I wonder how much the contemporary Church has to do with the Jesus of the Gospels. What in this corporation would be recognizable to, say, Mark or John, or to Bar-Timaeus?
A few years ago, I went to a priest, Father “N.N.,” to seek counselling in my difficulties with a fetishistic compulsion. I will not identify the parish here. Here, in fact, I'll deliberately make the waters muddy by saying that while I have not moved around Toronto very much, I have nevertheless habituated more than one church for Mass. I'll say also that Father N.N. has himself moved around, and is now filling, doubtless with brilliance, a position not in the parish where I sought him out.
But at any rate, this is my story. Where, asks Father (a couple of minutes after I launch my narrative of personal difficulty) did you get my name? Well, Father, I attend Mass here, and your name gets printed in the church bulletin.
Admittedly, there is more to say abut Father N.N. Our job is not to condemn, but to understand. I'll come back to Father soon.
Here’s a second story. With the topic of same-sex marriage stirring up emotions in Canada in 2003, a certain parish that I know well tried to get a “dialogue” going on homosexuality. A selection of readings, by distinguished authors, duly appeared on the parish Web site. I think the idea was that homosexuality was someone else’s problem. One had to develop an awareness of it at the parish level, of course, one had in some sense to feel the pain. Just as one had to feel the pain of impoverished farmers in Peru, of lepers in India. Or as one had to hear about the young woman put up for sale as a thirty-dollar slave in a Sudan market. (The issue of Sudanese slavery, for its part, got quite an indignant and open discussion in the parish at one point, in an actual meeting. We no longer lived in 1866.)
Now speaking of meetings: as part of the striving for “dialogue,” a three-part speaker-with-discussion series was announced, under the aegis of the Office of Catholic Youth, in premisses not too far from the parish itself. For 2003 November 11, we were offererd material on marriage and the family; for 2004 January 21, something under the approximate heading “Why Does the Church Think the Way It Does about Sexuality?” and on 2004 March 25, something on Church and State. (The latter topic was a lively one in the Toronto of the day for this reason, that the Church had instructed Catholic parliamentarians on the way to vote upon the tabling of same-sex-marriage legislation in the Ottawa House of Commons.)
I was too caught up in environmentalist causes and Catholic Worker stuff to involve myself much in the pastoral theology of homosexuality. So I missed the 2003 November 11 meeting. But I did attend what promised to be the juciest meeting of the three, the one which quite openly referred to sexuality in its title.
Although the night was rather stormy, something like sixty people turned up. We were offered a nice mound of savoury and sweet nibbles. The speaker was Fr Ronald Mercier, S.J., Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Regis College. Regis is the Jesuit Graduate Faculty of Theology at the University of Toronto. Fr Mercier spoke abstractly, as philosophy professors do. (I know the techniques and methods, since I used to be a philosophy professor. This was what I’d have considered a good Industrial Strength lecture, in the Canada Fancy quality grade. Definitely good enough for an archiocesan audience, though not pitched to the level needed for the American Philosophical Association. Perhaps two hours’ preparation time, perhaps more. Delivered mostly from notes, I think, with some slips of the tongue. Not, I think, read verbatim from a script. Only the very insecure read their philosophy lectures word for word from a script.)
Fr Mercier started by pointing out the change in economic arrangements, and comcomitantly in attitudes to sexuality, over the past century. In 1904, he said, managerial and market structures meant that a mere three years typically separated puberty from marriage. In 2004, the separation was on the order of fifteen years. But in this landscape of changing mores, we as Catholics (he said) need to speak to persons, not to speak through their roles. Our ethics cannot be based on attitudes of fear or on the bureaucratic ideal of problem-solving. (At Regis, Fr Mercier is not only a philosophy prof, but also a senior administrator, a Vice President or Dean, or perhaps a Vice-Presiedent-who-also-is-Dean.) We must instead (this was a particularly fine passage, so I took it down word for word in my diligent pencil notes) “explain sexuality as part and parcel of the graced reality of our lives.” We are sexual beings in our complete selves. We are most like God when we are in relationship with each other. We learn from the account of male and female humanity in Genesis that we cannot be complete without a relationship to another person. Relationships (Fr Mercier reminded us) are meant to be mutual. (In the belief that the medical profession could assist with depression, I used to see psychiatrist after psychiatrist. One of the more interesting members of that merry crew practiced in Melbourne, but was in fact an exile from Czechoslovakia. The said shrink explained to me, once, in a Mitteleuropa accent precisely fitting the traditional Hollywood conception of psychotherapy: “Dialogue viss our patients … is an essential element … in a socially responsible … psycho-serapy.”) There was more: relationships are not only to be mutual, but also to be equal, joyful, creative (that includes having babies), and peaceful. Real relationship, real friendship, is sexual, in a sense in which sexuality is by no means to be reduced to the mere genital act. Marriage comes at the end of a long line of development, of being schooled in one’s heart. We face today the challenge (Fr Mercier concluded) of connecting with our tradition, and of thereby actually being, not merely seeming to be, friends of God.
A philosophy talk, in other words, defending the Roman equivalent of what I think was in another tradition called the generalnye liniye, the general Party line. A Catholic equivalent of what used to be done, likewise under the mantle of academic philosophy, in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic and kindred jurisdictions. It’s philosophy not as a mode of enquiry, but as a procedure for confirming the converted in their conversion.
After the talk, we split into little discussion groups, of three or four or five individuals, addressing three recommended questions, or anything else we wished to address. The first question on the recommended list went something like this: “What kinds of understanding of sexuality do you sense among your peers?” In our particular group, we had a kind and sweet lady who appeared from her manner of wearing the Crucifix to be a nun. This could have been fun. But, alas, our particular nun or para-nun took “peers” to mean the group of laity she was counselling on (yup, you guessed it) marriage. So we never did get to hear about the really interesting stuff, like: Do nuns talk about chastity with other nuns, or is that a kind of angst exclusive, within consecrated Catholic life, to priests and brothers? Do nuns tend to find chastity easy or hard? Do nuns stop thinking about sex after menopause? How do nuns—I bet here they are likely to have something to teach guys—handle temptations and falls? How, in particular, do they deal with temptations concerning masturbation?
The technique of breaking up into small groups ensures that anything painful or controversial is shielded from the meeting at large. Having seen it in action, I’d now recommend it to anyone in public service having to face potentially troublesome constituents. Another technique later that evening I can likewise recommend: we were not invited to direct our questions orally to the speaker, but instead to write them down on slips of paper, passed up to the podium by assistants.
As the scarred veteran of endless campaigns in academic public speaking, I was left seventy percent sure, from a reading of verbal tone, that Fr Mercier was glad enough to bring the proceedings to a close. And I was glad that he did so rather early, about ninety minutes after opening them, since that gave me time to scoot off to the cinema and see a documentary on the takeover of society by business corporations. God, of course, planned the whole thing, and most notably the getaway. (It was somewhat odd that I happened to know the time and venue of the cinema screening.) As He also planned a certain Bette Midler musical interlude I’ll come to later in this FAQ.
But my main point is not to condemn Fr Mercier and company. Rather, I seek to understand. The way I see it is this, that all of us (Fr Mercier, the nun or para-nun, the other earnest and respectable people in the audience, me too) are prisoners of a dysfunctional Church.
Every November, we dutifully speak of Christ as the King. Was there ever a metaphor more alien to contemporary people, whose understanding of royalty is mediated by a mixture of Tolkien and the current House of Windsor?
While carrying on with our November duty, we do well also, and all through the year, to remember that Christ is the Liberator. Some day we will have, not in some reformist defiance outside the Church, but lovingly, right within it, an understanding of Christ as the One who sets free. Liberation will involve releasing us from the toxic concept of the “business relationship“ in the workplace, from a triumphalist conception of Church in our ecclesial lives, from feelgood attitudes in pastoral ethics. (Indeed Fr Mercier himself mentioned the Church’s “preferential option for the poor”—I half suspect, or even rather definitely suspect, in a tacit reference to persons struggling with same-sex attraction.) A Liberator fulfilling the Old Testament prophecy that God shall replace hearts of stone with living hearts.