Pope Benedict on Homosexuality (continued) Part Two

This posting continues the reflections begun in the posting of 7/26/13.

Sewald  responds to Pope Benedict’s comments on homosexuality with the observation :"It is no secret that there are homosexuals even among priests and monks. Just recently there was a major scandal on account of the homosexual passions of priests in Rome.” Pope Pope, being honest and humble, admits the truth of Sewald’s statement, but surprises me, because he does not say what I expected. I was anticipating something along the lines of the need for active homosexual priests to repent, just as priests who were heterosexual would have to repent of being unfaithful if they had sexual relations with women. Instead, the pope spoke out forcefully against homosexuals in the priesthood. This is what he said: “Homosexuality is incompatible with the priestly vocation. Otherwise celibacy itself would lose its meaning as a renunciation”.

 I had been thinking, Well, just as a heterosexual has to renounce marriage with a woman, a homosexual would have to renounce sexual activity with men.  He would have to be celibate in his own way.  But the pope is not considering two kinds of celibacy, one for homosexuals, and another for heterosexuals. He views celibacy in relation to marriage,  and marriage of course between a man and a woman. He continues: “It would be extremely dangerous if celibacy became a sort of pretext for bringing people into the priesthood who don’t want to get married anyway.”  That makes sense to me. Being a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom does mean giving up marriage to a woman, and more than that. It means more than being a bachelor who wears a clerical collar. It means being fruitful and multiplying the sons and daughters of God in the new family his Son has established, the Church.  I interpret the pope as meaning that the refusal of, or indifference to, spiritual fatherhood is the big problem. If a man is not interested in sacrificing being a father through marriage to a woman  for the sake spiritual fatherhood, he should not be a priest.  There are certainly bachelor heterosexual priests who are not interested in spiritual fatherhood, only in the priesthood as a career or a profession. But, ultimately, spiritual fatherhood is the natural responsibility of every male no matter what he labels himself, nor what his state in life. Without spiritual fatherhood, even if he is called to be single,  he is a “barren fig tree” or a “dead branch.”

How does a man usually mature as a man, or grow and develop into his potential as a male?   Usually by getting married to a woman, having a wife and children, by working hard to earn a living, by living for the family he has, giving himself for them, raising the children, and leaving sons and daughters behind him.  If all a man had to do was impregnate a woman and then disappear, fatherhood would be easily accomplished. But a male becomes more of a man by being a husband and father, or to say it more simply,  by fathering. Celibacy is a huge sacrifice since everything in a man is directed to finding fulfillment in and through a woman, the children, and the family he will establish with her. Fathering is his natural reason for being. The responsibility he accepts in marriage is what gets him out of bed in the morning and keeps him going. If a man has no desire for a woman and no desire to marry, and therefore becomes a priest, his renunciation of marriage is no renunciation at all. By becoming a priest he embraces fathering in a different form.

Pope Benedict continues:  “The Congregation of Education issued a decision a few years ago to the effect that homosexual candidates cannot become priests because their sexual orientation estranges them from the proper sense of paternity, from the intrinsic nature of priestly being. The selection of candidates to the priesthood must therefore be very careful. The greatest attention is needed here in order to prevent the intrusion of this kind of ambiguity and to head off a situation where the celibacy of priests would practically end up being identified with the tendency to homosexuality.”

Of course the “greatest attention is needed”, but I am afraid that no amount of care and attention that can completely eliminate the problem.  When it comes to psycho-sexual identity, there are as many possible scenarios as there are individuals, because every person’s psycho-sexual development has its own pace. Same sex attraction may be discovered during adolescence, before or after entry into the seminary, as well as before or after ordination to the priesthood. There are no absolutely perfect protocols, nor any foolproof procedures. The basic issue, I believe, is to face that same sex attraction is a disorder and to deal with it in a healthy way, instead of presuming, as our culture does, that homosexuality is normal and natural, and that the gay life style is as valid an option as marriage or the single life.

Here in the Northeast and East Coast, it may be already too late to head off the situation the pope speaks of,  “where celibacy would….end up being identified with homosexuality”. Maybe it is different in some parts of the South, and in the West, and Midwest, where I am told the Church is much stronger. I doubt the situation is different on the West Coast, however. It may even be worse out there, for all I know. Perhaps demographers and sociologists can explain how our culture and values vary according to geographical location here in the United states. Maybe the situation is to fluid for any national snapshot to be taken.

Some concluding thoughts on "same sex attraction" occur to me in light of Pope Benedict’s resignation and the election of Pope Francis, which I hope to use as the basis of the next posting on this topic. I do not see the term “same sex attraction” in the writing, nor in their conversations of either pope. As far as I can tell they both use the word “homosexual” and “gay" interchangeably.  Here in the United States a distinction between the two is made. A man who struggles with same sex attraction is said to be “homosexual” whereas only those who “come out” and embrace the gay life style with its culture, are classified as “gay”.  I think this is an important distinction to make. Doing so would contradict the popular assumption that “gays are born that way” and also help explain how  a good number of men who suffer from same sex attraction successfully deal with the disorder, and  go on to successfully  become fathers in the sacrament of marriage, or spiritual fathers the priesthood. Some, I daresay have even been canonized saints.

Pope Benedict on Homosexuality: Part One

       The book Light of the World consists of a series of broad ranging conversations between  Pope Benedict XVI  and Peter Seewald. It's about various controversial issues affecting Church and World. In Chapter 14, titled "Overdue Reforms ?", Seewald  quotes two statements from the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding homosexuality, and then asks Pope Benedict if these two views in the Catechism are not contradictory. 

      Here is Seewald's first quotation:...the number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible...They must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives.  The Catechism calls us to treat homosexuals with the respect and acceptance that is their due, simply because they (and we) are human beings. Then comes the second statement: Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as great depravity, tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.  Here the Catechism clearly says that homosexuality is not a "natural" or "normal" way for human beings to act, and in fact is a disorder, so much of a disorder ("intrinsically") that there is no way to justify homosexual acts or make them right. So Seewald asks: "Doesn't the second statement somewhat contradict the respect for homosexuals expressed in the first one"?

         Seewald seems to be asking how can you accept and respect a person (first quotation) if you think what he/she is doing is wrong, sinful, seriously disordered, and  in fact, a great depravity (second quotation). Worth asking, no? When I find a person's actions to be deeply repugnant,  my feeling of repugnance usually extends itself automatically to the person as well.  Seewald's question, however, is not  phrased in a way that is emotionally charged. He keeps the question theoretical: "Is not one perspective incompatible with the other? Here's Pope Benedict's answer to that question: "No." Well, that is both clear and blunt; no hedging or qualifying, just a straight out negative. He goes on to explain: "It is one thing to say that they are human beings with their problems and their joys, that as human beings they deserve respect, even though they have this inclination, and must not be discriminated against because of it. Respect for man is absolutely fundamental and decisive."

             I love that explanation. We human beings are concrete, specific individuals, not theoretical constructs, and the pope recognizes that fact.  He tells us that every human being deserves to be accepted and respected simply because he/she is, i.e. exists! The pope offers more than a theoretical answer, because both acceptance and respect involve our real feelings and actual emotions towards concrete people. He is pointing out that our value as  humans doesn't begin with our activity or productivity, but springs simply from being. We have no right to reject or despise any member of the human race since our very existence is good. That makes sense to me. A newborn baby doesn't just need love,  it has a right to love, and a right to demand it. What's the basis of that right? The newborn's very existence. If my, or our, worth depended on actual accomplishments, very few of us would be worth anything at all. An embryo, a fetus, an unborn baby, even a new-born,  would be worth nothing. Acceptance of  and respect for one another on the very basis of our common existence, is the decisive starting point for all of our interactions with one another. 

        The pope continues his train of thought: "At the same time though, sexuality has an intrinsic meaning and direction, which is not homosexual." This is the affirmative thrust his"No" leads to. Sexuality has a positive meaning and direction which we do not arbitrarily assign but has been built into the structure of sexuality. That is his second point, which he builds on the foundation block of his first statement. The reason why he can disagree with, and disapprove of, homosexual activity even though he has a very real acceptance of, and respect for, homosexuals as human beings is congruent with the meaning and direction he sees in sexuality. In fact, it is out of respect and acceptance for homosexuals that the pope affirms an obvious truth and says that homosexuality is a disorder. Since homosexuality is itself disordered,  both  the acceptance of, and respect for, anyone who calls himself homosexual require that this truth be made clear. Indeed, why would you lie to someone you accept and respect, no matter what the disorder? Presumably, the more serious the disorder, the greater the need to face the truth instead of colluding with an illusion or a deception. 

        Since the fall into original sin,  our human nature itself is in a state of disorder. The disorder in us begins when we do. The Creator made us male and female, as the Scriptures say. (True, God made us without any disorder originally, but a look in the mirror, and a look around us at the world we live in, both  provide objective proof that Adam and Eve have passed on to us the skewed human nature they acquired by sinning. This is not surprising, for how could they pass on anything else?)   Men are disordered, women are disordered, and so are our male-female relationships.  As individuals and as couples, we will never be  a complete whole, because both our individual wholeness, and the wholeness that comes from our  male/female relationships, does not start off in right relation to God. We carry that disorder into all we do, and all we develop into,  as we journey through life. 

 

    Our basic disorder cannot be overcome by our own efforts. Because of the Fall, we have no way to stand outside ourselves and evaluate ourselves objectively. The righting of our relation to God occurs by his grace and mercy working in us. But God does not work in us without us, i.e. without our asking him to, and asking freely and profoundly. This asking is not merely a matter of choosing Option A instead of equally valid Option B, but desperate begging. Our asking is "de profundis", a need born of the misery we find ourselves in. Only the Creator who mercifully sustains us even as he lets us experience our interior disorder can put us in right relation to himself. 

   

     Why not simply view homosexuality as one more disorder among the countless others, and let it go at that? Because sexuality is foundational. Sexuality affects the very ground of our being. Our sexuality with its male-female components, constitutes the core of who we are. Certainly  many disorders abound in us, and they are all interrelated,  but since our core being is disordered, so are our perceptions of our selves, and our perceptions of our relationships. Our disordered core-being is male/female, masculine and feminine, two halves of the whole each of us is,  even though one half predominates.   I am not equally half man and half woman, but a male with both masculine and feminine qualities, or a female with both masculine and feminine qualities. How the two halves become more or less integrated, or  or become more out of balance,  in any person male or female, is and remains mystery. 

      To call this process mysterious is not an attempt to escape its complexity, but to respect it. Science should study the phenomenon of attraction and sexual identity, and discover all it can about it: same sex attraction, other sex attraction, or attraction to both sexes. No matter how thoroughly science explores all the other related causes of homosexuality, I do not believe it will never be able to find one that is primary. Science will, I believe, learn more and more about the specific causes it studies. But the danger, I believe, in learning more and more about specific causes is that we also move further and further away from ever getting around to see how all the causes interrelate. The presence or absence of a certain gene, the help or harm from mother or father during early in childhood, or is the result of the psychic wound because of abuse,  the predisposition we have in us because of our genetic structure, the influence of our formation and schooling, society and culture,  etc., can all be studied ad nauseam.  An either-or explanation will never be sufficient, and no amount of studies will ever be complete or definitive. Even if all finite factors could be exhaustively studied and comprehensively understood,  science has no instruments to measure free will and grace. Both are impenetrable to the scientific eye. This does not prevent science from striving to learn all it can about the causes it can measure, but  should serve to increase science's appreciation of the mystery we are.

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        Our Creator is a Father who loves us even when he does not approve of us.   So acceptance of others by us never means denial of any disorder, nor does it presume any who accept us think we are free from disorder!  Nor does acceptance mean approval of the activity that a disorder  provokes. Disorders are counter-productive, and end up being harmful to the self as well as to others. Acceptance and respect should be the starting point from which the person with any disorder is to be related to and dealt with, by family, friends and neighbors, doctors and lawyers, social workers and therapists, prison guards and or parole officers, etc. But the strange thing in our society and elsewhere is that homosexuality is no longer recognized as a disorder. Why is that? Why is gayness is mainstreamed, normalized, and legalized as an alternative life-style? I suppose one reason is that,  over time, we can be brainwashed and socially conditioned to see the abnormal as normal. Bombardment through the media, training in the schools, political lobbying, legislation, and cultural pressure has succeeded in making commonplace what was startlingly odd in society not so long ago.

       But Pope Benedict has not lost track of the true nature of sexuality He, Benedict, continues: "We could say, if we wanted to put it like this, that evolution has brought forth sexuality for the purpose of reproducing the species." By appealing to Evolution, which science sees as free from the taint of Religion,  he is able to point out what science has loss sight of, or refuses to respect: namely that sexuality is geared by its nature to reproduction. Any honest scientist who deals with plants,animals, humans, or genes and cell structure would have to agree with that observation.  Even an atheist who was a scientist has to admit this. Only then does he introduces Religion: "The same thing is true from a theological point of view as well. The meaning and direction of sexuality is to bring about the union of man and woman and in this way, to give humanity posterity, children, a future. This is the determination internal to the determination of sexuality. Everything else is against sexuality's intrinsic meaning and direction. This is a point we need to hold firm, even if it is not pleasing to our age."  Posterity, children, and future generations: it is so obvious that these are intrinsic to the meaning and direction  of sexuality, that it should not even have to be stated. How would our ancestors of long ago ever have gotten beyond  mere rutting, if that was all nature had designed them to do?  

For the Fun of It: Discussing Friendship with C.S Lewis (Part One)

I have been reading  The Four Loves by C.S.Lewis, and conversing with the text as I go along. The topic is Friendship. M stands for me, and CSL for the great master himself. CSL's remarks are in quotation marks, because I am getting them directly from the text. I plead guilty for placing what he says in the context of my questions and comments, but I do not think I do violence to his meaning or intent.

M: I know friendship is downplayed today, and I was wondering, was it like that in the old days too? 

CSL: "To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it."

M: So, how did this seismic shift regarding friendship take place? If it was so esteemed in the old days, why is it so unappreciated today?

CSL: "The first and most obvious answer is that few value it because few experience it."

M: How can you say that? Today more and more people have tons and tons of friends. When I get online for example, I can get connected to friends all over the world by email and/or Facebook. And even off-line, I can be talking to or texting some friend or other all day long on my cell phone. Friendship seems to be more omnipresent and appreciated than ever before. Don't we have a natural hunger for friendship which, as human beings, moves us to connect to other human beings? It seems to me that friendship is a basic, natural instinct hardwired into our make-up. Isn't friendship as natural to us as breathing and loving?

CSL: "Friendship is...the least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious, and necessary. It has least commerce with our nerves; there is nothing throaty about it; nothing that quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale. It is essentially between individuals; the moment two men are friends they have to some degree drawn together from the herd. 

M:  That's astounding. Are you telling me that erotic love is more basic than friendship? That Eros is more elementary than friendship? That friendship is not erotic? What about affection? Isn't affection basic to our human nature? Isn't affection also part of friendship? Doesn't Eros always enter into affection? Aren't Eros and affection always mixed together, and aren't both always a part of friendship?

CSL: "Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship. The species, biologically speaking, has no need of it." 

M: I'm not used to thinking about Eros, affection, and friendship in a way that distinguishes them so clearly from one another. But I think I see what you mean. Eros used to be enough to ensure propagation of the species. Affection used to get us through the trials of raising children.  So friendship didn't necessarily have to enter the picture. Still, I don't understand why you think most people today are not eager for friendship or open to it. The way you talk about it, I'm tempted to believe you see us moderns as closed to friendship.

 

CSL: "The pack or herd - the community- may even dislike and distrust it. Its leaders very often do. Headmasters and Head mistresses and heads of religious communities, colonels and ships captains, can feel uneasy when close and strong friendships  rise between little knots of their subjects."

M: But why? Why do moderns object to friendship whereas the Ancients valued it? Why do we set more of a store on Eros and affection, whereas the Ancients thought friendship was higher or more noble?

CSL: The "(so to call it) 'non-natural' quality in Friendship goes far to explain why it was exalted in ancient and medieval times and has come to be made light of in our own. The deepest and most permanent thought of those ages was ascetic and world-renouncing. Nature and emotion and the body were feared as dangers to our souls, or despised as degradations of our human status. Inevitably that sort of life was most prized which seemed most independent, or even defiant of mere nature.  Affection and Eros were too obviously connected with our nerves, too obviously shared with the brutes. You could feel these tugging at your guts and fluttering in your diaphragm. But in Friendship - in that luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen- you got away from all that. This alone of all the loves, seemed to raise you to the level of gods or angels."

M: That's a marvelous way to put friendship into words: "the luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen." It makes me think of the knights of the round table discussing the best way to defend Camelot, or writers discussing their craft, or even a few research scientists planning how to develop a cure for a life threatening disease. They can be cool and collected, or aroused and passionate, in their discussion, but no matter how hot and heavy the discussion becomes, the group keeps it rational and level-headed searching for the answer that will illuminate their way to a good course of action.

 You know, just saying that makes me realize that I do think we are too self-absorbed to have many real friendships today, and to sense you may be right after all, when you say the old timers were more capable of friendship than we are.  What happened after the age of friendship to produce the age of sentiment, if I can put it that way?

CSL: "Then came Romanticism and "tearful comedy" and the "return to nature' and the exaltation of sentiment; and in their train all that great wallow of emotion which, although often criticized, has lasted ever since. Finally the exaltation of instinct, the dark gods in the blood; whose hierophants may be incapable of male friendship. Under this new dispensation all that had once commanded this love now began to work against it..."

M: Excuse me. I hate to interrupt, but I have to grab my dictionary and look up that word hierophant. As a modern, I am not as literate as your generation was... Okay , got it. Please, go ahead. You were explaining how we humans began to prize feelings and instinctual drives over and above reason and intelligence, how that tendency took over our culture and today predominates in most places.

CSL: "....that outlook which values the collective above the individual necessarily disparages Friendship; it is a relation between men at their highest level of  individuality. It withdraws men from collective togetherness as surely as solitude could do; and more dangerously, for it withdraws them by two's and three's. Some forms of democratic sentiment are naturally hostile to it because it is selective and an affair of a few. To say 'These are my friends' implies 'Those are not'. For all these reasons, if a man believes as I do, that the old estimate of friendship is the correct one, he can hardly write a chapter on it except as a rehabilitation. "

M: So friends don't necessarily adopt the party-line or engage in the group-think that the current ideology may seek to blanket society with? Friendship calls us to stand apart and speak the truth to each other, even when such an activity may be unpopular?Am I understanding you correctly? Is that why men seems to have less friends than women? Because women open up and communicate what they are thinking and feeling, but men today hesitate to do that with each other? Do you think I'm right when I say men have less friends than women?

CSL: "This imposes on me at the outset a very tiresome bit of demolition. It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual."

 

M:  Do you think men in this era are afraid of friendship because they think it  has a trace of homosexuality in it?

CSL: "The dangerous word really is here important.To say that every friendship is consciously and explicitly homosexual would be too obviously false; the wise acres take refuge in the less palpable charge that it is really - unconsciously, cryptically, in some Pickwickian sense - homosexual. And this, though it cannot be proved, can never be refuted. The fact that no positive evidence of homosexuality can be discovered in the behavior of two Friends does not disconcert the wiseacres at all: 'That', they say gravely, 'is just what we should expect.' The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden. Yes,- if it exists at all. But we must first prove its existence. Otherwise we are arguing like a man who should say 'If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it.' "

M: I can't wait to see where you are headed with this line of thinking.  I"m looking forward to picking up your book tomorrow. 

The Four Loves,  C.S.Lewis, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanich  pp.87-91

Celibacy Equals Homosexuality?

We have to "head off a situation", Pope Benedict said, where "the celibacy of priests would practically end up being identified with the tendency to homosexuality". That's how my (two paragraph) quotation of his statement ends. That conclusion, however, is not a  a resting place for me or for us, but a point of departure. He sets out for us the problem he is struggling with, and with which our minds and hearts are to grapple.  But what precisely is the problem he is pointing to? Why would celibacy end up being equated with homosexuality?  How could that happen? Who would be doing the equating, and why are they  arriving at that conclusion? 

A possible answer to the question: They are the public, or at least that part of the public who come into contact with priests, and form impressions of what they see. That means they are mainly (but not exclusively) Catholics, and mainly churchgoing Catholics at that. What would make regular, churchgoing Catholics (the few of them left) start to identify the "celibacy of priests" with "the tendency to homosexuality"? The logical answer is: seeing priests whom they think are homosexual, whether they are or not.  

That clause, whether they are or not, is somewhat important. I can be heterosexual, yet appear to others as homosexual.  Or, I can be homosexual and still appear to others as heterosexual. It is not just a matter of what I am, but of what people perceive me to be. Generally, perceptions are accurate.

But perception is not infallibly in touch with the truth of things in every instance. At times my perceptions tell me more about myself than they do about what is really out there.  We assume our perceptions are correct unless we have good reason to question or doubt them. I suppose people would only start equating celibacy with the tendency to homosexuality when they start seeing a number of priests who strike them as homosexual. Not just seeing one or two, now and then, but seeing a lot of them, a multiplicity. If that happens, they would begin to think it is a normal state of affairs among the Catholic clergy. 

It's not helpful to waste a lot of time trying to discovering who is and who isn't homosexual, nor to puzzle over my mis-perceptions, and discover their causes. Why not? Much depends on each human being's personal history, of which sexual preferences are a part: my family, culture, education, experiences, past and present choices, plus the imponderable element of God's grace and my response to it. If I am  am mystery to me (and I am), how can I presume to have an accurate perception of you, since you are definitely a mystery too? Anyway, even if perceptions are generally accurate, and mis-perceptions were correctly addressed by each one of us, the result would be...what?  The one Pope Benedict arrived at: To think that these men were priests because they were not attracted to the female of the species but to the male. 

Since this is a concern of the pope, it is fair to assume he thinks that such a general perception is not just a dangerous possibility, but a probability. Any guesses on the likely  countries he thinks that such a conclusion about the clergy is taking place?   What would you say are the top three countries? Would the United States win, place or show?

Pope Benedict on Homosexuality

"Homosexuality is incompatible with the priestly vocation. Otherwise celibacy itself would lose its meaning as a renunciation.It would be extremely dangerous if celibacy became a sort of pretext for bringing people into priesthood who don't want to get married anyway. For, in the end, their attitude toward man and woman is somehow distorted, off center, and in any case, is not within the direction of creation of which we have spoken.

The Congregation for Education issued a decision a few years ago to the effect that homosexual candidates cannot become priests because their sexual orientation estranges them from the proper sense of paternity, from the intrinsic nature of priestly being. The selection of candidates to the priesthood must therefore be very careful. The greatest attention is needed here in order to prevent the intrusion of this kind of ambiguity and to head off a situation where the celibacy of priests would practically end up being identified with the tendency to homosexuality."

Light of the World, Benedict XVI, 2010  pp. 152, 153  Ignatius Press