Queering the Church towards a reality based theology

Thesis 1. The Roman Catholic church has long been both fiercely homophobic and intensely homoerotic.Thesis 2. Most official Catholic pronouncements about homosexuality are meant to prevent serious discussion of it. Any real change in the “magisterial” pronouncements would require not just revision of conclusions in moral theology, but renunciation of the methods of authoritative teaching.

Thesis 3. Catholic denunciations of homosexuals are chiefly intended to produce silence around the topic of the male homosexuality that is within the church, especially in the priesthood and religious orders.

Thesis 4. So long as the present regime of church power lasts, we will never have accurate estimates of the number of “gay priests.” Even if the regime disappeared tomorrow, we could not reconstruct a convincing history of priestly sodomy. These losses should not prevent us from understanding how important male-male desire has been in the development of the Catholic church.

Thesis 5. The best way to understand contemporary clerical cultures in American Catholicism is by comparing them to life in America’s gay enclaves.

Thesis 6. Procedures for excluding gay candidates from seminaries and religious orders have succeeded chiefly in helping anxious candidates build more ornate closets.

Thesis 7. Contemporary quarrels over Catholic liturgy resemble clashes between competing forms of gay sensibility. Indeed, they are often those very same clashes in a different venue.

Thesis 8. The exercise of power in the Catholic church enacts some of the unhappiest forms of suppressed desire between men.

Thesis 9. While there are more and more communities in which to live as an honestly gay Catholic, there are still no words adequate for telling those lives.

Thesis 9.5 (the other half being exhortation). The most Catholic way to begin speaking about homosexuality in the church would be a public liturgy of repentance. This liturgy would have to be something more than vague formulas addressed to God. It would require at least a confession of hidden desires—and a vow to undertake twenty centuries of charity as penance for the twenty centuries past, which saw much less.

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