Originally appeared November 28, 1994, in
The New Republic.
In everyone here sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have been had they been loved.
That nothing cures.
- Philip Larkin, "Faith Healing"
I can remember the first time what, for the sake of argument, I
will call my sexuality came into conflict with what, for the sake
of argument, I will call my faith. It was time for Communion in my
local parish church, Our Lady and St. Peter's, a small but
dignified building crammed between an Indian restaurant and a
stationery shop, opposite a public restroom, on the main street of
a smallish town south of London called East Grinstead. I must have
been around 15 or so. Every time I received Communion, I attempted,
following my mother's instructions, to offer up the sacrament for
some current problem or need: my mother's health, an upcoming exam,
the starving in Bangladesh or whatever. Most of these requests had
to do with either something abstract and distant, like a cure for
cancer, or something extremely tangible, like a better part in the
school play. Like much else in my faith-life, they were routine and
yet not completely drained of sincerity. But rarely did they
address something that could unsettle the comfort of my precocious
adolescence. This time, however, as I filed up to the Communion
rail to face mild-mannered Father Simmons for the umpteenth time,
something else intervened. Please, I remember asking almost
offhandedly of God, after a quick recital of my other failings,
help me with that.
I didn't have a name for it, since it was, to all intents and
purposes, nameless. I don't think I'd ever heard it mentioned at
home, except once when my mother referred to someone who had
behaved inappropriately on my father's town rugby team. (He had
been dealt with, she reported darkly.) At high school, the subject
was everywhere and nowhere: at the root of countless jokes but
never actualized as something that could affect anyone we knew. But
this ubiquity and abstraction brought home the most important
point: uniquely among failings, homosexuality was so abominable it
could not even be mentioned. The occasions when it was actually
discussed were so rare that they stand out even now in my mind: our
Latin teacher's stating that homosexuality was obviously wrong
since it meant "sticking your dick in the wrong hole"; the graffiti
in the public restroom in Reigate High Street: "My mother made me a
homosexual," followed closely by, "If I gave her the wool, would
she make me one too?" Although my friends and family never stinted
in pointing out other faults on my part, this, I knew, would never
be confronted. So when it emerged as an irresistible fact of my
existence, and when it first seeped into my life of dutiful prayer
and worship, it could be referred to only in the inarticulate void
of that Sunday evening before Communion.
From the beginning, however - and this is something many outside
the Church can find hard to understand - my sexuality was part of
my faith-life, not a revolt against it. Looking back, I realize
that that moment at the Communion rail was the first time I had
actually addressed the subject of homosexuality explicitly in front
of anyone; and I had brought it to God in the moments before the
most intimate act of sacramental Communion. Because it was
something I was deeply ashamed of, I felt obliged to confront it;
but because it was also something inextricable - even then - from
the core of my existence, it felt natural to enlist God's help
rather than his judgment in grappling with it. There was, of
course, considerable tension in this balance of alliance and
rejection; but there was also something quite natural about it, an
accurate reflection of anyone's compromised relationship with what
he or she hazards to be the divine.
To the outsider, faith often seems a kind of cataclysmic
intervention, a Damascene moment of revelation and transformation,
and no doubt, for a graced few, this is indeed the experience. But
this view of faith is often, it seems to me, a way to salve the
unease of a faithless life by constructing the alternative as
something so alien to actual experience that it is safely beyond
reach. Faith for me has never been like that. The moments of
genuine intervention and spiritual clarity have been minuscule in
number and, when they have occurred, hard to discern and harder
still to understand. In the midst of this uncertainty, the
sacraments, especially that of Communion, have always been for me
the only truly reliable elements of direction, concrete
instantiations of another order. Which is why, perhaps, it was at
Communion that the subject reared its confusing, shaming
presence.
The two experiences came together in other ways, too. Like
faith, one's sexuality is not simply a choice; it informs a whole
way of being. But like faith, it involves choices - the choice to
affirm or deny a central part of one's being, the choice to live a
life that does not deny but confronts reality. It is, like faith,
mysterious, emerging clearly one day, only to disappear the next,
taking different forms - of passion, of lust, of intimacy, of fear.
And like faith, it points toward something other and more powerful
than the self. The physical communion with the other in sexual life
hints at the same kind of transcendence as the physical Communion
with the Other that lies at the heart of the sacramental Catholic
vision.
So when I came to be asked, later in life, how I could be gay
and Catholic, I could answer only that I simply was. What to others
appeared a simple contradiction was, in reality, the existence of
these two connected, yet sometimes parallel, experiences of the
world. It was not that my sexuality was involuntary and my faith
chosen and that therefore my sexuality posed a problem for my
faith; nor was it that my faith was involuntary and my sexuality
chosen so that my faith posed a problem for my sexuality. It was
that both were chosen and unchosen continuously throughout my life,
as parts of the same search for something larger. As I grew older,
they became part of me, inseparable from my understanding of
myself. My faith existed at the foundation of how I saw the world;
my sexuality grew to be inseparable from how I felt the world.
I am aware that this formulation of the problem is theologically
flawed. Faith, after all, is not a sensibility; in the Catholic
sense, it is a statement about reality that cannot be negated by
experience. And there is little doubt about what the authority of
the Church teaches about the sexual expression of a homosexual
orientation. But this was not how the problem first presented
itself. The immediate difficulty was not how to make what I did
conform with what the Church taught me (until my early 20s, I did
very little that could be deemed objectively sinful with regard to
sex), but how to make who I was conform with what the Church taught
me. This was a much more difficult proposition. It did not conform
to a simple contradiction between self and God, as that afternoon
in the Communion line attested. It entailed trying to understand
how my adolescent crushes and passions, my longings for human
contact, my stumbling attempts to relate love to life, could be so
inimical to the Gospel of Christ and His Church, how they could be
so unmentionable among people I loved and trusted.
So I resorted to what many young homosexuals and lesbians resort
to. I found a way to expunge love from life, to construct a
trajectory that could somehow explain this absence, and to hope
that what seemed so natural and overwhelming could somehow be dealt
with. I studied hard to explain away my refusal to socialize; I
developed intense intellectual friendships that bordered on the
emotional, but I kept them restrained in a carapace of
artificiality to prevent passion from breaking out. I adhered to a
hopelessly pessimistic view of the world, which could explain my
refusal to take part in life's pleasures, and to rationalize the
dark and deep depressions that periodically overwhelmed me.
No doubt some of this behavior was part of any teenager's panic
at the prospect of adulthood. But looking back, it seems unlikely
that this pattern had nothing whatsoever to do with my being gay.
It had another twist: it sparked an intense religiosity that could
provide me with the spiritual resources I needed to fortify my
barren emotional life. So my sexuality and my faith entered into a
dialectic: my faith propelled me away from my emotional and sexual
longing, and the deprivation that this created required me to
resort even more dogmatically to my faith. And as my faith had to
find increasing power to restrain the hormonal and emotional
turbulence of adolescence, it had to take on a caricatured shape,
aloof and dogmatic, ritualistic and awesome. As time passed, a
theological austerity became the essential complement to an
emotional emptiness. And as the emptiness deepened, the austerity
sharpened.
In a remarkable document titled "Declaration on Certain
Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics," issued by the Vatican in 1975,
the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made the
following statement regarding the vexed issue of homosexuality: "A
distinction is drawn, and it seems with some reason, between
homosexuals whose tendency comes from a false education, from a
lack of normal sexual development, from habit, from bad example, or
from other similar causes, and is transitory or at least not
incurable; and homosexuals who are definitively such because of
some kind of innate instinct or a pathological constitution judged
to be incurable."
The Church was responding, it seems, to the growing sociological
and psychological evidence that, for a small minority of people,
homosexuality is unchosen and unalterable. In the context of a
broad declaration on a whole range of sexual ethics, this statement
was something of a minor digression (twice as much space was
devoted to the "grave moral disorder" of masturbation); and it
certainly didn't mean a liberalization of doctrine about the
morality of homosexual acts, which were "intrinsically disordered
and can in no case be approved of."
Still, the concession complicated things. Before 1975 the modern
Church, when it didn't ignore the matter, had held a coherent view
of the morality of homosexual acts. It maintained that homosexuals,
as the modern world had come to define them, didn't really exist;
rather, everyone was essentially a heterosexual and homosexual acts
were acts chosen by heterosexuals, out of depravity, curiosity,
impulse, predisposition or bad moral guidance. Such acts were an
abuse of the essential heterosexual orientation of all humanity;
they were condemned because they failed to link sexual activity
with a binding commitment between a man and a woman in a marriage,
a marriage that was permanently open to the possibility of
begetting children. Homosexual sex was condemned in exactly the
same way and for exactly the same reasons as premarital
heterosexual sex, adultery or contracepted sex: it failed to
provide the essential conjugal and procreative context for sexual
relations. The reasoning behind this argument rested on natural
law. Natural law teaching, drawing on Aristotelian and Thomist
tradition, argued that the sexual nature of man was naturally
linked to both emotional fidelity and procreation so that, outside
of this context, sex was essentially destructive of the potential
for human flourishing: "the full sense of mutual self-giving and
human procreation in the context of true love," as the encyclical
Gaudium et Spes put it. But suddenly, a new twist had been made to
this argument. There was, it seems, in nature, a group of people
who were "definitively" predisposed to violation of this natural
law; their condition was "innate" and "incurable." Insofar as it
was innate - literally innatus or "inborn" - this condition was
morally neutral, since anything involuntary could not be moral or
immoral; it simply was. But always and everywhere, the activity to
which this condition led was "intrinsically disordered and [could]
in no case be approved of." In other words, something fundamentally
in nature always and everywhere violated a vital part of the nature
of human beings; something essentially blameless was always and
everywhere blameworthy if acted upon.
The paradox of this doctrine was evident even within its first,
brief articulation. Immediately before stating the intrinsic
disorder of homosexuality, the text averred that in "the pastoral
field, these homosexuals must certainly be treated with
understanding and sustained in the hope of overcoming their
personal difficulties. ... Their culpability will be judged with
prudence." This compassion for the peculiar plight of the
homosexual was then elaborated: "This judgment of Scripture does
not of course permit us to conclude that all those who suffer from
this anomaly are personally responsible for it. ..." Throughout,
there are alternating moments of alarm and quiescence; tolerance
and panic; categorical statement and prudential doubt.
It was therefore perhaps unsurprising that, within a decade, the
Church felt it necessary to take up the matter again. The problem
could have been resolved by a simple reversion to the old position,
the position maintained by fundamentalist Protestant churches: that
homosexuality was a hideous, yet curable, affliction of
heterosexuals. But the Church doggedly refused to budge from its
assertion of the natural occurrence of constitutive homosexuals -
or from its compassion for and sensitivity to their plight. In
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's 1986 letter, "On the Pastoral Care of
Homosexual Persons," this theme is actually deepened, beginning
with the title.
To non-Catholics, the use of the term "homosexual person" might
seem a banality. But the term "person" constitutes in Catholic
moral teaching a profound statement about the individual's
humanity, dignity and worth; it invokes a whole range of rights and
needs; it reflects the recognition by the Church that a homosexual
person deserves exactly the same concern and compassion as a
heterosexual person, having all the rights of a human being, and
all the value, in the eyes of God. This idea was implicit in the
1975 declaration, but was never advocated. Then there it was,
eleven years later, embedded in Ratzinger's very title. Throughout
his text, homosexuality, far from being something unmentionable or
disgusting, is discussed with candor and subtlety. It is worthy of
close attention: "[T]he phenomenon of homosexuality, complex as it
is and with its many consequences for society and ecclesial life,
is a proper focus for the Church's pastoral care. It thus requires
of her ministers attentive study, active concern and honest,
theologically well-balanced counsel." And here is Ratzinger on the
moral dimensions of the unchosen nature of homosexuality: "[T]he
particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin."
Moreover, homosexual persons, he asserts, are "often generous and
giving of themselves." Then, in a stunning passage of concession,
he marshals the Church's usual arguments in defense of human
dignity in order to defend homosexual dignity:
It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the
object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment
deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs.
It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most
fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity
of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in
law.
Elsewhere, Ratzinger refers to the homosexual's "God-given
dignity and worth"; condemns the view that homosexuals are totally
compulsive as a "demeaning assumption"; and argues that "the human
person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be
adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her
sexual orientation."
Why are these statements stunning? Because they reveal how far
the Church had, by the mid-1980s, absorbed the common sense of the
earlier document's teaching on the involuntariness of
homosexuality, and had had the courage to reach its logical
conclusion. In Ratzinger's letter, the Church stood foursquare
against bigotry, against demeaning homosexuals either by anti-gay
slander or violence or by pro-gay attempts to reduce human beings
to one aspect of their personhood. By denying that homosexual
activity was totally compulsive, the Church could open the door to
an entire world of moral discussion about ethical and unethical
homosexual behavior, rather than simply dismissing it all as
pathological. What in 1975 had been "a pathological constitution
judged to be incurable" was, eleven years later, a "homosexual
person," "made in the image and likeness of God."
But this defense of the homosexual person was only half the
story. The other half was that, at the same time, the Church
strengthened its condemnation of any and all homosexual activity.
By 1986 the teachings condemning homosexual acts were far more
categorical than they had been before. Ratzinger had guided the
Church into two simultaneous and opposite directions: a deeper
respect for homosexuals, and a sterner rejection of almost anything
they might do.
At the beginning of the 1986 document, Ratzinger bravely
confronted the central paradox: "In the discussion which followed
the publication of the [1975] declaration ... an overly benign
interpretation was given to the homosexual condition itself, some
going so far as to call it neutral or even good. Although the
particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is
a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral
evil and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective
disorder." Elsewhere, he reiterated the biblical and natural law
arguments against homosexual relations. Avoiding the problematic
nature of the Old Testament's disavowal of homosexual acts (since
these are treated in the context of such "abominations" as eating
pork and having intercourse during menstruation, which the Church
today regards with equanimity), Ratzinger focused on St. Paul's
admonitions against homosexuality: "Instead of the original harmony
between Creator and creatures, the acute distortion of idolatry has
led to all kinds of moral excess. Paul is at a loss to find a
clearer example of this disharmony than homosexual relations."
There was also the simple natural-law argument: "It is only in the
marital relationship that the use of the sexual faculty can be
morally good. A person engaging in homosexual behavior therefore
acts immorally." The point about procreation was strengthened by an
argument about the natural, "complementary union able to transmit
life," which is heterosexual marriage. The fact that homosexual sex
cannot be a part of this union means that it "thwarts the call to a
life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the
essence of Christian living." Thus "homosexual activity" is
inherently "self-indulgent." "Homosexual activity," Ratzinger's
document claimed in a veiled and ugly reference to HIV, is a "form
of life which constantly threatens to destroy" homosexual
persons.
This is some armory of argument. The barrage of statements
directed against "homosexual activity," which Ratzinger associates
in this document exclusively with genital sex, is all the more
remarkable because it occurs in a document that has otherwise gone
further than might have been thought imaginable in accepting
homosexuals into the heart of the Church and of humanity.
Ratzinger's letter was asking us, it seems, to love the sinner more
deeply than ever before, but to hate the sin even more
passionately. This is a demand with which most Catholic homosexuals
have at some time or other engaged in anguished combat.
It is also a demand that raises the central question of the two
documents and, indeed, of any Catholic homosexual life: How
intelligible is the Church's theological and moral position on the
blamelessness of homosexuality and the moral depravity of
homosexual acts? This question is the one I wrestled with in my
early 20s, as the increasing aridity of my emotional life began to
conflict with the possibility of my living a moral life. The
distinction made some kind of sense in theory; but in practice, the
command to love oneself as a person of human dignity yet hate the
core longings that could make one emotionally whole demanded a
sense of detachment or a sense of cynicism that seemed inimical to
the Christian life. To deny lust was one thing; to deny love was
another. And to deny love in the context of Christian doctrine
seemed particularly perverse. Which begged a prior question: Could
the paradoxes of the Church's position reflect a deeper incoherence
at their core?
One way of tackling the question is to look for useful analogies
to the moral paradox of the homosexual. Greed, for example, might
be said to be an innate characteristic of human beings, which, in
practice, is always bad. But the analogy falls apart immediately.
Greed is itself evil; it is prideful, a part of Original Sin. It is
not, like homosexuality, a blameless natural condition that
inevitably leads to what are understood as immoral acts. Moreover,
there is no subgroup of innately greedy people, nor a majority of
people in which greed never occurs. Nor are the greedy to be
treated with respect. There is no paradox here, and no particular
moral conundrum.
Aquinas suggests a way around this problem. He posits that some
things that occur in nature may be in accordance with an
individual's nature, but somehow against human nature in general:
"for it sometimes happens that one of the principles which is
natural to the species as a whole has broken down in one of its
individual members; the result can be that something which runs
counter to the nature of the species as a whole, happens to be in
harmony with nature for a particular individual: as it becomes
natural for a vessel of water which has been heated to give out
heat." Forget, for a moment, the odd view that somehow it is more
"natural" for a vessel to exist at one temperature than another.
The fundamental point here is that there are natural urges in a
particular person that may run counter to the nature of the species
as a whole. The context of this argument is a discussion of
pleasure: How is it, if we are to trust nature (as Aquinas and the
Church say we must), that some natural pleasures in some people are
still counter to human nature as a whole? Aquinas's only response
is to call such events functions of sickness, what the modern
Church calls "objective disorder." But here, too, the analogies he
provides are revealing: they are bestiality and cannibalism.
Aquinas understands each of these activities as an emanation of a
predilection that seems to occur more naturally in some than in
others. But this only reveals some of the special problems of
lumping homosexuality in with other "disorders." Even Aquinas's
modern disciples (and, as we've seen, the Church) concede that
involuntary orientation to the same gender does not spring from the
same impulses as cannibalism or bestiality. Or indeed that
cannibalism is ever a "natural" pleasure in the first place, in the
way that, for some bizarre reason, homosexuality is.
What, though, of Aquinas's better argument - that a
predisposition to homosexual acts is a mental or physical illness
that is itself morally neutral, but always predisposes people to
inherently culpable acts? Here, again, it is hard to think of a
precise analogy. Down syndrome, for example, occurs in a minority
and is itself morally neutral; but when it leads to an immoral act,
such as, say, a temper tantrum directed at a loving parent, the
Church is loath to judge that person as guilty of choosing to break
a commandment. The condition excuses the action. Or, take epilepsy:
if an epileptic person has a seizure that injures another human
being, she is not regarded as morally responsible for her actions,
insofar as they were caused by epilepsy. There is no paradox here
either, but for a different reason: with greed, the condition
itself is blameworthy; with epilepsy, the injurious act is
blameless.
Another analogy can be drawn. What of something like alcoholism?
This is a blameless condition, as science and psychology have
shown. Some people have a predisposition to it; others do not.
Moreover, this predisposition is linked, as homosexuality is, to a
particular act. For those with a predisposition to alcoholism,
having a drink might be morally disordered, destructive to the
human body and spirit. So, alcoholics, like homosexuals, should be
welcomed into the Church, but only if they renounce the activity
their condition implies.
Unfortunately, even this analogy will not hold. For one thing,
drinking is immoral only for alcoholics. Moderate drinking is
perfectly acceptable, according to the Church, for non-alcoholics.
On the issue of homosexuality, to follow the analogy, the Church
would have to say that sex between people of the same gender would
be - in moderation - fine for heterosexuals but not for
homosexuals. In fact, of course, the Church teaches the opposite,
arguing that the culpability of homosexuals engaged in sexual acts
should be judged with prudence - and less harshly - than the
culpability of heterosexuals who engage in "perversion."
But the analogy to alcoholism points to a deeper problem.
Alcoholism does not ultimately work as an analogy because it does
not reach to the core of the human condition in the way that
homosexuality, following the logic of the Church's arguments, does.
If alcoholism is overcome by a renunciation of alcoholic acts, then
recovery allows the human being to realize his or her full
potential, a part of which, according to the Church, is the supreme
act of self-giving in a life of matrimonial love. But if
homosexuality is overcome by a renunciation of homosexual emotional
and sexual union, the opposite is achieved: The human being is
liberated into sacrifice and pain, barred from the matrimonial love
that the Church holds to be intrinsic, for most people, to the
state of human flourishing. Homosexuality is a structural condition
that restricts the human being, even if homosexual acts are
renounced, to a less than fully realized life. In other words, the
gay or lesbian person is deemed disordered at a far deeper level
than the alcoholic: at the level of the human capacity to love and
be loved by another human being, in a union based on fidelity and
self-giving. Their renunciation of such love also is not guided
toward some ulterior or greater goal - as the celibacy of the
religious orders is designed to intensify their devotion to God.
Rather, the loveless homosexual destiny is precisely toward
nothing, a negation of human fulfillment, which is why the Church
understands that such persons, even in the act of obedient
self-renunciation, are called "to enact the will of God in their
life by joining whatever sufferings and difficulties they
experience in virtue of their condition to the sacrifice of the
Lord's cross."
This suggests another analogy: the sterile person. Here, too,
the person is structurally barred by an innate or incurable
condition from the full realization of procreative union with
another person. One might expect that such people would be regarded
in exactly the same light as homosexuals. They would be asked to
commit themselves to a life of complete celibacy and to offer up
their pain toward a realization of Christ's sufferings on the
cross. But that, of course, is not the Church's position. Marriage
is available to sterile couples or to those past child-bearing age;
these couples are not prohibited from having sexual relations.
One is forced to ask: What rational distinction can be made, on
the Church's own terms, between the position of sterile people and
that of homosexual people with regard to sexual relations and
sacred union? If there is nothing morally wrong, per se, with the
homosexual condition or with homosexual love and self-giving, then
homosexuals are indeed analogous to those who, by blameless fate,
cannot reproduce. With the sterile couple, it could be argued,
miracles might happen. But miracles, by definition, can happen to
anyone. What the analogy to sterility suggests, of course, is that
the injunction against homosexual union does not rest, at heart, on
the arguments about openness to procreation, but on the Church's
failure to fully absorb its own teachings about the dignity and
worth of homosexual persons. It cannot yet see them as it sees
sterile heterosexuals: people who, with respect to procreation,
suffer from a clear, limiting condition, but who nevertheless have
a potential for real emotional and spiritual self-realization, in
the heart of the Church, through the transfiguring power of the
matrimonial sacrament. It cannot yet see them as truly made in the
image of God.
But this, maybe, is to be blind in the face of the obvious. Even
with sterile people, there is a symbolism in the union of male and
female that speaks to the core nature of sexual congress and its
ideal instantiation. There is no such symbolism in the union of
male with male or female with female. For some Catholics, this
"symbology" goes so far as to bar even heterosexual intercourse
from positions apart from the missionary - face to face, male to
female, in a symbolic act of love devoid of all non-procreative
temptation. For others, the symbology is simply about the notion of
"complementarity," the way in which each sex is invited in the act
of sexual congress - even when they are sterile - to perceive the
mystery of the other; when the two sexes are the same, in contrast,
the act becomes one of mere narcissism and self-indulgence, a
higher form of masturbation. For others still, the symbolism is
simply about Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve, and the
essentially dual, male-female center of the natural world. Denying
this is to offend the complementary dualism of the universe.
But all these arguments are arguments for the centrality of
heterosexual sexual acts in nature, not their exclusiveness. It is
surely possible to concur with these sentiments, even to laud their
beauty and truth, while also conceding that it is nevertheless also
true that nature seems to have provided a spontaneous and
mysterious contrast that could conceivably be understood to
complement - even dramatize - the central male-female order. In
many species and almost all human cultures, there are some who seem
to find their destiny in a similar but different sexual and
emotional union. They do this not by subverting their own nature,
or indeed human nature, but by fulfilling it in a way that doesn't
deny heterosexual primacy, but rather honors it by its rare and
distinct otherness. As albinos remind us of the brilliance of
color; as redheads offer a startling contrast to the blandness of
their peers; as genius teaches us, by contrast, the virtue of
moderation; as the disabled person reveals to us in negative form
the beauty of the fully functioning human body; so the homosexual
person might be seen as a natural foil to the heterosexual norm, a
variation that does not eclipse the theme, but resonates with it.
Extinguishing - or prohibiting - homosexuality is, from this point
of view, not a virtuous necessitys, but the real crime against
nature, a refusal to accept the pied beauty of God's creation, a
denial of the way in which the other need not threaten, but may
actually give depth and contrast to the self.
This is the alternative argument embedded in the Church's recent
grappling with natural law, that is just as consonant with the
spirit of natural law as the Church's current position. It is more
consonant with what actually occurs in nature; seeks an end to
every form of natural life; and upholds the dignity of each human
person. It is so obvious an alternative to the Church's current
stance that it is hard to imagine the forces of avoidance that have
kept it so firmly at bay for so long.
For many homosexual Catholics, life within the Church is a
difficult endeavor. In my 20s, as I attempted to unite the
possibilities of sexual longing and emotional commitment, I
discovered what many heterosexuals and homosexuals had discovered
before me: that it is a troubling and troublesome mission. There's
a disingenuous tendency, when discussing both homosexual and
heterosexual emotional life, to glamorize and idealize the entire
venture. To posit the possibility of a loving union, after all, is
not to guarantee its achievement. There is also a lamentable
inclination to believe that all conflicts can finally be resolved;
that the homosexual Catholic's struggle can be removed by a simple
theological coup de main; that the conflict is somehow deeper than
many other struggles in the Church - of women, say, or of the
divorced. The truth is that pain, as Christ taught, is not a reason
to question truth; it may indeed be a reason to embrace it.
But it must also be true that to dismiss the possibility of a
loving union for homosexuals at all - to banish from the minds and
hearts of countless gay men and women the idea that they, too, can
find solace and love in one another - is to create the conditions
for a human etiolation that no Christian community can contemplate
without remorse. What finally convinced me of the wrongness of the
Church's teachings was not that they were intellectually so
confused, but that in the circumstances of my own life - and of the
lives I discovered around me - they seemed so destructive of the
possibilities of human love and self-realization. By crippling the
potential for connection and growth, the Church's teachings created
a dynamic that in practice led not to virtue but to pathology; by
requiring the first lie in a human life, which would lead to an
entire battery of others, they contorted human beings into
caricatures of solitary eccentricity, frustrated bitterness,
incapacitating anxiety - and helped perpetuate all the human
wickedness and cruelty and insensitivity that such lives inevitably
carry in their wake. These doctrines could not in practice do what
they wanted to do: they could not both affirm human dignity and
deny human love.
This truth is not an argument; it is merely an observation. But
observations are at the heart not simply of the Church's
traditional Thomist philosophy, but also of the phenomenological
vision of the current pope. To observe these things, to affirm
their truth, is not to oppose the Church, but to hope in it, to
believe in it as a human institution that is yet the eternal vessel
of God's love. It is to say that such lives as those of countless
gay men and lesbians must ultimately affect the Church not because
our lives are perfect, or without contradiction, or without sin,
but because our lives are in some sense also the life of the
Church.
I remember, in my own life, the sense of lung-filling
exhilaration I felt as my sexuality began to be incorporated into
my life, a sense that was not synonymous with recklessness or
self-indulgence - although I was not immune from those things
either - but a sense of being suffused at last with the possibility
of being fully myself before those I loved and before God. I
remember the hopefulness of parents regained and friendships
restored in a life that, for all its vanities, was at least no
longer premised on a lie covered over by a career. I remember the
sense a few months ago in a pew in a cathedral, as I reiterated the
same pre-Communion litany of prayers that I had spoken some twenty
years earlier, that, for the first time, the love the Church had
always taught that God held for me was tangible and redemptive. I
had never felt it fully before; and, of course, like so many
spiritual glimpses, I have rarely felt it since. But I do know that
it was conditioned not on the possibility of purity, but on the
possibility of honesty. That honesty is not something that can be
bought or won in a moment. It is a process peculiarly prone to
self-delusion and self-doubt. But it is one that, if it is to
remain true to itself, the Church cannot resist forever.