To repeat: the realization that we’re all in this mess together. There are the long-suffering parishioners, like me, easily one woman or man out of every fifteen or twenty or thirty or forty in every Sunday-morning Mass. There are the conscientious Fr Merciers. There are the baffled parish priests, so often (in spite of what I wrote above) doing their meagre best, even as the Fr Merciers do.
You can tell, by the way, when a priest is doing his meagre best. I’ve had priests really listen in confession—really try to say something, however inadequate. There was a priest who said to me in Holy Week that my future might lie in finding a buddy and having an intimate relationship, from which physical intimacies would not be excluded. Bad advice, I presume, but the priest was making an effort. Like the wonderful doctor who once said to me ever so casually, after prescribing some 1970s-style antidepressant, that one could swallow the whole bottle at once and suffer nothing but a nasty stomach upset. False, since swallowing those particular pills would have led to the swift cessation of biological life. Lying is never right. Yet we salute such a doctor, fighting as he was with every pathetic means at his disposal to preserve health and life, not too proud to sacrifice even Truth to what he sincerely took to be the requirement of compassion.
Yes, parish priests. On second thought, it may be that the one who was arranging for “dialogue” on homosexuality, in the guise of a guest-lecturer series, really was doing all that was possible in the given situation. What was the alternative? Perhaps, for all I know, launching a true dialogue, in that time of high political passion, say by adding a true sexual-issues discussion group to the existing right-inside-the-parish discussion-group roster, would have split the parish into factions. I just don’t know.
Even the guys in Rome who wear the red dresses are in this mess with us. Many of them, I’m sure, are, although chaste, nevertheless homosexually inclined, and find themselves as baffled as anyone else on how to extend compassion and healing to the homosexually troubled.
One of the illusions of our time is to think that problems have solutions—to think that all we have to do is make a few deft moves and things will fall magically into place. When the USSR fostered that illusion, it destroyed first its agriculture, then its industry. When the United States fostered that illusion, it invaded first Vietnam, then Iraq. Sanity starts when we realize that life is tough. We eventually understand that many problems don’t have a solution at all, short of the coming of that Kingdom for which we have been taught to pray daily.
Trying to do the best I can for the guys in the red dresses, then, I extend to them the benefit of the doubt. Surely, I reason, they were right in opposing the Iraq war; surely that was not a trespass of the Church into the rightful domain of Caesar. If, then, they presume to instruct Canadian Catholic parliamentarians on voting against a same-sex marriage bill, is it not possible that they are right again? What would Angelo Roncalli have done? I put it to you that he might well, in good-natured bafflement, have signed one of those creepy Catholic-lobby parliamentary petition-thingies put in front of us in some Canadian parishes in 2003. (And I therefore put it to you that I myself acted rightly, or at any rate innocently, in signing.)
The lack of easy answers is at a deeper level a cause for celebrating, not lamenting. It reflects the fact that the human heart is itself a mystery.
If you think the guys in red dresses are a bunch
of triumphalists, insensitive to the mystery, then have a look
at the last in the series of articles on homosexuality
published in 1997
at l’Osservatore Romano. The author
is a weighty theologian, Father Jean-Louis Brugues, O.P.,
a colleague of Cardinal Ratzinger’s. His work is
at
http://www.ewtn.com/library/HUMANITY/homo14.htm.
Here's part of what he has to say:
It should be honestly admitted that we cannot explain homosexuality. On
this precise point, and despite the progress made by the sciences of
human knowledge, we have come no further than we were in the past. The
humility of the scientist who does not reach full understanding requires
a corresponding humility from the pastor, who must guide people whose
personal struggles will remain largely mysterious. I cannot say that I respect someone,
if I accept only “parts” of him,
that is, if I am not prepared to accept—which
does not mean approve—the
totality of the elements constituting his being, with the exception
of his sin. Acceptance of the homosexual person means accepting the
burden of all he is, including his affective orientation. Every human being has been created in the image of God; he has been
loved with passionate love, because Christ offered his life for him on
the Cross; he is called with all his being to salvation, not
in spite of,
but with the
particular features of his personality development
which do not depend on him...
Is this the facile triumphalist line about
hating the sin and loving the sinner? Not really:
And he also says this:
The emphases are his, not mine.