James Alison: Open letter to my more conservative Catholic sisters and brothers in the wake of the Group 9 Synodal Report
Link to article: https://jamesalison1.substack.com/p/open-letter-to-my-more-conservative
If you have ever heard of me before, you will know that for some thirty years I have been in public disagreement with what passes as current Church teaching concerning what (to save time) I call “matters gay.” While you might disapprove of, or even despise, me for saying what I do say, I hope we can agree that I pay the price for holding my positions. My public disagreement with what Church Authority treats as a “third order teaching” and the practical consequences of acting in conscience relating to that disagreement, have made me, effectively, a “non-person” within the Church I love. Though both a priest and a doctor in theology, I have, for the last thirty-something years, been able neither to exercise a public ministry in the Church nor to hold a teaching job in a Catholic faculty. In 2015 I was formally dismissed from clerical status (without accusation received or explanation given). Then, in 2017, by a special grace from Pope Francis, I was affirmed in priesthood and given the power to preach and to absolve. For whatever reasons of his own, the Holy Father decided that my vocation was not simply to be discarded, even if he didn’t return me to public ministry. I suspect that this latter was because it would put any Ordinary who agreed to incardinate me in the unenviable position of accepting publicly to defend me against the inevitable wave of hate that would swarm across his desk, when a Bishop’s job includes defending the current teaching of the Church, whether he agrees with it personally or not.
So, if you think non-person status is the right place for me, I can scarcely disagree. Occupying this place is what the shape of my obedience to the Church and the exercise of my priesthood looks like. Not being welcome to take part in the life of a local Church hurts; I live through occasional waves of sadness and discouragement, and I long for this situation to change. But this does not destroy a deep joy at the grace which has empowered me to occupy a canonical limbo and live out my vocation. I’m not sure there is any formal way I could be allowed to have a public ministry until disagreement in the area I have discussed is no longer as psychologically fraught for the clerical world as it currently is.
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Why do I start like this? Not to complain, but to show you that I consider myself at least as conservative as you in expecting Church teaching and Church witness to be simultaneously true, clear, and logical. I have put my livelihood on the line to that end. I want to invite you to enter into sympathy not with me, who doesn’t need it, but with all those others who find themselves having publicly to maintain positions they either know to be untrue, or have forced themselves into defending for other reasons, and those from within those same worlds who are trying to do something about this.
In response to the Group 9 Synod report, some of you showed anger at what you sense as a dishonesty in subtly introducing the normalization of homosexuality against the constant teaching of the Church. The same thing seems to have led some of you to hate Pope Francis or to decry the “confusion created in the minds of the faithful” by the obvious signs he gave. Some of you are incensed that testimony concerning Courage given by one of the witnesses chosen from among the many contributions received, should have been made public in a semi-official report. This, given that Courage is a Catholic group whose stated aim is to support those gay and lesbian Catholics who seek to live lives of continence and celibacy in accord with current magisterial teaching. Some of you, knowing as well as I the high percentage of gay men in the clergy in general, and in the Vatican in particular, choose to see all this as some sort of progressive sodomitical conspiracy to subvert Church teaching.
Naturally, I am not asking you to see me as an ally. I am begging you to do something slightly different, which is to show a little empathy for all those involved in thinking through this matter: Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, the theologians and witnesses involved in Study Group 9, Courage, and those whom they have influenced one way or another, as well as other Catholics in general. There is a real problem here, not simply one of ideology or moral fibre: if you genuinely love the Church that we have, rather than the one you think we should have, please help me bring out what that real problem is in such a way as to make clear that it is not one of malice, guile, lechery or power politics.
Part 1
For convenience, and so as not to take up too much of your time by going far back in history, I propose we begin with the period surrounding Pope Paul VI’s document Humanae Vitae. As you know, Pope Paul saw it as his job to maintain what is really the only teaching, or central norm, about sex that the Catholic Church has. This is that the sexual act between married spouses of differing sex that is open to procreation is a good thing. And that any other sexual act is to some or other degree a bad, because defective, version of that good thing. This norm had been elaborated by the time of the death of Clement of Alexandria in 215 A.D. and became the traditional teaching of the Church, receiving firmer backing from Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Pope Paul was under pressure from many people, including the vast majority of those in the commission he had appointed to study the matter, to make it no longer indispensable for the lovemaking or “unitive” function of the sexual act to be accompanied by its baby-making or “procreative” function. In other words: most commission members, serious Catholics all, did not think that every sexual act had to be open to the possibility of procreation in order to be good. However, in 1968 the Pope told them they were wrong: in order to avoid sin, every sexual act must be open, at least potentially, to achieving its indispensable finality in procreation.
Pope Paul was, by all accounts, intensely shocked when it became clear that the vast majority of the Catholic faithful with direct experience of the matter at hand did not accept his teaching, and that a number of Bishops’ Conferences went out of their way to diminish the dismay provoked among the faithful, by teaching them about the importance of conscience. While firm statistics are hard to come by, almost sixty years later, among Catholic populations somewhere between 80% and 90% neither accept the teaching nor practice it. After the first years of John Paul II’s attempt to reinvigorate Pope Paul’s teaching, both by his writing and by those he appointed as Bishops, the matter has gradually become less and less of an issue. Both Pope Benedict and Pope Francis were pretty low-key about it and there are probably many young Catholics, even in highly legalistic cultures such as that of US Catholicism, who are simply unaware of the teaching.
In most places where employment is dependent on Catholic institutional approval, there is no attempt to police the matter. Straight Catholics who are not married, or are divorced, are rarely, if ever, fired if found to be dating. Still less is the question of any married couple’s abstention from the use of artificial means of contraception (something invisible to anyone outside the couple) raised as a bar to admission to a job, or to having their children baptized, confirmed, or allowed to study in Catholic schools. Priests who hear many more straight people’s confessions than I, will tell you that their married penitents rarely mention the matter, and they, the priests, are loath to raise it, lest it drive people away from confession, making it more difficult for them to come for reconciliation when burdened by sins that really matter to them.
It is right to mention that in the wake of Humanae Vitae, there were several groups founded to help those Catholic couples who wanted to follow the teaching to do so. By following this or that method of timing their intimacy, they were able to follow the letter of the teaching by reducing to the barest minimum the possibility of conception resulting from the sexual act without barring it completely. There were also attempts to clothe obedience to the teaching in less Aristotelian-sounding language, such as that offered by John Paul’s “Theology of the Body.” The groups putting this into practice necessarily had greater clout than was warranted by their numbers, since they and the Bishops who supported them could gain favour by demonstrating their loyalty to the Pope in a matter particularly dear to his heart.
However, the vast majority of the faithful have simply moved on from thinking about their relationships, their bodies, and their families with the intellectual tools which Paul VI had used to render his judgment. They did not do so simply out of immorality, weakness of faith, frivolity, or because they were victims of rampant secularism. They did so because the linguistic, biological, psychological and moral world which led to the judgment made no sense to them. And this was very largely the result of the normalization of the astounding advances in gynaecology in particular, and modern medicine in general, since the discovery of the ovary in 1858. Pope Paul’s 1968 determination to abide by definitions whose 3rd Century backdrop had been the reproductive biology proposed by Aristotle – the best of its time – did not travel outside a fading framework of meaning. That, and the long-term shifts in a cultural mindset which had taken for granted male ownership of female bodies, ensured the teaching’s poor reception.
Now please notice what this means in practice: it means that the vast majority of the Catholic faithful do not accept either in theory or in practice that a sexual act that is not open to the possibility of procreation is, simply by that fact, an “intrinsically evil act because it lacks its indispensable finality.” They know that sexual relations between couples without a procreative purpose may be a perfectly good thing. And when they aren’t good, it is very rarely the lack of openness to procreation that has diminished the act: more often than not, it is some or other form of emotional or physical violence, incompetence, or indelicacy that has made it a defective version of itself. This non-acceptance of the obligatoriness of the indispensable finality of the act is not in fact punished in any way, nor is a couple’s obedience or disobedience visible in any way, except when deliberately articulated by the couple in question. And Church authority has got entirely used to this situation. When a teaching remains on paper, is not transmitted between several generations of families, and is not policed where even conservative Church authorities have the power to do so, then, de facto, the teaching is what the Church does, not what a document says.
Luckily, and in part because disobedience in the matter of the “intrinsically evil sex act deprived of its indispensable finality” is invisible and not policed, there is much good Catholic discourse about marriage: preparation for it, childbearing, companionship, shared life, family dynamics, where the “tail” of that teaching does not wag the “dog” of the matter at hand. Outside strictly policed faculties of moral theology, a great deal of richly Catholic discourse on what we might call “heterosexual couple-hood” has developed, because people are able to talk about things thanks to their experience, with the help of novels, films, songs, and psychology. They are able to find their way into an understanding of how to live the sacrament of marriage through meaning acquired along the way, and shared with others by witness given, gradually filtering out things that are not of God, and taking on board, and flourishing through, those that are. Learning over time.
Now here is where the real problem I alluded to earlier begins to arise for Church Authority. Because there is, of course a small minority of Catholics who find ourselves principally oriented, emotionally and erotically to members of the same sex. So, it is worth comparing how Church Authority sought to deal with us from 1968 onwards, because in both the majority and the minority cases Church Authority is dealing with exactly the same teaching. Fr Gustave Martelet SJ reportedly told Paul VI, while he mulled over where to come down in writing Humanae Vitae, that were he to allow the link between the unitive and the procreative function of the sexual act to be severed, he would deprive the Church of any logical reason to teach against homosexual acts. And that is exactly the case, since following the same logic, a sexual act between members of the same sex constitutes “an intrinsically evil act because not available to its indispensable finality.” The only difference between it and its heterosexual equivalent is that no barrier to the indispensable finality of the act (some artificial method of contraception) is deliberately interposed: because none is necessary. Condom use, for instance, between gay men is a prophylactic, never a contraceptive, choice.
So, let’s look at some history as that same teaching has wended its way through time in relation to this different group. By 1975, Church authority wanted to underline its views on sexual ethics in general and did so in a document which included the Church’s first public teaching in history to use the word “homosexuality”[1]. This was for the simple reason that the only teaching the Church had concerning the matter over previous centuries was about same-sex acts. There was literally no prior magisterial teaching about “people who are that way.” And in fact, the word “homosexual,” the first semi-scientific word to describe “people who are that way,” was invented only as recently as 1869. In the 1975 document, Church authority showed itself aware of the significant medical and psychological breakthroughs in the field over the previous twenty-five years, because in repeating its teaching about acts not available to their indispensable finality, it talks of the “homosexual condition”, warning that some people were treating this as a neutral or even a positive reality. Why this warning? Because Church authority knew that if the “condition” were neutral or even positive, then the acts could not be intrinsically evil, since the condition would be part of the created order, and acts flowing from it would therefore have a finality of their own as good parts of creation, a finality which, self-evidently, would not include baby-making. So, these would then be contingently good or bad acts, whose goodness would depend on circumstances quite other than their availability for procreation.
The perception that gay and lesbian people “just are that way,” or in my unpoetic phrase, that we are “bearers of a regularly occurring non-pathological minority variant in the human condition,” had nevertheless kept on growing throughout western society, and well beyond, wherever people got used to meeting, and getting to know, us. Including, of course, seminarians and members of the clergy meeting and getting to know one another and themselves. In other words, the attempt to insist that we were in some or other way defective heterosexual people, whose condition could not be described in a way that was neutral or even positive, was running into a growing difficulty. And this led to a genuine (theoretical) problem: if Church authority were to concede that “gay and lesbian people just are that way,” then they would be recognizing a category of humans for whom sexual intimacy does not require openness to procreation. It would of course be absurd to allow such intimacy for the same-sex oriented minority, while disallowing it for the other-sex oriented majority, and to do so would effectively sink Humanae Vitae.
The only logical way, then, to “save” Humanae Vitae – which is to say, to treat it as still valid teaching for straight people, even as it became clear that its principal intended audience did not accept it – was to insist that gay and lesbian people should regard themselves as defective heterosexuals whose condition needed to be defined starting from its (non) relationship to the marital act open to childbearing. It was this that led to the famous phrase in the 1986 document[2] which claimed that “while the homosexual tendency is not itself a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency towards acts which are themselves intrinsically evil, and therefore it (the tendency) must be considered to be objectively disordered”.
There were various novel elements in this formulation. The first is that by saying that the homosexual tendency is not itself a sin, Church authority avoids the neo-Calvinist temptation to regard “the homosexual tendency” as something absolutely depraved. So, anyone who claims “the Church teaches that homosexuality is a sin” is quite straightforwardly mistaken. The second is to make, for the first time in history, the assertion that the homosexual tendency must be considered to be objectively disordered. This does not mean what “objectively disordered” normally means in modern parlance (as for instance, when we say that “we know objectively, through the deliverances of science, that anorexia is a pathological disorder”). It means that the tendency is “ordered away from its true object.” The true object being a sexual act with a married partner of the opposite sex that is open to procreation. The claim is designed to close the loophole concerning “intrinsically evil acts” which had been opened up by the possibility that gay and lesbian people “just are that way.” The authors knew that an intrinsically evil act cannot flow from something that is good, so, in order to keep the act intrinsically evil (as opposed to good or bad depending on context) they needed to re-define what it flows from as something disordered, but yet without making it radically depraved.
The third element worth noticing is one of logic: the formulation makes it clear that the central teaching that is being maintained is that of the prohibition of “intrinsically evil acts,” as for straight people. But it also makes clear that that teaching, in the case of Gay and Lesbian people, can only be maintained if their tendency is held to be ordered away from its proper object. That is what “must be considered” claims. Formally speaking the claim is that: “Because we know absolutely and with certainty that such an act is always and everywhere wrong, and because we know that intrinsically wrong acts cannot flow from good tendencies, therefore there must be something wrong with your tendency to do the act in question.” You can see that this works, as a perfectly circular syllogism. Nevertheless, if the tendency is in fact grounded in real existing human biology and psychology and turns out to be non-pathological, then you will have turned out, however unwittingly, to be making a truth claim about something that is. One based not on observation, but on your need to keep a prohibition intact.
You can understand why the English language authors of the 1986 document (and its original was English, not Latin[3]) made that formulation. They were dealing with amiable Catholic Bishops who wanted to be able to say: “Yes, we know that you gay and lesbian people just are that way, and you are loved by God as you are. Our only teaching for you is that your sex acts are forbidden.” But this, as any genuinely Catholic thinker knows, is weak-minded nonsense: genuine moral prohibitions in Christianity have to correspond to something true about the nature of those concerned, they can’t be simply: “Well you mustn’t do this because we say, or Moses says, you mustn’t do this.” Christianity knows of no extrinsic moral law: that’s what St Paul’s arguments with his Jewish confrères concerning the Law were all about. No, the only way to make Humanae Vitae stick, was to close off the possibility that any same-sex act might be appropriately ordered, while avoiding the proto-Protestant solution of declaring a particular form of human desire to be intrinsically depraved. An exceptionally fine tightrope to walk, and one whose uncertain walking has unwittingly injected significant confusion into the life of the Church.
What do I mean by that? Well, the Church authorities of the 1980’s seem to have thought that “as long as gay people don’t “come out”, or ever formalize their relationships in the public sphere, then no one is really going to notice their acts[4] and they won’t be discriminated against. They will of course have scarcely any, if any, subjective guilt in the matter, and a largely benign clergy will let them off very easily, just as we have been letting each other off easily in this matter for centuries. So, they should keep quiet, not come out, and the matter will be as private as is almost all marital heterosexual disobedience in this sphere.” These authorities from the mid-1980’s did in fact badly misjudge what was happening around them, which was that the grotesque legal inequities heaped on the surviving partners of same-sex couples during the pre-retroviral years of AIDS meant that formal legal protection of partnerships became urgently necessary: some way of ensuring next-of-kin visiting rights, shared pension rights, surviving spousal rights, shared property rights. And the most parsimonious way of ensuring these, as with straight partnerships, was, and has become, civil marriage.
What this meant was that, if we look back at Humanae Vitae, a real visible difference emerged over time between groups of people who were happily ignoring the same Church teaching: the straight majority, whose ignorance or unconcern about the teaching was invisible and unpoliced; And the gay or lesbian minority, whose ignorance or unconcern about the same Church teaching is straightforwardly visible in every long-lasting couple who are happy to be seen together in public, and even more so if they have signed up to whatever their country has put forward for them as the legal way of guaranteeing their basic rights as a couple.
Having got this far, I want to bring out for you why this is a much more important matter for us all as Church than it might seem. Where habitual but invisible disobedience to exactly the same teaching has zero consequences for a large majority of the faithful, and yet for a small but significant minority of the population the same habitual disobedience is visible, and therefore liable to discrimination, we have achieved a de facto situation which no responsible Catholic Christian, and certainly no Catholic leader, could tolerate: people being allowed, or even encouraged, to judge others negatively for doing exactly the same thing as they are doing themselves[5].
If there is anything central to ecclesial living, from Jesus’ words in the Gospels through Paul’s correspondence and other Epistles, it is that judging other people for things we do ourselves is a sure way to remain under wrath[6]. And of course, most straight people are unaware of the fact that if they ignore the teaching themselves but nevertheless condemn gay and lesbian people for practicing exactly the same forbidden acts, then they have been nudged in the direction of wrath by Church Authority. This is simply because those straight people may well assume that same-sex acts are bad because they are same-sex acts (ones which, having an “ick” factor, are quite different from their own) and not because they are sex acts not available to their indispensable finality (acts that are morally identical to their own). For Church Authority can, and does, police the visible, but is happy to play “don’t ask, don’t tell” with the invisible. No wonder Pope Francis was so keen to try to get across that gay and lesbian people are the same as straight people as regards sins, and no wonder that, for instance, the USCCB and its litigious backers, having built a whole legal strategy around getting Church exemptions from just labour laws regarding gay and lesbian people, was so irked. Francis was trying to save them and us all from what Paul calls “the wrath.”
This, then, is the fundamental reason why I would ask you to have some sympathy with those in authority who have been trying to work through this: over time the method of thinking that led to maintaining Humanae Vitae as valid has had seriously discriminatory consequences. For straight people, it is a tail that doesn’t wag the dog – the teaching hasn’t got in the way of a whole series of other developments of what is good in living the sacrament of marriage. In fact, Humanae Vitae being quietly dropped would probably only be noticed in Catholic faculties of moral theology and among historians. For gay and lesbian people, however, the tail so wags the dog that there is no dog: if the basic form of visible couple-hood can only be talked about with relation to the objectively disordered tendency leading to intrinsically evil acts, then a shared good can neither be imagined or worked towards, only an evil mitigated. The reaction many of you had towards Pope Francis’ approval of Fiducia Supplicans is evidence of your sense that the tail, de facto, eliminates any possibility of a dog.
In other words, the gays have been left paying the piper for something the straights have long ago given up on without consequences. Even if you love the sort of thinking that led to Humanae Vitae and its neat way of tying gays and lesbians into the same teaching, I ask you to consider that the inequitable consequences of this logic over time has in fact become quite a serious ethical and spiritual matter in its own right, risking grave consequences for those who judge the visible and ignore the (much larger) invisible. And that those who are trying to attend to this are neither treasonous nor heretical.
Part II
Now having tried to show first why the situation as it stands is unsustainable, and why therefore any sane Catholic leadership would have to try to alter it, I would like to go into the weeds a little to show why something of what was suggested by the signs created by Pope Francis and by Study Group 9 was not only inevitable, but in fact the conservative way to go. And here I am going to talk about how what one might call “the generation of 1986” have been dealing with all this. The “generation of 1986” is a term I’ve invented to describe the very considerable number of those of us whose adulthood in the Church has been hugely overdetermined by the official need to maintain the “tendency itself must be considered to be objectively disordered” as valid. Such people include, obviously, myself, many of my friends and colleagues, my brothers (mostly) and sisters in Courage and other related movements, as well as innumerable officials at every level of Church life.
The source of confusion and difficulty has been the gap in meaning between the aprioristic logic[7] at work in the 1986 document and the sphere of meaning which any modern person inhabits and which might lead them to apply the teaching this way or that. This is in fact exactly the same gap in meaning which was opened up between the aprioristic logic in Humanae Vitae and lived reproductive biology as experienced by heterosexual couples in a world with better-developed gynaecology. And among heterosexuals the movement from an a priori based understanding of biology and sexual acts to a relational one has just massively happened.
However, in the case of gay and lesbian people, the gap was not opened up between the logic and our reproductive biology, but, whether those who formulated the teaching realised this or not: between the logic and our psychology, which therefore meant our very capacity to stand up, speak, be honest, and develop relationships publicly. That is to say it entered directly into the same sphere as the developing anthropological understanding from the 1950’s onwards which had made it ever more evident that there is no pathology intrinsic to being gay or lesbian, and that those who are able to accept themselves, “come out” and relate to others – family, partners, colleagues, workplaces – as themselves, are generally capable of flourishing in ways that those who live the same reality in furtive and hidden ways are not. This is part of what Study Group 9 referred to as an “Emerging Reality”.
So, the new teaching brought into the public sphere the possibility that something was being taught which, if treated just as a piece of logical scaffolding necessary to hold up another teaching, with no intention of having any real incidence on any part of human subjectivity, was in fact meaningless; or if treated as a deliverance in the sphere of the real, would be making a truth claim in an area which might be, and ever more clearly is indeed, subject to empirical verification. Defenders of the teaching have in fact oscillated between denying it makes a truth claim about a pathology (the more rigorous Natural Law types) and affirming the sort(s) of pathology to which it supposedly points. In my view, the oscillating instability is not the fault of either party: it is inherent to the teaching mode itself that it produces this confusion.
In fact, the very same processes of modernity that had led to many gay people “coming out” (the development of a relational subjectivity and the capacity to narrate a story of self amidst gradually decreasing violence), also meant that there would almost inevitably be an attempt to flesh out the logical deliverance of the “objectively disordered tendency” in the form of some or other identifiable pathology with psychological evidence: at the very least “something identifiably wrong” in the way of being of gay people that we should desire in this way. And so it was that in the 1980’s and 1990’s Catholic thinkers and groups began to borrow from the literature and practices of Evangelical groups such as those associated with Exodus International. And soon enough, acceptable Catholic writers were offering Catholic versions of the Evangelical practices sometimes known as “reparative therapy” or “conversion therapy.”
An anecdote: I found myself in Bogotá, in the summer of 2004 for a conference. At that time the first attempts to get the legalization of same-sex marriage through the Colombian legislature and judiciary were underway. These faced, to no surprise, strong ecclesiastical resistance. I went to chat with a representative of the family section of CELAM[8]. I was very courteously received by the monsignor, and asked him: “Leaving aside the matter of marriage, what, if anything, are you (at CELAM) doing to create space for LGBT Catholics within the life of the Church?” He told me that they had attempted to raise the matter with Rome, but that Cardinal López Trujillo (a Colombian, who had previously been president of CELAM, and had then been taken to Rome by John Paul to be put in charge of Family matters) had made it quite clear that there was to be no opening of any sort in this area. The then President of CELAM, (the Chilean) Cardinal Errázuriz, next asked the CDF (as it then was) “Fine, but then what would you have us read to understand this matter better – can you recommend any literature that is acceptable to you?” There was no answer. A few months later, the CELAM officials wrote to the CDF again. No answer. They wrote a third time, and after a long pause, they received a letter back, signed by one of the lowest officials in the CDF, with a list of the names of four authors whose books were deemed acceptable: Joseph Nicolosi (in English), Gerard van den Aardweg (in Dutch) Tony Anatrella (in French) and Aquilino Polaino (in Spanish). These authors all promote one or other form of “conversion therapy.” The monsignor was as desolate as I, sharing the news that this was quite literally all that the CDF could recommend as being compatible with their doctrine.
I raise this, because it makes clear that, at that time at least, those held to be capable of fleshing out the 1986 teaching in practice were all public proponents of widely debunked psychological theories, that, since then, have only been more widely debunked. It is scarcely surprising that when, in 2005 the Congregation for Education published a document banning gay men from entering the seminary[9], the arguments used were drawn from the pathologies that it was supposed that gay men have that make us incapable of priesthood, such that even chaste gay men were not to be admitted. The major article supporting and interpreting this teaching in l’Osservatore Romano was written by Tony Anatrella, one of the authors mentioned above. He himself was later disgraced owing to his practice of sexually abusing seminarians and other young men sent to him to be “treated for homosexuality.” It took over ten years of heroic insistence by the distinguished Dominican biblicist (now member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission) Philippe Lefèbvre OP before the French hierarchy finally dared to face down the scandal caused by their blocking their eyes and ears to “see no evil, hear no evil.” For them Anatrella had been far too convenient a way of dealing with the problem of gay seminarians, and one oh-so well-backed by powerful figures in Rome.
To illustrate the difficulty, in practice, of finding stability of meaning in the aftermath of the 1986 teaching, let us look, not at Anatrella, but at the standard Nicolosi[10] position. This was that there is no such thing as a gay person. What we call a gay person is in fact an intrinsically heterosexual person who is suffering from a grave disorder of desire called “same-sex attraction,” and that this could, in principle, be altered. You can see at once how such a position might be attractive as an interpretation of the 1986 teaching. The trouble is that it effectively puts the “patient” in the position of not accepting themselves as same-sex oriented, but as someone with something wrong within them that can be put right. And when this something wrong doesn’t change, they often find themselves simultaneously hating themselves and yet engaging in frequent, furtive anonymous sexual encounters. I’ve met and heard testimonies from many such over time. The ones I’ve met and heard have been, obviously, people who had managed to move on and accept themselves. They describe those they’ve left behind in groups like Courage (and there are several such groups) as being sadly obsessed with (an elusive) chastity while believing that they are being faithful to the Church in not accepting themselves.
The instability in the teaching is quite easy to see in practice: whatever the theory, if a same-sex orientation is treated as something that is wrong with you and that can change, then, when it stubbornly doesn’t, you find yourself host to what is in effect an element of Calvinist radical depravity within you, an immutable evil leading to no form of flourishing. Along with this, you find yourself prey to a harmful and dangerous series of sexual practices, and a deep underlying despair which comes out in the need constantly to be attacking anyone who doesn’t go along with your addiction to this pain[11].
On the other hand, the moment you actually accept yourself, and start to realise there is nothing wrong with you, it then begins to become clear that you may learn to love and be loved; stable relationships and some sense of flourishing become possible; and that there is a difference between good sex and bad sex. In other words, you are no longer able to agree that the acts that you might do are intrinsically evil. So, you leave officially backed groups such as Courage and have to face up to the fact that you are in disagreement with the teaching of the Catholic Church in a matter concerning truthfulness. This can be, for some, a hugely challenging experience, so strong is the temptation to be loyal even at the expense of not daring to become human.
I mention Courage here, because one of the witnesses quoted by Study Group 9 reported having been directed by Courage towards “conversion therapy”, and Courage leadership reacted indignantly with a letter denying that they do such things. Their denial was obviously disingenuous: a quick scan of keynote speakers at their annual conferences, as well as what any number of former members testify concerning approved reading they were given, tell a different tale. Yet I don’t want to judge them for this, given what were the only CDF approved texts for people seeking to be loyal to the 1986 teaching. If you treat the 1986 teaching as having any incidence in psychology, then it has a harmful incidence; if you treat the 1986 teaching as having no incidence in psychology, then it is a meaningless piece of circular obfuscation to protect another teaching, and the fact that it was thought necessary means that the teaching to be protected is itself put into doubt. You can see why any group seeking to be loyal to the Church and its teaching is itself caught in the grip of the oscillating instability dealing with which has been the lot of “the generation of ‘86”. How on earth can it be applied practically in any way that isn’t in fact either harmful or meaningless?
In the wake of the Study Group 9 report, the defence of Courage by Bishop Munilla (their loudest Spanish backer) was that they do not send people to conversion therapy, they support “those who seek help for unwanted same-sex attraction.” In practice, this phrase either means those who don’t accept their same-sex orientation (in which case, unless you are working to help them accept their orientation, you’re avoiding conversion therapy only in name) or it means that you are helping those who do accept their same-sex orientation, but have chosen freely, of themselves (not under threat of hell or loss of ecclesiastical employment) to live celibate lives, but are having problems with lust of the sort that any straight, gay or lesbian person might have, whatever their state of life. If the latter, then…even these celibate people don’t, in practical terms, believe that their orientation itself is disordered as regards its object, merely that in their own particular cases their elective, or divinely given, form of flourishing will be as a single person who will learn, hopefully with genuine help, to give themselves away without using or abusing others spiritually, emotionally or sexually. They will not be frightened, or resentful, at working honestly alongside other people with their same orientation who, unlike themselves, have partners and shared life projects. In other words: they too will have, de facto, stepped outside the 1986 teaching.
Just to make this clear: I’ve singled out Courage merely because of their mention in the Study Group 9 testimony. They (alongside other similar groups whose loyalty to promoting celibacy comes along with a recognisable slippage into promoting dubious therapies, maybe even despite their better judgment), are the messenger rather than the message. All of us of the generation of ‘86 are co-strugglers with the oscillating instability of meaning which aprioristic thinking cannot but introduce into the world of the relational, the talk-able and the psychological. And that is where we are. This is why I am writing this: to ask those of you of a more conservative persuasion to see that what Francis was doing, and what Study Group 9 is trying to do is far more conservative than some of you have given them credit for. To conclude, I’d like to point out some obvious areas where the application of what the Synod Group proposes will tend to have more stable, more conservative and more Catholic results.
1) Vows/promises
A significant percentage of those professing, or seeking to profess, vows or promises within any number of different Church bodies, clerical or lay, are in fact same-sex oriented. As its teaching stands, the Church cannot offer them a limpid context within which to make such promises or vows. Those involved have either to play some sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” game, which can then be used against them at a later stage, or they are taught to engage in complex verbal contortions to describe themselves in ways convenient for their higher ups (for instance “dealing with same-sex attraction,” rather than “being a deep-seated homosexual”). The ones needing to be publicly honest are usually weeded out, and the best dissemblers or contortionists survive. Several recent NAC[12] graduates have described to me how, on arrival in Rome, they adopted the “strategy of the submarine”: this meant being completely obedient to everything they’re told to do and never saying anything that might give a hint of how their intimacy works. This way they could survive by submersion, and then only come up into visibility, start to reveal who they really are, after ordination, when their Bishops would have to deal with who they really are. But the sad truth is that after six or seven years of living like this, those who stay, rather than being heroic survivors, far too often merely become successful liars: party men with a shared ability to survive by lying. No wonder a previous generation of such products was so proficient in covering up sex abuse.
Then of course there are questions of validity concerning vows or promises taken when the candidates have been led to believe that, because there was something wrong with them, they had no real option in their life other than celibacy. Maybe, years later, they finally work out that there is nothing wrong with them, they are not defective heterosexuals, and that they have been deluded into believing something false about themselves, and yet their vow-or-promise-receiving body has to abide by official teaching. Their vows or promises are therefore potentially null[13], yet the only body that might recognize their nullity is itself officially beholden to its own falsehood. Even when officials in the dicastery concerned understand very well that it is the gay or lesbian person in question who is telling the truth, not their own system. This is obviously untenable.
It is clear that this world can only become sane, healthy, and non-dangerous when it is expected that candidates will be able honestly to be themselves, without fear of repercussions, whatever their orientation; and, if their vocation includes celibacy, then transparent living will be expected from the outset. They will be given realistic help from others of their own orientation who have learned through experience and are able to speak honestly. This is true whether of seminarians, sisters, lay members of clerical institutes, confraternity members or others. It is only where there is a shared language of truthfulness corresponding to what people know themselves to be, not an imposed language with distorting side-effects, that this will become healthy. And surely this is what every conservative person wants: healthy professed members of Catholic groups who are able both to live, and to tell, the truth without fear of favour.
2) Obedience
Catholic canonical structure is hierarchical and depends on shared obedience. However, once again, a bizarre semi-world is created by no one quite being able to tell the truth honestly about what they know to be true, about themselves or others, to their superiors, lest their superiors who might or might not be personally committed to the teaching, but have to defend it in public, decide to take action, or demand that they themselves take action, this way or that. The result is just the sort of arbitrariness that makes genuine truthfulness, and thus obedience, impossible. Indeed, how could it be otherwise where “aprioristic truth” is in such a weird and oscillating relationship with what people learn and know to be the truth about themselves and others. Why should, and how can, an honest gay or lesbian person genuinely be obedient to someone they understand perfectly well to be a self-hating homophobe, one who has made the 1986 teaching functional for his own disfunctions, who is allergic to honesty and rewards those who play his game? And how and why should an honest superior or ordinary, who knows the 1986 teaching to be unworkable, be obliged to hold it in public, when they know that it will only distort the consciences of those under them, and will often be used to try to manipulate them, the superior or ordinary, into taking decisions that they know to be wrong? Once again, for obedience and sharing of conscience to be real, then, a shared language of truthfulness is a pre-requisite. This is yet another reason why conservative people should be delighted with the Synod Group 9 proposals: they are encouraging us to move out of the unstable world of strange definitions with bad psychological consequences, and into one where we can learn from shared experience what is actually true. This can then be lived out in such a straightforward way that witness is not contorted. In fact, making truthful witness possible is what this is all about.
3) The dog-less tail
One of the effects of the dog-less tail – meaning the way official Church teaching in this sphere up until Fiducia Supplicans shut down any kind of discussion about what flourishing same-sex relationships might look like, or how they might be blessed and celebrated – is to reveal the Church’s teaching authority as pathetically weak and with nothing useful to say. In the aprioristic world which came up with the deliverances we have seen, a monological deliverance of an absolute position is supposed to be the end of a discussion. In a world which learns relationally and inductively, a monological deliverance, an absolute claim of the sort made in 1986, has the relational effect of saying no more than “We, the delivering body, are incapable of entering into rational discussion about this”. It’s a confession of impotence. This means that in practice the “teaching” concerning matters gay becomes, over time, not a teaching at all, but simply a barrier against developing a teaching, since that could only come through experience, witness, learning and discernment over time. And the barrier against developing a teaching comes to be a way of keeping out of the life of the Church a whole lot of people who both feel (and are right to feel) despised, while allowing in those who learn to survive a dishonest game.
If you are conservative, you are surely horrified by this, because you see perfectly well that it leads to a de facto failure in catholicity. It makes much more sense to be sharing a Church with people who want to give their gifts as themselves, who are far less likely to have complicated furtive double lives than those who are tied to the unstable oscillations of meaning proffered by the status quo. What could be better, then, than a learning process by which we discover, together, who we are and how we fit into the life of our Church; what the forms of flourishing which are proper to us are; and how, and in what ways, they might be different, from the straight majority? This is not a matter of sexual ethics: it is a matter of a theological anthropology of learning: the talk-able muckiness of graced humanity and its learning processes. And what could be more Catholic than that?
Of course, the paradigm shift that Study Group 9 described is occurring, whether we want it to or not. Within it, the question of “how do we become Catholic truth tellers within this different universe of meaning” is going to be a patient and a delicate one. Gaudium et Spes 36 taught authoritatively that:
§ 36 …If by the autonomy of earthly affairs we mean that created things and societies themselves enjoy their own laws and values which must be gradually deciphered, put to use, and regulated by men, then it is entirely right to demand that autonomy. Such is not merely required by modern man, but harmonizes also with the will of the Creator. For by the very circumstance of their having been created, all things are endowed with their own stability, truth, goodness, proper laws and order. Man must respect these as he isolates them by the appropriate methods of the individual sciences or arts. Therefore if methodical investigation within every branch of learning is carried out in a genuinely scientific manner and in accord with moral norms, it never truly conflicts with faith, for earthly matters and the concerns of faith derive from the same God…
I was delighted that Pope Leo quoted this carefully in Magnifica Humanitas § 20[14], and then added:
This affirmation shows that creation bears the imprint of an original goodness that our human outlook must preserve, cultivate and bring to fulfilment. In this regard, the Church offers herself in a way that helps to interpret reality in all its depth. She supports with humble firmness the choices that promote the dignity of every person, the cohesion of communities and the good of all.
I suspect that this humble firmness in supporting choices for transparent living, and helping us to interpret the reality which is ours, will show us how we can move on from the dead-ends bequeathed to us by the thought patterns behind Humanae Vitae, even as Gaudium et Spes 36 was already, some 60 years ago, nudging us towards a more inductive methodology.
Thank you for engaging with me.
Your brother,
James
[2] Homosexualitatis Problema cf Para 3.2
[3] An eyewitness present at an emergency meeting of the Canadian Bishops to discuss the document before its November 1986 release told me how they had, as a bilingual conference, asked the CDF to send them the French version of the document to aid their understanding. On being told there was no French version yet, they asked for the Latin original, for the same purpose. They were told that there was no Latin original and so deduced that the document was born in the USA.
[4] A 1992 CDF document dealing with matters gay and employment issues at the time of the Bush Sr/Perot/Clinton election makes this pretty clear: Some Considerations Concerning The Response To Legislative Proposals On The Non-Discrimination Of Homosexual Persons.
[5] Cf Romans 2:1
[6] Cf Romans 2:5
[7] I use “aprioristic” rather than “natural law” since it is a particular flavour of natural law logic that is in question, and not natural law itself, which I value greatly.
[8] The Latin American Bishops Conference, which has its headquarters in Bogotá.
[9] Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders
[10] By contrast with what emerged about Anatrella, I have met several former patients or clients of Nicolosi’s who shared that he was a kind and gentle man, and that even after they told him that they were moving on, having not experienced any change in their desire, or having fallen in love and found happiness, he was neither angry nor judgmental.
[11] In an Australian city in which I had been invited to give some talks in 2010, the local Bishop, rather to my surprise, received me very kindly. He warned me that there was a local antigay heresy hunter of this sort who might try to attack me publicly during my visit, but that if he did, I shouldn’t worry “because I know exactly where his favourite cruising ground is.”
[12] North American College (the seminary maintained in Rome by the USCCB to educate their “high-flyer” seminarians)
[13] As would very obviously be the case in a marriage where one party had been gaslighting the other since before vows were exchanged.
[14] He quotes only the first sentence, but I have included the rest of the paragraph for what it makes clear.