A pope who declares hell is empty and sells hard pressed Chinese Catholics down the river to atheist organization of their churches is this Protestant’s idea of an anti – pope heretic. All the more reason to be disappointed that it should be this same Pontiff should be reasonably innovating in the vexed area of gay relations he is happy to see blessed.
Pope Francis’ willingness to bless gay unions has taken many by surprise, my non Catholic self included. Over two decades ago I obtained a world first doctorate in gay spirituality subsequently published in UK as A Special Illumination. Till last year I also ran a blog of broadly gay theological and cultural interest. The aim was semi – pastoral for those confused about identity, reported cures etc. If I have not been more heard that has something to do with not going the rainbow way and absenting myself from a widespread drift of academic gay Christians towards materialistic neo-Marxist queer theory about which one early critic dubbed me “alarmist”, though today I might be seen as farsighted.
Now, after so much debate and the Pope’s proposal still retaining many (Catholic) opponents – 90 theologians by one report – things seem back decades to square one. Much again is forgotten and ignored with talk of just sex “acts” , homosexuality as “just” sodomy and fornication and thus any blesssing on those who might seek it as satanistic, But there have been a few changes to note and I can see some omissions in fact or emphasis, that I can now deal with here.
To simplify and shorten complex issues I will make a conversation between C (Conservative) and R (Revisionist)
C You can’t change what bible and tradition say. For St Paul, homosexuals are excluded from the kingdom and those who exchange natural sex for unnatural are specially guilty.
R A precise equivalent of“the modern “homosexual” word did not exist in Roman times. The arsenokoites word used in Corinthians can translate rapists, extortioners and murderers depending .What we can more securely know is that early Christians as represented by the Didache catechism forebade corruption of youth and the apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas opposed paidophtoreseis (pederasty) . This is what the apostle may specially have had in mind. However, ideas like Paul in Romans 1 that those we today call homosexuals exchange natural for unnatural is outside average “born that way” convictions among gays and it can be confusing and damaging to insist on it today. Paul may anyway have been thinking of recreational bisexuality under the Roman decadence and/or the goddess worshipping cinaedi, a sort of castrate drag queen-like prostitute. The apostle was born and raised in Tarsus, the home of Stoicism whose notion of the natural was sex for procreation only. Whatever the truth here, allow the words of Jesus could carry more weight than those of Paul!
C No! Allow and compare nothing! Believers are supposed to be examples of the good to live above suspicion, a light amid darkness. To bless the traditionally rejected and obviously unnatural involves priest and people pushing a false and therefore sinful rite.
R Since St Augustne against the Donatists, even communion is not automatically invalid if the priest is unrighteous. The name of Jesus still has some degree of power in its own right to transmit good, and Jesus won’t refuse those who sincerely use his name ( Mk (9: 38,39 ). Many Japanese have sought Christian weddings because they believe they make for greater stability in their unions. Should you not at least be pleased in a secular world (that Pope Francis heretically maintains needn‘t be evangelized) people are seeking and deferring to God in organization of their lives?
C But there is no credible biblical or Christian precedent.
R This can be questioned. For example,David and Jonathan had a “berith” which means covenant or marriage, at any rate a very special connection. Jeremiah forbidden by God to marry, lives with his faithful secretary Baruch. Gay Michelangelo portrayed himself as Jeremiah. I’ll not list why this fits, but it does. For centuries the Eastern churches blessed “unions of brethren “ quite likely some of them gay.
C Even if homosexual couples could exist in some sort of imagined self-defined “union”, that’s not a licence to the unholy degredation of sodomy.
R The degredation idea looks back to ancient treatment of prisoners of war and the behaviour of some of the men of Sodom who wanted to rape angels in the biblical record. But who said that sodomy is crucial and the essence of homosexuality? It’s a predominently same sex attraction and most essentially a psychology, philosophy and aesthetic as the history of culture shows. Authentic gays are nature and society’s necessary variation on the theme, often a conduit of the new. (It’s a subject in itself, but people are born gay if and when their birth pattern is notably Uranian ).
C If homosexuality is that vital, why did Jesus not refer to it as such?
R Before Jesus let’s start with God. Read with understanding Dan 1:9 in which God gives (according to the for once more correct KJV version) tender love (rak) for Daniel to the prince of eunuchs. We could derive from this that God recognizes and works with same sex attraction. Jesus almost certainly assumes homosexuality and its function, especially when referring to eunuchs from their mothers’ wombs – which is something hard to be literally. By Jesus’ time the eunuch word was a broader term than just castrate. It is even possible Jesus regarded himself in such an outsider fashion. Jewish Christians like Bishop Hugh Montefiore and Canon Paul Oestreicher have speculated Jesus would seem, in modern terms, gay.
C. Surely that’s unlikely. If Jesus was in some outsider fashion eunuch-like, that would be against at least the spirit of Jewish law and suggest imperfection.
R Since from the outset God declared people should “be fruitful and multiply”, it’s true one would not expect Jesus to encourage any disciples to be eunuch – like. That he does so at all surely belongs to the new messianic era, the age of grace equivalent to the now outgoing age of Pisces. But actually, if valid, the “eunuch” identity could hold a very justifying spiritual secret. If, as once taught by the first nineteenth century gay libbers, the Uranian gay male is a female soul in a male body and the lesbian vice-versa, the incarnate Jesus is more representatively human because he is male and female together in a way the heterosexual is not,
C Aren’t gospel sayings on eunuchs about celibacy for straights?
R Yes and no. They are especially about being different for and dedicated to the kingdom; but when the disciples protest, then Jesus is explicit not everyone can assume the ideal. So marriage is normal for straights. In which case, what if anything might be the alternative concession for gays, what if anything could they feel able to celebrate and affirm as human beings?
C They don’t or shouldn’t need anything ; they should be like a castrate, celibate.
R If only pragmatically one should ask the question. Church father Origen literally castrated himself then said he had sinned doing so (biblically mutilation is forbidden). So meaningful alternatives and identities might matter. Indeed, in today’s over-sexualized society, a pure celibate idealism without alternatives and no self – identification as gay risks misunderstandings all round : unrealistic hopes of cure, straights getting romantic arund the wrong persons, the young misunderstanding about or exploited by teachers etc etc. Even cured alcoholics should call themselves alcoholic, One should assume even celibates have an eros of sorts.
C But these alternative people shouldn’t be expressing their difference, and I dread to think how and why you might imagine they should. You would presumably not recommend what Catholics declare to be against nature, disordered, a waste of seed and mortal sin?
R That kind of response tends to cancel the subject from needed discussion; but across our different moral positions I hope we could at least agree such as masturbation would always be better than rape; and as to wasted seed (which owes much to Augustine on the sin of Onan who to insult his wife and refuse tribal procreational duty spilled seed) it’s pre-scientific to speak of “wasted” when thousands of sperm are lost in just urination or wet dreams,
C So just what understandings or action are you getting at? It sounds as though you will end up denying any possible wrong to the traditionally contra naturam with no justification for confession or repentance towards it.
R No I wouldn’t go so far. For some matters in life, and not just sexual ones, I would reckon on something like an ambiguous grey area as in war. In a war someone can believe they were both right and wrong to kill an enemy and their repentance is thought accordingly.The bible also envisages some things being right or wrong depending on their timing.”There’s a time for….” as Proverbs famously declares. Even among committed gay partners there can be something good/bad in especially anal sex (which is what got the heterosexual D. H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover into its legal trouble ) because there is a savour of the archetypal underworld journey to it and also perhaps an aura of violence. However, especially now there’s more movement among gays towards mindful practices, full body orgasm (which I’d say attempts to realize the male/female gay self), dry orgasm, solo sex with or without another person etc, I envisage more “tantric” type acts and attitudes. In this the body and its stronger impulses are not automatically seen, western style, as the enemy but something to be mindfully accepted and worked with, sometimes the tiger to be ridden, Since anyway so many trans people turn out gay in the long run, one wonders if there had been sufficient savouring and integration of the male/female erotic self.
C This thinking is completely unbiblical and runs against all the apostle’s warnings against indulging the flesh and pursuing pleasure
R Undeniably there are warnings against fleshly indulgence (not all sexual in reference – drunkenness, greed, anger etc can be fleshly) but St Paul does also speak (generally rather than sexually) of loving our bodies (Eph 5: 29). However….bible perspectives apart, we may take something from the book of nature in this realm. It’s a fact that in a woman the clitoris has no known function but pleasure ( the violence of female genital mutilation thrives on refusal to accept such facts) while 98% of aninals have been found to masturbate in what seems like a relaxation function. This situation could be compared to the way in humans the end of an illness especially depressive, is often signalled by revival of libido. It looks like one could assume that God, though the enemy of addictive behavious is not automatically opposed to all pleasure and the auto erotic.
C It is not enough to cite animals because we are not animals but rational beings who can and should guard our thoughts and desires which we can both inflame or control. I shouldn’t need to cite Jesus on how looking on a woman to lust is adultery.
R That famous saying derives from The Sermon on the Mount which aims to question motives and internalize the Law and the subject in this case is adultery. This is something, (in effect a theft) done with a married woman, not just any woman and “to look on” here is more like to look to, to intend to do something whether you succeed or not. Granted that gloating or plotting seduction is implicitly disapproved, but if no man is ever to look at a woman with desire, how could a male know his feelings and society continue in existence? And what is the Song of Solomon doing in the bible or “with my body I thee worship” in the rite of marriage? We need to understand what Jesus was getting at.
C Despite what some say, The Song of Solomon is a mystical not an erotic poem. You shouln’t cite it, With anything erotic there is anyway usually a degree of idolatry. The bible often links the two or even makes no distinction between them. An addictive, porn fuelled, image-ridden masturbation belongs to the “disordered” irrational state that for Catholics is a reason it’s classified as mortal sin.
R Yes, recently that genial TV Franciscan Casey Cole, (now called “Satan’s son” by some for oddly suggesting there’s nothing in the whole bible that refers to homosexuality), holds masturbation is still rightly classed mortal sin because it is “disordered.” This is medieval philosophy; I don’t see how one can fall madly in love or have sex and not be a bit disordered! And at least some forms of sex guilt are involved with confused management of the different levels of consciousness eros crosses or even effects of “this body of death” (Rom 7: 24):which due to the fall cannot realize perfection in this life. But one can agree with Cole that average masturbation links peoople to a corrupt porn industry. Any connection between your eros and idolatry depends on the implicit question: who and/or what do you belong to in the material or spiritual worlds. At this level we might be a little closer to some agreement because I believe in the soul aura and effects on it,. The bible seems everywhere to assume a body electric without stating it although much, especially on sex, makes little sense without it. Two bodies surely don‘t become “one” short of auras blending during orgasmic excitement. St Paul even seems to think people are married to the prostitute they used. Artists like Osman Spare, poets like Alan Ginsburg and Satanists like Aleister Crowley have all pursued inspiration or magic through solo sex because higher states of awareness are involved. Some people and exorcists would tell you the result is unwanted possession states. I can accept that claim as I have an odd tale raising questions…… James Joyce is one of the literary masturbators. His weird eros never had the least appeal to me. But I did once buy a guide to Finnegan’s Wake to understand its riddles and have some late night reading. More than once I was much disconcerted to be faced on waking with unwanted images of Baphomet I hastened to banish. Had some Joycean intentions got stuck on the ethers?! Others don’t report the same, but possibly because they are less spiritually/psychically sensitive than I sometimes am.
C After that it’s amazing you don’t just avoid or condemn all irrational sex alternatives.
R I don’t exactly go around recommending them and, like here, I freely admit the problems. People should always do what seems and feels right. But I accept the ambiguities. It’s like wine. Should you drink or recommend drinking it? It can be good for some (even St Paul once recommended it for the stomach’s sake!) but for others wine can be the very devil. The matter is for between you and God… and just a little for the times too. At the end of an era and the start of another, new self-awareness and new thought trends intervene; so I do perceive “homosexuality” being understood and practiced in different ways and less and less defined by the sodomy beyond which some religionists can never see.
Back to the papal Blessing
This pair could keep on arguing, but in conclusion, what about that papal blessing? Is it, as some charge, no different from blessing a couple just living together? I say it isn’t quite the same because the live-in couple could do differently and change tomorrow whereas the authentically gay couple can’t be situationally and psychologically other than they are and that has implications for the nature of any rite. In the push for gay rights it used to be said gays were “just like you”. But they aren’t and singly, but especially as a couple, they need help to understand and positively work with their difference from the mainstream and often even from their own partner. This sort of thing could use a few prayers….. as could following…….
In opening I gave indication I saw Pope Francis as a heretic and his sensible adjustment on gay issues as welcome despite all the rest. But certainly the heresies add up. And among these some critics now see or emphasize only the gay change as the crucial symbol for all the errors so that once again gays finish good as symbol and the scapegoats for the downfall of society and faith that conservatives envisage. Just this has recently happened in the devastating video from bestselling Jewish Christian writer, Jonathan Cahn. His account of the recent supposedly open sign from heaven against the Pope is exciting and can hardly be ignored if true, as it appears to be. But surely the many papal heresies are more significant for any judgment warnings than anything to do with directing some blessings towards gays. It’s not exactly the edifying prophetic item its author imagines, but you should sttill hear it The Sign of the Statue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1iCW5Lsd80&t=938s
McCleary's Alternatives 