Posted in category "History"
Former Papal Envoy to the U.S., Archbishop Jean Jadot of Belgium, died last week at the age of 99. Jadot’s predecessor and successor as papal delegates to the U.S. received the red hat of a cardinal. Jadot never received one in recognition of his work here. In fact, he is the only Vatican diplomat assigned to the United States that was never made a cardinal. Why not a red hat? 
In 1973, Pope Paul VI sent Archbishop Jadot to Washington, DC to serve as the apostolic delegate to the United States. The pope told him he was chosen partly because he was not part of the Vatican bureacracy, and thus might not be as pliable in the hands of powerful American bishops; who to Paul VI’s view were often more businessman than pastor. Jadot was sent to press the American church to carry out the reforms of Vatican II, and find candidates for future episcopal appointments who were willing to do so.
Although largely undone by the conservative appointments of Pope John Paul II, Jadot had a hand in over 100 nominations, including such well known names as Roger Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles, Joseph Cardinal Bernadin of Chicago, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, Archbishop Rembert Weakland in Milwaukee, Archbishop Francis Hurley of Anchorage, and Bishop Walter Sullivan of Richmond, Virginia. All of these bishops have made an effort to outreach to Catholics on the margins, including gay people.
As a Washington Post article said in 1983, “Whatever their background, the new breed of bishops was less concerned with the ring-kissing and watered silk vestments that went with the office, and more with getting to know their people.”
Paul VI saw an evolving role for his nuncios after Vatican II. “Nuncios should travel,” Paul VI said, not so much as the representatives of Rome to secular governments, or even as legates between Rome and the world’s bishops. Instead, they should “show the Pope’s concern for the poor, the forgotten, the ignored.”
Although Archbishop Jadot strongly adhered to most of the church’s teachings, including its opposition to abortion, he was willing to leave some issues, like artificial contraception, to individual consciences. He also helped to lead a largely successful effort to push the American church to welcome minorities, widen the role of women, increase participation by the laity and relax some rules, like the automatic excommunication of divorced people.
In A Watchman for the House of Israel , his November 9, 1976 address to the general meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Jadot called attention to the situation of minorities in the American church: “How are we to give pastoral care to those who do not feel at home with our white, Western European ways of public worship and community living, to those who have not adapted and do not want to adapt to what we call our American way of doing things?”
He added, “I wonder if the majority of our priests and people realize our shortcomings in these areas and even our arrogance toward our brothers and sisters in the faith who are in some ways different from ourselves. I wonder if we can ever fully understand the legitmate frustrations that they feel.”
He could have been speaking about how gay Catholics feel treated by their church.
In his concluding remarks, the apostolic delegate called brief attention to two other areas of concern that the bishops would have to follow up on: “There are other problems either near or far on the horizon. I could mention the question of the role of women in society and in the church or problems that will come from the rejection of the traditional standards of morality in society, political and business life.”
Jadot concluded his address to “my brother bishops” by saying: “Let us be confident, courageous and open to the Spirit. Let us build the church of God by our foresight.”
After this address the apostolic delegate became the target of bitter animosity from conservative bishops and laypeople. He received a steady flow of anonymous hate mail telling him to get out of the United States and go back to Belgium. He was also being denounced at the Vatican. At one point, Jadot offered his resignation to Paul VI, who responded immediately by saying, “No. You are doing just what I want you to do.”
The anti-Jadot campaign was allegedly spearheaded by Cardinals John Carberry of St. Louis, John Krol of Philadelphia and John Cody of Chicago. Polish-American Cardinal Krol had the ear of John Paul II and eventually convinced him Jadot was “destroying the Catholic church in the United States.” Cardinal Cody was opposed to Jadot because he knew personally that Jadot had asked Paul VI to remove him. 
When John Paul II became pope, Archbishop Jadot was relieved of his position and given a minor post. The fact he was not honored with the customary red hat was the subject of a September 7, 2002 article in the Tablet by veteran Vatican reporter Robert Blair Kaiser.
“The Jadot I found in Brussels,” Kaiser wrote, “did not strike me as a man who was nursing any grievences. He knew he had done a fine job – for Paul VI and for the Church. He refused to speculate about why he did or did not become a cardinal, and had good words, moreover, for some in the Roman Curia. He said he liked Cardinal Gianbattista Re. “I trust him very much. He’s in the category of honest people.”
“I asked him how many cardinals he in put in that category.”
“Jadot hesitated, then laughed. ‘I don’t know all the cardinals,’ he said.”
But Jadot may have expressed his private feelings to his good friend and biographer, theologian Dr. John (Jack) Dick, the day his successor, Archbishop Pio Laghi, who appointed conservative bishops, was named a cardinal on May 29, 1991. That day, after lunch, Jadot said, “It is a slap in my face.”
Dr. Dick, now retired from the University of Louvain in Belgium, is completing a book about Jadot titled Paul’s Man in Washington. Perhaps the book will reveal things Jadot was too much of a diplomat and a gentleman to ever mention directly.
On the other hand, when it came time to select a new archbishop in Vienna in 1986, John Paul II picked Hans Hermann Groer, a Benedictine abbot, because he had met the man at a Marian conference and was impressed for one reason alone: his obvious devotion to Our Lady. (Cardinal Franz Konig got the news about Groer’s appointment on television.) A few years later, Groer had to retire after allegations that he had been seducing the young men at his monastery.
The AP story headline read: Vatican secret confessional tribunal opens up. “One of Vatican’s most secrecy shrouded tribunals,” the story began, “which handles confessions of sins so grave only the Pope can grant absolution, is giving the faithful a peek into its workings for the first time in its 830-year history.”
It’s known as the Apostolic Penitentiary, and its currently headed by an American, Cardinal James Francis Stafford.
“Even though it’s the oldest department of the Holy See, it’s very little known – specifically because by its nature it deals with secret things,” said Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, the tribunal’s #2 official.
The sins this “tribunal of conscience” hears include:
1. Defiling the Eucharist.
2. A priest breaking the seal of the confessional by revealing the nature of the sin and the person who sought penance.
3. A priest who has sex with someone and then offers forgiveness for the act.
4. A man who directly causes an abortion–such as paying for it–who then seeks to become a priest or deacon.
5. Physically attacking the Pope.
6. A bishop who consecrates another bishop without permission from the Holy See.
These sins bring automatic excommunication. Once the pope has granted absolution, the excommunication is lifted.
Personally, I was surprised. I would have thought mass murder, child prostitution and pornography, stealing food from starving people, etc. would have been worse sins, but I guess not.
“Maximum Leader,” (who I assume is Catholic, given his comments and other posts on religion) weighed in on his blog, Naked Villany: 
“This was quite intriguing to your Maximum Leader as he’d never known such a tribunal existed. And he also never knew specifically that there were sins so grave that only the Pope could grant absolution. He had assumed that there were probably real “doozy” sins that required going to a Bishop. He supposes that at some level he might have assumed that there were sins so serious one would need to get in contact with Rome (at least) before granting absolution.
One wonders if the act of confession dealt with by the Apostolic Penitentiary actually ends with the penitant coming and confessing to the Pope personally. Your Maximum Leader would assume that it would have to be a face to face encounter. He doubts that the Pope would sit in a little confessional and open the screen to hear the confession.
This reminds your Maximum Leader of one time he went to confession. Many years ago he happened to be on the campus of Catholic U and walked into the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It was during one of the times they offered Confession, so your Maximum Leader decided to make a confession. Up to this point in his life, he’d always gone into the little dark confessional and waited for the screen to open and get started. Well, there was some construction in the area where they normally have the confessionals. So he waited in a side chapel in front of a nondescript door. People would go in, and after a time would come out. When it was your Maximum Leader’s turn he walked in and found himself face to face with a priest sitting in a bright room with two chairs. There was a moment there when your Maximum Leader considered walking right out without opening his mouth. He was used to the dark. Used to the annonymity. Used to hiding what he was doing. But there was no hiding here. Bright light. Open chairs. Face to face (almost eye to eye) contact.
It was one of the most difficult things your Maximum Leader ever did; making his confession that day.
In retrospect it seemed the most fulfilling as well. There was something very comforting about seeing the priest and making a personal connection.”
Your Censor Librorum remembers the last time she went to Confession. The priest refused to grant absolution because she refused to promise to stop using birth control. She and her husband were students, and she told the priest that while she intended to have children someday, they could not afford them when they were in school. The priest asked her to leave the confessional, and she never went back.
Confession is good for the soul; secrets we are ashamed of, and carry around inside can be corrosive. It is a relief to unburden yourself, and ask to be forgiven. When we feel forgiven, it helps us to forgive ourselves.
But we need to make sense of the sins, so the emptying is not an empty gesture.
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?
The late John Paul II was wounded in a 1982 knife attack. The would-be assassin, a priest, attacked the pope during a visit to Fatima Square in Portugal. The priest was opposed to the reforms adopted by the church after Vatican II.
The pope kept the injury secret. He carried on with the trip without disclosing his wound.
The incident is described in a new film, Testimony, and is based on the 2007 book of the same name by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the pope’s long-time secretary and friend. Cardinal Dziwisz accompanied Karol Wojtyla from his time in Poland until his last days in the Vatican. The film is a testimony of John Paul II’s life, presenting many new facts and interpretations. 
The film premiered at the Vatican on October 16, 2008. It is narrated by actor Michael York.
Dziwisz, who is now cardinal of Krakow, Poland, was John Paul’s private secretary and closest aide for nearly 40 years, including all his 27 years as pontiff.
“Today I can say what up to now we have kept secret,” Dziwisz said in the move. “That priest wounded the Holy Father..When we got back to the room there was blood.”
The attack occured on May 12, 1982, when Juan Fernandez Krohn lunged at John Paul with a bayonet during a ceremony in the shrine of Fatima in Portugal. The Pope had gone to the shrine to give thanks for surviving a gunshot wound from Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981.
Krohn was an ultra conservative priest, and former member of the Society of Saint Pius X. He was expelled from that group because he openly proclaimed Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre opposition to Pope John Paul II was too weak. 
Krohn was expelled from Portugal in 1985 after serving half of a six year jail sentence.
Gay clerics and those rumored to be–nuns, priests, bishops, cardinals, monks, abbots, even popes–have been with us always. Some were celibate. Others were not. Most were discreet. Others celebrated their love and loves. One of them was Alcuin of York.
Alcuin, also known as Alcuinus (Latin) and Ealhwine (Saxon) was born in York, in Northumbria, England in 735 A.D. 
At the invitation of Charlemagne, Alcuin headed the king’s school for his children at Aachen from 782 to 796. He was a leading figure at court during that time. He wrote many theological and dogmatic treatises, as well as a few grammatical works and a number of poems.
Alcuin was made abbot of Saint Martin’s at Tours in 796, where he remained until his death on May 19, 804. He is considered among the most important architects of the Carolingian Renaissance.
John Boswell, in Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980) writes:
“A distinctly erotic element…is notable in the circle of friends presided over by Alcuin at the court of Charlemagne. This group included some of the most brilliant scholars of the day (Theodule of Orleans, Anglibert, Einhard, et al,), but the most erotic element subsisted principally between Alcuin and his pupils. Intimates of this circle of masculine friendship were known to each other by pet names, most of them derived from classical allusions, many from Vergil’s Ecologues..The prominence of love in Alcuin’s writings, all of which are addressed to other males, is striking…”
One of the most famous poems is addressed to a student whom Alcuin called “Daphnis” and laments the departure of another student, “Dodo,” who is referred to in the poem as their “cuckoo“. 
Boswell explains that “One expects hyperbole in poetry, but even in Alcuin’s prose correspondence there is an element which can scarcely be called anything but passionate. He wrote to a friend (a bishop…)
‘I think of your love and friendship with such sweet memories, reverend bishop, that I long for that lovely time when I may be able to clutch the neck of your sweetness with the fingers of my desires. Alas, if only it were granted to me, as it was to Habakkuk (Daniel 14:32-38), to be transported to you, how I would sink into your embraces,..how much would I cover, with tightly pressed lips, not only your eyes, ears and mouth, but also every finger and toe, not once but many a time.”
“Love has penetrated my heart with its flame,” wrote Alcuin to Arno, Bishop of Salzburg (c. 750-821). “Neither sea nor land, hills nor forest, nor even the Alps can stand in its way or hinder it from always licking at your inmost parts, good father, or from bathing your heart, my beloved, with tears…Let us seek the delights and ever-enduring realms of heaven with our whole heart, mind, and hand. The blessed hall of heaven never separates friends; a heart warmed by love always has what it loves. Therefore, father, abduct me with your prayers, I beg you (precibus rape me). Then our love will never be estranged.”
Surely, Alcuin was one of the first Catholic religious figures to blend gay sexuality and spirituality in his writing, relationships and life.
One of the most fascinating, but least mentioned stories in the Bible is about King Saul and the Witch of Endor. The spectre of the prophet Samuel rising from the ground to confront the king has to be one of the creepiest, horrifying scenes in any literature–Bible or pulp fiction. 
The Canaanite Witch of Endor appears in the First Book of Samuel, chapter 28:4-25. She was an oracle, a woman “who possesses a talisman” though which she called up the ghost of the recently deceased prophet Samuel at the demand of King Saul of Israel.
After Samuel’s death in Ramah, Saul had driven all the necromancers from Israel. Then, in a bitter irony, Saul sought out the witch, anonymously and in disguise, only after he had received no answer from God from dreams, prophets or the Urim and Thummim as to his best course of action against the assembled forces of the Philistines. Samuel’s ghost offered no advice, but predicted Saul’s downfall as king. 
The Witch of Endor had a string of ancestors that stretched back over 10,000 years before her fateful seance.
Israeli archaeologist, Dr. Leore Grosman, and her team from Hebrew University discovered the remains of a 12,000 year old witch in a tomb in northern Israel. The woman lived at the time of the prehistoric Natufian culture, an ancient community that lived in the region 10,000 years before Jesus. 
The witch was around 45 years old when she died. She was petite, and had an asymmetrical appearance due to a spinal condition or injury that would have affected her gait, causing her to limp or drag her foot.
The tomb, located at Hilazon Tachtit in western Galilee, contained a vast number of grave offerings. Among them were 50 complete tortoise shells, the pelvis of a leopard, the wing tip of a golden eagle, the tail of a dow, two marten skulls, the forearm of a wild boar and a human foot.
It would be interesting to study how women’s abilities for diviniation and spiritual intercession went from high respect in the Natufian society to persecution by King Saul and clerics in medieval Christianity.
Was it the evolution to a male God figure calculated? Did male saints and male religious authorities co-opt religious intercession and power roles to reside only in their own gender?
