A rchive Date
[ 05-01-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Religion ]
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[What makes Catholic Church attractive to gay men?
BY MARK D. JORDAN
May 3, 2002, 4:49PM
When American cardinals met with the pope in Rome, our attention was directed to a policy for dealing with priests who abuse minors sexually. Should it be a policy of "zero tolerance"? Should it distinguish between pedophilia strictly speaking and consensual sex with adolescents just under legal age? Would it apply retroactively?
The cardinals, apparently unable to agree among themselves, must carry these questions to the meeting of American Catholic bishops scheduled for June in Dallas. It would be a good thing for the bishops to agree on a strict and enforceable national policy.
But what many Americans are calling the "crisis" of the Roman Catholic Church won't be settled by an administrative proposal on the single issue of sexual abuse. The crisis is a big bundle of old questions about priestly sexuality and systems of Roman authority.
Many church officers, here and in the Vatican, want to keep the larger questions out of the discussion, in particular the volatile question of priestly homosexuality. There's an irony here. In recent months, some church voices have tried to blame pedophilia on homosexuality.
The pope's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, suggested a few weeks back that the cause of the scandals was too many homosexuals in the priesthood. Gay men shouldn't be priests, he claimed, and then wondered aloud whether they could even be validly ordained. Let's bring that spin full circle.
Making gay priests scapegoats for pedophilia raises the forbidden question: Just what is the role of homosexuality in Catholic priestly life? Or in Catholic symbolism as a whole?
Before the latest scandal began, Catholic bishops didn't often talk in public about homosexuals in the priesthood. When pushed, they might admit that there were a few of "them" -- perhaps "2 percent," certainly fewer per capita than in the general population. But in the middle of the cardinals' gathering, the president of the American bishops' conference found himself admitting that there is "an ongoing struggle" to ensure that the priesthood "is not dominated by homosexual men." "Dominate" is the striking word.
Maybe Bishop Wilton Gregory meant to say that homosexuals tend to "predominate" in the priesthood, threatening to outnumber heterosexuals (assuming always that the two categories are exclusive and fixed). Some informed estimates do place the percentage of non-heterosexual priests in America at or above 50 percent. Anecdotes gay Catholics share with each other put the figure higher still.
Of course, the exact numerical "domination" of homosexual priests is unknowable and finally unimportant. It's much more important to ask: What makes the Catholic priesthood or religious life so attractive to gay men? Why makes it easy for them to "dominate" in it?
The beginning of an answer is that the Catholic church is and has long been both loudly homophobic and intensely homoerotic. Our public discussions of priestly sexuality won't make any progress until we can begin to talk about the homoeroticism written into Catholic imagination and its institutions. Gay friends who are not Catholic often ask how a gay man can remain in the church, which is, as they see it, one of the most dangerous enemies of gay civil rights in the United States. The puzzle is worse than they think. Some of us don't have the excuse of being born Catholic: Like myself, we converted. We were drawn to the church as much through our sexual orientation as through any other natural disposition. Converts or cradle Catholics, many gay believers further feel a strong calling to priesthood or religious life.
The call doesn't seem to deny same-sex desires; it seems instead to complete them. A vocation to the celibate, all-male priesthood is a grace. It is also a call to act out your manhood against social expectations, outside heterosexual marriage and in the company of other unmarried men. So I tell my friends that my sense of vocation to religious life gave me my first gay identity. Pious young men struggling with homoerotic desires are still attracted to seminaries and religious houses of study.
Why?
Because they are promised an exchange of their "disordered" identity as outsiders for a respected and powerful identity as an insider. Because they want to remain in the beautiful, sexually ambiguous space of the liturgy. Because they are drawn to public celebration of suffering that redeems. Because they want to live in as gay a world as the Catholic church offers. Male-male desire in Catholicism isn't confined to the priesthood or religious life, though it is certainly most intense there. The desire suffuses Catholic imagination. The sacramental theater of the Mass culminates when God becomes flesh again as the priest consecrates bread and wine. We believe it is the actual body of Jesus, back among us, invoked and guarded by an all-male priesthood. Images of the Catholic Jesus are its lesser manifestations.
The image-body hovers over churches and homes in graphic crucifixes, in prints of the Sacred Heart, in scourged statues of the Man of Sorrows. The body of Jesus is mirrored in the bodies of his saints, whose relics are venerated and whose martyrdoms or miracles take shape in church art. However puritanical it can sometimes seem, Roman Catholicism is Christianity not ashamed that God took flesh in a body with genitals.
For official theology and ancient liturgy, it matters that the body was a male. I emphasize the gender because male and female sexuality are assigned very different values within Catholicism. Women are still sufficiently disenfranchised within the official church to make lesbianism a separate issue when thinking through Catholic homoeroticism. I know by listening and from historical study that women's religious communities have provided important places in which to work out both lesbian desire and women's gifts for ministry.
Still, the power of the official Catholic Church remains in the hands of men, both literally and figuratively. Men rule over the church; men make the body of Jesus at Mass. So men's desires for men must be managed differently by the church than women's desires for women. Male-male desire is also protected by church structures in ways that female-female desire is not. A priestly discipline of silence keeps what happens inside from becoming notorious on the outside. Priests or religious who violate the rules for silence around homosexuality can be dealt with quite severely, perhaps especially by gay superiors who see their safety in keeping those rules.
But if a priest or religious is relatively discrete, if he keeps the rules for silence, then he can often expect a kind of protection. "Don't ask, don't tell" is an old churchly impulse. Much will be said this summer about new Catholic policies for pedophilia. Male homosexuality will be mentioned in them only if it can be blamed for sexual abuse of minors. Be sure that the policy spins won't touch the deeper questions about priestly sexuality or the church's homoeroticism.
The Roman Catholic Church entices us gay men to fall in love with it much before we ever consider its policies. We have long found a home in this church because many of its symbols and roles, its beauties and gifts, are so evidently our own.
Jordan is a professor in the religion department at Emory University in Atlanta and author of The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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