by Molly Ivors
I used to be a Catholic. Until surprisingly recently, I guess, I retained a residual affection for the bells and whistles of the religion I was born into, and in which I spent many, many years. If you're an aesthete, for example, the Quakers and the Baptists and the Methodists don't really have too much to offer (well, I guess the Baptists have music....)--nothing that matches the colored light pouring in through stained glass, the interwoven narratives in the paintings, the surge of organ music, the heady smell of incense, the tang of cheap wine on the tongue. Catholics realized long ago that if you want to fill the seats, you have to put on a good show, and that show is deeply interwoven into my consciousness, regardless of any epistemological implications. It's like the taste of Mallomars.
Of course, it doesn't take much reflection to realize that Mallomars are filled with corn syrup and horses' hooves, and while you can bracket off that information temporarily, you probably will have to face it eventually.
And so Catholicism and I had a horses' hooves moment, almost exactly three years ago now. Pope Benedict was the breaker for me. Catholics had a chance to turn away from hatred, to rediscover their moral compass (and by moral I mean worrying more about whether someone is fed than who they're fucking), to make a real difference. They could have cast aside William Donohue in favor of Dorothy Day, but they didn't.
My late mother hated Cardinal Ratzinger, who headed an enforcer's office we used to call The Inquisition, hated him with all the passion of someone who spent their life obeying their church only to see the church betray them when they actually went to put their beliefs into practice. My folks were (and my dad still is) Catholics of the Pax Christi/Catholic Worker mold, rather than the Opus Dei/If Only We Were Fundies mold. But honestly, my big break came when the depth and breadth of the fireblanket of silence over the molester priest scandal broke, and Ratzinger's answer was not to apologize for collusion or take responsibility or admit that the whole lifelong celibacy thing is probably not a decision one can make at 18. No, for him, the real problem was that some priests were--gasp!--homosexuals, and you know what they're like, what with their proselytizing and recruiting and fabulous art and pedophilia. Yep, Benny the Rat said, we should have known better than to let those gay people into the church--what were we thinking?
Benny's coming to America this month, and though he has apparently decided to stay home and trim his nose and ear hair rather than meet with Little Boots, his visit is nonetheless having a chilling effect on the American Catholic Church, and particularly the colleges which operate under its auspices. One other reason Catholicism held me far longer than it might have otherwise done is that, whatever else you say about it, Catholicism does have a long and often respectable intellectual and educational tradition. Which is what makes stuff like this so discouraging:
Corvino's presentation "What's Morally Wrong with Homosexuality?" was scheduled last week at the college, but administrators postponed it until April 22 after receiving complaints.
Aquinas President Ed Balog canceled the event Thursday, saying the Catholic school cannot endorse a program that directly opposes church teachings.
"I'm not trying to keep people from seeing him. I'm trying to prevent the college from sponsoring an event that displays an attack on Catholic teaching values," Balog said.
The cancellation came a week before Pope Benedict XVI's scheduled meeting with more than 200 Catholic school officials from across the country. The gathering Thursday, at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., is being called a lecture, but Vatican watchers predict it will be an admonishment that teaching and activities at U.S. Catholic colleges and universities more closely adhere to church orthodoxy.
Church officials won't give details about the content of the speech, but conservative Catholics are predicting -- and hoping for -- shock waves from Benedict, who before becoming pope was associated with public reprimands of Catholic theologians and blocked appointments of university faculty members he thought were too liberal.
Now, as noted, Ratzinger has long had a bug (or possibly a comely young page) up his butt about homosexuality. He's published some truly hateful shit about it over the years. And maybe back in his Hitler Youth days, that kind of authoritarianism had legs, but this is America in 2008, dood. Back the fuck off and let the grownups talk.
I've never much gotten the whole anti-gay religion thing: even a cursory view tells you that there's not much about homosexuality in the Bible. Besides, 150 years ago, the same book was used to defend slavery, 100 years ago, the denial of women the vote, and so on. You may believe that the book's eternal, but our interpretations of it certainly are bounded by history and experience, so forgive me if I just don't take the Leviticus crap too seriously. (Where're my crabcakes?)
I was thinking about all this while reading through the gay blogosphere's varied analyses of Obama's tepid interview with The Advocate (primarily Pam's House Blend and Shakesville). These folks are rightly pissed off that no viable presidential candidate has even made a gesture toward marital equality for them, something supported by the vast majority of the young voters Obama, at least, is supposed to bring to the table. And they haven't forgotten the name Donnie McClurkin. But in the Obama interview there's also a lot more subtle stuff going on: his argument that his relative lack of contact with the gay press is just people complaining that he's "not giving them enough love" (hint: "issues" aren't "love"), for example, or his odd Tom-Hanks-Accepting-the-Oscar-for-Philadelphia moment in which he tries to namecheck a gay prof, except that he can't quite remember the guy's name. (But at least "he wasn't proselytizing all the time.")
Obama's argument is that he's addressing gay issues in a broader context, to people who need to hear them, rather than just preaching to the choir (He uses that phrase, actually.) And I can see that, to some extent. But Jeff at Shakesville has a point too: "it's not asking too much to say that you need to demonstrate that you understand the LGBT community is not some annoying interest group that you need to minimally placate. You need to demonstrate that you know that you're trying to become the person who is fighting for them, and women, and the downtrodden, and the poor, and the irreligious, and everyone else here in the progressive movement." I'm not sure Obama can say that, however. He, too, is a triangulator, only he's triagulating with religion rather than politics.
I'm trying to tie these two threads together, and I'm not sure I've managed it. All I know is that, as someone who walked away from my tradition when it elevated someone abhorrent to my principles, I'm not going to get too enthusiastic by people who want to make nice with that gang.