Posted in category "Arts & Letters"
The Vatican has approved a study which concludes that men and women sin differently.
When commenting on a new book dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas’ teachings on the seven capital vices, Monseigneur Wojciech Giertych, personal theologian to Pope Benedict XVI, told Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that “there is no sexual equality when it comes to sin.” 
In the article, “The Unsuspecting Resources of Weakness,” Mgr. Giertych referred to his own anecdotal experience at the confessional, and said his insights were supported by an analysis of confessional data carried out by the Rev. Roberto Busa, a 96-year-old Jesuit priest. Fr. Busa is the author of Index Thomisticus, a complete lemmatization of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Mgr. Giertych asserts St. Thomas Aquinas taught that pride is humanity’s greatest enemy because it leads a person to believe he or she doesn’t need God and “hinders a person from having a relationship with God.” 
Lust and sins against chastity “are less dangerous because they are accompanied by a strong sense of humiliation and, as such, can be an occasion to return to God.”
Mgr. Giertych describes men’s sins as “difficult,” while women’s are described as “dangerous.”
“When one looks at capital sins not from the view of their opposition to grace but at the difficulty they create,” Mgr. Geirtych states, “it is clear that men experience them differently from women. For men, the most difficult to take on is lust, followed by gluttony, sloth, anger, pride, envy and avarice. For women, the most dangerous is pride, and then envy, anger, lust, gluttony and the last is slothfulness.”
A woman described as a founder of feminist theology has a different spin on sin and the sexes.
Valerie Saiving (married name – Goldstein), a religious studies teacher at Hobart and William Smith Colleges from 1959 to 1987, published an essay in 1960 in which she appeals for greater awareness of the ways in which concepts of masculinity and femininity shape the ways in which we experience sin. Her theories have been developed and refined by two generations of female scholars. 
In her article, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” she forms what can be called a feminine complaint against contemporary theologians who make the mistake, she believes, of assuming that a “thinking man’s theology is equally good for a thinking woman.”
The crux of Saiving’s argument is that the focus on pride–characteristic of traditional Christian interpretations of sin–reflects male experience in a way that is inappropriate to the experience of most, if not all, women.
A landmark in both feminism and religious studies, Saiving’s article was the first to insert gender in the study of religion. Within two months of its publication in the Journal of Religion, Time magazine ran a 700-word article on Saiving and her paper.
Read the Time article here.
I feel ashamed and very uneducated that I never heard of Valerie Saiving prior to researching this article. I’m grateful to have discovered her now. Her analysis was the starting point for the modern development of feminist theology. 20 years after her article, author and religious studies professor, Judith Plaskow, took up and developed Saiving’s analysis in Womenspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion.
I think it was intriguing for Mgr. Gierytch to partner with Fr. Roberta Busa, known for his usage of computers for literary and liturgical analysis. I was a little scandalized he used confessional data (I thought it was sacroscant?) and, the sampling was probably pretty small and select, since not that many people go to confession anymore, and most of the examples Mgr. Gierytech cites are nuns.
The hit HBO show “Mad Men” features a closeted homosexual. Salvatore Romano, the married Italian American art director at Sterling Company, has a crush on Ken Cosgrove, a young account executive at the agency climbing his way up the corporate ladder. 
In the first show of the series, ”Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Sal replies to Dr. Guttman’s statement about smoking and a death wish: “So we’re supposed to believe that people are living one way and secretly thinking the exact opposite? That’s ridiculous.” (Sound a little like the life a closeted person might lead?)
Sal married. His wife, Kitty, was a neighborhood girl in Baltimore, Sal’s hometown. They moved to New York and live with his Italian-speaking mother in an apartment in Brooklyn or Queens.
In Season 1/Episode 8, “The Hobo Code,” Sal is the recipient of an overture from Elliot, a salesman from Belle Jolie. They met earlier in the day at a presentation of an ad campaign for Belle Jolie: “Mark Your Man.” After work, Sal met Elliot for drinks at the bar in the Roosevelt Hotel. They share a drink as Elliot rhapsodizes about the wonder of New York City. Before long, their conversation changes tone. Elliot reaches across the table and drinks from Sal’s glass. The sexual tension is obvious, but when Elliot asks if Sal would like to go see the view from his bedroom Sal declines, clearly embarrassed. “I know what I want to do,” he says. 
In Season 2/Episode 7, “The Gold Violin,” Sal’s orientation becomes a little clearer. Ken Cosgrove, the man inspiring Sal’s smoldering longing, has written two unpublished novels and became the target of office jealousy when his short story, “Tapping a Maple on a Cold Vermont Morning,” was published in the Atlantic Monthly. But Sal seems to understand the creative, vulnerable, writerly side of Ken, and when Ken asks him to review one of his new stories, Sal invites Ken to dinner at his apartment.
When Ken arrives at Sal and Kitty’s apartment. Sal says he loved Ken’s story, “The Gold Violin” which was inspired by a violin Ken saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (”It was perfect in every way except it couldn’t make music,” says Ken.) Throughout dinner, Sal fastens on Ken’s every word, as if they are as delicious as his own cooking. (Needless to say he’s oblivious to his wife’s needs.) He’s especially thrilled when Ken lights his cigarette (some obvious symbolism).
After Ken leaves, Kitty breaks down in tears, saying Sal left her out of the conversation the entire night. “Do you even see me here?” she asks. “I am so sorry,” he replies. It wasn’t an intentional thing to hurt Kitty, because Sal really does care about her.
As he’s cleaning up, Sal discovers a lighter that Ken left behind. Sal lovingly puts it in his pocket.
The tension–and the torment–of homosexuals, especially married people, was the norm in 1962. It is still very much the case today–a person who is sexually attracted or in love with a co-worker, a friend, a fellow student, a neighbor, a member of their religious community–but must refrain from saying or acting on their feelings, and can only communicate their interest and desire in very veiled ways. 
Ironically, the actor playing Sal Romano is a very out gay man, Bryan Batt. He and his partner, Tom Cianfichi, have been together for more than 18 years. They own a home decor and furnishing store, Hazelnut, in New Orleans.
As an openly gay man, Batt was asked how it was to perform as a closeted man during the ’60s. “He’s so much more reserved than I am: great posture, very calculating, always analyzing what’s going on around him because he has to fit in. The hardest thing about playing him is that I’m an open book and Sal is not…as a gay man it’s very interesting to play this character because people forget what people had to go through at that time.”
Being married is also a perfect cover entertaining clients or nights out with the boys from work. He can go to strip clubs and say, “No, I’m married,” so he’s not forced to participate in the hanky panky.
Batt also commented that people stop him on the street to ask when is Salvatore coming to come out. “My response is, ‘To what?’ There was no real gay community back then. There’s been so many great strides made in just a short amount of time to have a vocal gay community.”
Were feelings more poignant when we were closeted?
Does anyone, infamous or not, deserve to be outed? Do they have the right to privacy, but not a right to hypocrisy,” as openly gay Rep. Barney Frank believes?
“Outrage,” a new documentary from filmmaker Kirby Dick, takes issue with the secret lives of closeted gay politicians–especially conservative Republicans who outwardly oppose gay rights. See the “Outrage” trailer here.
It’s long been considered socially unacceptable to “out” closeted gay politicians. “Outrage” makes the argument that when they take positions harmful to millions of gay people, it’s unacceptable to let them stay in the closet. “Traitors to their people” is how one person in “Outrage” describes politicians who live gay lives in secret while campaigning and voting against gay rights in public.
The film features interviews with former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey; Washington Blade editor Kevin Naff (who tells the story of how he met FOX News anchor Shepard Smith in a gay bar); David Phillips, the DC IT technologist who tells his story about sleeping with Sen. Larry Craig in graphic detail); muckraking BlogActive blogger Mike Rogers, journalist and author, Michelangelo Signorile, and many more.
The public has developed an increasing appetite for private details in public lives, and the press are no longer sticklers for convention. Bad news for closeted conservatives.
If a closeted politician or religious leader is too outrageous in his condemnation of homosexuality, he may well find himself in the daily paper or headlining the six o’clock news. This is what happened to the Rev. Ted Haggard, a fundamentalist minister who was head of the largest evangelical church in America, and a powerful voice for evangelicals nationally.
Mike Jones, the male prostitute Haggard paid for sex and drugs, said he made his outing allegations against Haggard in response to Haggard’s political support for a Colorado Amendment 43 on the November 7, 2006 ballot that would ban same-sex marriage in that state. Jones told ABC News “I had to expose the hypocrisy. He is in the position of influence of millions of followers, and he’s preaching against gay marriage. But behind everybody’s back [he's] doing what he’s preached against.”
Catholic leaders–including bishops and cardinals–were also exempt from public scrutiny until the advent of the clergy sex abuse scandal broke everything open. Since then, such powerful figures as Legionaires of Christ head Fr. Marcial Maciel, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer of the Archdiocese of Vienna, Austria and Archbishop Juliusz Paetz of the Archdiocese of Poznan, Poland have all been dragged into newspapers with accusations they abused young priests, seminarians, monks and youths.
Michelangelo Signorile is a gay American writer and national talk show host. His article, “Cardinal Spellman’s Dark Legacy” was published by New York Press on April 23, 2002. Read the whole article here. It details the hypocrisy of New York Archbishop Francis Cardinal Spellman’s known, but closely guarded, gay life. 
“Two Sundays ago,” the article begins, “the rector at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Monsignor Eugene Clark, gave a homily that inspired the kind of PRIEST BLAST GAYS headlines that New York’s tabloids thrive on. Standing in for the embattled Cardinal Egan, Clark blamed the sex abuse scandals on gays, railed against homosexuality as a “disorder” and said it was a “grave mistake” to allow gays in the priesthood.”
“Yet, among the several skeletons in gay-basher Clark’s closet is that he in fact dutifully worked as secretary for one of the most notorious, powerful and sexually voracious homosexuals in the American Catholic Church’s history: the politically connected Francis Cardinal Spellman, known as “Franny” to assorted chorus boys and others; who was New York’s cardinal from 1939 until his death in 1967.”
“The archconservative Spellman was the epitome of the self-loathing, closeted, evil queen, working with his good friend, the closeted gay McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn, to undermine liberalism in America during the 1950s’ communist and homosexual witch hunts.”
“During Spellman’s reign and long afterward, all of New York’s newspapers in fact cowered before the Catholic Church. On Spellman’s ordered New York departmen stores–owned largely by Catholics–pulled ads from the then-liberal New York Post in the 1950s after publisher Dorothy Schiff wrote commentary critical of his right wing positions; Schiff was forced to back down on her positions.”
“In the original bound galleys of former Wall Street Journal reporter John Cooney’s Spellman biography, The American Pope–published in 1984 by Times Books, which was then owned by the New York Times Co.–Spellman’s gay life was recounted in four pages that included interviews with several notable individuals who knew Spellman was a closeted homosexual.”
“Among Cooney’s interview subjects was C.A. Tripp, the noted researcher affiliated with Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey of the Institute for Sex Research, who shared information that he had on Spellman regarding the prelate’s homosexuality. In a telephone interview with Tripp last week, he told me that his information had come from a Broadway dancer in the show One Touch of Venus who had a relationship with Spellman back in the 1940s; the prelate would have his limousine pick up the dancer several nights a week and bring him back to his place. When the dancer once asked Spellman how he could get away with this, Tripp says Spellman answered, “Who would believe that?”
“U.S. ambassor to Ireland and friend of the Church, William V. Shannon, reviewed The American Pope for Book Review. Shannon’s review was scathing, attacking Cooney for even bringing up the subject at all: ‘Prurient interest in the sex lives of public figures serves no useful purpose.’”
“A Jesuit priest wrote a letter to the Book Review, published a few weeks later: “Cardinal Spellman’s sex life does not matter, but (his) homosexuality does…It matters to thousands of people whose jobs, relationships and whose very lives are threatened because of their sexuality, all the while being forced to view and eat the hypocrisy of their church. And it enrages people that church men and women can retain their jobs, hiding behind their clerical and religious statutes while their own people suffer persecution, disease and discrimination.’”
“Sadly, the Jesuit’s words still ring true today, almost 20 years later. While Spellman has long been dead, his legacy of hypocrisy lives on: there are closeted homosexuals –often condemning ’sexual immorality’ publicly while having gay sex privately–throughout the uppermost echelons of the church today.”
My personal opinion: the Censor Libororum feels closeted lesbians and gays are entitled to their privacy whatever their personal opinions…. the threat of “outing” a relationship or sexual situation has been used by unscrupulous or jealous people for revenge, profit or politics. It happened to me. (See my LCSW post on June 10, 2006 – “Edward Murphy of The Stonewall Inn” for another example.)
However, if elected leaders and members of the hierarchy are sexually active gays and lesbians, and homophobic in public statements, I firmly believe they should get the hook out of the closet, and join the people they are condemning at the pillory.
Commonweal’s February 27, 2009 issue had a short piece entitled “The Perfect Sinner” by Harold Bordwell. It was about Max Jacob, a French Jew born in Brittany, who was a painter, poet, novelist, playwright, and critic, who played an important role in the formative years of Cubism as well as in the new directions of modern poetry during the early 20th century. His poetry was made up of an amalgam of Jewish, Breton, Parisian and Roman Catholic elements.
Max Jacob alternated between a wildly bohemian lifestyle and periods of contemplation. He converted to Catholicism in 1915, after experiencing a vision of Christ a few years earlier. But his conversion did not save him from the Gestapo, who rounded him up and took him to Drancy internment camp. He died there of pneumonia on March 5, 1944, two days before he was scheduled to be sent to Auschwitz. He was 68. His body was eventually returned to his home of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire near Orleans. 
Saint-Benoit was the site of a celebrated abbey church. Max Jacob first came to Saint-Benoit in 1921, and stayed there periodically until 1937, when he settled down permanently, living a quietly religious life–early daily Mass, evening prayer, and working as a church guide.
Max Jacob reminds me of David, a “man after God’s own heart.” Sensuous, a sinner, each man experienced periods of prayful contemplation and penitence. But in their full and vivid life each also held God in a loved and honored place.
Max Jacob chose Saint-Benoit to escape his disorderly and worldly life–he was homosexual, he took drugs, he liked to play the clown–and, as his biographer Beatrice Mousli notes, to be nearer to God and away from his temptations that he could never resist in Paris.
It was a very different life than his days in Paris, where his writings and gouache paintings led to friendships with Picasso, Jean Cocteau, anf Guillaume Apollinaire, among others. There were rumors that Jacob was a male lover of Picasso. “Oh, Picasso was absolutely having sex with Max Jacob. And everyone knew!”, said John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer. Even Picasso’s mistress, Fernande Olivier, noted upon first meeting Jacob that the two men were “toujours ensemble.”
In his journals, novelist Julian Green remembers how Max Jacob used to haunt the Cafe Select by night, and then the next morning hurry down the boulevard to Notre-Dame-des-Champs to confess his sins, with the priests hiding behind the church columns but knowing that one of them would eventually have to listen to the same sins they all knew by heart.
Green calls Max Jacob the perfect sinner because he was truly sorry for his sins, which didn’t prevent him from starting all over the next day.
Shortly after A Good Man is Hard to Find was published, a discerning reader in Atlanta wrote to author Flannery O’Connor to tell her she realized that God was the main subject in the short story collection. “You are very kind to write to me and the measure of my appreciation must be to ask you to write to me again. I would like to know who this is who understands my stories,” O’Connor responded in a letter dated July 10, 1955. 
It was the first of 274 letters O’Connor sent to Elizabeth “Betty” Hester, sparking a friendship that would continue until the Flannery O’Connor’s death from lupus in 1964.
Betty Hester, ”an agnostic obsessed with God,”was shy, a flirt, and a chain-smoker with a menagerie of cats who cared for a widowed aunt named Clyde. Although she never published any of her stories, Hester shared her writing with O’Connor. Hester wrote book reviews for the diocesan newspaper, The Bulletin, as did O’Connor.
The early letters center on the two women’s faith. In the course of their correspondence, Hester converted to Catholicism, asking O’Connor to be her sponsor. Flannery tried to help Hester in her understanding of the Catholic faith in hopes of giving Betty some spiritual comfort; but shortly after her baptism, Hester decided to leave the church. That disturbed O’Connor more than Hester’s admission she was a lesbian. 
After much intense correspondence and several visits, Betty insisted on telling Flannery her “history of horror” before the friendship went any further. At 13, Betty had watched her mother commit suicide. The neighbors, believing she was “playacting,” did not intervene. Betty also told O’Connor that she had served in the Air Force in Germany, but was dishonorably discharged for “sexual indiscretion” with a woman.
O’Connor responded to Hester’s revelations with this frank and nonjudgemental note: “Compared to what you have experienced in the way of radical misery, I have never had anything to bear in my life but minor irritations…If in any sense my knowing your burden can make your burden lighter, then I am doubly glad I know it. You were right to tell me, but I’m glad you didn’t tell me until I knew you well. Where you are wrong is in saying that you are the history of horror. The meaning of redemption is precisely that we do not have to be our history, and nothing is plainer to me than that you are not your history.”
Hester and O’Connor remained friends and corresponded until O’Connor’s death. It is through the correspondence with Hester published in The Habit of Being that scholars are able to get a clear view of O’Connor’s thoughts on writing and her Catholic faith. 
In 1998 Hester committed suicide with a hollow-nose bullet aimed at her skull. She died after eating a late afternoon Christmas dinner and playfully mocking her friend, William Sessions, “for taking the Church seriously.” She was 76.
“The church risks becoming a sect. Many Catholics no longer expect anything from this pope. It’s very sad,” Kung said in an interview published by the French newspaper Le Monde on February 24, 2009. 
Fr. Kung noted that one of the four traditionalist bishops whose excommunication was lifted by the pope minimized the Holocaust, igniting widespread criticism. The pope’s misjudgement on such an important issue, Kung said, reflected his own isolation.
“Benedict XVI has always lived in an ecclesial environment. He has not traveled much. He’s always remained closed in the Vatican–which is quite similar to how the Kremlin was at one time–where he is safe from criticism,” Fr. Kung said.
Kung went on to way that in his nearly four years in office the pope has shown a lack of pastoral courage and a lack of awareness of the “profound crisis” in the church. He suggested the pope could make several important gestures:
–Allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion in some circumstances.
–Take steps to “correct” the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae and allow the use of birth control in some cases.
–Abolish the rule of priestly celibacy in the Latin-rite church.
–Institute a new way of electing bishops with the involvement of local Catholics.
Fr. Kung said it would be helpful to call a third Vatican council to deal with these and other issues.
Read the Le Monde interview here.
Fr. Kung’s interview provoked some responses that were humorous…or ironic. Here are the best from the web..
Cardinal Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals, told Vatican Radio he was “hurt” by reading the interview, and contended that the accusations were “unproven, generic affirmations.”
Cardinal Sodano went on to say “Fraternal criticism has always been possible in the church, from the times of Sts. Peter and Paul. Bitter criticism, on the other hand, especially when it’s so broad, does not contribute to the unity of the church, for which Pope Benedict is working so hard.”
From the blog, Bilgrimage: “Benedict has the reputation for being a great intellectual; yet who more than he has shut down the intellectual life of the Catholic Church, turning it into a sect for the brain-dead.”
From the blog, Enlightened Catholicism: “I expect the blunders will continue unless he decides to launch real reform of the way the church is run. Even in the Vatican you can’t just rely on the Holy Spirit.”
My thanks to the Joseph S. O’Leary homepage, for the above quotes and this rousing call to action: “I suspect in the coming months we will see more initiatives coming from both the laity and clergy calling for real and sustainable change in how Catholicism conducts its business. It will be coming from people who also really love this Church, even the ones who have left in frustration. It’s way past time for these voices to be heard. The conservative wing of this Church has had their say for the last forty years. The results have been disastrous in the West and placing the blame for these results on those who hae left is rather self serving.” 
In Defense of Desire – The Theology of James Alison is an article in the January 30, 2009 edition of Commonweal Magazine. It was written by Christopher Ruddy, associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Here is an excerpt:
“Alison builds his argument for the goodness of homosexuality by drawing from Catholic teaching on creation, original sin, and salvation. As (the Council of) Trent taught, human nature retains its integrity, even after the Fall. No dimension of human desire is therefore instrinsically evil–that is, irredeemable–because it is capable of being rightly ordered and healed. Salvation is the perfection of human nature, not rejection.
As Alison lays out the argument, Catholicism has long taught that people are heterosexual by nature, and that homosexual activity is thus unnatural. But this teaching conflicts with the growing recognition that homosexuality is a way of being, not simply a way of acting; unchosen, it belongs to one’s nature or essence. Drawing upon the scholastic axiom agere sequitur esse (acts flow from being), Alison maintains one cannot hold both the homosexual inclination is natural or involuntary and that homosexual acts are inherently evil. ‘Either being gay is a defective form of being heterosexual,’ he reasons, “or it is simply a thing that just is that way”–a reality, like “rain, tides or left-handedness,” as he puts it elsewhere. Alison affirms the latter position, and consequently holds that homosexuality is morally equivalent to heterosexuality. Like rain or tides: arguments from nature, for so long used to condemn homosexuality, now become its greatest support. ‘Natural law is our friend,’ Alison writes; the gay or lesbian person is saved in the perfection–not the rejection–of his or her homosexual nature.”
Dr. James Alison, 49, is a Catholic thelogian, priest and author. He lives in London. Visit his website. 
“What should we give up for Lent?” I asked my wife recently. But the usual choices–chocolate, dessert–weren’t appealing and felt superficial. In past times it seemed clever to combine Lenten “give-ups” with shaving off five pounds in time for the beach. Not this year.
Last year I promised to put $5 in the charity box every time I used a curse word. The poor box at church made out quite well by the end of Lent, with a big boost from one especially bad day at work which netted $50 before noon.
Once, about two weeks before Easter–when my resolution really starts to wobble–Lori and I were at a Friendly’s near Middletown, NY. That year, we had given up chocolate but not dessert. I noticed one of the sundaes included M&Ms candies.
When the waitress came over to take our order I said: “I have a religious question. I gave up candy for Lent, but if I order the “M&M Sundae” does it…”I didn’t even get to the word “count” before she burst out: “It counts! It’s been tried before! It counts!” 
So much for “wiggle room” during Lent at Friendly’s.
I had to settle for the hot fudge sundae, and sneak sideways glances at my (probably protestant) neighbor in the next booth slurping down a sundae with M&Ms. It looked delicious. It was all I could do not to grab it and run out the door. There is something about sin that just makes things taste better, even though you (always!) regret it later.
The above all fell under the proscribed “give-ups” for Lent, but never impacted my spiritual life in any meaningful way. I justed felt deprived, and tried to turn it into a grace.
But three things converged this year to make me rethink my Lenten practices.
The first was receipt of a notice by Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry’s “Church in the 21st Century” announcing their spring series would focus on “the riches of the Catholic tradition of spiritual practices.” One lecture in particular caught my eye. “Christian Spiritual Practices: Drawing from the Storeroom Both the Old and the New.” I made a note to explore what ancient practice I could use this Lent.
The second came to me from Zenit, the Vatican news service. The February 3rd edition included Pope Benedict’s Lenten Message for 2009:
“Dear Brothers and Sisters!
As the beginning of Lent, which constitutes an itinerary of more intense spiritual training, the Liturgy sets before us again three penitential practices that are very dear to the biblical and Christian tradition–prayer, almsgiving, fasting–to prepare us to better celebrate Easter and thus experience God’s power that, as we shall hear in the Paschal Vigil, ‘dispels all evil, washes guilt away, restores lost innocence, brings mourners joy, casts out hatred, brings us peace and humbles earthly pride’ (Paschal Praeconium). For this year’s Lenten Message, I wish to focus my reflections especially on the value and meaning of fasting.”
You can read the message in its entirety here. (For the record, I do particularly appreciate the Holy Father’s outspokeness for the protection of the environment, the disproportionate impact of environmental degradation on the poor, and his willingness to take the gloss off of some of Pope John Paul II’s favorites, including Fr. Marcial Mariel and the Virgin Mary apparations as seen by the six “visionaries” of Medjugorje.)
The third was stumbling upon an Ancient Practices Series book entitled Fasting by Scot McKnight, the popular Jesus Creed blogger and Anabaptist theologian. I thumbed through the book while I was browsing at Barnes & Noble on Friday. He inspired me to consider diferent fasts this Lent.
A search on Google led me to Carole Gardibaldi Rogers, a writer, poet and oral historian whose backgound is both Roman Catholic and Jewish. Her articles have appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, America and Commonweal, including one or two on fasting. Her book, Fasting – Exploring a Great Spiritual Practice, will be my companion guide this Lenten season. 
Besides the usual fasts on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and the abstinence from meat on Friday (when every cheeseburger in the world seems to jump in my face, and the scent of bacon wafts from every open diner door) I will resolve to clothe myself in the armour of the Lord and keep walking. But this year I plan to go beyond and make every Friday my weekly fast day.
This Lent, Lori and I also decided to fast from spending money. That is, the spending on consumables–particularly those we love, like books, chocolate, going out to dinner, tickets to shows and sport events, antiques, stuff for the house, outdoor goods…anything. All discretionary spending will end for 40 days beginning Febuary 25th.
The pain has already set in. I’m going to miss the one New York Knicks basketball game I was going to see this season – February 25th at the Garden against the Hornets.
It will be interesting to see just how much discipline will be involved not to give my body and my imagination whatever it wants, the moment it wants it. And discover just how much of my life is an impulse dedicated to the daily gratification of my wants and needs.
How hard is it going to be to get beyond them?
The article below was written by Ned O’Gorman, and appeared in the December 5, 2008 issue of Commonweal.
There is a place where even the liberal Catholic press fears to tread. The relative lack of serious discussion about homosexual desire casts into spiritual darkness a tribe of believing Catholic men and women who must fend for themselves in their quest for a serene emotional life, for companionship, and for the comfort of sexual love. For “the teaching church,” the subject is untouchable.
There are few intellectuals, lay or clerical, who will take it on, for it is risky to bring into the public forum the notion that there are Catholics who practice their faith with diligence and who love those of their own sex and have known the joy of that love. I am such a Catholic. I have discovered that such a love is easy to bear, complete, and holy.
So, I will offer some thoughts I have about a homosexual’s life and its difficulties, its spirituality, its struggles with desire and the church’s punitive silence. 
If I obey the church, there is only a life of absolute celibacy open to me. I must accept my lot, hope for the best, cross my fingers, and “offer it up.” What “the best” is, the church does not quite say, but it cannot be sexual.
Everything must be avoided that might lead to the discovery of the beloved: no flirtations, no gathering together with other homosexuals, no dating, no risk of arousal. If such constrictions were imposed on heterosexuals, there would be no marriages.
No priest will bless a union between homosexual Catholics, no matter how committed the couple is to a long fidelity, for the church forbids the homosexual an erotic life. An erotic life sets the homosexual beyond the communion of the sanctuary.
And if that is it, a Roman Catholic homosexual, devoted and faithful, believing and rigorous in the practice of his faith, after long suffering and neglect, might just say the hell with it and welcome love and live outside the sanctuary.
Could it be there is a band of men and women set apart by God who will never know the fullness of love within the life of the church? That question does not give comfort. I have known men who have married so that they might have a place in the church and in society, knowing that they were turning their back on the truth of their sexuality. They abandoned the love they had for other men and entered into marriages that failed, and devastation was soon everywhere-children, wives, families all in ruins.
What, then, does the church do?
It seems that the church has decided that there is nothing to do. So upon this tribe of men and women exile falls with a mighty thud. Perhaps the only way for them to live a life of faith and fullness is to live the life of the outlaw and the renegade, trusting in the Lord and his consolations.
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.”
