I was out with a friend last night and we were propping up a bar, musing, as we do, on the gay scene and how we make sense of sex and relationships with men. Or fail to. He picked up a little photocopied pink slip of paper from a pile that was nestling between the glossy stacks of scene magazines with pneumatic torsos on the cover, and handed it to me.

Exactly in the style of the slips I used to be handed as a boy on entering the Church of Our Lady of Refuge in Rathmines on Sunday mornings, it was announcing a Mass, for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered Catholics, parents, families and friends, at St Anne’s Church, Dean Street, Soho, with Fr. Tim Curtis, SJ, and special Lenten music. On the back, there was information about a Palm Sunday Mass, this time with Fr. Bernard Lynch, SMA, the Irish-American priest and psychotherapist, presiding. My friend, himself with a Catholic background, couldn’t see how it was possible. Neither could I.
Fr Lynch appeared memorably on the Late Late Show in 1986, with harrowing tales of men who were dying of AIDS in New York, and his struggle to minister to them against strong Church opposition. He was asked by Gay Byrne whether he was gay or not, and he denied it, something which he later regretted. Ten years later, he went on RTÉ again to rage against the “soul murder” of gay men by the Catholic Church, taking issue with the self-loathing and misery among his flock, which he attributed to the Church’s teachings on homosexuality. At the time, it was a moment of personal revelation to me, when my initial sentimental neo-adolescent urge to support him and campaign for a more enlightened Church was extinguished in an instant, with the realisation that it was never going to happen, not in our lifetimes at least, and that there were other churches where people could get spiritual and pastoral support regardless of their sexual orientation, if that’s what was needed.
The only sensible and sane approach, I realised, was to take a firm stand against the Church getting its manipulative claws on young people, and to name it unambiguously as a destructive force. I have not wavered since then on that point. Since then, the Church has become even more conservative on the issue, actively campaigning against gay marriage for example; and, among many other crimes, its devious machinations to deliberately conceal sex abuse scandals by clergymen in 1962 have come to light.
It turns out that St Anne’s is not a Catholic Church. Of course not. The rector of the church is the Rev Clare Herbert, who is, unsurprisingly, the area dean of Women’s Ministry in the Anglican Diocese of London. The Mass happens twice a month, and is under the aegis of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement.
I have become more mellow over the years on the need for a spiritual dimension in people’s lives, and can quite see how the longing to belong to something greater than ourselves is often met by following the teachings of a traditional religion, that offers a route to meaning and a sense of order in the chaos of life. I am, however, firmly of the belief that a shame-based religion functions primarily as a means of social control, of keeping people en masse in line, and it works for the majority of its adherents, at extreme cost to the minority who are driven by a more individualistic bent.
To get an example of the official hard line that Catholicism is all about, I can quote from an exchange that happened in the last few months in a mailing list that I lurk in. It’s called Courage, an officially approved Catholic Support Group (on Yahoo), offering “Hope for Catholics with homosexual attractions”. In the introduction, it espouses the dangerous rubbish that homosexuality is a “curable condition”, and that no one is born homosexual. It also promises that everyone is welcome to be honest, for no one is going to be judged. Thankfully, it doesn’t have even a dozen members. But I joined to keep an eye on the enemy.
A heartrending message was posted to the (open) group, probably from some internet café. “I am Bosnian Catholic and living in Sarajevo. I am looking for man and relationship in the UK because in my country it is impossible. My father kicked me out of house and I am freezing out by temperature -20. I don’t know what to do pls help me if you know how I’d like to have somebody in my life who can love and give me a bit of happiness.”
The response from the moderator was thus: “I would suggest you examine your own behaviour and what would cause your father to turn against you and ‘kick you out’ of your home. Your priority should be to be reconciled with your father, and make amends to him for what made him so angry. Seeking sexual relationships isn’t really the answer to your predicament.”
This is of course a classic Catholic response. Deconstructing it, the problem lies solely with the troubled outcast, not with the family. The quotes around “kick you out” insinuate that he’s exaggerating or lying, that a good Catholic family wouldn’t be so heartless. By placing the onus on the young Bosnian to make amends to his father, and to appease his hateful act of irresponsible parenting, it reinforces patriarchal authority, and keeps the dissenter infantilised, disempowered. Despite the message being explicitly about looking for love and acceptance, the moderator re-interprets it as a search for sexual relationships.
A lurking post-Catholic angry pagan anarchist (phew, I’m not the only one. Come to think of it, we’re probably in the majority) came out and protested at the heartlessness of the response, wondering “what would Jesus think?”
The response came: “Do you really think Jesus would want him to get sucked into the sordid squalor of the gay scene rather than be reconciled to his father?”
There are two separate issues here - a young man’s search for love, expressed in a crie de coeur that would melt most people’s hearts. That need for love and understanding can be met in many different ways, through friendship, work, a community, as well as relationships. It is a Western distortion to see romantic sexual relationships as the only source of love. Any decent humanitarian would point that out, and offer loving support to help someone in his situation to find it, exactly as he is, without trying to change him, to pathologise him, to keep him ashamed.
The second issue is the self-fulfilling prophecy of declaring the gay scene “sordid squalor” - primarily because it is sexual, especially in urban centres. If one sees sex as inherently sinful or bad, then no amount of bright lights and rainbow-flag waving will make the gay scene seem anything but squalid. But, and this is the pagan in me - if one sees all consensual sex as a celebration, a creative form of self-expression, then one has to grow up and start to make informed choices about how one has sex, how one gives and receives love. The challenge to find a balance between both in this life can then be thinkable.
But to find inner peace and maturity as a queer Catholic? Unthinkable. It is a contradiction in terms.

Roman Catholic Caucus, Lesbian & Gay Christian Movement [email protected]