No Disordered People at God's Table

Saturday March 17, 2007

These excerpts were taken from a ‘talk’ that I delivered on Sunday, January 14, 2007 to ‘PFLAG’ Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays of Northern New Jersey.

First of all, let me tell you that it is an honor and a privilege to be with a group of ‘real’ people on the cutting edge of life and society.

I’m here to day not as an official representative of the Roman Catholic Church but as a ‘pastor-at-large’ without any specific official appointment. I speak as a ‘pastor’ not as a psychologist or even as a scholar.

As a pastor, I am a radical centrist. Sounds like an oxymoron? Right enough, it is and it keeps ‘some people’ guessing but it also makes many people think. A pastor-preacher should not tell people how or what to think, It is his role to get people to think about vital issues of the day in the light of the Gospel and the tradition of the Church. People who know me well know exactly where I stand on the issues of the day.

But let me broaden the picture just a bit and back into what I call ‘table talk’ because that’s what I would like to take place here this afternoon.

In order to do that, I need to revisit our family table at 77 Chestnut Street in Morristown where I grew up. We moved to Morristown from Jersey City on April 28, 1939 to be exact. I was two years and three days old.

I grew up in a time when families gathered at table at least once a day—for supper, and there was always lots of talk at our table. But the best meal of the week took place on Sunday morning. After Mass, we stopped at the ‘paper store’ and the bakery. We were way ahead of the times because both my mom and dad worked. They shared household tasks, as did my sister and I. But dad prepared breakfast on Sunday morning while my sister and I read the funnies and my mom perused the headlines of the Sunday secular and religious newspapers against the background of Sunday morning religious broadcasts—Protestant and Catholic—on local radio station, WMTR. Oatmeal or cold cereal was the usual fare during the week but on Sunday we indulged in eggs, bacon, hash, friend potatoes ham and all the stuff that we now know clogs the veins.

But the best part of the meal was the ‘table talk’ that unfolded after we finished the meal—family stories that took us back to times and places that my sister and I had never been.

We were and still are what we used to call a ‘Heinz Family.’ For those of you who remember Heinz 57 brand, you know why we chose that label. “Here comes everybody!’

Although our immediate family ancestry was Irish with a touch of German, our larger family genealogy expanded over time to include almost every nationality.

At our table it was understood that terms such as ‘wop,’ guinnie, kyke, nigger or ‘fag’ were not tolerated! No questions. Unacceptable, period! Although this was before we understood same sex gender orientation differences, cruel epithets were also unacceptable.

Everyone was welcome to my grandmother’s table—of whatever race, color or creed and yes, there were what we now understand as gays in our family.

Of course, we didn’t understand same sex issues. I think it was probably an early version of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell thing.’ I think we just didn’t know how to talk about it. But there was no question that there were to be no exclusions. We kids were not as kind away from the table but we learned that we were not to bring our biases to the table.

Decisions about important matters were made ‘at our family table’ not at the Church table. This doesn’t mean that the Church table wasn’t important or that it didn’t count. It was just that the final word did not come from the pulpit or from the chair of the bishop or the pope.

But my family table has expanded over the years to include my sister’s table with her seven children, their wives and their children.

But it has also expanded to include hundreds of tables to which I have been invited as a pastor. And I have brought what I have learned at those tables to our church table.

B So what have I learned over time at table?

1. I have learned that homosexuality is in fact determined at birth and is not to be condemned by God’s people.

2. If this is so, than it is part of the natural order of things. This should not be viewed as a freak of nature but as a part of the divine plan. We don’t have to understand it any more than we need to understand electricity to turn on the light or how messages sale through cyberspace to send an email message.

3. I, along with many Roman Catholic theologians, psychologists and pastors have concluded that Roman Catholic bishops may simply not know enough in order to make apodictic or doctrinal statements about homosexuality.

4. The Church is slow to change but it has changed over time and will change again and again. A short look at the past can reveal how dramatically it has changed over time:

a) Galileo
b) Slavery
c) Even its view on sexuality, vis-à-vis natural birth control
d) All this is part of an evolutionary process—yes, we are still
evolving intellectually and theologically as well cosmologically.

5. There is a mix of characteristics and human qualities in the male and female psyche. There’s more to being male than macho and female is not about being passive. My dad was a sensitive and gentleman but no push over. My mother was a gracious lady but she was no doormat for anyone.

6. Let’s look at the reality—Gays bring many good things to our table not the least of which is an appreciation for the arts, compassion, sensitivity but it is not limited to these enduring qualities… they have been great engineers, popes, priests.

7. A word about gays in the priesthood and the flak over the sex abuse ‘scandal’ / crisis.

Gays have wrongly become scapegoats with regard to sexual abuse.
However, there is a gay subculture that has created a climate that has enabled sexually abusive priests—heterosexual and homosexual—to hide from their accusers within a clerical culture in which they are harbored and protected by other priests who fear being ‘outed’ for their own hidden lives. I have elaborated on this issue in Harvey Interviews

There are no disordered people in God’s house.

_And this is a ‘re-print’ of an article that first appeared in The Boston Globe.

A Dangerous Closet

A psychologist argues that the Catholic Church’s message to gay priests – that homosexuality should be a shameful secret – contributed to the sexual abuse scandal.

By MARY GAIL FRAWLEY-O’DEA
The Boston Globe
March 11, 2007

Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea, PhD spoke to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops during their meeting in Dallas prior to their approval of the Dallas Charter and subsequent norms in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse by clergy in the Roman Catholic Church. Her words were strong and direct. She was never consulted by the bishops again.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/03/11/a_dangerous_closet/

The Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality eventually might take its place among the other aspects of Catholic sexual theology generally discounted by the laity and many priests. Nonetheless, the hypocrisy of a church condemning homosexuality while depending on a significantly gay priesthood to run it and to administer its sacraments is, among several other factors, directly implicated in the sexual abuse scandal. The unspoken known that the priesthood is more homosexual than the wider culture is countered by an edict to priests not to speak openly about their sexual orientation but rather to preach about the evil of enacted homosexuality. Mixed messages, sexual secrets, and denied realities abound in a clerical Wonderland in which the institutional church appears to play the Queen of Hearts. Secrecy about and coverup of the sexual abuse of minors becomes an almost inevitable component of such a crazy and crazy-making realm.

Contemporary researchers suggest that between 28 percent and 56 percent of the American priesthood is homosexual. Most psychologically healthy gay men are attracted to the priesthood for the same reasons that it attracts mature heterosexual men. They love God, desire to pursue a life of deepened spirituality, and are committed to living out gospel values within a community of faith.

It is probable that gay men always have been attracted to the priesthood in numbers disproportionate to their presence in the wider society. Until very recently, and in some cases still, Catholic boys who recognized their homosexuality faced the scorn of family, friends, and church. Taught that acting on his sexual love and strivings is intrinsically evil and mortally sinful, the Catholic gay man faces painful conflicts between his identity and his attachment relationships. Entering the priesthood was a move that, until quite recently, evoked family pride, with the seminarian or priest being held in great esteem by his community.

It is also logical to hypothesize that homosexual men would be attracted to the all-male environment of the priesthood. Further, when boys entered the seminary as young teens, the explosion of pubescent sexual strivings had only one direction in which to travel. Surrounded by men and boys in an environment that rendered women dangerous, except for idealized mothers and the Virgin Mary, an adolescent seminarian was left with few choices. He pretty much could lust after his mother or he could lust after those around him, many of them gay men. And so we encounter the paradox of an organization teaching that homosexuality is disordered and then constructing an environment that maximally elicits homosexual yearnings.

Many gay men growing up in what has been until recently a pervasively homophobic society have lived in closets in which they sometimes deny who they are even to themselves. The antihomosexual theology of the Catholic Church, conveyed in homosocial seminary environments likely to stimulate forbidden and derided sexual desires, often constructed for the young gay priest a particularly suffocating closet. Here, the self-hatred plaguing many gay men could be magnified for gay priests, some of whom tried to cope by strenuously denying their sexual orientation, even turning hatred outward toward other gay men. Denial and dissociation on this scale encourages the denial of other sexual secrets like the sexual abuse of children.

Nothing psychologically sound or, I suspect, spiritually enriching can emanate from such hypocrisy. Surely, the pope, cardinal, bishop, or priest who cannot look in the mirror and acknowledge his reflection as a homosexual man will have difficulty looking into the face of a sexually abusive brother and naming what he sees. Rather, he is likely to close his eyes to true evil, because his own humanity has been mislabeled as inclining toward evil. He may also blame or ignore the victims of sex abuse, unconsciously turning away from his own victimization by his Church and the wider society. Closets, then, are built within closets and lies pile up until it is hard to find the truth, much less speak the truth.

Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea is a clinical psychologist specializing in sexual abuse recovery in Charlotte, North Carolina. Send comments to magazine@globe.com. Excerpted by permission from Perversion of Power: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church by Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea. Copyright 2007 Vanderbilt University Press.

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