Papal PR

The Washington Blade, the D.C. gay newspaper, has named Pope B16 as the "anti-gay person the year." Ouch. Along with a damning story, the article has a sidebar on Ratzinger-Benedict's written record on homosexuality. It certainly looks ugly all lined up like that. And the story doesn't even mention the 1999 sanctions against Sister Jeanine Gramick and Father Robert Nugent for their work with News Ways Ministry, a ministry for gay Catholics and their families that struggled mightily to stay within the increasingly narrow bounds of church teaching.

My posts on the document banning gay priests should make my views on this matter clear: The church's current teaching and practice is punitive, unnecessarily harsh, and lacks proper recourse to modern psychological data about sexual orientation in general and homosexuality in particular. It also generally forgets that there are many Catholics who are gay and lesbian, as well as many gay priests, religious, and lay people who have been faithfully serving the people of God for centuries. And I think it's legit for gay folks in general and gay Catholics in particular to feel abandoned, angry, persecuted, and misunderstood--and to put those feelings into print and action, as well as to oppose Vatican interventions into the secular political sphere.

At the same time, I'm not sure if hyperbole helps here. Take the comments of one "lesbian Catholic activist" associated with Soulforce: "His rhetoric is obscene. He wants gays clearly taken care of — it’s almost like the Final Solution." The Final Solution? Perhaps I'm accustomed to Vatican abuse, but that's a little over the top.

But it's hard to deny that in the popular imagination the Catholic church is "against" gays: It opposes gay marriage and even domestic partnership benefits (like spousal health insurance), adoption by same-sex couples; at times it opposes the inclusion of sexual orientation in non-discrimination laws (even those that exempt religious organizations); and Catholic parishes and dioceses have fired gay employees for that reason only (though I doubt there is a diocesan chancery without a gay employee). No amount of asserting the Catechism's teaching that homosexuals must be accepted with compassion and sensitivity can trump the systematic resistance to almost any advancement of the secular civil rights of gay and lesbian people.

I think the tide may be turning though: The recent document on gay priests landed with a thud; it had few defenders, many mainstream detractors, and a huge number of spin doctors that tried to neutralize it. That may come to nothing, but one hopes that we've turned a corner. But I grant that I'm probably being unrealistically optimistic.

Unless Catholics really want the world to think that "the church"--we baptized--are "against" gay people... But I don't think God is, and I don't think Catholics should be either.