Church Blessed

The editorial on Ordaining Gay Men (11/11) does not want to come to grips with the fact that the overwhelming number of priestly sexual abuse cases that have come to light have been committed by gays. It does no one any good to pretend there isn’t a problem here. This does not, however, mean that the church hasn’t been blessed by many priests who are gay. No doubt it has.

The editorial struggles to say that it would be ill-advised to ban gays from the priesthood. Of course it would be, and for one very good reason: no sooner would the ban go into effect when we would learn that a great gay priest, who is celibate, got past the radar. What then? The scandal that would erupt by bouncing this priest would be nothing compared to what we’ve been going through all year.

The answer, then, is to screen more carefully so that immature men are not allowed to become priests.

William A. Donohue,

Protecting

I commend you on the most timely and relevant editorial on domestic violence (11/18). My experience is that one of the best-kept secrets in the Catholic Church is the bishops’ document When I Called for Help: A Pastoral Response to Domestic Violence Against Women. Very few pastors talk about this issue from the pulpit. Often the women who come to our center, Woman’s Place, are told by their pastors, Just be a good wife, try harder, pray more. The pro-life stance of the church must be proactive in protecting women and their children from the abuser in their family. Your editorial should be available to all pastors and pastoral councils as the first step in the education process of our parishes.

Jeanne Meurer, F.S.M.

Barefoot in Rome

Practicing the Faith, by John F. Kavanaugh, S.J.(11/4) gave me some comfort, the kind that comes from finding that one is not alone. Almost like Father Kavanaugh’s student-friend, I am connected with Catholic history and tradition and sought a truth worth understanding, a good worth loving and a faith to die for. Unlike the student, I believe that I have found it. (I am also some 50 years older than she is.) I have opposed capital punishment all my adult life, regard abortion as a moral and social evil, abhor the School of the Americas, the evil (yes, Mr. Bush, evil) practices that it teaches so well and the hypocrisy that allows our government to sponsor it. I also regard Bush’s obsession with war on Iraq as his own personal grudge match, no casus belli in any language. I regard many of my country’s foreign policies as bullying and its domestic policies as shortsighted and oblivious to the needs of the poor.

Along with the late Malcolm Muggeridge, I would like to see Christ walking barefoot through the Vatican. Christ was a radical, and oddly, the older I get the more radical I seem to become. At least I’m not alone!

Conchita Collins

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

Needs at This Time

The proposed national plenary council for U.S. bishops (Signs of the Times, 8/26) sounds like a desperate exercise in self-validation. The time would be better spent in a critical self-examination of bishops’ needs at this time in church history.

For example, what should be the job description of a bishop/cardinal in the 21st century? What should be the job description for a priest? What are the educational needs that will bring bishops/cardinals up to speed to become competent managers? This is a serious issue. What programs need to be devised for the continuing education of bishops/cardinals?

The teaching office of the bishops is a relic of a church that no longer exists. We are no longer a congregation of ignorant peasants. Many faithful Catholics are better educated than their bishops. Additionally, it is time to re-examine the truths that the Catholic Church teaches in the light of history, scientific discoveries and biblical scholarship. Bishops need to learn to listen again to theologians who have pondered these revelations of God’s presence in our midst.

There are even more frightening issues to be faced. Do these men dare stand up to the Vatican and assert that they, English-speaking ecclesial authorities, have the competency to decide what should be the English-language translations of biblical and liturgical texts? Do they dare stand up to the Vatican and say that there is a crisis in the number of priests, and say that they will ordain whomever they please to assure that the faithful will have access to the sacraments? Probably not. But some time soon, dynamic leadership will have to emerge to save the church.

Jim Harvey