Posted in category "History"
“He was one of the most gifted leaders in the post-Vatican II church in America,” said Rev. Jim Martin, a Jesuit priest and associate editor of America, a Catholic magazine, “and certainly beloved by the left, and sadly that gave his critics more ammunition.”
Archbishop Weakland was among those who publicly questioned the need for a male-only celibate priesthood. He also led American bishops in a two-year process of writing a pastoral letter on economic justice, holding hearings on the subject across the county.
He stepped down as Archbishop of Milwaukee in May 2002… one day after a former lover disclosed on the ABC network television show, “Good Morning America,” he had been paid $450,000 to keep quiet about an affair with Weakland in 1980.
But now, in interviews and in a memoir, A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, Archbishop Emeritus Rembert Weakland is speaking out about how internal church politics affected his response to the fallout from his affair and why Catholic teaching on homosexuality is wrong. 
“If we say our God is an all-loving god,” he said, “how do you explain that at any given time probably 400 million living on the planet at one time would be gay? Are the religions of the world, as does Catholicism, saying to those hundreds of millions of people, you have to pass your whole life without any physical, genital expression of that love?”
He said he had been aware of his homosexual orientation since he was a teenager and suppressed it until he become archbishop, when he had relationships with several men because of “loneliness that became very strong.” 
Archbishop Weakland, 82, said he was probably the first bishop to come out of the closet voluntarily. He said he was doing so not to excuse his actions but to give an honest account of why it happened and to raise questions that the church’s teaching that homosexuality is “objectively disordered.”
“Those are bad words because they are so pejorative,” he said.
The archbishop said it was partly because of his strained relations with Pope John Paul II he did not tell Vatican officials in 1997 when he was threatened by a lawsuit by Paul J. Marcoux, the man with whom he had a relationship nearly 20 years before and who had appeared on “Good Morning America.”
Archbishop Weakland said he probably should have gone to Rome and explained he had had a relationship with Mr. Marcoux, that he had ended it by writing a lengthy and emotional letter that Mr. Marcoux still had and that the archbishop’s lawyers regarded Mr. Marcoux’s threats as blackmail.
But, the archbishop said, a highly placed friend in Rome advised him that church officials preferred that such things be hushed up, which is “the Roman way.”
“I suppose, also, being frank, I wouldn’t have wanted to be labeled in Rome at that point as gay,” Archbishop Weakland said. “Rome is a little village.”
In its report “Good Morning America” quoted from the 11-page handwritten letter dated August 25, 1980. The letter describes a planned vacation on Nantucket, a trip to Boston, and conflict over Marcoux’s involvement with a man named Don.
“I should not put down on paper what I would not want the whole world to read. But here goes anyway,” the letter said.
“I felt like the world’s worst hypocrite. So I gradually came back to the importance of celibacy in my life.” Weakland describes his decision to turn away from Marcoux and back to celibacy as “the greatest renunciations” in his life as a priest.
The letter also makes clear that even then, Marcoux was pressuring Weakland for money. “Paul, I really have given you all I personally possess. The $14,000 is my personal limit…Your anger was evident that I couldn’t play the great patron…”
He signed the letter, “I love you.” 
Seventeen years later, Marcoux resurfaced threatening to file a lawsuit. The archdiocese was prepared to counter with an extortion charge, but according to the signed settlement agreement, eventually Marcoux walked away with $450,000. Marcoux’s sister told reporters Marcoux had burned through all the money by 2002 – the time of the “Good Morning America” program.
Paul Marcoux told ABC News reporter Brian Ross he was just trying to get an apology. “That’s not blackmail?” Ross asked. “What do you call it?” Ross asked. “A settlement for a sexual assault case, and what I wanted to do was to have my day in court,” Marcoux said. And though the agreement bars Marcoux fom discussing it, he told Ross he couldn’t keep his silence any longer. “I’ve been involved in the cover-up. I accepted money to be silent about it, not to speak out against what was going on,” he said.
Marcoux linked his situation to the clerical sex abuse scandals: “He was sitting next to me and then started to try to kiss me and continued to force himself on me and pulled down my trousers, attempted to fondle me. Think of it in terms of date rape.” Marcoux was 32 at the time of the affair. A graduate student in theology at Marquette University, he met Archbishop Weakland at a reception.
His “date rape” example could apply to what most teenage girls get used to fending off with regularity.
Shortly after the “Good Morning America” program aired, Archbishop Weakland said he phoned the Apostolic Nuncio in Washington, DC–Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo–who, he said, told him, “Of course you are going to deny it.”
Archbishop Weakland said he told the Nuncio that while he could deny emphatically it was date rape, “I can’t deny that something happened between us.”
The book comes out on May 29th.
I welcome the return of Archbishop Weakland. We have missed him.
While researching a post about the character of Sal Romano, a closeted homosexual advertising executive on the very popular AMC series, “Mad Men,” I clicked on a link to a story about the 2002 murder of Salvatore Romano, 57, the last of the capoclaques, professional clappers traditionally entrusted with leading the applause at the theater, opera or other such event. Romano was paid by singers to applaud their performances at Rome’s opera house. He was believed to be murdered by someone he picked up and brought home for sex. Neighbors saw a young man running down the stairs with a cigarette in his mouth.
But it was another Roman victim mentioned in the article that caught my eye – Enrico Luizi, a papal protocol aide.
“Police are hunting for the killer of one of the pope’s gentlemen-in-waiting,” an article began, “who was found battered to death in his apartment surrounded by his Vatican medals and with a gay pornographic cassette in his VCR.”
Papal official Enrico Sini Luzi, 67, was founded dressed in his underwear with a cashmere scarf wrapped around his neck, lying face down on a velvet cushion. The back of his head had been smashed in by a brass candelabrum found nearby.
At the time of his death in January 1998, he was the latest of 19 men, suspected to be gay, who were murdered in Rome since 1990. There was speculation that some or all of the unsolved killings are the work of a serial killer, as many of the victims were found with scarves tied around their necks.
Mr. Sini Luzi, in his day garb of white tie and tails bedecked with papal decorations, served as an escort for bishops, ambassadors and heads of state who came to the Apostolic Palace for audiences with Pope John Paul II. His family family belonged to the minor nobility. 
At night, Luzi was a well-known figure in Roman male-only bars.
“He was a sociable man, maybe too much so. He knew a lot of people and brought many people home, usually young people,” a neighbor said.
The Vatican yearbook noted Mr. Sini Luzi began service as a Gentleman of His Holiness in April 1989. The Gentlemen of His Holiness were formerly known as Papal Chamberlains; they received their current title after the 1968 reform of papal ceremonies by Pope Paul VI.
A Vatican spokesman didn’t comment on Luzi’s murder, but the newspaper La Repubblica quoted an official of the Curia, the Rev. Giovanni D’Ercole, as saying: “In the face of death, one must only be silent. One cannot express judgements because it is not yet clear how the whole thing happened.”
Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian Catholic bishops’ conference, reported in a brief notice that Luzi, whom it identified only as “E.S.L, a Roman nobleman,” died earlier that week, presumably the victim of violence.
Franco Grillini of Arcigay, the Italian gay and lesbian rights organization, accused the Vatican and Catholic hierarchy of creating a “homophobic atmosphere” that he said was “in large part responsible for this culture of violence.”
“This time, the victim is a gentleman of the pope’s entourage, which confirms that the people at risk are those who hide and live among people where homosexuality is not acknowledged, like the Curia,” he said.
Some members of Mr. Sini Luzi’s familystrenuously denied he was homosexual. “He was not a person of ‘certain habits,’” his brother, Lillo, 72, was quoted by La Repubblica as saying. “Such comportment cannot be reconciled with his morality and the Catholic education he always observed.”
Mr. Lillo Sini Luzi said any evidence of homosexual activity found in his brother’s apartment had probably been introduced by the assailant “as a trick.”
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.
Fr. Peter Kennedy, 71, was removed as pastor of St. Mary’s, South Brisbane, Australia, by Archbishop John A. Bathersby earlier this week. This action was a tremendous loss not only to the parishioners of St. Mary’s, but all Catholics around the world that look for points of light–parishes, groups, schools, retreat centers, religious people, theologians, authors, bloggers–to take hope and comfort in knowing light from an open door shines for us. 
Archbishop Bathersby accused Fr. Kennedy of being “out of communion” with the church by allowing women to preach the homily, giving Communion to gay and divorced people, baptizing babies using unorthodox wording, criticizing the pope and not wearing traditional vestments.
The archbishop’s decree said Fr. Kennedy had “caused harm to ecclesiastical communion in spite of frequent requests from me to do otherwise.”
“The question for me,” said Archbishop Bathersby, “is not so much whether St. Mary’s should be closed down, but whether St. Mary’s will close itself down by practices that separate it from communion with the Roman Catholic Church.”
“In reality St. Mary’s South Brisbane has taken a Roman Catholic parish and established its own brand of religion,” he said. “Undoubtedly it does good, it promotes a strong sense of community, opens its doors to all who wish to come, but its own style of worship and sacramental practice can hardly be described as Roman Catholic.”
The conflict between Archbishop Bathersby and the parish community of St. Mary’s stretches back at least six years.
In 2004 the Archbishop demanded that Fr. Kennedy comply with Redemptionis Sacramentum, follow the liturgical norms and stop baptizing people “in the Name of the Creator and the Liberator and of the Sustainer.” Fr. Kennedy countered that they were doing this to make the sacrament “more inclusive, less patriarchal.” 
The parish previously angered conservatives in the church by welcoming gay couples and allowing the Brisbane Gay and Lesbian Choir to perform there in June 2003 as part of Brisbane Pride Festival celebrations. Archbishop Bathersby opposed the performance and said it was “inappropriate.”
Tony Robertson, who belongs to St. Mary’s, said parishioners were rallying to save their parish. Robertson blogs on Out and About with Tony – A Queer Perspective on Life as a Gay Catholic.
“St. Mary’s is a church which takes seriously its identity as a Catholic community and practices the teachings of the Catholic Church which calls for homosexual persons be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity,” Robertson said.
“Such acceptance calls for practical action which welcomes gay and lesbian people to the life and worship of the community.”
Robertson noted that other Catholic churches also welcome sexual minorities, including one church that flies the rainbow flag among its public decorations.
“Those who have concerns about our support for sexual minorities need to remember that the Catholic Church also teaches that every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. In this spirit the Church has opened its doors to the Brisbane Lesbian and Gay Pride Choir who use the Church for weekly rehersals as well as supporting the musical and religious culture of St. Mary’s,” he said.
“Gay and lesbian Catholics who prefer a more traditional worship have always been a presence at the Cathedral of St. Stephen where one of the beautiful stained glass windows is dedicated to a gay member of the famous Mayne Family of Brisbane,” he added.
“Jesus Wept” at the loss of a relationship, not the interpretation of a rule.
Follow the St. Mary’s situation on St. Mary’s Discussion Forum.
Show your support for St. Mary’s on their MySpace page.
Interesting notes on gay history in the Mayne family can be found on page 229 in Colonialism and Homosexuality by Robert Aldrich.
“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?
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.
