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Hope and Homosexuality

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:01:00 -0400

An Orthodox friend has a T-shirt that says, “Wow, suppose it’s all true!” The “all” of course is the Christian Gospel and its ultimate promise of resurrection and everlasting communion with the Holy Trinity. If it is all true, if Jesus is risen, and if following him leads to that everlasting communion, then the impact on our lives will be vast.

The impact will even touch sex. That proposition is increasingly incomprehensible to souls nurtured by the toxic soup of post-modern sentimentalism. In that fog sex is a free-floating good to be used to the most gratifying effect by a disembodied self casting about for meaning, affection, and joy. It has become a right, indeed an entitlement. Any interference with the attainment of that entitlement, even the publication of discouraging news about the results of the sexual revolution, is out of bounds in large segments of our culture. Sexual freedom and self-expression just cannot be bad or dangerous or illusory. If increasing numbers of female undergraduates show signs of depression, it cannot have anything to do with the sexual anomie into which the society has delivered them. Sex is nearly the most important thing, but it cannot be thought to have any real affect on the person.

Those who know Christ know differently. Those who know themselves to be on pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God know that sex, as important as it is, can no more define us than can power or money, ethnicity, or politics. Those whose eyes are open to the truth of God can see what the culture dare not imagine.

Wesley Hill believes that it’s all true , and in his little book, Washed and Waiting , he has offered a look at what it is like to be a young homosexual man who believes that the most important thing is to follow Jesus. He is utterly forthright, his book poignant, thoughtful, and engaging.

As the title indicates, he understands himself as a baptized Christian on pilgrimage to the Kingdom. He is “washed,” and he is “waiting.” His Christian faith runs deep, nurtured in his Evangelical family and firmly held through his teens and early adulthood. His growing awareness of his same sex attraction is laid out with honesty. The confusion and pain are all there. He provides a window for heterosexuals, men in particular, on the experience of homosexuality. He wants us to understand, and he succeeds. Among the most moving of his stories is his account of dancing at a wedding with a lovely female friend and simply having no awareness of her “sexual value,” the very apt term employed by Blessed John Paul II in his early work Love and Responsibility . What he regrets is not male swinishness but the capacity to appreciate her fully as a woman with or without sexual intent. He realizes again that he cannot marry and simultaneously regrets his corollary struggles to relate to men.

As a faithful Christian, he will not accede to the promise of sexual relief that entering the lifestyle would offer. It will not provide the love and acceptance for which he longs. Nor can he imagine living at odds with the clear teaching of Scripture.

Scripture is not an enemy that inflicts sexual frustration on him. Rather, it provides a liberating perspective on love. The Church, he learns from the New Testament, is for Christians the principal locus of love. Neither marriage nor “committed relationships” can bear the freight laid upon them by post-modern sentimentalism. His cultivation of friendship, pastoral relationships, and partnership in prayer is exemplary. Homosexuality has required him to nurture his faith and examine his psyche, and his quest for faithfulness makes the book a significant piece of Christian spiritual literature. His is the story of a soul.

It is a soul with the longing to be loved and with vigorous sexual appetites. But it is a soul that believes that only God in the end can meet the deepest longings of our hearts. Finding his color on the politically correct rainbow and expressing it to the full will not take away the sense of brokenness he describes. He could adopt the common enough view that God just wants everybody to be happy and then suit himself. But he sees through that temptation and commits himself to celibate Christian discipleship. In two short chapters he examines as models Henri Nouwen and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who shared his struggle.

The turn to Catholic writers for models betrays a deficiency in Protestantism. There is essentially no positive role for celibacy. The model of Jesus, John the Baptist, and Paul has not yet enabled even biblically serious Evangelicals to shape a theology that would affirm celibacy as anything more than a regrettable alternative to more-or-less mandatory marriage.

Wesley Hill understands that, as a faithfully Christian homosexual man, he is not in the only category of people who are not called to sexual activity. Because sex is not a free-floating good but a component of the call to marriage, celibacy must be the norm for many people. Homosexuals who disavow the active homosexual lifestyle for the Kingdom of God are in a vast and excellent company. Hill is certainly aware of this and touches the issue several times. He is also aware that marriage and parenthood carry their own burdens. Neither marriage nor the rejection of marriage guarantees happiness. Sexual intimacy is not a certain cure for loneliness or for anything else that goes wrong in the tragedy and comedy of human existence. This context of his celibacy needs further reflection. I expect and hope there will be a book that will push the matter forward, much in the mode of Dawn Eden’s The Thrill of the Chaste . He has perhaps begun the process with some exegetical reflections near the end on how God glorifies us.

For the glory that is set before him he has chosen the narrow way. The burden of that yoke is lightened again and again by friends and prayer, by faith and most of all by hope. His choice is not easy, but he is credible and engaging, washed and waiting with hope for the healing that none of us will fully know this side of the Kingdom.

Leonard R. Klein is a priest and the Director of Pro-Life Activities for the Diocese of Wilmington, Deleware. He was a Lutheran minister for 30 years and is married.

RESOURCES

Wesley Hill, Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality

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What Can the Catholic Church Learn From Married Priests?

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 01:08:00 -0400

I might well have been one of the most available priests in the diocese that Saturday afternoon. After four hours of shoveling, my driveway was clear before the rectory garage was plowed out. Because of a disability, our youngest lives at home. Because she needs a wheel chair, we own vans. They have four-wheel drive.

So I got to the church to celebrate mass for the small group that assembled that evening. On Sunday I said one mass at the parish to which I am assigned and one at a neighboring parish. I prepared an RCIA lesson. I shoveled some more snow. Before bed I switched on the hospital pager, since hospital chaplaincy is another part of my assignment. The four-wheel drive would have made the thirteen miles, had I been called.

Whatever the difference is between celibate clergy and us exceptions, it is, I am convinced, not availability.

There is enough time; there is never enough time. What is true for everyone in the modern world is true also for priests, equally for the celibate as the married. Clergy who bemoan the demands of their office and the lack of personal time are whining. Tough though some of their situations may be, family life would not ease them.

I entered the Catholic Church in 2003 after twenty years as a Lutheran pastor and was ordained to the priesthood in 2006. I have a wife, three children, and five grandchildren. They have claims on my time, as do our large extended families. But many a celibate priest must respond to a large extended family or provide care for aging parents. Priesthood does not bring freedom from family and human obligations, nor should it. The requirements of a nuclear family are more immediate and time-consuming, but it does not seem to me that they establish a categorical difference in availability from the rest of the clergy.

To be sure, married priests can’t easily be sent off for advanced study in Rome. Nor can we move at the drop of a hat. We are in some ways more expensive, but the costs of maintaining and staffing a rectory are considerable. And we are generally cheaper to educate, since we all come to the Church with theological educations and a personal formation refined by the reflection and self-examination that led us to full communion.

So it cannot be the practical arguments that bear the weight for celibacy. Pastorally, there are some advantages. On questions of marriage and family we do have an enhanced credibility. While it is surely wrong to think that celibate priests know nothing of family life and equally wrong to imagine that marriage and family make anyone an expert on those subjects, it is true that those of us who have made this commitment have worked hard to live out our values and stand willing to help. A huge percentage of the people in the pews are unmarried, but few seem unwilling to relate to a married priest, while the opposite opinion seems widespread.

Acceptance by other priests has not been a problem. Some who were ordained in the turmoil after Vatican II expected celibacy to fall and may resent us, but their numbers seem few. Some may also be too imbued with Anglo-Saxon notions of fairness to accept the Roman character of the Church’s law, which sets standards that the legislator may in his benignity relax.

Most of my colleagues are happy to be colleagues and to have one more hand on deck. I cannot say that I have felt unwelcome or out of place at all, whereas in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in American I found myself increasingly out of step and at times could not in good conscience even attend liturgical celebrations. My day-to-day experience is not one of feeling exceptional. I feel part of the thin black line called to serve the Catholic Church in a world that has lost its way.

It would be a mistake to confuse the exception made for some of us with an experiment in married priesthood. Even less does the exception constitute a critique of celibacy. There is in any event little indication that the Catholic Church is going to change a discipline so firmly rooted in its own history and paradigmatically modeled by Jesus, Paul, and John the Baptist.

At the same time I would concede that not all the critiques of celibacy are irrational.

A married priesthood would increase the pool of available men who might otherwise suppress their sense of vocation, but to blame celibacy for the shortage of priests overlooks some possibly more significant and spiritually weighty causes. Where there is a passion for the faith and an assertive call to sacrifice there tend to be more vocations. If the problem is secularization and weakened commitment, a married priesthood is not much of a solution. Richard Neuhaus’ famous and often maligned solution to the abuse crisis”“Faithfulness, Faithfulness, Faithfulness””is likely both the better and the more realistic solution also to the vocations crisis. But to hear it requires abandoning some widespread assumptions.

The Long Lent of 2002, now dawning afresh in Ireland and Western Europe, has also led many to wonder anew about the wisdom of celibacy. While a celibate community does provide concealment for offenders and has contributed to the formation of dark networks of abusers, ending celibacy would not end human sinfulness. Celibacy does not cause abuse any more than marriage causes adultery. A married clergy and the ordination of women have hardly ended violations of the sixth commandment and pastoral trust in Protestantism. Protestantism endures the scandal of divorced and remarried clergy, sexual abuse in all forms, and in the mainline the increasingly successful effort to normalize homosexual liaisons. The Protestant experience ought to warn any thoughtful person off the notion that celibacy causes sexual misconduct.

That argument is also a smokescreen. It conveniently serves a bias that was already in place. Worse, it has served the politically correct denial of the main feature of the abuse crisis, to wit, homosexual misconduct. Now again, in reports on the European crisis, the word “pedophilia” is automatically used to describe the homosexual abuse of young males, when the statistics and anecdotal accounts suggest only a handful are pedophiles and the rest are homosexual men behaving badly.

Thus to the question many would prefer to skirt: Would a married priesthood dilute the problem of homosexuality in the priesthood? Almost surely to some degree, although in Lutheranism a married clergy did not eliminate either homosexual networks or sham marriages. But the problem in the Catholic priesthood was not so much the presence of a disproportionate number of homosexual men; it was the winking at misconduct, culpable naiveté and the failure by bishops to deal with criminal acts.

While a disproportionate presence of homosexual men in the priesthood can influence the ethos in troubling ways”Michael Rose’s anecdotal Goodbye, Good Men remains relevant”the option of marriage would help less than would an authentic quest for holiness in life and ministry. Where there is a passion for the Gospel, the Church, and the Christian life, sin remains but purification comes much more quickly.

There is one other thing that is usually left out of the advocacy for a married priesthood. In our sexually saturated culture it is simply assumed that what the celibate priest gives up is sex. Naturally enough. But that is not what the tradition sees as primary. What the celibate priest “gives up” is marriage. Marriage includes sex. Naturally enough. But in any biblical understanding of human reality, sex is part of the vocation of marriage, not a free-floating good looking for a place (generally in the modern mind any place) to land.

In giving up marriage and the family, vowed celibates teach a jarring truth, fundamental to the Christian faith: The greatest of human goods, one Catholics understand to be a sacrament, in itself a means of grace, is secondary to the pursuit of the Kingdom. Speaking of himself, Jesus said that some had made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of God. It would be hard to put it more bluntly. And it is plain that he expected some of his followers to follow his example. The mind of the Western Church on priestly celibacy instantiates that vision, even as the Church recognizes that it could be otherwise and hence permits some of us married converts to be ordained.

The wise old priest who catechized Christa and me had the idea that the Orthodox could afford a married priesthood because their liturgy pointed so powerfully to the otherness and holiness of the Kingdom of God, but that in the Catholic Church that witness had come to be shouldered by the celibate priesthood. The point has value. It suggests that advocates of a married priesthood as the obvious solution to the vocations shortage and other problems would do better to lay aside the political model of entitlement and complaint and to place their energies into the reform of the liturgy. A vigorous commitment to the truth of the Catholic faith and the long-overdue realization that the world is not our friend will do more good that a laundry list of “progressive” changes that should have been made after Vatican II.

Still, in the end it may prove that we were an experiment and not an exception and that the Church will reconsider the requirement of celibacy. The Church may look at the record of married convert clergy and other aspects of clerical celibacy and re-examine the practice. Married priests were common enough in the first millennium in the Western Church, and no one can on Catholic grounds object to the practice of the Eastern churches. It may indeed be the will of God at some point that the Roman Church change its practice. I do not envision such a time, but none of us has privileged information about the future.

Meanwhile there are a few hundred married men in the priesthood in the Latin rite. We are not here to make a point but to serve. The Church will, we hope, be enriched by our experience as married men and by the positive legacies and hard lessons we bring from our past ministries. Our presence provokes discussion of things that need to be discussed, and that may be argument enough that the occasional exception is a good thing.

Fr. Leonard R. Klein is the Director of Pro-Life Activities for the Diocese of Wilmington.

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Axis Mundi

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:35:00 -0400

I recently read an article in which a Methodist minister referred to the Eucharist as “revolutionary.” It would be easy to dismiss her use of a term used to advertise a new shampoo or safety razor. But the claim that the Eucharist is revolutionary is a reminder we very much need to hear, for it is very much true. We can too easily get accustomed to what we do at the Eucharist and forget its meaning for us and for the world. We lose much, perhaps everything, if we forget it.

In the Eucharist we are joined to the sacrifice of Christ”offered and received”and the sacrifice of Christ is the only true revolution. All the other revolutions have turned out to be merely adjustments in the way things are done, for better and far too often for the worse.

The American Revolution was an event of great world historical significance, yet in many ways it was just an adjustment in well-established English ways of living and thinking. The French Revolution replaced the absolute monarchy of France with a government just as absolutist and more bloody, which became the ancestor of all the bloody tyrannies of our era.

Then there is the Scientific Revolution. It has brought much good, but it has also given us greater abilities than human moral capacity can easily manage. It has brought healing, conveniences, communications, and knowledge unimaginable in earlier times, but on the other hand it has brought advanced killing technology, pollution, and embryonic stem cell research. It has provided a convenient excuse for childish atheism and shattered many aspects of human community and family life.

Human revolutions are merely adjustments in human life, not human nature. They leave us unchanged and the real human problem of sin, death, and the devil unaddressed.

The Eucharist”celebrated constantly throughout the world and this night with a particular intensity”turns our world upside down. It announces that at the center of the universe is the crucified Jew, Jesus.

When he was crucified, everybody thought the real action and the real power and glory were in Rome. Jesus was just another small-time, backwoods nuisance to the emperor, easily disposed of.

But in the frail flesh of Jesus, in his death, God changed everything. This is in human terms a most unlikely form of revolution. More radically”if that is imaginable”God continues that work under the forms of bread and wine.

Here God says no to sin and death, no to our weak compromises with the values of the present age. Here he heals us of our delusions of power, self-determination, and achievement. Here he says yes to us and brings life, forgiveness, and enlightenment for true change in human affairs. And we say our feeble “Amen.”

The kingdom and the power and the glory are not in Washington, they are not at the U.N. Headquarters, they are not on Wall Street, they are not in Hollywood, Beijing, or Brussels. They are on the altar, hidden in bread and wine as they were hidden in the same flesh of Christ on the cross.

The kingdom, the power, and the glory were hidden in the liberation of a band of slaves from Egypt and in the sacrifice of a lamb and the eating of unleavened bread.

The kingdom, the power and the glory were hidden in the washing of feet by Jesus, the work of a slave performed by an outsider.

Hidden in such moments, in such realities, is the truth that revolutionizes the world: that sin is forgiven, that death is defeated.

The Eucharist exposes all the false gods that we create to hide from our sin and pretend to immortality. Through it our small lives can be understood as the arena where God is working out the true revolution, the one that brings human beings back to God, the one that sends us out into the world to wash the feet of others.

Here God is creating the revolution that enables us to avoid getting sucked in by the phony glories and satisfactions with which our economic, social, cultural, and political systems tempt us. Here is the revolution that can free us to criticize and resist the deepening darkness of secularism, atheism, nihilism, and materialism currently on the march throughout the western world.

To receive Christ in the Eucharist, to adore him, to worship the Holy Trinity”this is to join the real revolution.

That is why the Church has enemies. That is why the powers of secularism so despise the Church. That is why empires from ancient Rome to modern China have tried to disrupt the Eucharist.

For at and through the Eucharist, we are the resistance. We are the true revolutionaries. At the end of the canon, Catholics say “Amen” to the words “through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit all honor and glory is yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever.” No Caesar wants to hear that. No Caesar can tolerate another center of power so absolute.

But for us who have tasted and seen the goodness of the Lord, who have found the core of our lives in the worship of God”for us there is no alternative to being at the Eucharist. We can want nothing more and imagine nothing greater than to be part of the people gathered around the altar of Jesus Christ, in whom alone are glory and freedom.

Fr. Leonard R. Klein is the Director of Pro-Life Activities for the Diocese of Wilmington.

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Catholics in Exile

Thu, 01 May 1997 00:00:00 -0400

In “The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy” (Public Square, January), Richard John Neuhaus proposes “Neuhaus’ Law” concerning the life of religious institutions: “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.” In the same issue, James Nuechterlein argues (“In Defense of Sectarian Catholicity”) that catholic orthodoxy can nonetheless exist in places outside the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Although Mr. Nuechterlein’s claim is surely correct, the existence of “sectarian catholicity” may go further to uphold Neuhaus’ Law than to disprove it. Mr. Nuechterlein and I are both members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), and I think we can both see the evidence for the gradual proscription of orthodoxy. The interest groups and the merrily bland can happily tolerate each other. What they cannot tolerate is the continual threat of orthodoxy.

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Catholicity and Protestant Survival

Sat, 01 Mar 1997 00:00:00 -0500

The Catholicity of the Reformation
Edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson.
Eerdmans, 112 pages, $12.

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Lutherans in Sexual Commotion

Sun, 01 May 1994 00:00:00 -0400

By almost every standard for measuring such things the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America stands on the conservative side of mainline Protestantism. It maintains cordial relations and some measure of cooperation with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which nobody would place in the mainline. Pastors and congregations subscribe formally to the authority of Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions, and that subscription is taken seriously. The creeds and liturgy provide an additional support for the dogmas of the church catholic. A continuing pietism flavors that orthodoxy with a deep concern for personal conduct and devotion. Lutheran identity counts, and that identity for most Lutherans still includes clear doctrinal and ethical content. In 1994 in North America many of these commitments and characterizations are much shakier than they were one or two generations ago, but the best aspects of Lutheran particularism are still identifiable.

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