Cross-posted from my Vox.com blog, a story coinciding with the oncoming Easter holiday.
At my job, I spend a lot of time on the phone with vendors and over the past year or so have gotten to know a few more personally. We'll spend the first few minutes trading stories of weather, vacations, business trips, before moving on to matters of contracts and deliverables.
One of our vendor reps, a woman I'lll call Susan, takes the most remarkable vacations, often occasioned by connections she has through friends and family. Last year was a friend's Moroccan-style wedding in Israel. This year was a trip to the Vatican with her boyfriend's devoutly Catholic family. On an official pilgrimage no less.
Doctrine of the Faith
They knew all the right people. They had a brief audience with the pope and then got to have tea with a few high-ranking priests inside the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the lavish global nerve center for the enforcement of Catholic doctrine. Also the place where Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, served before stepping into his new role.
It must have been an extraordinary experience for Susan, not a Catholic and unchurched as far as I know, to be among people fulfilling a lifetime dream, to be surrounded by such a show of faith, opulence, and power.
Susan lives in North Hollywood and has tons of gay friends, and somehow her teatime chat with the clergy turned to the matter of those gay friends, how dear they were to her, and how she couldn't understand a faith that would condemn them.
Then went back and forth. Argument and counterargument, all ending in the double-knotted logic of religious dogma. Susan got angry. Her love for her friends, her desire for their happiness and fullness of life smashed against the cold, concrete mass of unflinching orthodoxy.
Gay people -- so it went, back and forth for round after round -- deserve only a life of celibacy and semi-invisibility. Their love, if they dare to love, must be sexless and their sex, if they are too weak to resist, must be loveless.
Susan probed for a hint of human warmth and found none. The anger welled up inside her. The tears came.
Welcome to Our World, Susan
Her story brought me back to a series of articles I wrote last year for The Vital Voice, the St. Louis area's GLBT community paper. "Faith Life" explored the paths of GLBT believers, the faith communities they were a part of, and the struggles over their place in them.
Writing for the series was transformative, wrenching at times. The piece that got to me the most was on GLBT Catholics.
I asked everyone in the series to tell me if they had ever felt the presence of God in their lives and, if so, how they would explain that feeling to someone who had never experienced it. Like, say, me.
God is Love
I will never forget the words of Jane (a pseudonym). She's nun who ministers to the tattered spirits of GLBT Catholics right under the nose of St. Louis's rock-ribbed conservative archbishop.
"I feel surrounded by love," she told me. "And I feel love flowing through me."
Mary, a young woman who had found an accepting parish to call home, described it this way.
"You are loved and cherished for exactly who you are right now," she said. "And that love is always present, even when you can’t feel it or aren’t looking for it."
"On the day I was baptised," said Sam, Preident of Dignity USA, a refuge for GLBT Catholics, "God wrote my name on his palm and thundered across the universe, I love this man!"
I still get a weird stirring in my chest when I remember their words. Maybe the closest I'll ever come myself to knowing what God feels like.
And Now for Something Completely Different
In the interest of journalistic even-handedness, I contacted
the Archdiocese of St. Louis to get their take on quotes from the people I interviewed. I was put in touch with Father Richard Edward, then the Academic Dean of the Kenrick Glennon Seminary, the principal training ground of the Archdiocese of St. Louis
Here's what I wrote him, a little over a year ago in the thick of Holy Week.
One respondent related to me that the Church hierarchy's long-standing attitudes and open pronouncements regarding "homosexual acts" cut so deeply into her sense of self-worth that she can't bear the pain of going to Mass. What advice should this woman in particular be given?
I probably shouldn't have expected an academic to be a well of human warmth or empathy, still less an academic theologian who, for all I know, has his curriculum set by the very men Susan butted heads with.
Still, I wasn't prepared for what I got back.
The morality of human acts is judged according to the way the act one performs or the action one intends actually constitutes a good in relationship to human nature, as such, and the perfection of that nature.
The "good" or "evil" in a human action is not defined so much due to a decree of the Church as much as it is a question of conformity to truth about the human person whose true dignity is sought and protected by the magisterium.
The Church's position on the question of homosexual acts holds in high esteem the authentic and potential freedom of every person. The idea that a person's sexual preferences can define the identity of the person is contrary to the authentic meaning of the human person.
The Church continues to say this even though many people today define themselves by sexual orientation, a self-concept that leads to determinism in action.
In the end, the Church is upholding the person's dignity and concept of self-worth rather than injuring it by supporting the freedom of the person to choose such true goods as are consistent with the authentic meaning
of the human person.
Only by denying one's true self or creating one's own sense of self could one come to the conclusion that the Church is injuring your questioner’s self-worth by the Church's appraisal of homosexual acts.
All people have to struggle against actions which lead away from the perfection of our nature and the Church recognizes that those with homosexual tendencies have a particularly difficult burden. Still, upholding their freedom to make good choices is an affirmation of their dignity as human persons.
Dead Inside
As a Unitarian Universalist, I'm bound by principle to respect religious differences.
But this dude got to me. Reading his words sent me to the bottom of an emotional sinkhole. For days I was sad, then angry, then more sad, then more angry. I guess I knew all along that detachment wasn't possible in this series. The people I was interviewing for the series were my own, sometimes my friends and neighbors.
So I wrote him back.
Dear Father Richard-
First, let me express my appreciation for the time and thought you put into your message during a very busy time.
That said, I wanted to let you know I won't be calling you this morning for the follow-up conversation we arranged. I'm going to step out from behind my role as the journalist in this story for a moment to explain why.
I'm neither a Catholic nor a Christian, but talking to the committed Catholics I interviewed for this story brought me closer to understanding their feeling of the presence of God than I have ever been. Their words moved a lifelong atheist to tears.
Then I read your reply and I felt dead inside. Just dead.
I don't presume to know what is in other people's hearts, but I struggled to understand how the words you sent me could have been written by anyone who was not themselves dead inside.
The utter lack of empathy that comes across here for people who feel singled out, excluded, and denigrated -- indeed, the unwillingness to concede that their feelings are even valid -- was, in a word, sickening.
At the very least, that leads me to the conclusion that further conversation on this topic is not in anyone's interest.
The Year Since
The conservatives' stranglehold on the church hierarchy has only gotten stronger. Now they've even taken to writing letters to GLBT parishoners who defy the order to be celibate or, if they are not celibate, to be silent.
It's galling enough without coming from the lips of people who, in their own human weakness, let the sexual abuse of children go on for years.
For now, for myself, I look to GLBT Catholics and those who uphold their equality when I want to understand what it means to live a life of faith. I will never forget what they taught me.