Posted in December, 2008
Just when I think the Pope is going to advocate for the environment in his Christmas message, he uses it instead to deliver a shot at gay people as unnatural:
The Pontiff stated that while the Church needs to “defend the earth, water, air, as gifts of the creation that belongs to all of us [... ], it must also protect the human being from his own “destruction.”
“It is necessary that there be something such as an ecology of man, understood in the proper manner,” he said.
“It is not outmoded metaphysics,” Benedict XVI affirmed, “when Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected.”"The rain forests certainly deserve our protection, but man as creature indeed deserves no less,” he said.
“What is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender,’ is definitively resolved in the self-emancipation of the human being from creation and the Creator,” Benedict warned.
“Gender” as used in the pope’s address is broad enough to encompass anyone who doesn’t completely conform with their assigned sexual roles; including homosexuals, bisexuals, transgender and others.
Benedict XVI explained that great theologians have “qualified marriage, that is to say, the link for life between man and woman, as a sacrament of creation, instituted by the Creator.”
Both Michael Bayly in his post, “And a Merry Christmas to You, Too, Papa“; and Rose Marie Berger in her post, “Pope Goes Green and Straight for Christmas,” covered Benedict’s address and subsequent hullabaloo very well and I have nothing to add to their excellent commentary.
But after reading the pope’s remarks, this quirky little thought hatched in my brain: How “natural” is God? 
Did you notice that our “Creator”–always referred to by a male pronoun–doesn’t have a wife? Is that unnatural–compared to Zeus, Odin, Vishnu and other male god kings, all of whom had wives or female consorts?
Can you think of any figure outside of the Hebrew God that doesn’t have a mate, or engage in sex with one or both sexes as opportunities present themselves? I can’t. God has a wife, except for our God.
Other oddities:
St. Joseph, honored as the patron saint of fathers, husbands and children, didn’t “know” (i.e. have carnal knowlege) of his wife, the Virgin Mary, until she gave birth. Jesus’ “father” wasn’t his biological father at all, but is held up as the icon of fatherhood.
Can you think of one person in real life–especially in Italy–who gladly sticks with his wife when she’s pregnant by someone else?
Could the virgin birth of Jesus been the result of parthenogenesis? Virgin births have been confirmed in nature in sharks, insects, and certain types of fish.
Finally, the pope’s remarks raise other questions. How natural is enforced celibacy? If God impregnanted Mary without the use of a penis, how is the miracle of artificial insemination any different?
Finally, if human beings are made in the image of God, our deity is both male and female. How does that reckon with the strict gender definitions promoted by the Vatican?
I belong to a parish I adore. My pastor is a good man. I have a tremendous respect for him: his kindness, warmth and integrity. He makes everyone feel welcome and at home. You are happy to come to church every week.
The people of the community fit the same mold. It is a place where you strive, because you feel happy and loved, to live the values of the faith and try to do right every day.
But a situation came along this year to beckon me to live my faith in a prophetic way.
I recently made a commitment to be part of a community lead by a Roman Catholic Womanpriest. I am a little scared, but also very resolute in my commitment to my priest, her ministry and the community she is undertaking to bring to life. It is an honor for me to be part of this group.
The dual feelings of joy and apprehension are not new. It is worship on the shadow’s edge; gathering in discretion, hoping not to invite persecution at the hands of religious authorities, but understanding it is always a possibility.
The last time I experienced faith on the margins was in the early ’80s, when Dignity groups were tossed out of church facilities. Instead of going away quietly, gay Catholics found new moorings in liberal protestant churches and nondenominational facilities. Forced out of the gay ghetto, Dignity and CCL members expanded relationships with other reform and renewal-minded Catholics. There are now several hundred “gay-friendly”Roman Catholic parishes with supportive family and friends, and discreet, but out, gay and lesbian parishioners.
The priest of my new community was ordained in Boston on July 20, 2008. “The organization calling itself Roman Catholic Womanpriests is not recognized as an entity of the Catholic Church,” said Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston. “Catholics who attempt to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the women who attempt to receive a sacred order, are by their own actions separating themselves from the Church.” 
The Womenpriests organization says their ordinations are legitimate because Catholic bishops in good standing ordained their first members to become female priests and bishops. That means the women being ordained can claim apostolic succession, or direct descent from Jesus’ apostles.
“Why is Rome so upset about us? Because they know the ordinations are valid,” said Bridget Mary Meehan, the spokeswoman for Roman Catholic Womenpriests.
The organization has not released the name of the bishops it says ordained the first women priests and consecrated the first women bishops, saying they would face sanction by the Vatican, but says it will release the names once the male bishops die.
The Boston ordination ceremony was presided over by Dana Reynolds of California and Ida Raming of Germany.
“We know only too well in how many ways Vatican church leaders refuse to acknowledge the equality in Christ that God has established between men and women, and how they constantly try to reimpose the precedence of men over women, which is unchristian,” Bishop Raming said. “We give witness to the whole world that it is not male gender which is the prerequisite for a valid ordination, but faith and baptism, the foundation of our dignity and equality.”
“I’m feeling such joy, I could rise up,” said one of the newly ordained priests, Judith A.B. Lee, said in an interview after the ceremony. She pointed out that she was wearing a cross from Dignity, an organization of gay Catholics. “I am a priest for the poor and for those who live at the margins, and we deserve the full sacraments of the church,” she said.
The Wise still seek him… 
Merry Christmas! Nollaig shona dhibh beirt nuair a thagann si! (Happy Christmas when she comes) Joyeux Noel!
I would like to offer a personal holiday greeting and note of appreciation to all who have contributed to this blog in the last year. Your presence has helped to make it fun, lively, provocative and shared–which is all a person can ask of religion. Your comments have helped me to reflect, explore and reach out–growing in faith and mind. I can ask for no more. Thank you all. I will remember each of you with affection and gratitude at Christmas Eve Mass tonight.
A special thanks to my buddies, and the angels who sat on my shoulders this year as I wrote; including Thom, Michael Bayly, Benny the Bridgebuilder, justme, Christine, Nicole, Archangel, Katherine, Kansas City Catholic, Terry Weldon, Polo, eric, Mary Ellen, Ed Murphy and Christina Bumgardner.
Merry Christmas and joy, always,
Karen
Father Marty Kurylowicz, M.Div., M.S. is a Roman Catholic priest and clincial psychotherapist.
His blog, Fr. Marty Kurylowicz, was started to bring together factual data on human sexuality, beginning with Early Childhood Psychological Development, Growing up Gay and other related issues. The blog also provides an extensive list of links to national medical and mental health hospitals, institutes, professional associations and gay resources.
Recent posts cover the research of Dr. Sidney H. Phillips, whose work is significant in understanding the kind of harm caused to very young children who grow up to be gay and the effects it has for these children in their adult lives.
His studies, as well as those of Dr. Jack Drescher, Dr. Richard Isay and others bring to light the many problems and complications that children who grow up to be gay will encounter in their adult lives, when these children are raised in a social environment that has been influenced by harsh antigay social and religious norms. 
Fr. Kurylowicz’ ministry for children growing up gay began during Holy Week of 1997, when he told his parishioners, the people of Holy Family Catholic Church in Sparta, Michigan, that he was a celibate homosexual. At that time, Fr. Kurylowicz had served as pastor for 12 years. He had struggled for years with his homosexuality.
The announcement came shortly before he took an educational leave to study psychology at the University of Michigan and Madonna University. Then-Bishop Robert Rose took no action against Kurylowicz, saying his views were in line with Catholic teaching.
Because he grew up gay himself, Fr. Kurylowicz understood the kind of harm done to children when they come under the influence of social and religious norms that convey to be “gay” is socially unacceptable and evil.
Since then Kurylowicz has spoken out to raise awareness of violence against gays and teach others homosexuality is not a choice but inboard trait. Church leaders still don’t understand that and contribute to gays’ poor self-esteem, he said.
“Kids as young as 4 or 5 know they’re different,” said Kurylowicz, “they grow up with this pervasive guilt which sabotages their growth and motivation.” 
The church needs to discuss sexuality more candidly and heed Jesus’ teachings more closely, he said. “Jesus never said one word about homosexuality,” Kurylowicz said. “He said, ‘Be careful not to hurt one of these little ones of mine.’”
Justin Green is a comic artist who grew up in suburban Illinois in the 1950s and early ’60s. He is best known for his 1972 autobiographical comic, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. 
Green was the typical Catholic boy: hormones firing away to produce a continual barrage of random impure thoughts. But most of the nuns who taught during those decades were steeped in Jansenism – a rigid, puritanical Catholicsm with a heavy emphasis on the body as the source of sin, depravity and a shortcut to the pains of hell. ”Homo thoughts about Christ!! I better do some penance,” Binky chokes.
Green’s Catholicism was also influenced by his then undiagosed obsessive-complusive disorder.
Binky begins to develop an elaborate system of obsessions based on the fear that he will contaminate religious sites with his sexual thoughts. These “rays” come from his fingers, feet and of course, his penis. He takes extreme care to make sure a ray never crossed the path of a church, or intersected with anything sacred, especially statutes of Mary.
Green equated Catholicism with scrupulosity – a neurotic obsession about committing sin. At the time he drew the book Green did not know about his obsessive-complusive disorder and described his condition as neurosis, which he blamed largely on his Catholic upbringing.
But time has softened Green’s stance a little.
“I no longer consider myself to be a warrior against the church,” he said. “Here in Sacramento we have a very liberal church. They offered a weekly program for lapsed, embittered Catholics. I attended out of curiousity. I needed to thoroughly understand the dogma that I had rejected; I wanted my latest material to have a ring of authenticity.”
“From the lively discussions, I progressed to an experimental look at the Mass. The church is in transition. Like Surrealism, there is no ultimate version (though the far right of the church claims utter and inviolable orthodoxy, as always). There is too much baggage in the organization for me to return, though somewhere along the way I lost my righteous anger.”
“I came to see how the church provides a need that is very real and good for a lot of peoples’ lives. Jesus is not the sexual bogeyman. Many repressive doctrines have been grafted onto his teachings.”
“It has been hard for me to disentangle which are uniquely my own misconceptions and which are inherent in the institution,” he goes on. “According to the latest findings of behavior psychology, my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder would exist even if Iwere never exposed to Christianity. OCD gave me a unique vantage point, though; if I was able to address symbolic content that is hidden to most people, then the behavior disorder was a gift.”
As an older artist, Green has to some extent made his peace. He feels the church is not the same monlith it was in the 1950s. Voicing his concern that Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is a “sin of youth”–and his concern as a parent that some child might get a copy of it–he nevertheless says, “I hope to retain the quality of the voice, because it was done out of internal necessity.”
I’m curling up with a good book by the fireplace this Christmas: The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period. Written by Michael Goodich, the book was published in 1979.
I have often wondered why and when the church began to focus on sodomy as a sin so detestable it crystallized in the phrase “peccatum mutum” – the mute sin, the silent sin- the secret sin. What combination of people and events came together to ignite a centuries-long persecution of homosexuals by the church? Why did it start? What incident, situation, person or persons was the catalyst for the continuing cascade of religious persecution that began in the 11th century?
Three other books dealing with medieval gay history are also on my list to read: John E. Boswell’s two books – Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Christianity From the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (1980); Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (1995); and Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050-1230 (2004) by William Burgwinkle.
One major aim of his work, Dr. Boswell wrote, was “to rebut the common idea that religious belief–Christian or other–has been the cause of intolerance in regard to gay people.”
Dr. Goodich seems to have drawn the opposite conclusion.
In two 1976 articles in the Journal of Homosexuality, Michael Goodich briefly sketched the close connection between heresy and sodomy in 13th century secular and ecclesiastical law. His book, The Unmentionable Vice, elaborated that sketch into a full-scale study of homosexuality in Europe from the 11th to the early 14th century. Goodich posits it is during this period the Catholic Church consolidated its moral condemnation of homosexual activity.
Although the Council of Ancyra had treated sodomy as a crime as early as 314 A.D., at the beginning of the 11th century there was no uniform legislation on the subject. It seems to be been regarded primarily as a non-Christian vice.
But thereafter more and more attention was given to sexual conformity. Two treatises devoted to the denunciation of homosexuality, Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrah (1049) and Alan of Lille’s Complaint of Nature (ca 1165) were published during this period.
With the opening of the Fourth Latern Council (1215), “a more miltant, aggressive phase opened in the history of the Catholic Church,” Goodich writes. The penalities for conviction of sodomy continued to be strengthened, and the Inquisition was developed as a means of hunting down heretics and sodomites. The Domincian Order was to take an instrumental role in exterminating heresy and hunting down that “evil filth” (sodomites).
Although he was an Italian Renaissance figure, in the 1490s Dominican Girolamo Savonarola of Florence succeeded in declaring sodomy a capital offense punishable by death.
One of the interesting parts of Goodich’s book is the verbatim report of the trial for heresy and sodomy of Arnold of Verniolle in 1323. The distance between theoretical views and actual practice (sound familiar!) is shown by the apparent ease with which he met his partners.
By his own confession, Arnold committed sodomy with several young men, whose testimony is also included. Arnold was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment in chains, on a diet of bread and water.
What happened to him?
San Francisco’s archbishop has appealed to Catholics on both sides of the same-sex marriage issue to be civil to each other.
“We need to stop talking as if we are experts on the real motives of people with whom we have never even spoken. We need to stop hurling names like ‘bigot’ and ‘pervert’ at each other. And we need to stop it now,” he said. 
In a December 1, 2008 open letter that was posted on the Archdiocese of San Francisco’s website, http://sfarchdiocese.org, Archbishop George H. Niederauer said: “Tolerance, respect and trust are always two-way streets, and tolerance, respect and trust often do not include agreement or even approval. We need to be able to disagree without being disagreeable.”
He called on “churchgoers” to “speak and act out on the truth that all people are God’s children and are unconditionally loved by God.”
“Whoever they are, and whatever their circumstances, their spiritual and pastoral rights should be respected, together with their membership in the church,” he wrote. “In that spirit, with God’s grace and much prayer, perhaps we can all move forward together.”
Do ”intrinsic moral evil” and “objective disorder” qualify as uncivil, hurtful and mean-spirited terms good Catholics should take pains to avoid?
The Secrets (Ha-Sodot) follows two young students in an all-female seminary in Safed, Israel.
Desire, awareness, a need for fulfillment, and stretching religious tradition makes things as messy for them. This is a situation many Catholic lesbians, or feminist Catholic women, for that matter, can immediately identify with. It almost always leads to a crossroads, where either choice brings loss as well as new, fertile ground.
The heroine of The Secrets is Naomi, the brilliant, beautiful, and headstrong daughter of a revered Orthodox Israeli rabbi. The film begins with Naomi entreating her father to postpone her marriage to his sour, self-righteous protege so she can pursue her religious studies at a seminary for women in Safed, the birthplace of the Kabbalah. Her distant dream is to one day become the first female Orthodox rabbi in a culture in which men smugly dismiss women’s conversations as “idle chat.”
Naomi begins to change when she forms a friendship with Michelle, one of her roommates. A sullen, chain-smoking Parisian student, Michelle’s family sent her to the seminary for disciplinary reasons. The two students fall in love. 
When Michelle visits Naomi during the Jewish holidays the two friends become lovers. Naomi, consulting sacred texts, determines there is no law against lesbian love, that homosexuality is taboo only for men, who spill their seed.
Their passionate explorations in romance and religion eventually get them expelled from the seminary. Michelle also becomes torn between Naomi, and a kind-hearted man, a klezmer clarinetist.
Near the film’s end they drift apart–Michelle toward marriage and Naomi toward declaring her independence in a society dominated by men.
“This is a movie about desire,” one rabbi commented. “Frustrated desire. Fulfilled desire.”
See the movie trailer here.
A federal appeals court has permitted a lawsuit over alleged sexual abuse to proceed against the Vatican.
The ruling, issued on November 24, 2008 by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio, marks the first time a court at so high a level has recognized that the Vatican could be liable for negligance in the thousands of sex abuse cases in the U.S.
Sex abuse victims and their attorneys have long claimed that the church failed to report priests accused of sexual crimes and misconduct; and instead covered up the deeds to protect them.
Walking a fine line in recognition of Vatican sovereignty, the appeals court found that the Vatican may be responsible for policies or directives as they were carried out in the U.S., and may have affected how abuse complaints were handled.
One of the central pieces of evidence in the case was a 1962 memo, issued by the Vatican and unearthed by reporters in 2003, that directs Catholic bishops to keep silent about claims of sexual abuse. The document was approved by John XXIII.
“What the court has allowed us to do is proceed against the Vatican for the conduct of the U.S. bishops because of the bishops’ failure…to report child abuse,” said William F. McMurry, the attorney for three men who claim they were abused as children by priests in the Louisville, Kentucky archdiocese.
The November 24 ruling will allow the plaintiffs’ case to proceed in the U.S. District Court in Louisville. Among the legal questions to be decided in the case is whether U.S. bishops are employees of the Vatican, and whether they acted on the Holy See’s orders.
