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!