Is the Catholic Church bigoted?

I apologize for the sensationalist title to this post, but this is really seems to be the question underlying so much of my interactions with others with respect to the Church.  Recently, I was giving a presentation in front of DSG when a Senator muttered under his or her breath doubt as to the Catholic Church recognizing any rights whatsoever. Earlier this year, one of my good friends asked me, “How can you be a part of an organization that denies that an entire community of humans even exist?”

I’ll admit that these comments disturb me.  If the Church does in fact dehumanize a whole group of people, then the Church would be undermining the dignity of the human person it claims to prize so highly. But this doesn’t seem consistent with the Church’s actions—it is the largest charity in the world that provides aid regardless of race, creed, or orientation.  While the rest of the world was going on about GRIDS, it was the Catholic nuns who were the first to overcome the fear that paralyzed society and step in to nurse the suffering—sexual orientation a nonfactor. 

This just doesn’t seem bigoted to me.  I would say bigotry is an irrational judgment without considering the facts, and based solely on gender, race, orientation, religion, etc. With that in mind, a statement such as,

“Men tend to be physically stronger than women,” 

could be considered bigoted if I just made it a priori without evidence and reflection on how I came to that conclusion.  But if we, like the scientific community, believe in some objective physical reality, it could simply be a statement of scientific fact established by accepted methods within physiological research (e.g. Janssen et al, Journal of Applied Physiology, July 1, 2000 Vol 89 No 1, 81-88). 

Similarly, a statement such as,

“homosexual acts are intrinsically morally disordered,”

could be considered bigoted if I just made it a priori without evidence and reflection on how I came to that conclusion.  But if we, like the Catholic Church, believe in some objective moral reality, it could simply be a statement of theological fact established by accepted methods within ethical research (e.g. Catechism of the Catholic Church 2357-9).

Sadly, it seems to me that many look no further than a single statement of the Catholic Church to call the Church bigoted without a study of the epistemology that the Church uses to construct her worldview, or the evidence that the Church considered to draw her conclusion.  Somehow, theological claims are something we’re all entitled to an opinion regardless of our depth of study.  Few educated people take seriously extremists who dismiss evolution or some other scientific claim without a degree in Evolutionary Biology or some related study.  Yet we as a community seem to laud those who, without theological degree or even carefully considering the Church’s evidences, reject the Catholic Church’s theological claim.  How many who reject the doctrine mentioned above can tell me the arguments the Church uses to justify that doctrine?  Yet, if we as a community don’t study the Catholic arguments, how can we ask Catholics to consider ours?

This is not to say that individual Catholics always act with pure motives, or have not used their religion to justify hate, despite the Church’s explicit forbidding of this (See again my comment about people feeling entitled to express theological opinions without a careful study of theology).  I am not asking non-Catholics to study or agree with a faith they don’t profess.   However, I am asking non-Catholics to not make judgments about a view they have not carefully studied based on an incomplete exploration of the arguments. After all, that would seem to be an irrational judgment without fully considering the facts.

Calling my Church names without studying her teachings dismisses a billion people worldwide for no reason other than their religion.  I invite the community here to, with me, enter into conversation with my Church on her view on LGBT rights.  But please, do so after careful study of her arguments and how she derives them.  It is, after all, merely the treatment you would ask any Catholic when considering ours.

"God is Love"

If there’s one thing that rarely gets much love on this blog, it’s the Bible.  Now, perhaps that’s understandable—Leviticus 18 tends not to get too many in the LGBT community excited for what follows (Leviticus is, admittedly, also the end of many Christians’ attempts to read the Bible cover-to-cover). And, for the LGBT community, what follows doesn’t seem to be particularly “Good News.”  Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, 1 Timothy 1 don’t seem to contain the affirmation we generally expect in the LGBT community.

I was recently directed to a very interesting discussion of Scripture and homosexuality.  Matthew Vines, a student at Harvard who came out his sophomore year, has spent the last two years researching Biblical exegesis on this topic.  In a recent presentation, he discusses the passages in the Bible he finds to be cited most often in Scriptural arguments against homosexuality. After exploring each one of them in turn, he [spoiler alert] concludes that none of them can be used as arguments against a loving, committed, and monogamous same-sex relationship.

While the Catholic Church would end up disagreeing with Matthew’s conclusion, one of the things I love about his discussion is how it places the Scriptural passages he discusses in context.  One of the tenets of the Catholic faith is that any Scriptural passage must be interpreted within the Tradition as well as within its overall Biblical context.  While Matthew, being Protestant, doesn’t exactly discuss a ton of Catholic Tradition, his presentation does a great job of contextualizing the passages, and is definitely worth a watch.

One of the things that surprised me in Matthew’s presentation was not necessarily what he chose to include.  Rather, I found it very interesting one Biblical quote that he didn’t mention. It’s perhaps the passage that I have seen most quoted around this community: 1 John 4, “God is love.”  It’s an absolutely beautiful quote that is central to the Christian understanding of God and love both.  It is also a quote that is often used in an argument against the Church’s teachings on homosexuality.  The argument generally runs something along the lines of, “I can’t imagine a God who is love asking me to deny such a huge part of myself whom He created and called good.”

I think it’s particularly appropriate to talk about this argument today, because today is the day Christians celebrate Good Friday—the day we commemorate the death and crucifixion of Jesus on the Cross.  What does Jesus being tortured to death have to do with an argument predicated on “God is love,” you may ask?  Well, everything.

In my previous post, I asked us to reflect on what we mean when we say “love.”  When St. John writes, “God is love,” he specifically is referring to agape—Christian love. John Paul II, in his Theology of the Body, teaches that love is a “sincere gift of self.”  The ultimate expression of this gift of self is ultimately found on the Cross.

When a Catholic looks at a crucifix, (s)he sees this paradigmatic act of love.  “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).  Christian love is a sacrificial love that looks beyond oneself.  It is a gift of oneself without thought to whether another “deserves it.”  Christian love is to “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (Luke 6:28). 

This is why the Church looks with confusion on an argument that seems to say “God is love, therefore gay sex.” This argument makes multiple assumptions.  It rightfully assumes that we were ultimately created in order to love.  It wrongfully assumes that love necessarily entitles one to sex.  It wrongfully assumes that if I don’t have sex, I can’t love.  It wrongfully assumes that to deny one of my desires is necessarily to deny God’s ultimate plan.  Jesus said,  “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34).  To derive from love a right—any right—seems counterintuitive to the love we are reminded of so clearly on Good Friday.  Where is entitlement in Jesus on the Cross?

God’s love on the Cross was all about giving everything when nothing was deserved.  That’s understandably unpopular in this world, and it’s a teaching that, admittedly, Christians often don’t live up to.  After all, today is the day we remember that when Jesus came preaching this message, we all rejected Him and tortured Him to death.  However, that does not change what love means, and it does not change that Christians are called to this understanding of love.

No wonder, with all the Scripture Matthew Vines used to argue against the traditional interpretation, he didn’t mention the argument from “God is love.”  That sentence contains so much of the Christian message. Yet, it cannot be taken out of context and argued that that sentence necessarily contain sex.  Today, we are reminded that love is about so much more than sex. 

I hope everyone has a blessed Good Friday and a happy Easter.

What do we mean by Love(=Love)?

In the LGBT community, we love the phrase Love=Love. It’s plastered everywhere—from outside the Center to shirts we distribute to the entire campus. But I can’t help but wonder what message people are actually receiving. After all, Love=Love seems to be more than just a trivial tautology, else there would simply be no point.

While loveis an unfortunately vague and overused word in the English language (e.g. Mean Girls),judging by the art on the T-shirt, which includes gay and straight couples holding hands, I don’t think we’re talking about my love for Italian food or God’s love for humanity. We seem to be talking specifically about romantic love, and I think most people interpret the shirt as meaning gay/lesbian romantic love=straight romantic love.

That seems simple enough. However I think that many people, upon seeing this shirt, draw more than this. Consider the application of this to political rights, where we might want to say gay romantic love=straight romantic love, therefore gay marriage. However, the only rights that we can really derive from the statement gay romantic love=straight romantic love are those which are guaranteed solely in virtue of romantic love. And, thus, I am left asking what does romantic love in and of itself entail.

I feel that in our culture we are taught that love justifies pretty much anything (note how we’ve lost the “romantic” part--though it's still implied). While the hopeless romantic in me loves Disney movies, there is a recurring message that love solves everything; Hercules literally becomes a god through romantic love. Or what about romantic comedies, such as Made of Honor, in which Patrick Dempsey does everything he can to break up his best friend’s wedding because he is “in love”with her? Made of Honor ends up with Patrick Dempsey happily on his honey moon with his now-wife. No regrets. No mention of the now-ex-fiancé who was literally rejected at the altar.

How often dowe try to use love to justify things we normally would never even consider? How many times have you seen your friend, once they have a boyfriend or girlfriend, disappear from your life to spend all their time with their boy/girlfriend—previous plans discarded? I once was told not to date during my Freshman year, because apparently love demands me to sacrifice my grades despite my education’s $59,900/year price tag. And sometimes, romantic love apparently demands we even violate others ’rights—what is it we say about those we love? That for him/her, we’d let the world burn? Dante once wrote,

“People in love cannot be moved by kindness,

and opposition makes them feel like martyrs.”

Once we are in love, we appeal to love to ignore the normal rules of kindness, and we start sacrificing others in devotion to love, and we hold ourselves up as somehow sanctified by our sacrifice. We start feeling not only justified in our actions by romantic love, but entitled through it.

And so we return to my original question—what we can derive from romantic love? It is so tempting for those fighting for LGBT rights to equivocate on romantic love and capitalize on the cultural primacy of love to try. Love=Love à{Rights} without clearly establishing what rights romantic love can actually give. Turning romantic love into rhetoric, however, makes us lose sight of how beautiful and valuable romantic love itself is. We must return to ask what exactly love is, and in determining what romantic love is—and is not—I suspect we will find it to be more than we even wanted it to be, even if not in the way we originally thought.

We consider ourselves a loving and accepting community, so let us figure out what we mean when we say that. Let us explore what love actually means.

Devil’s Advocate

[Editor's note: Please welcome our newest writer to the blog! We're thrilled to have you, Shane!]

Like so many people who write on this blog, I was falling inlove—but it wasn’t the Disney story I imagined it would be. It was going all wrong.

No, this isn’t another coming out story. And Love Story time was yesterday, so this isn’t a story about how the man of my dreams came and swept me away despite my best heteronormative efforts. No, I can’t even get “falling in love all wrong” right. You see, I was falling in love with the Catholic Church. Not just God and not just Catholicism—those two had laid irrevocable claims on my soul long before—but specifically the Roman Catholic Church.

You can imagine my surprise. Despite the fact that at that point in my life, I was just coming to terms with my sexuality, and, on top of that, I already had my fair share of struggles with Church teaching. Growing up, I had been pretty much the only Christian—much less Catholic—in my group of friends, and so I had heard the various objections to the Church's teachings ad nauseum. But despite all of this, I couldn’t ignore the fact that God was undeniably calling me to a deeper involvement with His Church.

This seemed to be just a bit of a problem. There are gay guys out there who are, philosophically speaking, theistic. There are even gay guys out there who identify as Catholic, but who often maintain a careful disdain of the institutional Roman Church. Gay guys who consider themselves in love with the Roman Catholic Church seem to be few and far between.

What I was hearing all around me didn’t help [“Why are you still Catholic at all?”], and even the counselor I was seeing told me it was hopeless. I mean, I’ve sworn off hopeless crushes on straight guys; how could I expect any relationship with the Church to work out any better?

Hans Küng, an ecumenical theologian and Catholic priest once wrote “the problem ofGod is more important than the problem of the Church; but the latter often stands in the way of the former." I agree with Küng when he says this last part doesn’t have to be the case.

“There are two ways of getting home,” GK Chesterton writes in The Everlasting Man,“and one of them is to stay there. The other way is to walk all the way round the whole world till we comeback to the same place.” While I could hold up My Experience as infallible and withhold my assent to the Church until she reworks the witness of 2000 years of some of the world's brightest men and women so I don’t ever have to be challenged, I have seen my interpretation of my experience be wrong or incomplete again and again.

At the end of the day, every time I am at Mass or Adoration,God confirms He wants me in His Church. And I have no clue why He’s asking that of me, to be honest. It’d be so much easier to join some nice LGBT-affirming Episcopalian parish. But I can’t. I am Roman Catholic. And my love of God—of Catholicism—of Church—really isn’t a choice. And I can no more divorce my Church from myself than I can my sexuality.