The instruction from the Vatican regarding “persons with homosexual tendencies and their admission to seminaries and sacred orders” is Ratzinger nailing his colours firmly to the mast, in his first major statement since being elected Pope. Fair enough. His views are well known. When the Cardinals elected him, underneath Michelangelo’s ceiling, they knew where he stood on queers.
We are unfit to be priests, not only because we have sex, but because the role requires emotional maturity, which, apparently, we lack. The document lists four dimensions of personal development: human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral. Apparently, we fall at the first hurdle – our human development is in doubt, the basis for all others. We are “objectively disordered”. The sex we have is gravely sinful, “immoral”, and contrary to “natural law”. (Quite what that is, when mother nature keeps churning us queers out, generation after generation, I can’t make out.) Those who have sexual troubles (in the original: disturbi sessuali) are not welcome.
Although we queers are to be treated with “respect and delicacy”, it appears now that the old Catholic sophistry, the distinction between homosexual persons and homosexual acts, is now old hat. Up to now, it didn’t matter with whom the priest might have had sex, were he a layman. Celibacy was the great moral leveller, it was egalitarian in principle. Sex was sinful for all.
Now, I’m not critical of celibacy per se, nor even of anyone who aspires to it as an authentic expression of their spirituality. However, I believe it has more validity if entered into in the spirit of extreme intimacy with one’s body and its energies, along Tantric lines.
Rather than shunning sex and the body, in a flight to the spirit, one should know it, embrace it, dive into it, in search of spirit. Go through it.
But this notion, I imagine, would send shivers down the spines of those cagey old men of the Curia. This is a crisis of masculinity as much as anything else. A manifestation of how much these priests have lost touch with their bodies. I suppose it is what happens when one celebrates the chimera of a virgin mother. No phallus allowed.
This document is an institutional response to the change in sexualities over the past 50 or so years, and these new-fangled notions of rights, of identity being linked to sex, of the personal becoming political. This statement is a political reaction to the “ so-called gay culture” – (even in the original Italian, they call it la cultura gay). It is insistent that, not only those men who have sex with men, but any man with “deep-rooted homosexual tendencies”, and any man who “supports” this gay culture, may not be admitted to the priesthood. Because, it states, they are in a situation which “gravely obstructs” the way they relate to people.
I do think they’re on to something if they doubt the maturity of anyone who supports gay culture. What’s there to support? Bad cabaret acts? Classy escort ads? Andrew Hollinghurst? It is indefensible.
But they are trying to eliminate dissent in the clergy’s ranks by excluding anyone who uses the language of gay identity, who talks of individual rights, who does not believe that homosexuality is a sign of emotional immaturity, arrested development, and sexual disturbance. It’s a clarion call to follow the party line.
They are retreating to this fundamentalist position because they are frightened. They do not know how to deal with the crisis of perverted priests and the children they have abused, which is threatening to financially and morally bankrupt their institution.
Their blurring of the lines between homosexuality and pederasty is unforgivable. Their belief that homosexuality could be the result of a “transitory problem, such as an incomplete adolescence” deserves only scorn.
They haven’t a clue.
This instruction will have the opposite effect to that which its drafters intended. Dishonesty will increase in the seminaries, not decrease. Those who are determined to become priests will, of course, still do so, as they always have done, for millennia.
How else, traditionally, could queers have avoided marriage, except through priesthood? In seminaries, honest discussion about sexuality, cravings, lusts, relationships and love, so necessary for general self-awareness and the “human” development that the Vatican claims to prize so much, can no longer be possible, if it ever was.
The “culture” of the priesthood is set to become even more toxic than it is today, like anaerobic bacteria removed from the oxygen of rational discourse.
Traditional wisdom has it that spiritual emergence, an awakening of a sense of the transpersonal or spiritual, is supposed to be disturbing.
For any significant appreciation of the mysteries of the human condition to develop, in order to truly mature, we have to find ourselves disturbed, challenged to our core by our experience of life. In our time, this arena of disturbance is often sexual, as confusing as it may be.
As frightening as it may be. As threatening as it may be. And we need, more than ever, a way to make sense of it, to make meaning from it, to see it as sacred. Not shameful.
The document speaks of the notion of spiritual fatherhood. But it heralds a very ugly witch-hunt. Nobody, of course, expects the Inquisition. But it’s here.
In the name of all those queers who have lived good lives as priests, nuns, bishops and popes down the centuries, who have eased the lives of the flocks they have served, I spit on this document. In the name of all those queers who have been parents and godparents to children down the centuries, living and breathing examples of “spiritual fatherhood”, I spit on this document. In the name of those priests I have fucked and been fucked by, I spit on this document.
In the name of the priest I might have become, had I not been infected by fancy modern notions of respect for myself, and respect for my truth, and respect for my own spiritual path, I spit on this document. In the name of those countless kids in Catholic homes who have been, and are now going to be even more infected with concepts of dis-ease and dis-trust and dis-like, of dis-may and dis-gust, for themselves and for others, I spit on this document. b