New Vatican Eyes for Gay Guys

Chuck Colbert

In Newsweekly
October 20, 2005
    

The Vatican's coming - so hide the Judy Garland CDs.

Surely, Judy, a gay cultural icon, is proof positive for "evidence of homosexuality" now that Vatican inspectors have been given their marching orders.

Next week, my alma mater, the Weston Jesuit School of Theology located here in Cambridge, Mass., is scheduled for its apostolic visitation.

For more than five years, I immersed myself in studies both gay and Catholic. I even wrote a thesis arguing a case for same-sex marriage, both its civil recognition and sacramental celebration by the Church.

But, it's a good thing that I am no longer enrolled there. My presence and academic interests surely would be construed as further "evidence of homosexuality" at the school, which also serves as a seminary for Jesuits priests.

One thing seems certain despite Rome's best efforts to uproot gays. Just as there are real live, flesh and blood homosexuals within the Church universal, so we are everywhere.

In varying degrees of outness to others and ourselves, gays inside and outside centers of theology use the G- and the L-words to describe our identity. Usage of the words "gay" and "lesbian" have far less to do with other people's propensity to focus on our presumed pelvic activity. Rather, using "gay" and "lesbian" is one way to affirm a positive attitude about our personhood.

Despite hierarchical efforts to denigrate us as threats to marriage, the family, and children, we gays and non-gays are blessed to live now when more people outside the ranks of the Church hierarchy have come to see our homosexual orientation as an intrinsic element of the human condition.

In the real world, genuine knowledge of homosexuality has increased over the last several decades at the same time the GLBT community has become even more open and honest about our love and lives.

For me, intellectual and spiritual life outside the rarefied Vatican worldview of human sexuality flourishes. But with Vatican snoops on their way to Cambridge, I can only imagine the fear of those who still live, work, and teach in a belly of the pontifical whale. This time, Rome's local calling card comes under the leadership of Pope Benedict XVI, who seems increasingly obsessed with homosexuality and gays among the ranks of the clergy. His words "objective disorder" and "instrinsic evil" still thunder.

In less anxious times, evaluation of seminary studies and houses of priestly formation might well ring in a chorus of happy days. But Vatican instructions are quite clear. One of the questions that "must be answered" includes, "Is there evidence of homosexuality in the seminary?"

What constitutes evidence of homosexuality under the new Vatican eyes for gay guys is anybody's guess. Perhaps just as beauty is often in the eye of the beholder, so it goes for homosexuality. But at Weston next week, no one dares come out. Such personal honesty and integrity is tantamount to occupational suicide. Still, I wonder how will anyone answer the evidence question with a straight face.

My hope, however, is that when the apostolic visitors arrive, they cast their eyes on the big picture.

At first glance, any visitor notices the school's distinctly international character. It's a veritable rainbow of races and ethnicities, including men and women, ordained and laity, Jesuits from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. In one moral theology class, for example, I studied with a U.S. nun who had marched in Selma during the civil rights era. She wore a full habit then. At the same time, I learned firsthand about the Church and the world in Latin America and Africa from personal accounts of those continental natives who were classmates.

In other words, Weston is a place where all the people of God are welcome to study, reflect, and prepare to serve the Church. It is an exciting intellectual and spiritual environment, with a vibrant celebration of the Eucharist each Wednesday and where a primary concern for justice to and ministry with the poor and those on the margins of society derive from the very message and person of Jesus.

Yes, doctrines and teaching of the Magisterium are presented authentically in terms of truth, justice, peace, and chastity, among other principles. But on occasion, the Church's old hard-line bumps up against the real lives of women and gays. That clash of Church and culture rears its head perhaps most readily with the hot-button pelvic issues of an all-male priesthood and mandatory life-long celibacy for homosexuals.

Yet in working out that apparent clash of doctrine and reality, something wonderful happens. In classroom discussion and personal interactions, true compassion and better understanding emerges. Some minds remained closed, but most hearts were opened just a bit more, if not much wider.

That's because at Weston, the social teachings of the Catholic Church, perhaps its best gift to Christianity, animate a demand of justice for all.

So does the Gospel message of love they neighbor.

Somewhere over the rainbow, Judy and Jesus must be so proud. 

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