To identify as a gay devout Catholic seems contradictory to many people—and for good reason. The Church, both historically and presently, continues to debate the sinfulness of homosexuality: traditionalists condemn it, religious liberals accept it, and a host of individuals (often closeted themselves) are lost in a gray mist of confusion, hate, and more often, self-loathing.
The LGBT Educating and Affirming Diversity (LEAD) Ministry within the Saint Matthew Catholic Church in Baltimore seeks to harmonize religious and sexual orientations, while providing church-goers with a community and place of congregation that is unanimously accepting. Most recently, documentary filmmaker Eric Kruszewski crossed paths with LEAD and was so moved by the group’s mission statement, decided to create a documentary series.
Kruszewski explains:
“I was raised Catholic, but have not practiced my faith in years. And before this project, I had never heard of Saint Matthew Catholic Church. One of the parishioners knew my work and me. So when we bumped into each other at a media event, she told me, ‘I have a story for you…’”
When Kruszewski finally met the LEAD members, he was taken by their hospitality and warmth, both directed towards himself and to each other:
“The first time I met the LEAD members was during their monthly meeting. When a lesbian couple announced they were getting married and moving into a new apartment, another member offered rooms-worth of furniture to get them started. When a newcomer was introduced to the group, the room was pin-drop quiet as he/she shared an intimate story of love and heartbreak. It was clear that there was something special within this congregation.”
Kruszewski quickly felt the need to honor LEAD with a documentary he could share:
“There’s no way I can fully understand what it’s like to be an LGBT Catholic in 2016. But through interviews, the documentary process and getting close to the individuals portrayed in these videos, my goal was to accurately capture their thoughts, feelings and experiences. Perhaps the video series becomes a platform for open discussion surrounding LGBT Catholics acceptance, as well as fuel to keep alive their passion for change and desire for full inclusion. After all, before they knew their sexuality, the Saint Matthew LGBT people were baptized Catholic. Why should that change upon discovering themselves?”
Throughout this week, we will be posting individual videos about LEAD members.
Kruszewski’s first video below is a mere introduction to the many people who identify as Catholic and LGBT:
U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, at their first assembly since gay marriage became legal nationwide, vowed Monday to uphold marriage as only the union of a man and a woman and to seek legal protections for those who share that view.
Some bishops said they were committed to reversing the U.S. Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling last June. Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, said a concerted effort was needed to “build a consensus” to do so. As a model, he pointed to new state laws that have made it harder to obtain an abortion, even as the procedure remains legal nationwide.
“I don’t think because five Supreme Court justices changed the public policy on such a fundamental issue that we should just accept it. I think we have to be as strong as we have on the pro-life issue,” Naumann said at the gathering of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore.
Bishop Robert Baker
Bishop Robert Baker of Birmingham, Alabama, said the bishops should join other religious groups in working to protect government workers who refuse to participate in same-sex weddings. The bishops have not said specifically what kind of conscience protections they support for civil authorities.
“I hope we will not back away from that advocacy,” Baker said.
Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, president of the bishops’ conference, highlighted the bishops push for religious exemptions for charities, schools and individual for-profit business owners who oppose gay marriage and other laws and regulations.
Dozens of U.S. dioceses and Catholic nonprofits are suing the Obama administration over the birth control coverage requirement in the Affordable Care Act. President Barack Obama created an accommodation that requires insurers to provide the coverage in place of objecting religious nonprofits. The bishops and other faith groups said the change did not go far enough. The Supreme Court recently announced it was taking up lawsuits challenging the accommodation, with arguments scheduled in March.
Archbishop Joseph Kurtz
“What a great tragedy it will be if our ministries are slowly secularized or driven out of the public square because of short-sighted laws or regulations that limit our ability to witness and serve consistent with our faith,” said Kurtz, of Louisville, Ky.
The bishops’ meeting came just days after the Islamic extremists attacked Paris. U.S. bishops said they were praying for victims of the violence and renewed their commitment to resettling Syrian refugees, as some U.S. governors threatened to stop accepting them. American dioceses have a vast network of charities that help resettle refugees.
Still, religious liberty and marriage were the focus of the gathering Monday, the first of two days of public sessions. Among the issues they discussed was how they should include children of gay parents in church life. Last week, the Mormon church sparked a backlash with new, strict limits on participation in church rites by children with same-sex married parents.
The bishops’ conference also heard an address from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the Vatican’s U.S. ambassador who was behind Francis’ controversial meeting with Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who briefly went to jail rather than comply with a court order to issue same-sex marriage licenses.
Vigano had invited Davis to be among those greeting the pope in the Vatican embassy in Washington last September during Francis’ visit to the country. Her lawyer caused an uproar when he announced the meeting soon after Francis returned to Rome, describing it as a papal affirmation of Davis’ approach to conscientious objection. The Vatican insisted the meeting was not an endorsement and said she was one of several dozen people who had greeted Francis. The U.S. bishops’ conference has never commented on the meeting.
In his speech Monday, Vigano urged the bishops to persevere in working to “preserve a moral order in society” and said they should not “fall prey” to “secularized and increasingly pagan” practices in broader society. He said Catholic colleges and universities, specifically those founded by Jesuits, should do more to shore up Catholic identity at the schools.
The ambassador received two standing ovations from the bishops. He turns 75 in January, the age when bishops are required to submit their resignations to the pope.
Rev. Oliva’s (pictured) book was published by the historic Dominican publishing house, called Cerf.
A Dominican friar, Fr. Adriano Oliva, has celebrated the 800th anniversary of his religious order with a book about “the Church, the divorced and remarried, and homosexual couples.”
Amours (“Loves”) is a study of St Thomas Aquinas’ definition of love and aims to show that the “Angelic Doctor” recognized the “natural” character of homosexuality. In the wake of the Synod on the family, Oliva pleads for new ways of welcoming divorced and remarried and homosexual couples into the Church and of recognizing their unions in civil law.
His editor, the “editions du Cerf” publishing house, is the historic Dominican editor in France, founded at the request of Pope Pius XI in 1929. It still functions under religious supervision.
“The highest of friendships: this is how St Thomas Aquinas calls the unique, faithful and gratuitous love between two spouses who give themselves to each other in consecrated union, as a sacramental sign of the love of Christ for the Church, His spouse. Should couples who are divorced and remarried, who live out their union in a responsible manner, be banned from this friendship? Could it be that homosexual persons, who live as a couple with responsibility, be banned?” reads the text accompanying the book on the Cerf’s web-shop.
It goes on: “Does a theological assessment of the ‘naturality’ of the homosexual inclination, which St Thomas recognizes, not open the doors to new ways of welcoming same-sex couples within the Church? The anthropology of ‘naturality’ then demands that civil rights be accorded to such couples in national legislations.”
Besides putting homosexual unions on a same plane with conjugal unions, Oliva’s argument would imply no State should have the right to refuse recognition to same-sex couples: an extreme standpoint, that goes even further than notoriously liberal Human Rights Courts across the world.
That a Dominican friar should promote such scandalous propositions is in itself a sign of the times.
Fr. Adriano Oliva is works as a researcher for the State-run CNRS in France (National Center for Scientific Research) at the “Laboratory of Monotheistic studies. But he is also a doctor in theology, a historian of medieval doctrines, and president of the Leonine Commission founded by Pope Leo XIII in Paris in 1880 in order to publish or republish critical editions of St Thomas Aquinas’ work and to “restore his golden wisdom.”
Dominicans from all over the world are associated with this prestigious institution, whose aim is restore the knowledge of one of their wisest predecessors in the very town where he taught and lived. Oliva also presides the “Bibliothèque thomiste” collection of the Parisian academic editor, Vrin.
Oliva’s book was published and is being promoted in that context, as a genuine or at least noteworthy interpretation of St Thomas’ work. “This essay accompanies us into the complexity of the most authentic theology, with the intent of promoting the Gospel of mercy and the tradition of the Church,” comments the Dominican editor of the book.
Adriano Oliva clearly wants homosexual couples to be “welcomed within the heart of the Church, and not at its periphery,” “totally integrated in full communion with the Church”.
Catholic philosopher Thibaud Collin explains that Oliva bases his reflection on the fact that “counter-natural pleasure” can exist, either because of a corruption which comes from the body (“finding sour things sweet because of fever” for instance), or which comes from the soul, “such as those who, from habit, find pleasure in eating their fellow man, in having relations with animals or homosexual relations, and other similar things which are not according to human nature.”
From this Oliva deduces the thesis according to which “St Thomas places the principle of pleasure in sexual unions between persons of the masculine sex as coming from the soul and not from the body, where he had placed venereal pleasure, on the other hand.” He then proceeds to declare: “St Thomas considers homosexuality as an inclination that is rooted in its most intimate part, the soul, from where affections and love are expressed.”
This leads him to affirm that it is necessary to distinguish between homosexuality and sodomy which is practiced for the sole aim of gaining pleasure. “For this singular person, homosexuality cannot be considered as being against nature, even though it does not correspond with the general nature of the species,” writes Oliva, who considers this general nature not as a reality but as an abstraction.
For these people, therefore – reasons Fr Oliva – as homosexuality is constitutive of the very nature of their soul, moral virtue consists for them in living out their inclination according to the demands of their humanity: in unique, gratuitous, faithful and “chaste” love. And the Church must accompany them in their love for a person of the same sex in which they “accomplish” themselves. Sexual acts, in this context, are rendered morally legitimate by the criterion of “love” between homosexual persons, in the same way as happens between heterosexuals.
(One wonders why cannibals were not so similarly vindicated.)
Thibaud Collin has published a scathing response to the sophistic reasoning of the Dominican friar. In the first place, he questions, why should “monogamy,” either homosexual or heterosexual, be a criterion of virtuous love inscribed in the nature of the human person? Couldn’t it be argued that “polyamorous” inclinations are also for some persons in the very nature of their souls? “It is quite foreseeable that some time in the future another cleric will stigmatize the polyphobia of such a position,” argues Collin.
Several fallacies are present in the statements that homosexuality is connatural to the individual and that its finality is the virtuous love of another person.
In the first place, Oliva leaves aside the fact that St Thomas speaks of a “corruption” of the natural principle of the species which leads the human person to be orientated towards a person of the opposite sex, an orientation that allows human life to be transmitted in the sole framework that is fitting to its dignity: marriage, says Collin. Contrary to what Oliva writes, St Thomas does not designate the origin of this corruption as being in the soul but in “habit”: an acquired disposition that becomes a “second nature”. This “habit,” in opposition to mere biological processes, is “on the side of the soul” because “only the potencies of the soul can be disposed by the repetition of identical acts that create a habit.” The same could be said of drug abuse or any other addiction.
In the case of counter-natural sexual pleasure that an individual experiences as connatural, St Thomas considers it to be rooted in a habit that is against reason: which is defined as a vice, a disposition to what is evil, explains Thibaud Collin. St Thomas, in the text quoted by Oliva, is describing the non-natural pleasure some people experience as being natural in an act that is opposed to human nature and therefore to the objective good of man – in this case sodomy – without looking for the source of a psychological type that 19th century psychiatry would later end up calling “homosexuality”.
The second main point of Oliva’s reasoning in view of legitimizing homosexual unions is that this inclination should be accomplished in faithful love that pastors should bless and support: “A homosexual couple has a fundamental right to form, because homosexuality is a constitutive component of the individualized nature of two individuals who unite in natural and in some cases in supernatural friendship,” writes Oliva. Blessing such couples would help them on their “way in fidelity.”
Thibaud Collin comments: “Here, there is confusion between true friendship and sexual and affective attraction.” When Oliva argues that homosexuality, being rooted in the soul, should also express itself and be lived out in the body, he is contradicting the whole of St Thomas’ teaching on natural moral law and the virtues.
Fr. Oliva, in fact, replaces “truth” with “sincerity”: moral truth shows a person’s reason the good that should be accomplished by his free acts, that is proper to human nature as God created it, explains Collin, indicating that Oliva reasons inversely: “For him, natural law ends up by adjusting to an individual whose natural principle is distorted, according to St. Thomas.”
Oliva quotes St Thomas as saying that walking on one’s hands, even though hands are made for another physiological use, is to commit a “small sin,” or even “no sin at all,” in order to justify “using the sexual organ in a relation with the same sex in the context of true homosexual love, unique, faithful and gratuitous.” He even founds his statement on Humanae vitae, concluding that one must answer, “without hesitation,” that “nothing” opposes such a justification. Sodomy would only be wrong if it is experienced without love: “Accomplished with the love that springs from the soul, informed by the soul, such an act will comprise no sin,” writes Oliva.
His subjectivist distortion – one might even say prostitution – of St Thomas’ teachings cannot be set aside as the very marginal ravings of an isolated individual. Fr Oliva is a prominent representative of the religious Order of Preachers – and teachers. His book was accepted by a Catholic editorial team: the Dominicans’ own publishing house. It is available to all on the Cerf’s website, with warm recommendations.
The radio station of the archbishopric of Paris, Radio Notre Dame, includes a conference by Fr. Oliva on its website agenda: the conference itself will take place in a Parisian library in partnership with the Society of St. Paul. The poster for the conference speaks of Oliva’s “tour de force” in referring to the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas “in order to put two questions under debate at the Synod on the family” – divorced and remarried and homosexual couples – “under a new light,” by “returning to the definition of love given by the saint as the greatest form of friendship.”
Interestingly but not surprisingly, this sort of reasoning was invoked in substance by Vatican priest Krzysztof Charamsa, who said on the occasion of his “coming out” just before the Synod: “The Bible says nothing about homosexuality. It speaks of acts that I would call ‘homogenital’. Even heterosexuals can commit such acts, as often happens in prisons, but in this case they act against their nature and so commit a sin. When gay persons engage in such acts, on the contrary, they express their nature. The sodomite of the Bible has nothing to do with two gays who love each other in Italy today and who want to marry. I have not managed to find a single passage, even in St Paul, which can be interpreted as relating to homosexual persons who demand to be respected as such, as at the time the concept itself was unknown.”
This is substantially what Adriano Oliva is saying. And while Charamsa was promptly suspended from all his priestly and magisterial functions for having confessed that he was unfaithful to his commitment to celibacy, a religious like Oliva is allowed to theorize on “homosexual love” with what looks like the blessing of his Order.
In the same way, this rooting of homosexual orientation and “love” in the soul is a manner of making individual and subjective conscience the measure of moral good. This heresy is also at the heart of present false “debates.”
We must surely expect to see more of the same in the months and years to come.
The author of That Undeniable Longing: My Road To And From The Priesthood, Mark Tedesco, contacted me through this site and asked if he could send me a copy of his memoir in hopes I’d be able to review it. I was glad to make his e-acquaintance and said; “by all means, do send me a copy.”
First off, I was surprised to discover that the book was published way back in 2006. Where have I been? I had to ask myself. I try to stay on top of such things, but I totally missed this one.
Mark’s road to and from the priesthood begins with him leaving his home in California in 1978 at the age of nineteen to enter a seminary with the Oblates of the Virgin Mary on the outskirts of Rome. My own road to the priesthood began ten years in 1967 at age 17 when I left my family in Chicago to enter college seminary in Northern Illinois with the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. I was a novice by age 19.
Despite the differences in our stories I think the dovetailing is rather remarkable. And Mark’s reminiscences were very familiar territory to me. The struggles Mark recalls of his efforts to wed his spirituality with his burgeoning sexual awareness mirrors precisely the turmoil I encountered when I interviewed the 50 gay priests for my doctoral thesis. It mirrored my own story too.
I read That Undeniable Longing thinking, my goodness, another story of a super talented man, one with so many gifts, one that clearly had a vocation to serve God’s people, but one who had to choose between ministry and personal integrity. Why, I had to ask myself, why is this still going on? Why does the Church continue to sacrifice its faithful sons on an altar of an outmoded sexual morality based on a woefully deficient understanding of human sexuality?
Mark Tedesco
To his credit, Mark is not bitter as he looks back on his priestly formation and active ministry and toward his new life as a layman.
“How did I arrive at this point? Could I ever have imagined, long ago on a winter day in Rome, that I would find myself on this new path, my dreams not shattered, but transformed? And that elusive, relentless desire, for happiness – where is it leading me?”
That Undeniable Longing is not an angry book, though God knows, it could have been. Notwithstanding Mark’s emotional struggles, which at times manifested themselves physically, his attitude and his lack of recriminations at the end of his priestly dreams are very refreshing and, I believe, they are the heart and soul of the book.
The author details his involvement in a conservative lay Catholic cult with Italian ties that he calls the Community and Freedom (CF). I’m guessing this is a thinly veiled Community And Liberation. But, as they say, a rose by any other name smells the same. Sounds to me like extricating himself from CF was as traumatic as leaving the priesthood.
After some soul-searching and with the help of a counselor, Mark, who was by now in Washington DC, left the priesthood and moved back to California to start a career as a teacher.
Mark doesn’t go into much detail on his process of discernment regarding his being gay vis-a-vis his priesthood. I would have liked him to have spelled out that more. It would be helpful for other gay priests still weighing their options. Even though Mark mentions that he had deep emotional (love) attachments to some of his confrères, he never goes into detail. Did he act upon his attractions? He doesn’t say. But I remain curious. Not for the prurient interest, mind you, but because how we behave is how we learn. That being said, the fact that Mark went through this ordeal, dealt with all the oppressive and sex-negative Catholic culture has to offer, and came out the other side in tack, is a testament to his character. Not everyone who attempts this is successful.
I know that a lot of visitors to this blog are gay clergy and religious. I know that a lot of my visitors are struggling with a lot of the same things Mark struggled with. I believe many of my visitors would prosper from reading this book. Mark’s openness, honesty, integrity, not to mention his chatty writing style, are remarkable as well as edifying.
Pope Francis leaves St. Peter’s Square after his weekly audience at The Vatican on November 11, 2015 in Vatican City, Vatican. During the event, the Pontiff continued his catechesis on the family, focussing on togetherness and solidarity which extends as “a sign of God’s universal love” .
The encounter took place in a non-descript room at the Vatican, and conversation stuck to regular diplomatic briefs. But for the parties involved on Tuesday morning, the meeting held historic significance: Randy Berry, the first-ever U.S. Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI persons, and Vatican officials from the Holy See’s Secretary of State office were meeting for the first time.
The moment, simple as it was, marked a new level of U.S. engagement with the Catholic Church on LGBT human rights issues. Berry told TIME he met with officials for about an hour, and he met separately with representatives from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. For both sides, the conversations were new.
President Barack Obama only created Berry’s position at the State Department in April, and until now, Berry has primarily only talked with faith leaders in the field, as he has traveled to 30 countries in the last seven months. He met with evangelical congregations in Jamaica when he visited in May, for example. Conversations about LGBT human rights have never before reached this level with the Catholic Church, which considers gay and lesbian sexual behavior a sin and restricts marriage to unions of one man and one woman.
Berry’s focus however is not on marriage, but on the twin foreign policy issues of violence and discrimination. That strategy, Berry hopes, allows for common ground with the Vatican to stand together against extreme violence. “We were not there to talk about issues of civil unions or same sex marriage, for example, because that is not part of our policy,” Berry says. “That is not part of the conversation we were interested in engaging in, nor do I think were they.”
Berry requested the Vatican meeting as part of his three-week trip to Eastern Europe, which has included visits to five countries and a stop in Athens for the annual conference for ILGA, an international lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex rights association. Church officials accepted. “I wanted a chance to brief Vatican officials myself,” Berry says. “These issues of violence and extreme discrimination are of concern to us all.”
The meeting is particularly noteworthy ahead of Pope Francis’ visit to Uganda at the end of the month, where homosexuality is illegal. When Uganda introduced a law last year that further criminalized homosexuality with extensive prison sentences, Western powers including the U.S. pushed back, while local Catholic leaders had mixed responses. Courts eventually struck the measure down, but hundreds of gay Ugandans have since fled to Kenya, where homosexuality is also illegal and where Pope Francis also plans a visit during his trip to central Africa.
Berry says he spent time in “listening mode” to learn from officials about how Pope Francis engages on human rights issues when he travels. He remembers how a gay rights activist was included when a large group of political activists met with Pope Francis in Paraguay this summer. “That inclusive approach speaks volumes,” Berry says. “I would hope that certainly those same messages are shared, and I fully expect that they will be because I think they are completely consistent with what we’ve seen from His Holiness in the past.”
The fact that the meeting even happened is revealing. It is a sign that the Obama administration sees future opportunity to work with the Vatican after the Pope’s September visit, with the possibility to build on the partnership they have strengthened on climate change and migration. It is also a sign that Vatican diplomatic efforts are willing to take certain amount of risk by talking with the U.S. on this issue, as any LGBT issues thrusts the Church into an often conflicted spotlight. Pope Francis has continued to advocate dialogue and listening to a range of perspectives even as he has ramped up the Vatican’s diplomatic activism, and the U.S. State Department continues to take note and look for opportunities to engage.
Discussion of any concrete collaboration with the Vatican would be premature, however. For now, Berry hopes to further common ground and expand contacts for future conversations. “It was an important first dialogue and I hope that we will continue,” Berry says. “I get to do a lot of really amazing things in this job,” he continues. “It was quite a positive experience.”
