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.