Most Respected

Avery Dulles, S.J., as the only American theologian ever to be raised to the College of Cardinals, is arguably, at least in the eyes of the Vatican, the most respected theologian in the country. Yet when he submits an article to your magazine on the important question of evangelization (10/21), you not only submit it to others for a comment to be published in the same issue, but print a response that is longer than his original article. It would seem to me America’s editors should swallow their bias and treat a brother Jesuit with greater respect.

Lou Baldwin

Truth and Feeling

I’d like to commend Gerard Quigley’s lovely, evocative illustration for Some Basics About Celibacy (10/28). It is a beautiful example of how symbols communicate both truth and feeling.

William J. O’Malley, S.J.

A Dreadful Mistake

It seems, if I correctly understand the authors responding to Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., (10/21) that I may have made a dreadful mistake. Whatever was I thinking when I responded to Jesus’ gracious invitation and entered the church? Whatever was God thinking? Didn’t he know that I, as a Jew, didn’t need to be evangelized?

Of course, I wasn’t a practicing Jew at the time. Does that matter? Is the Gospel to be irrelevant to Jews as individuals, or to Jews as a people? Perhaps agnostic or atheistic Jews might appropriately be evangelized, while only observant Jews should be exempted from hearing about Jesus? Now, would that be just Orthodox observant Jews, or perhaps also Conservative Jews; what then about Reform Jews? Or are we talking issues of genetics and ethnicity here? (Non-practicing baptized Catholics are part of the covenant toodo they then not need evangelization either?)

St. Edith Stein, help me! Or did you make a dreadful mistake, too? Oh, yes, you died before the rules changed, so you’re O.K.

Of course God’s covenants (plural, please) with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David et al., have never been revoked. But when did Catholic tradition begin to set aside inconvenient biblical truths, rather than learn to live with the tension between seemingly incompatible precepts? We used to call these mysteries.

Cardinal Dulles, always polite, terms the views expressed in Covenant and Mission ambiguous, if not erroneous. To this observer, they appear deficient, defective and distorted. I think it is clear who is making a dreadful mistake. Perhaps evangelization (as opposed to proselytization) might be best understood as proclaiming the Gospel, forthrightly and honestly, to everyone who is willing to listen.

Robert V. Levine

Ubiquitous and Protean

Buried in the substantial disinformation throughout the Rev. Andrew R. Baker’s Ordination and Same Sex Attraction (9/30), old chestnuts about allegedly effeminate affective manners and proper masculine behavior most alerted my historian’s antennae. As Carolyn Dean shows in her fine recent study of sexuality between 1918 and 1940 (The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France [2000]), the crushing evidence of World War I trenches forced postwar medical doctors to abandon their fin-de-sicle belief that a male’s feminine appearance indicated same sex attraction. As a consequence, anxiety ran rampant among cultural critics throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s: if effeminate men might be heterosexual while masculine men might actually be inverts, then appearances could no longer be relied upon. Anyone might be passing for straight, raising the specter that inversion was both more ubiquitous and protean than previously thought. (The example of the burly rugby-playing hero of Sept. 11’s Flight 93, Mark Binghama gay mannicely illustrates the present-day anxieties over prudent doubt and moral certitude.) In several ways, Father Baker’s essay reflects the very latest in 19th-century thought: fascinating reading for the professional historian, but perhaps not more widely helpful.

Stephen Schloesser, S.J.

Fewer Whiners

Congratulations on the choice of articles for the Sept. 23 issue. These were real articles about the daily problems that people encounter. It is encouraging to hear that good people are still working so hard for the church. Fewer articles by whiners, nit-picking theologians and about the politics of the clergy would be appreciated. Maybe there is still hope for the church.

Michael F. Melloy

Variation

I write to disagree respectfully yet strongly with the position taken by the Rev. Andrew R. Baker in America’s issue of Sept. 30, opposing the ordination of men who happen to be homosexual in their orientation. Though all of the important points he has raised merit substantive discussion, I focus here on two of those points only.

First, I must take issue with Father Baker’s presentation of the way in which the phenomenon of homosexual orientation or same sex attraction might be most adequately understood. While not overlooking the insights contained in that presentation, I am dismayed by the fact that no mention at all is made of the great amount of scholarly work that has been done in the field of the empirical and human sciences regarding this phenomenon. Studies that I have undertaken in connection with my work in moral theology have brought to my attention the general consensus among scientists and psychologists that sexual orientation is a complex human reality, admitting of no single explanation. I have found a similar consensus that same sex orientation is not an abnormality nor an aberration, but rather a variation in human makeup that appears with statistical frequency and that, in many instances, does not in and of itself affect an individual in a deleterious way. Adding to my dismay is the fact that in mentioning some experts who believe that same sex attraction can be treated and even prevented with some degree of success, Father Baker does not acknowledge that this is an opinion held by few.

Second, I must object to what appears to be Father Baker’s assumption that men who happen to be same sex in their orientation will inevitably exhibit some or all of what he lists as significant negative aspects arguing against their suitability for holy orders. In general, I find those aspects alarmingly stereotypical and the discussion of them lacking in essential nuance. Moreover, while the church, in speaking to or of homosexual persons, has insisted repeatedly that human beings must never be reduced to their sexual orientation, this list could, even while greatly inaccurate, be read as doing just that.

My thanks to Father Baker for his thoughts and insights on this most important topic and to you, America, for the publication of both Father Baker’s and Bishop Gumbleton’s articles.

(Rev.) Robert J. Smith