The Sad Legacy of Pope John Paul II (and Ratzinger) on Homosexuality

Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Pontifical Council on the Family, called the law “a very great iniquity.” Employing language worthy of the crusades, he called on Christians to resist, even at the risk of losing their jobs.

This picks up just where John Paul II left off. A few weeks before he died, John Paul called same-sex marriage part of “a new ideology of evil.” On his watch and under Ratzinger’s signature, the Vatican released the famous “Halloween letter” of 1986. Seeking to correct what it feared were overly benign understandings of the homosexual “condition” as morally neutral or perhaps even good, in this letter the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith affirmed that the homosexual person has “a more or a less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.” Worse, it expressed benign sentiments toward an increase of “irrational and violent reactions” against homosexual persons. What was that, again, about an “ideology of evil”?

John Paul II was, in many ways, a convincing, attractive and morally challenging figure on the world stage. The sheer force of his personality had as much to do with this as his stances on issues, including opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq and capital punishment, stances somehow overlooked by many putative admirers. Amid the clamor of cries to declare John Paul II “santo subito,” it may seem ungracious and narrow to recall his homophobic legacy.

But wherein lies the real narrowness here? Surely not on the part of Jesuit Father John McNeill, whose groundbreaking work, The Church and the Homosexual (1976), meticulously re-examines of the scriptural and theological arguments against homosexuality. A silencing order from the Vatican followed promptly. McNeill complied for eight years, but finally broke his silence in response to the Halloween letter and, as a result, was expelled from the Jesuits.

Who is being narrow when the Vatican worked for years to refute, discredit and shut down New Ways Ministry, an organization that promotes education and understanding among Catholics about gay and lesbian persons? Father Bob Nugent and Sister Jeannine Gramick, who founded New Ways in 1977, offered a relentlessly hopeful message in their numerous seminars and publications. Repeated investigations failed to identify even a wrinkle of doctrinal error in their work, which draws from church documents and theologians. Yet, it was a foregone conclusion that this process would result, as it did in 1999, in their silencing and ordered removal from their ministry.

The egregious narrowness of Pope John Paul II’s outlook on homosexuality was most personally on display in 2000, when a World Gay Pride observance took place in Rome. While church authorities issued the predictable denunciations, the pope himself remained above the fray. In the end, however, John Paul could not contain himself. In the course of his Sunday Angelus remarks to the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, he departed from the customary pious phrases to sound a shrill note. A scowling John Paul declared that he “could not express his bitterness for the affront” that the Pride march represented and “for the offense” that it caused to the “Christian values” of the city.

For a man so skilled at reaching out with touching gestures, it is sad that what he had for tens of thousands of Pride marchers that weekend was: a bitter scowl. True, he concluded his remarks on a sort of positive note, by recalling the Catholic Catechism’s teaching that “homosexuals ought to be received with respect, compassion, and delicacy.” But this was mere postscript.

Where were John Paul’s own gestures of “respect, compassion and delicacy”? Even assuming the sincerity of his belief that homosexual acts are “against nature,” how could the “vicar of Christ” have failed to model, rather than only speak of, respect and compassion for homosexual persons?

John Paul II’s failure to engage the subject of homosexuality with candor, depth and grace at any moment during his long pontificate is both sad and telling. In Catholic clerical culture, sexuality represents an unruly domain that carries the power to undo the power of the priestly class. The ordination of women, married priests, birth control, homosexuality, the familiar bugbears of the modern papacy, are threats to the prestige of celibacy and patriarchy. John Paul II associated calls for change in these areas with what he regarded as the self-indulgence of contemporary western society. That analysis sounds hollow, however, when Vatican pronouncements fail to engage truthfully and in depth arguments put forward for change by serious thinkers.

That failure is most obvious in the area of homosexuality. Mark Jordan’s The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism examines in detail the failure of church documents – for example, the Halloween letter – to address the inadequacies and mistakes alleged by modern scholarship regarding traditional scriptural and theological arguments deployed against homosexuality. No fair minded scholar thinks the story of Sodom (Genesis 19), for example, has anything to do with homosexual relationship, love or identity, yet the impact of that mistaken use of the text remains.

Homosexuality, however, represents something more for the hierarchy than just another subject requiring theological and pastoral solicitude. It strikes fear, because it strikes close to home, as Jordan’s book amply illustrates. Homosexuality is a major subtext in the history of clerical culture. And why would it not? For generations, the priesthood presented a viable alternative to marriage for gay men. Today, the loss of shame associated with homosexuality knocks away a linchpin in the cultural strategy that made that haven viable: secrecy. For well-adjusted gay men, no alternative to heterosexual marriage is required and the denial of their sexual identity is no longer desirable.

The past four decades have seen an extraordinary awakening to the existence, experiences and gifts of same-sex-oriented persons. Social institutions ranging from armies to corporations have been touched and changed by this awakening. Legislatures are moving to correct past injustices.

This movement for change includes, of course, the Roman Catholic Church, which is by no means coterminous with the Holy See. In many places, Catholic families, parishes, religious communities and academic institutions have come to recognize that they have members who share a sexual and affective orientation toward persons of the same sex. Loving parents, dedicated pastors, and caring parishioners have sought to inform themselves. Faced with the cognitive dissonance that results from loving a same-sex-oriented person and loving a church whose teachings call that orientation “objectively disordered,” many have prayed and studied and worked their way toward reconciliation. Someday the Catholic hierarchy will face its own deep-seated fears to seek a healing and reconciliation that it dearly needs and will find only in the embrace of gay and lesbian persons.

(Father Murray, chair of the God and Sexuality Conference Advisory Board, is Catholic Chaplain and Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion, Bard College. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1975 by Pope Paul VI.)
4/26/2005