You read Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s The Case for Gay Acceptance in the Catholic Church on The Atlantic‘s website, and scratch your head, and shuffle your feet, and drum your fingers on the table, and shuffle your feet again, trying to figure out what exactly you can say about it within the usual bounds of discourse.
The problem is that the article is precisely as idiotic as Christian Tappe shows in Because She’s a Kennedy. (Tappe writes a little exuberantly, I should say, and with an obvious pleasure in tweaking the Kennedy’s.)
For example, using (in typical propagandist fashion) a horror story from Uganda, Townsend insists that murdering homosexual people “goes against the Church’s own age-old tradition,” which is of course true. But she isn’t really referring to “Thou shalt not kill.” As Tappe writes, quoting the article:
Heck, “What other institution separates men and women and encourages them to live together in monasteries and convents where they can develop deep relationships with those who share their kind of love?”
Can you imagine? How can an institution that promotes monks hate gays? Monks live together. There are no women around. They cultivate relationships. And they “share their kind of love.” They’re practically gay.
And similarly, after declaring “how misogynistic” is the Bible, she declares that things have changed for the better. “Happily,” writes Tappe quoting Townsend,
“that has now changed. Women have entered schools of theology and can now show that Jesus was one of the first great feminists. Mary Magdalene is no longer thought of as a prostitute but as the ‘apostle to the apostles.’”
It’s good that women are finally allowed to enter those big forbidding schools of theology and wrest from the clutches of the misogynist priests (not the monks, though, they’re charming and their habits are so fabulous!) those long-secret passages of theology—like John 20:16 and Mark 16:9—that showed Mary Magdalene wasn’t just some filthy whore.
[NOTE: Peter Abelard and many others referred to Mary Magdalene as the “apostle to the apostles” as early as 1132. I can only assume that Abelard was really a female theologian.]
I think the title “Apostle to the Apostles” is even more ancient, as is the title used in the East, “Equal to the Apostles,” but in any case Townsend seems genuinely ignorant that the Church’s understanding of St. Mary Magdalene and women in general didn’t change from darkness to light fairly recently. And as a friend noted, her idea that Mary Magdalene was once considered a prostitute but is now considered an apostle to the Apostles “sums it up rather nicely. The implicit assumption that she cannot be both of those things shows a near-perfect ignorance of Christianity.”
Yet, as she writes near the beginning of her essay, “This is what I wrote about in my book, Failing America’s Faithful. While researching it, I gained many insights into the Church and its history of both prejudice and tolerance.” You expect to find a smiley face at the end of this sentence.
One thinks that an organ like The Atlantic could surely do better than this. As a Catholic, I could write a better defense of homosexuality than Townsend has managed. (Not that I’m going to.)
Maybe, another friend wrote, the editors at The Atlantic ”have accurately gagued accurately their reader’s general level of knowledge, prejudice, sense, and credulity towards ‘celebrities’.” Or maybe they don’t think they need to do better, that the Catholic position is so weak that good argument is superfluous, and can be left to the golly gee whiz writers. Maybe — I think of a baseball team so unconcerned about the other team that the manager starts his third stringers — they think they discredit it even more effectively by leaving the attack to writers like Kathleen Townsend Kennedy.
My thanks to David Poecking and William Tighe for their comments.
April 4th, 2012 | 8:35 am
Yes, the Kennedy’s, those beacons of fidelity to the Catholic faith, starting with Uncle Jack, who erected a high wall of separation between his faith and his positions on public policy issues. Since 1960, the Kennedys have been undermining the Catholic church, using it when it suits their purposes, discarding it when it opposes their agenda, and ignoring it entirely when it interferes with their personal lives. They have no credibility on any issue related to the faith, and should be ignored.
April 4th, 2012 | 10:28 am
I’ve heard that argument once before, in a Catholic seminary, at a refectory table, from a fellow student, a diocesan brother, actually. It was not unusual for the speaker to say some pretty outlandish things. This was 1998, so I don’t doubt that such lines of, uh, reasoning have been percolating for quite some time.
April 4th, 2012 | 11:06 am
The problem, which Christians have not fully come to grip, is that the secularized chattering class simply does not respect Christianity as a type of knowledge. That’s why TV interviewers and editorialists feel confident they can do a quick 15-minute prep to come up with a couple of facile “gotchas”–Didn’t Jesus teach about love? Didn’t he hang out with prostitutes? (Kennedy is heterodox on this one) What about ‘do unto others’…?–and thereby dismiss a Weigel, a Dolan, or even a Benedict.
Miss Kennedy’s piece is not just the expression of one foolish person from a family with a vested interest in the relaxation of Christian teachings; it’s above all the expression of the editors of The Atlantic–who are not foolish people, however wrongheaded they are. It’s those intelligent but secular people who read an essay like this and say, “Of course! Publishing this in our prestigious journal will settle the matter once and for all!” Again, they do not respect the idea that there might be a body of knowledge that would dispute or contradict their own thoughts and prejudices on these matters.
I said that Christians have not come to grips with this reality. Perhaps that’s why we spend so much effort doing point-by-point takedowns of individual pieces, instead of focusing attention on the larger editorial regime(s) which fail to raise the simple questions that editors would ask of other articles on, say, some issue of technology or foreign policy.
At the same time, this deaf-and-blindness is a great source of weakness for our secular tribunes, which Christians have by and large failed to exploit (perhaps because we’re so eager to ingratiate ourselves with them). We’ve seen an instructive situation this week, in the Supreme Court arguments on Obamacare, where the administration lawyers’ lack of appreciation for conservative constitutional arguments made the administration look foolish and weak (indeed, revealed it as such).
April 4th, 2012 | 12:26 pm
Hating gays is wrong. Hate is wrong. Hating any group of people is a bad thing to do.
Murdering gays is absolutely unacceptable and must be condemned in the strongest possible way. Gays should not be brutalized, intimidated, or deprived of human rights.
Now what has all of this to do with Christianity? Are we supposed to believe that disapproving of various behaviors in accordance with a spiritual or governing philosophy of life automatically implies hatred?
Do we automatically assume that being a kosher Jew means being a Jew who hates those who are not Kosher? What about a vegan who believes that all human beings should follow vegan dietary laws – is the vegan guilty of “hate” toward non-vegans, and does that make the vegan guilty of contributing to every crime that happens to a non-vegan?
This makes no sense to me.
April 4th, 2012 | 1:54 pm
For me, the absurdity of the Townsend’s case stems more from a mistake in anthropology. When asked the question, “What is a human being?” I believe it would be a very rare individual that’d establish the criteria of identity on anything sexual.
Humans are so much more than sex.
By insisting on identifying oneself primarily with sexuality, or who one wants to sleep with, the “gay pride” movement is fundamentally anti-human. It implies that I am not worthy of respect (since I’ve chosen to remain a virgin until I’m married this September), or not fully human.
The “gay pride” movement is certainly unchristian, preventing forever any acceptance of the movement, even while the Church loves as God’s children those who mistakenly identify themselves as “gay”.
A good Christian hopefully would answer the question “What is a human?” with something close to revealed truths in Genesis, or from the Baltimore Catechism: A human is a creature made in the image and likeness of a loving God, redeemed from sin by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and made to know, love, and serve God and His children both in this life and eternally in the life to come.
And it strikes me that the celibate orders serve a valuable and enduring function in a culture gone sexually insane–they remind us there is so much more to life, being, and human dignity than reproductive organs, and what’s done to or with them.
April 4th, 2012 | 2:25 pm
Artaban wrote
“When asked the question, “What is a human being?” I believe it would be a very rare individual that’d establish the criteria of identity on anything sexual.”
Perhaps, but neither would they overlook the fact that human beings are living systems. Now, “living systems” are, by definition, chemical data-processing systems that self-perpetuate (those that do not self-perpetuate, cease to exist).
Processes that are “adaptive” are those whose output does not inhibit self-perpetuation; namely: territoriality; reproduction; competition; self-amelioration; inter-education; and affiliation into groups. The urge to procreate is no different; and the urge to indulge in the complex, ritualised onanism that is homosexuality is simply a malfunction.
Nor would they adopt the fallacy of the Enlightenment that the nature of the human person can be adequately described without mention of social relationships; the erroneous notion that a person’s relations with others, even if important, are not essential and describe nothing that is, strictly speaking, necessary to one’s being what one is.
April 4th, 2012 | 2:36 pm
I think the main problem with articles like this is that they are unwilling or unable to distinguish between the sinner and the sin. Even if one accepts the idea that homosexual inclinations are completely genetically determined and unalterable, it’s still not clear how that’s different from any other kind of sin. It’s been shown that alcoholism is at least partly determined by genetics, as well. Does that make alcoholism acceptable? And is condemning alcoholism the same as condemning moderate drinking? Similarly is condemning homosexual sex the same as condemning same-sex friendship? Or is it actually respectful of it and a way of preventing its abuse?
April 4th, 2012 | 3:29 pm
By insisting on identifying oneself primarily with sexuality, or who one wants to sleep with, the “gay pride” movement is fundamentally anti-human. It implies that I am not worthy of respect (since I’ve chosen to remain a virgin until I’m married this September), or not fully human.
Artaban,
I don’t quite see how this can be reconciled with 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. As I understand it, a candidate for the priesthood must be heterosexual in orientation, because to be so is to have “affective maturity” which will “allow him to relate correctly to both men and women, developing in him a true sense of spiritual fatherhood towards the Church community that will be entrusted to him.” It seems to me that the Church considers sexual orientation (or at least heterosexuality) to be core to humanity. To dumb it down considerably, men are “father types” and women are “mother types.” And to be anything other than that is to be “disordered.” In the anthropology of the Catholic Church, as I understand it, gender is extraordinarily important. There are male roles and female roles, and the Church assumes, along with these roles, heterosexuality, or fatherliness and motherliness. This certainly does not prevent there from being more to life than genital sexual activity, but it does mean that heterosexual maleness and femaleness are at the very core of human identity (according, again, to the Church). It seems to me this is clear from Genesis onward to the most contemporary official Catholic documents.
Sexuality, even as the Church sees it, is not a matter of whom you “sleep with.” It is something very much like gender that is an essential part of being human. The heterosexual priest relates “correctly” to men and women not because he wants to, or ever will, have sex with women, but because he is a “spiritual father,” and apparently even spiritual fatherhood requires heterosexuality.
April 4th, 2012 | 4:35 pm
David, you’re correct in what you’re saying about heterosexuality (and sex as a biological reality).
I guess I’m failing to see how the statement you quoted is inconsistent. I may have been unclear…
April 4th, 2012 | 6:14 pm
There are several issues here:
First and foremost, the Church proclaims that the mystery of the person, of what it means to be ‘man’ can and ultimately only can be discovered in the light of Christ, Who through His Incarnation has identified Himself with each person in a mysterious but real way. From this flows not only our proclamation of the dignity of each person from the moment of conception until natural death, but also the supernatural dignity we all have. We have been created (in the image of God) for communion with Him. We discover this in Christ. Without this ‘communion’ we have ‘nothing’.
Secondly, the Church needs to continue to reinvigorate and renew her moral teaching according to the Scriptural, Patristic and Thomist tradition which sees ‘Happiness-beatitude” and Communion as our ‘teleology’: our ‘end’, the purpose for which we have been created. Given this ‘vision’ what we want for everybody is real happiness-what could possibly be wrong with this?
In this theology: graced virtue is the focus. The Catechism itself tells us of this vision, speaking ( in the case of the Sixth Commandment: You shall not commit adultery) of an ‘apprenticeship in chastity’. In other words, to be frank: it is not enough to simply say ‘no, you shall not’ [as important as this is]. We must help all to grow in love for God and neighbor (an in this case affective conversion and chastity).
The Catholics need to have courage at the local level (diocese and parish community) of proclaiming the beauty of conjugal love which is human, total, exclusive, faithful, and generative. It is only in this light that all the rest of the Church’s teaching on sexual issues can be seen in the proper light.
In our own day, everything has become ‘politicized and sexualized’. This is a tragic development that prevents the richness of human love to express itself in other ways. For example, have those with same sex attraction or other sex attraction even heard of the beautiful tradition the Church has called “Spiritual Friendship”: deep, affective, intimate relationships between people of the opposite gender and same gender, yet not expressed genitally outside of marriage?
The New Evangelization is just beginning. I believe these aspects are an integral part of it and are desperately needed, as this latest ‘comment’ from one of the Kennedy’s shows.
April 4th, 2012 | 6:48 pm
It’s been shown that alcoholism is at least partly determined by genetics, as well. Does that make alcoholism acceptable?
Patrick,
Is alcoholism sinful? Should alcoholics not receive communion?
April 4th, 2012 | 8:40 pm
David, I can’t speak for Patrick, but it seems to me that whether or not alcoholism is sinful _per se_, it is certainly the root of much sinful behavior, behavior for which the alcoholic is responsible because even though alcoholism has a genetic component, people with that genetic predisposition can and do lead sober lives.
April 4th, 2012 | 9:55 pm
I don’t recall anyone promoting alcoholism as an acceptable lifestyle. Having alcoholism is not a sin. Drunkenness is. The self-aware and repentant alcoholic understands that his or her inclinations lead to a state and actions contrary to God’s Law, and therefore avoids alcohol, which is poison to him or her.
Is that so difficult to understand without resorting to straw man fallacies?
April 5th, 2012 | 9:27 am
Is that so difficult to understand without resorting to straw man fallacies?
Anthony Tackman,
I don’t see a straw man here. Perhaps you are thinking I am accepting an analogy between alcoholism and homosexuality, but I don’t see it at all, except insofar as people see both as “sinful.” My real question is whether “sinful” people like alcoholics and homosexuals should be excluded from the Christian community or, if they are Catholic, whether they should be denied communion. Regarding alcoholics, I am thinking of those who manage to function well enough to hold a job, keep a family intact, and so on. I have known such people, and I don’t see the point of ostracizing them. As I have said a number of times previously, as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, I don’t see why gay people in same-sex relationships can’t be treated almost identically to those who have married in the Church, civilly divorced, and civilly remarried without an annulment. They are, in the eyes of the Church, living in adultery, but they are no longer ostracized. They are invited to participate in parish life, although they may not receive communion.
I would not assume that every alcoholic or everyone who is addicted to drugs is capable of quitting. In fact, it seems from the statistics I have seen that the prognosis for alcoholism is poor.
April 5th, 2012 | 11:36 am
I don’t recall anyone promoting alcoholism as an acceptable lifestyle.
Alcoholism, perhaps not. Drinking (including drinking to excess) is promoted heavily. Binge drinking in college is epidemic. I remember my father a good fifty years ago describing how he accepted one drink at social functions and held onto it all evening so as not to be pressured to keep having another and another. I don’t drink at all, and I have found the pressure to accept a drink in some situations can be extremely intense. Alcoholic beverages are heavily promoted by advertising even though there are many limitations (some of them self-imposed) on advertising alcoholic beverages. I have no moral objections to drinking. Alcohol is just something I never developed a taste for. I am not even sure I have any moral objections to getting “responsibly” drunk, although one of my least favorite things is being around people who have had too much to drink.
April 5th, 2012 | 1:26 pm
David, I can’t speak for Patrick, but it seems to me that whether or not alcoholism is sinful _per se_, it is certainly the root of much sinful behavior, behavior for which the alcoholic is responsible because even though alcoholism has a genetic component, people with that genetic predisposition can and do lead sober lives.
Perhaps more importantly, there is growing evidence that when a situation like this is defined as a “sickness”, it leads the sufferer toward learned helplessness (away from empowerment), and – perhaps more discouraging – there’s also growing evidence suggesting that bystanders are more likely to shun the person who “has an innate defect” than the one who is “making lifestyle choices”, even when the outcome is the same.
Which is, by the way, exactly the opposite of what was supposed to happen (when we started turning all behavioral choices into diagnosed conditions).
If gays are truly doing no harm, they should make that the basis of their argument – that, being endowed with liberty, they have the right to behave any way they want, as long as they do no harm. That they instead prefer to choose to avoid this argument in favor of arguments that rely on the idea that they are permanently, innately, and incurably defective and thus require special “pity” treatment seems very Orwellian to me: why would anyone choose to identify as inherently flawed over simply choosing to identify as making the choices they are entitled to make? The answer appears to be, because they are not content to live within the bounds of “doing no harm”.
April 5th, 2012 | 1:31 pm
ChrisZ: That is a great point, thank you for making it.
April 5th, 2012 | 4:58 pm
That they instead prefer to choose to avoid this argument in favor of arguments that rely on the idea that they are permanently, innately, and incurably defective and thus require special “pity” treatment seems very Orwellian to me . . .
Blake,
Where in the world do you find gay people arguing that they are “permanently, innately, and incurably defective”? Pardon me for being blunt, but that is utter nonsense. Many gay people (and straight people, too) argue that a homosexual orientation is innate, but “incurably defective”? Did gay people expend their efforts to get a diagnosis of homosexuality removed from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual only to turn around and argue that they are “incurably defective”? What kind of sense would that make? The whole premise of the gay-rights movement is based on homosexuality being a normal variant of human sexuality, somewhat like left-handedness is not a “defect,” but a normal variant.
Perhaps more importantly, there is growing evidence that when a situation like this is defined as a “sickness”, it leads the sufferer toward learned helplessness (away from empowerment), . . .
Regarding alcoholism, can you cite some of this “growing evidence”?
April 5th, 2012 | 8:27 pm
Where in the world do you find gay people arguing that they are “permanently, innately, and incurably defective”?
They do not use those words.
But by insisting that they suffer from a genetic abnormality – and therefore cannot be held to have any free will in the matter of their lifestyle – that is exactly what they are arguing: that they, unlike every other human being, are held captive to their sexuality, and must therefore be excused from any social norms, discipline, or expectations that are in conflict with their uncontrollable sexuality.
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