Queering the Church towards a reality based theology

I suppose I should be angry at Benedict’s remarks yesterday on gay marriage, but in fact I find I can’t be bothered. Instead, what strikes me is how clearly these remarks exemplify Mark Jordan’s demonstration of the weakness of the Vatican’s rhetoric against homoerotic relationships, because that is all it is – rhetoric. There is no rational argument, there is no evidence, no recognition of the Church’s own deeply homoerotic culture – and there is no history. This apparently implacable opposition is of recent origin, and can in principle vanish as quickly as it came.

Too many contemporary discussions of Catholic homosexuality circle endlessly within the words of a few recent documents, the oldest of which dates no further back than 1971. Historical foreshortening is typical of official moral theology, which wants to squeeze its readers into the prevailing regulations.What matters is the current ruling.

-Mark Jordan, “The Silence of Sodom“

The first thing that struck me about his remarks when I read them last night was how completely devoid they were of any substantiation, any clarification of his reasoning, or any description of just how gay (civil) marriage constitutes a threat to traditional marriage. In this, he resembles the familiar bluster of US opponents of marriage, who rant similarly about the “threats” – but cannot explain how marriage is threatened by its expansion.

In the absence of any reasoning, therefore, let us look instead at the context. A reader asked, in response to my initial post last night, why the pope had coupled the issues of gay marriage and divorce. I guessed at an answer which I now think was only half- right: Portuguese politics. As Fr Geoff Farrow clearly explains, it is indeed politics – but not simply the Portuguese variety. In fact, yesterday’s remarks joined not only gay marriage and abortion, but also divorce. All three of these are currently hot-button issues in Portuguese politics. As Fr Farrow reminds us, it was only in 1971 that Pope John XXIII set aside the triple crowned tiara, of which one represented temporal power.

John XXIII - the last to wear the triple tiara.

We easily forget that until the early nineteenth century, the papacy occupied extensive spatial territory, and was a real temporal power, with substantial sway in international and domestic politics across Europe. (more…)