve Bannon a few years ago might suggest that he's also liable to go wobbly as soon as real-life "politics" rears its ugly head. Back in the day, Terry Nelson gave a brief personal opinion of Burke (and his supporters) on his blog here.

Personally I find Burke's smirking and simpering nauseating - not to mention the banality of the issues on which he deigns to speak out. (It does seem that such issues are mostly to do with the Sixth Commandment. It would seem that Burke's trying to form a grand alliance between latter-day traditionalists and the prudes and family values neocons of John Paul II's time, without any real inkling of quite how rickety such a coalition will be. And no, the "transgender nun" story does not surprise.) So good luck with that counter-reformation! (I can't see oafs like Steve Bannon taking much interest in it!)

I would be interested to know though why one cardinal out of 247 touches such a raw nerve. And is Fatima "dubious"? Has it discredited the papacy and the magisterium? I'm not sure that it is, or has. In fact the only person who's really damaged the papacy in recent years has been the most recently deceased successor of St Peter, who from time to time would either treat the institution as so much pointless tedious mummery (because the papal tiara and palace were silly anachronisms, pontifical protocol was a waste of time, the Swiss Guard were beneath his contempt, as were the altar-boys in St Peter's, etc.) or use it as a platform for irrelevant woke nonsense (Third-World immigration, climate change, etc.) that had absolutely nothing to do with the spiritual challenges facing Catholics in the world of today. As for the magisterium, rather more damaging that anything Card Burke (or Dr Taylor Marshall) could have said or done was a Vicar of Christ stonewalling (and I use the term advisedly) on some of the Church's most basic teachings. (His answers to Burke's dubia never saw the light of day.)

Card Burke was also far from the only one peddling conspiracy theories about the "St Gallen Mafia" - the sources for which "theories" tended to have been the more outlandish claims of people like Austen Ivereigh and Catherine Pepinster. (Personally I consider them not so much theories as the idle boasts of a hubristic liberal clique, but there you are.) Yes, if the Church really has been "infiltrated" then it's been infiltrated by the likes of Card Dolan and Burke himself, not to mention you and me and millions of other bad Catholics going back to Judas Iscariot. But it's hard to blame the likes of Dr Marshall for seizing on such memes.

Finally, I trust Nelson realises that the "post-conciliar Church" and (presumably) the pre-conciliar one are one and the same. It's perfectly legitimate to think the Catholic Church took a wrong turn in the 1960s. (Ditto civil society, for that matter!) And obviously it's perfectly legitimate to suggest that whereas every Mass has the same intrinsic value some Masses will have more extrinsic value than others. So it's hardly illegitimate to hope that at some point good and holy men will arise who will lead the Catholic Church out of her current doldrums and into happier, saner times ahead.

Franz Von Stuck, 'Lucifer' (1890)