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The Pope and the “gay Lobby”

By Joan Acocella
New Yorker
June 18, 2013

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/06/the-pope-and-the-gay-lobby.html



Why did the Roman Catholic cardinals choose, as their Pope, a man who liked to ride the bus and cook his own dinner? Didn’t they guess that such a person might not be a good advertisement of the Church’s magnificence? And when Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose the name Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi, probably the most self-abnegating man ever to direct a religious order—and one whose name, tellingly, had never before been selected by a Pope—didn’t they worry a little bit? They should have. El Mundo says that “several Vaticanists” have commented that “the Pontiff is capable of speaking without restraint on any matter, as delicate as it may be.” Recently, he gave a good example. He spoke about homosexuality in the Vatican.

On June 6th, in a meeting at the Vatican with a group named CLAR (the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious Men and Women—that is, nuns and priests), he acknowledged that there were serious problems in the Roman Curia. The organization, he said, included many holy people. “But there also is a stream of corruption, there is that as well, it is true…. The ‘gay lobby’ is mentioned, and it is true, it is there…. We need to see what we can do.” Transparency has been a constant theme of Francis’s administration so far. “Open the doors … Open the doors!” he said at the beginning of his address to CLAR. “Don’t be afraid to denounce!” Since when have we heard that from a Pope?

Francis’s remarks were not taped, though at least one person in the small audience was observed to have a notebook. After the meeting, what was said to be a summary of his remarks was leaked to the press, without his consent. This is poor evidence for the accuracy of the document, as representatives of CLAR later pointed out. They said they deeply regretted the leak, since “the singular expressions contained in the text cannot be attributed to the Holy Father with certainty.”

Yes, and what was the context of those singular expressions? In the leaked summary, Francis’s statement about a gay lobby comes immediately after his admission that there is corruption in the Curia. It would seem, then, that he is citing the gay lobby as an example of the corruption. But do we know this to be the case? There are ellipses between the two statements. (The ellipses are not mine. They were in the summary.) What material did those ellipses replace? Did they change the meaning?

Then there is the amount of space that the Pope apparently gave to the gay lobby: twenty words out of the thirteen-hundred-word summary. That’s 1.5 per cent. The remainder has nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality, but is concerned with matters that Francis apparently considers more important: Pelagianism (rejection of the doctrine of original sin; belief that you can achieve righteousness by good works alone), Gnosticism (a tendency, as Francis puts it, to “spiritually bathe in the cosmos, things like that”), capitalism, and, above all, poverty, his constant concern.

Other things, too, are puzzling in this document. The gay lobby that he speaks of: What is it lobbying for? Rachel Donadio, who is the Times’s bureau chief in Rome, and who therefore probably has good contacts in the Vatican, told me that the Pope was responding to a report from a committee of cardinals that he appointed in April. The report apparently suggested that a gay lobby was “vying for power and influence.” Power to do what? Donadio adds that the homosexual collective was rumored to be using blackmail to gain influence; or maybe it was that they were susceptible to blackmail. For what?

Perhaps this is a long shot, but what is the possibility that the “gay lobby,” if it exists, is campaigning, at least partly, for the Church to take a more tolerant view of homosexuality? The Roman Catholic catechism says that homosexuals should be treated with respect and compassion, but that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and cannot be approved under any circumstances. This is a comically sophistic rule but one that seems unlikely to be revised any time soon, in part because of the scandal over pedophile priests and their protectors within the church hierarchy—this despite the distance between pedophilia and adult homosexuality.

If things were otherwise, Francis might have been a good man to relax the rule. He certainly knows that it wasn’t dictated by the Holy Ghost. Celibacy became a requirement for priests only in the Middle Ages. “For the moment,” Francis has said, “I am in favor of maintaining celibacy, with all its pros and cons.” It seemed to him, he added, that many Catholics who were calling for an end to celibacy were doing so out of “pragmatism”—presumably, that is, in order to have a greater pool of men to call on for the priesthood. “For the moment”? “Pros and cons”? “Pragmatism”? This does not sound like a ringing endorsement of celibacy. Of course, violation of the rule of celibacy is not the same as homosexuality. But didn’t it occur to anyone that in the priesthood, as in prison, a rule of celibacy might be very, very hard for young men to observe? And did they also not consider that sexually inactive and closeted homosexuals, too, could find the priesthood a good profession?

Doctrinally, however, celibacy may be almost a small matter. Last month, Francis declared that you didn’t have to be Catholic to go to heaven: “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! … But do good: we will meet one another there.” Presumably, that includes homosexuals.

 

 

 

 

 




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