Yes. Four recommendations:
Andrew Sullivan, who keeps a blog at http://www.andrewsullivan.com/, is a poster boy of what we might call the Bad Catholic movement. Unlike me, he is for physical sex between men. I pretty well stopped reading his blog after the backed the 2003 Iraq war. But his 1998 book Love Undetectable has some finely crafted writing, talking honestly of pain and the theology of friendship.
By the way, I have a truly dreadful Andrew Sullivan story.
One night, feeling down, I indulged
my bad habit of talking in an illicit way
with a couple of guys
on the Internet. A lot of our conversation had to do
with the Bette Midler song:
Some say love, it is a river
(Predictably, we camped up the song.
My contribution ran “Some say love, it is a blazer,/
in expensive Harris tweed.”) I then went into a bookstore,
as one does in a time of depression, and bought the Sullivan book,
and took it to the Market Garden café in Toronto’s
Delta Chelsea Hotel. I read with rising interest as the bad-boy author
developed his concluding argument. At the climax of the
exposition, around where he
compares and contrasts the apostle Peter
with the apostle John (who had leaned on Jesus’s breast at the
Last Supper), the Delta Chelsea music-by-Muzak started tinkling out
the Bette Midler
tune: Bling-da-BLING, da BLING da blong-blong,/
bling-da-blong, da-blong-da-blong.
An epiphany? Yup.
Nonetheless,
I refused, and still refuse,
to believe that God was in that hotel calling me to a life of sex.
that drowns the tender reed.
Some say love, it is a razor
that leaves your soul to bleed.
Some say love, it is a hunger,
an endless aching need.
I say love, it is a flower,
and you its only seed.
It’s the heart, afraid of breaking,
that never learns to dance.
It’s the dream, afraid of waking,
that never takes a chance.
It’s the one who won’t be taken,
who cannot seem to give.
And the soul, afraid of dying,
that never learns to live.
Like Sullivan, Stephen Lovatt at http://www.geocities.com/pharsea/ plumbs the deep theology of friendship. While lacking Mr Sullivan’s high literary polish, Dr Lovatt shows an almost terrifying grasp of church history and technical theological debate. If anyone is ever going to argue cogently (not by swinging the blunt club of authority, but by reasoning validly from plausible premisses, in the manner of Chesterton or Newman) that my own no-sex-please-we-are-Vatican-men theology is wrong, it is this person. At the core of Dr Lovatt’s position is the suggestion that sex has a comparatively minor role in the overall moral scheme. The Vatican, he suggests, has blown the sexual issue up out of all proportion, in an ultimately pornographic obsession with penis and vagina meeting on the deliberate hazard of procreation. A must-read is the author’s fantasy encyclical from “Pope Leo XIV”, supposedly promulgated on the feast of John Henry Cardinal Newman in the Year of Our Lord 2112. It’s disarmingly clever, and for those of us who try to steer by Vatican injunctions, a shock to our moral complacency. (How easy it is, one realizes, to take the pronouncements of the theological tradition, notably on the meaning of marriage, and argue honestly, and yet come up with a set of pastoral precepts significantly divergent from the Vatican’s.)
The Courage movement, which I discussed above, is a potential source of useful authors who uphold Vatican teaching and so offer a balancing counterpoint to Andrew Sullivan and Dr Lovatt. So far I have found two such individuals. (i) For Courage On Line moderator David Morrison, consult first and foremost his 1999 book Beyond Gay. Mr Morrison’s blog (which, however, I have not found time to examine deeply; and, in general, we must be wary of blogs) has recently moved to http://davidmorrison.typepad.com/sed_contra/. (ii) For Courage Seattle thinker Ron Belgau, author of “Sodom and the City of God” in New Oxford Review, use a Google search. Google is liable over coming years to turn up fresh Belgau writing that was only work-in-progress as I myself put this list together.
Finally, there is the incomparable Father Henri Nouwen. Father Nouwen struggled with homosexual compulsions (remaining chaste, in the judgement of his biographers and commentators). He struggled with depression. He abandoned a teaching career on Ivy League campuses for work with the intellectually handicapped in Toronto’s suburbs. Here, Mark, John, and Bar-Timaeus would say, in all this hilariously unreal Catholic world of the third millennium, is a priest like the Jesus we knew.
On the whole, I’d say I tackle the whole morality-of-sex thing thus, that I look at the personal holiness of the people taking the various positions, and find myself powerfully drawn to some examples in Courage, and above all to Father Nouwen. I also find it clarifying to imagine Angelo Roncalli giving me a little bit of private spiritual direction. As Ron Belgau wrote in “Sodom and the City of God”, “For Catholics, truth is never purely abstract: it is always incarnate.”
And of critical importance, I reflect on the lives of
heterosexual people. Here's how I thought the thing through
in a different piece of writing, my
Utopia 2184. (I stress in that writing,
as you’ll see in a moment,
that chastity goes beyond avoiding the
overt illicit physical act. A dimension of what we are called to
is interior peace.)
I have in my limited experience (now essentially confined to the
writer's desk) found chastity comprehensible when I imaginatively
contemplate it in others, perhaps especially in persons who have
attained a heterosexual development. A fine 1990s film,
Dead Man
Walking,
dramatized the pastoral work of Sister Helen Prejean with a man
whom the Louisiana government had condemned to death by injection. Would
the story line have been improved, I ask myself, had Hollywood inserted
a romantic interest, as its screenwriters are wont to do? By, as it
might in this case have been, having the celluloid heroine fall in love
with some cragged
defense attorney, bringing her passion to ecstatic
consummation in a motel room? Or, more delicately, by making her love a
matter of the private imagination, of fantasy, with an ultimately
triumphant sweaty private struggle to be “good”?