Gay Sensibilities and High Mass

Andrew Sullivan recently commented on the natural connection between Catholic estethics and the sensory sorts of things that gay men (whether by nature or by social conditioning) appreciate.

I’ve often wondered how many straight Catholics fully appreciate how gay their church has always been. Especially in the old days. High Mass was, in its heyday, more elaborate and choreographed than a very melodramatic Broadway musical.

There was some negative reaction to this comment, along the lines of, “How superficial! To think that some people only go to church for the entertainment value!” That’s not what Sullivan is saying.  The point he’s making, and one that I try to make here, is that Catholicism has a fundamentally sensual approach to reality. And gays pay close attention to those sensory things, which makes for a lot of natural overlap.

If God really did become man and take our flesh to Himself, and even keep it after He ascended to His Father, then we need to take fleshly things (imagery, sound, smells, texture) seriously, especially in our religion. That doesn’t mean that High Mass is a sussed-up spiritual drag show or grand opera with crucifixes, even if it ought to be pressing some of the same buttons.

Blessed Feastday of St. Sebastian

Today is the yearly celebration of the martyr St. Sebastian.

Trade Your Baby for a PS3

Oh, those wacky heterosexuals! FOX News reports on a revealing gag:

Yesterday on KDWB-FM’s morning radio show, host Dave Ryan asked his listeners if they would be willing to give up their baby for 24 hours in exchange for the new PS3. To his shock the radio station was flooded with calls from listeners willing to make the trade!

Ryan says the question was meant as a gag, and couldn’t believe so many people were “lined up to turn their kids over to strangers!”

Some callers played along with the joke but about three quarters of the listeners calling in were dead serious about offering up their children.

Good thing that gays can’t adopt. God knows, traditional straight families are the only way to keep our children safe! (Link found at Musing Minds.)

Keeping the Faith

There’s a fairly good article in the Washington Blade on the American bishops’ gay outreach guidelines and the challenges of being both Catholic and gay. Most of the commentary is predictably from the leftish side of the argument, as the more conservative gay Catholics are probably not lining up to be interviewed by the Blade. This comment was really good, although it probably needs a few nuances:

One significant question for Catholics who remain active in the church’s gay ministries is how they reconcile their sexual orientation with the church’s teachings on the matter.

“I know what the church, the hierarchy, the people way up at the top are saying, but for myself it’s a personal issue with me and God,” Silva says about why he chooses to remain a practicing Catholic. “It has nothing to do with what the cardinal, the Pope, the bishops say.”

When he read about the bishops’ plan to vote on the gay ministry document, Silva was dismayed. But placing it in the context of other church teachings on sex, it didn’t seem so harmful, he said.

“They tell straight people not to have sex … without getting married,” Silva says. Discussing the matter is a step in the advancement of gay rights within the church, he says. “It’s a start, it’s a sort of waking up.”

A lot of more secular gays think, as the article’s author does, that the dissonance is between Church teaching and our orientation. The dissonance is really more between the teachings and our sexual choices. The Silva fellow hits on that, pointing out that there is plenty of dissonance between Church teachings and the sexual choices of most straight Catholics. In that context (the bishops also repeated Church teaching against contraception in the same meeting as they discussed ministry to gays), it’s not so much about condemnation as it is about holding up a sexual ideal that society has pretty much rejected, rightly or wrongly. Straight Catholics who are all homophobic need to realize that the Church (for many of the same reasons) also rejects a guy sleeping with his girlfriend, a single man practicing the “solitary vice,” a wife going down on her husband, a married couple using the pill, or a divorced man remarrying while his ex-wife is still alive. Gays aren’t being singled out. If it seems like that, then I think it’s more about homophobia than Church teaching as such.

Another thought occurs from the above selection. Yes, there’s a difference between my faith in God and the things that the Pope and cardinals say, but that doesn’t mean the two don’t have anything to do with each other. Even if they are wrong sometimes or ignorant, they’re still the main teachers of the faith I have. Even if I listen to them with a critical ear (in the good sense), I still ought to listen. Then, weighing their words against what I know from scripture, tradition, and solid theology, my conscience may accept or reject what they are saying, but it’s got to be more than just a knee-jerk reaction. And that goes not just for gay sex, but for straight couples and their contraceptives, too.

Bishops’ Guidelines for Pastoral Ministry to Gays and Lesbians

What about the Bishops’ Conference’s new guidlines for gay and lesbian ministry? Everyone seems to be all worked out about them.  On right-wing blogs and news sites, people are accusing the bishops of betraying Truth (always with capital letters), of soft-pedalling sin, and of capitulating to The Gays. Some of the nervous nellies are even claiming that — gasp — this document is worse than Always Our Children (being part of the Vast Homosexual Conspiracy, I predictably like AOC). Presumably, that’s because the document begins by reiterating Catechism teaching that gays and lesbians have human dignity, too, presumes that sexual orientation is neither a choice nor generally changeable, does not endorse “reparative therapy” pseudo-science, and does not wallow in excessive verbiage about how twisted, warped, and evil we are.

On the other side of the fence, gay activists are making lots of noise about the same document being hateful, homophobic, etc. Presumably that is because this national document doesn’t reject the teaching of the world-wide Church, because it reiterates (in much more careful and considerate language) what the Church has been teaching all along, and because it repeats the standard discipline that if a person has engaged in what the Church considers serious sexual sin (of whatever sort), then confession is necessary before receiving the Eucharist. In other news, the sky is still blue. One valid criticism, I think, is the way the document discourages people coming out: on that, more in a bit.

The document seems very balanced to me. In 25 pages, it sets out a framework of what a ministry should look like if it (a) sets out to help gay Christians in our particular struggles to follow Christ and (b) intends to bill itself as a Catholic ministry. What follows is a listing of the various topics covered by the document, with my own comments on each section.

Repression and the Male Sex Drive

*Christopher has written a very thoughtful post on the nature of male sexuality (of both the gay and straight varieties) and the need for elucidating first principles that lead to healthy integration, rather than self-destructive and compulsive “acting out.” I’m not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, but I think he has hit the problem in the bull’s eye. Whether or not one comes to quite the same conclusions, I think *Christopher points us all on the right track in terms of where the solutions lie.

Interesting St. Sebastian Site

I came across this blog dedicated to our patron saint, Sebastian. Lots of neat information.

His Secret

The guy at This Gay Christian’s Blog has a funny snippet from AlterBoyz the Musical, about identities that not everyone approves of:

“I look into your eyes, and I see the pain you hold inside,

Aren’t you tired of the lies you tell so you can hide?

(What if my friends don’t accept me?) I know…

(What if my parents reject me?) I know!

But you won’t truly be you, until you can saaayy…

I,

am,

a Catholic! ….

It reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip, “My position is curious: I am not a Catholic: I am simply a violent Papist.” Of course, he eventually went on to become a Catholic, to boot.

Gay Adoptions and the Catholic Church

Here’s an interesting article in The Tablet on a Catholic adoption agency sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, Catholic adoption agencies have seen that sometimes it’s in the best interest of a child to place him or her with a gay couple and have quietly been doing so for some time now. On the other hand, the Vatican has reasserted that the ideal is for a child to be placed with a man and woman in a traditional marriage, and that gay partnerships are so far from that ideal that Catholics (and, a fortiori, Catholic agencies) ought to oppose gay adoption. Adding to the dilemma is the insistence of certain governments that an agency either does not discriminate regarding sexual orientation, or gets out of the adoption business altogether.

The Boston Archdiocese’s pullout has gotten the most notice. But the Archdiocese of San Francisco makes for an interesting contrast. There, the letter of the law is being followed, with the Archdiocese no longer placing any children for adoption since it can no longer place with homosexual couples, but the Church is nevertheless “loaning” employees to do basically the same work with another non-profit group that does occasionally place children with gays and lesbians.

It seems logical to me that children would do best in a loving, Catholic family with a Mom and Dad and other siblings. But sometimes that sort of family is not available for a particular child, particularly if the child has special needs. Surely it’s better to place a kid with a loving, responsible same-sex couple than to let him be tossed around from foster home to foster home until he turns 18.

Certainly, what matters most is the welfare of the child, and not the wishes of the would-be parents. But there are no data to support the notion that kids of gay couples turn out any better or worse than kids of straight couples, all else being equal. So, even if one agrees with the Vatican that the best thing would be to place the kids with a man and wife, sometimes the best available option is to place them with homosexuals. Really, if I were a Catholic adoption agent, I would be more worried about the religion of the prospective parents than about their sexual orientation.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

One of the greatest artists in human history, and one of the leading lights of the Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarroti was also a man who understood the Catholic attraction to the beauty of the human form, a beauty in which God deigned to clothe Himself in the Incarnation.

It’s hard to imagine a modern artist being paid by the Pope to decorate a church with the vibrant nudes that Michelangelo used for the Sistine Chapel. Or of any esteemed Catholic artist today who would fashion a crucifix with a naked Christ. Or so daringly combine the strength of devotion with the strength of the unveiled male body. Michelangelo did it all.

In spite of the opposition to this glorying in the human form, Michelangelo is but one representative of an authentic current of Catholic esthetics that figures that if God has created man’s body as good and that if Christ has glorified that by His own coming as man, then art is free to use that form to glorify God, even in ways that aren’t explicitly “religious,” as we see in some of the “merely” decorative nudes that Michelangelo uses in the Sistina. Indeed, if man in his body and soul is truly the culmination of God’s creation, then he becomes the most fitting creature to be represented by art.

The artist’s own sexuality gave him a particular insight into the beauty of the male form and a sensitivity to its beauty. This perhaps was a gift that allowed him to offer his particularly vigorous art to God’s glory and for the building-up of the generations that have come after him.

That peculiar (queer?) viewpoint comes through also in some of his written art, the exquisite sonnets that he composed. This page discusses his sexuality, as seen through certain of his sonnets.

It’s too bad that our own culture, warped perhaps by mutant strains of Calvinist Puritanism (both of the religious and non-religious sorts), equates human flesh with nothing but lust. The old Catholic genius, rooted in Christ’s own flesh, saw the body as an expression of God’s glory, and the erotic as one of the most vivid metaphors for the overpowering presence of the Divine.