The Homosexuality of the Catholic Church (3): The Campy Humor of a Clerical Culture That Is Both Homophobic and Homoerotic

                                             Gay Acrobats Perform for Pope Benedict XVI

                                           The Episcopal Installation of Georg Ganswein

                     The "Loving Friendship" of Pope Benedict XVI and Georg Ganswein

Pope Benedict XVI's Famous Red Shoes

Benedict in His Red Ermine-Lined Bonnet

Benedict XVI loves ecclesiastical accessories--red shoes, red bonnets, gold watches and cuff-links and more.  Frederic Martel suggests that the best portrait of Benedict was drawn by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the homosexual dandy Dorian Gray develops a love for the priestly vestments of the Catholic Church. "In the mystic offices to which such things were put," Wilde observed, "there was something that quickened his imagination."

Benedict also loves handsome young men--such as his intimate friend Georg Ganswein, who is 30 years younger than he.  He promoted his friend, even making him an archbishop.  And unlike any modern pope, he presided over an elaborate liturgical celebration--a coronation mass--for Georg's consecration as archbishop on Epiphany, January 6, 2013.  It lasted almost three hours.  It can be seen in the YouTube video above.  Some in the Vatican said that this was the most beautiful liturgical ceremony they had ever seen.  One high point was when the pope spent a long time stroking Georg's hair.

Watching the video of this ceremony, Martel felt a loving admiration for Benedict's daring display of his homoeroticism:

"In his way, Joseph Ratzinger remained loyal to his singleton, in spite of the frantic warnings of the Curia.  This high mass was a magnificent statement.  And that day, he was radiant.  His restrained smile was a marvel.  Having drained the chalice to the dregs, he was not afraid of taking another drink from it.  He is handsome.  He is proud.  Magnetized by his own daring, he has won.  Seeing him again in the video, so superbly dramatic, I have never loved him as much as I do in that moment" (444).

This confirmed the pope's reputation as the "liturgy queen," a term first used by Mark Jordan in his book The Silence of Sodom, his account of the paradox that the clerical culture of the Church is at once both homophobic in its moral teaching and homoerotic in its liturgical aesthetic.

One month after his coronation of Georg, Benedict announced that he was resigning as pope, which no pope had done in over a thousand years.  Georg is now both personal secretary to the retired pope and prefect of the pontifical house of Pope Francis.

Martel recounts the many rumors about Benedict and Georg being lovers.  "These rumors and gossip, which were regularly passed on to me at the Vatican without ever being proven, all focus on the same thing: an emotional relationship" (438).  But "without ever being proven"!  That's the complaint of Martel's critics--that his book is full of unproven rumors of homosexuality passed on in a campy gay humorous style that many critics find offensive.

It should be noted, however, that Martel stresses that the speculation about Benedict and Georg's active homosexuality is largely discredited by the lack of any clear proof.  The "most likely hypothesis," Martel suggests, is that Benedict and Georg have a "loving friendship" in the ancient and medieval tradition of Platonic love.  We "might hypothesize that homophilia was the thorn in Joseph Ratzinger's flesh," just as it was for Saint Paul (447).  His latent homosexuality has been sublimated into clerical vocation, philosophical research, literary and musical aesthetic, extravagant clothing, and the beauty of boys.

"If this hypothesis is true--and how can we know?--it may be that Ratzinger was more sincere than LGBT activists believed when they rebuked him so often for being 'in the closet.'  According to this view, Benedict XVI has no other ambition than to impose his own virtues on others and, faithful to his own vow of chastity, he was only asking homosexuals to do as he did" (441).

Remember that it was Ratzinger who promoted the teaching that men with homosexual "inclinations" might be tolerated by the Church as long as they refrained from homosexual "acts," and thus were chaste in their love for other men.  This is what Martel calls the "Maritain Code."

In his attack on Martel's book in First Things, Paul Mankowski complains that Martel is so blinded by his bias that he cannot see anyone in the Church who sincerely believes the Catholic teaching on homosexuality as "intrinsically disordered."  "Martel's antipathies are too strong to allow him to see and recognize even trivial exceptions to his laws.  His universe admits no such being as a chaste person, hetero- or homosexual, who authentically believes the Catholic Church teaches truth; it is therefore no surprise that he failed to find such a man within the Vatican."

But this is not true, because Martel sees all those who follow the "Maritain Code"--including Benedict--as homophilic Catholics who accept the condemnation of practicing homosexuality, and who show their chaste homophilia in abstaining from homosexual acts, while channeling their homoerotic longings into a Platonic love of beauty and God.

Perhaps there is no hypocrisy when Catholics like Benedict live lives that are both homophobic and homoerotic, as long as their homoerotic longings escape the immorality of homosexual acts.   But this depends on the distinction first made by Cardinal Ratzinger between homosexual inclinations and homosexual acts.  Oddly, Ratzinger denied the moral relevance of this distinction in the "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," which was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1986.  The Letter declared: "Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder" (sec. 3).

If the Catholic Church is really teaching that the homosexual inclination itself is an "objective disorder," then it would seem that Catholics like Benedict who try to live lives of chaste homoeroticism through "loving friendships" are hypocrites in failing to live up to the sexual morality that they profess to believe.

Pope Benedict XVI Dies. A Theistic Evolutionist, a Homosexual, and a Lockean Liberal

 

                    Pope Benedict XVI with Georg Ganswein (His Homosexual Lover?)

Pope Benedict XVI (born Joseph Ratzinger) has died.   The New York Times has a good series of articles on his life and an obituary

As Cardinal Ratzinger, he was for 25 years the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Church (once the Holy Office responsible for the Inquisition), which was the office charged with defending Church orthodoxy.  When Pope John Paul II (now Saint) died in 2005, Ratzinger was chosen to become the new Pope.  He stunned the world in 2013, when he resigned the Papacy, because that had not been done in almost 700 years.  He continued to live as "emeritus Pope" living on the grounds of the Vatican, which seemed to challenge the authority of Pope Francis, particularly since Benedict was a favorite of the conservative Catholics as opposed to the liberal Catholics who favored Francis.

Benedict's position in the Church was complicated.  In condemning relativism and secularism and defending the traditional orthodoxy of the Church, he seemed to be a conservative.  But he was also a theistic evolutionist, a homosexual who condemned homosexuality, and a Lockean liberal in asking forgiveness for the Church's history of religious violence and in promoting religious toleration.

Over the years, I have written a series of posts on Benedict's moral and theological ambiguity as a manifestation of the intellectual crisis of the Catholic Church.

Fiddling While Rome Burns: Ryan Anderson's Lecture on the Catholic Crisis

Recently, Ryan T. Anderson was appointed as the first St. John Paul II Teaching Fellow at the University of Dallas, where he delivered his inaugural lecture on "Catholic Thought and the Challenges of Our Time."  Here's the video of his lecture.

He presents the history of the Catholic Church as a story of answering challenges to the truths taught by the Church.  First, the early Church answered challenges to its truths about God.  Then, the Church during the Reformation answered challenges to its truths about the Church itself.  Now, today, the Church must answer challenges to its truths about human nature--about man as created in the image of God.  He then spends most of his lecture arguing that Karol Wojtyla (who became Pope John Paul II) and Joseph Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI) have rightly defended the Catholic truths about human nature, which can resolve the current crisis of the Church.

What is most remarkable about this lecture is not what he says but what he doesn't say.  He says nothing about scandals in the Church over the clerical sexual abuse of young boys and seminarians and over the predominant homosexuality of the Catholic priesthood and hierarchy that has been responsible for covering up priestly pedophilia.  In particular, he says nothing about the fact that both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI were surrounded by homosexuals who hypocritically condemned homosexuality as sinful, while protecting tens of thousands of sexually abusive priests, which included some of the greatest pedophiles and sexual perverts of the past 100 years--such as Father Marcial Maciel, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, who abused thousands of children and seminarians.  He says nothing about the evidence that in the United States somewhere between 6% and 10% of the Catholic priests are pedophilic sex abusers, and elsewhere in the world the proportion is probably much higher.

Anderson is utterly silent about the many revelations of these facts--such as Carlo Vigano's letters and Frederic Martel's book In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy.  (There is a significant silence about Martel's book at The Public Discourse, the internet journal for the Witherspoon Institute founded and edited by Anderson.)  Moreover, he has only one sentence (at the end of the lecture) about Pope Francis, while remaining silent about Francis's warning about the hypocrisy and corruption of homosexuality in the Church: "Behind rigidity there is always something hidden, in many cases a double life."

This is the true crisis of the Catholic Church that has driven many Catholics away from their Church, and which may well soon destroy the Church completely.  I suspect that Anderson cannot confront this crisis because to do so would force him to consider the possibility that the crisis arises from the Church's false teaching about the human nature of sexuality, which can only be overcome by formulating a true account of the natural law of human sexuality.

As one illustration of the confusion in the Church's teaching on sexual morality, consider what Ratzinger has taught about homosexuality.  He has affirmed the traditional teaching that homosexuality is utterly abhorrent because it is "against nature" in that same-sex pleasure has no procreative end.  But then in his Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons (1986), Cardinal Ratzinger distinguished between the homosexual "condition" or "tendency" and homosexual "acts," and then claimed that only homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered."  And yet he also said that "the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder" (sec. 3).  A few years later, however, in the New Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), the Church embraced Ratzinger's distinction between homosexual "tendencies" and homosexual "acts," and affirmed that only "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered."  The Catechism even declared: "Homosexual persons are called to chastity.  By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection" (par. 2359).

The "Christian perfection" of homosexuality?  Does this imply that priests and clerics and even popes can be homosexual in their inclinations as long as they don't actually practice homosexuality--or as long as they are homophilic without being fully homosexual?  Or is it self-contradictory to accept homophilic inclinations as natural but not homosexual actions?

There is some evidence that the recent popes--Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis--have tried to live a life of homophilic chastity with their homophilic inclinations sublimated into "loving friendships" (such as Benedict's homoerotic love for Georg Ganswein), and in doing this they perhaps followed the example of Paul who struggled with "a thorn in the flesh."  But how is this consistent with Benedict's teaching that "the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder"?

Does the pervasive practice of homosexuality among priests and clerics show the failure of Benedict's intellectual project for separating homophilic inclinations from homosexual acts?  Is it unnatural to demand that homosexuals deny their sexual nature?

And does this confusion about homosexuality show a more general confusion in the Church's teaching about human sexuality that comes from a failure to recognize the natural goodness of sexual pleasure as serving the good of conjugal bonding even when it does not serve the good of procreation?

To answer these questions, Anderson--and other traditionalist Catholics--would have to recognize and speak about the true crisis of the Catholic Church as arising from its false teaching about human sexuality.

I will continue with this line of thought in my next post.

I have written previously about Ryan Anderson here and here.

How Will We Know Whether the Holy Spirit Has Chosen the Pope?

          The Pope Holds the Keys of Heaven Given to Peter by Jesus (Matthew 16:19)

This morning in Rome 133 cardinals celebrated Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, where they prayed for the guidance of the Holy Spirit in selecting the 267th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, a successor to Pope Francis.  They then entered the Sistine Chapel, and the doors were closed and locked.  They will have a series of votes until the new pope receives two-thirds of the vote.

As I have argued previously, the Holy Spirit cannot overcome religious pluralism by revealing the one true church for all believers.  This shows that the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence is pluralistic in that human beings will always disagree in what they believe to be the true religious experience of the transcendent world.  There has never been a divine revelation of the religious truth clear enough to bring religious believers to agreement.  This confirms Locke's argument that since "every church is orthodox to itself," government must practice religious toleration, so that every church is a voluntary association that cannot rightly employ force in compelling belief in its orthodoxy.

Isn't it obvious that the voting of the papal conclave will be decided not by the Holy Spirit but by Church politics?  On the one side are the liberals (or progressives) who want to continue the left-wing Catholicism of Francis.  On the other side are the conservatives (or traditionalists) who want to revive the traditionalism of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  In the middle are the centrists (or moderates), who will probably decide the election.  

This confirms Locke's claim that not just "every church is orthodox to itself," but even "every man is orthodox to himself," so that even within the Catholic Church, the conservative Catholics think themselves more orthodox than the liberal Catholics.  Religious pluralism is manifest within every church.

You can see this illustrated in a essay posted yesterday at the First Things website by Father Raymond de Souza.  He asks: "Does a conclave elect the man the Holy Spirit desires to lead the Church?"  His answer: "History teaches that sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't."  He agrees with what then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) said in 1997 when asked whether the Holy Spirit chooses the pope:

I would not say so, in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the pope.  I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us.

Thus the Spirit's role should be understood in a much more elastic sense--not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote.  Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.  There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked.

But notice that our recognition of the "many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked" is simply a matter of our human judgment.

De Souza says: "The Holy Spirit does not get a vote in the conclave.  The cardinals elect the pope, and no one else.  The more apt question then is whether this particular conclave is likely to be an instrument of the Holy Spirit, knowing of course that even Balaam's ass can speak should God so will it (Num. 22:21-35)."  He then compares the conclaves of 1978 and 2025.

In 1978, there were actually two conclaves.  The first one selected Pope John Paul I.  The second Pope John Paul II.  De Souza explains:

It is evident now that the second John Paul was God's choice, but that the cardinals could not initially see their way to electing a fifty-eight-year-old non-Italian, so they first got it not exactly wrong, but not exactly right either, electing Cardinal Albino Luciani.  Then the Holy Spirit did cast his vote, and Blessed John Paul I was dead thirty-three days later.

But how does de Souza know that the Holy Spirit cast his vote by killing John Paul I so that John Paul II could be chosen?  De Souza thinks he knows that because he is a conservative Catholic who believes that Pope John Paul II became the great advocate of conservative Catholic orthodoxy, and therefore he believes that the Holy Spirit correctly identified John Paul II as orthodox.

In the rest of his essay, de Souza says that the conclave of 2025 will not be as good an instrument of the Holy Spirit as the twin conclaves of 1978 because so many of the cardinals in 2025 are liberals appointed by the liberal Pope Francis.

Nevertheless, de Souza says he will be confident that the Holy Spirit has guided this 2025 conclave in choosing the right man if they select de Souza's favorite conservative Catholic candidate--Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

Recently, in an interview with the London Times, another conservative Catholic--German Cardinal Gerhard Muller--said that if the cardinals choose a liberal pope like Francis rather than a conservative orthodox pope, the Catholic Church is likely to split into two.  He explained that Catholics are not obligated to follow a pope who is not orthodox:  "No Catholic is obliged to obey doctrine that is wrong.  Catholicism is not about blindly obeying the Pope without respecting holy scriptures, tradition, and the doctrine of the Church."

These conservative Catholics know what kind of man the Holy Spirit wants to defend Catholic orthodoxy because "everyman is orthodox to himself."

If Cardinal Muller is right, and the selection of a liberal pope creates a schism in the Catholic Church, this will just add one more to the long list of hundreds of schisms in Christianity over the past two thousand years.

That's what I mean by the failure of the Holy Spirit to overcome the natural human propensity to religious pluralism.

In John 17, in the Garden of Gethsemane just before his arrest, Jesus prayed to God that all believers would be as one, that they would come to complete unity, "so that the world may believe that you have sent me."  It seems that Christians give witness to the truth of Revelation by showing their agreement about that Revelation.  But when the Holy Spirit fails to convey God's Revelation of the true Apostolic Successor to Christ as the head of the True Church, that creates doubt about the truth of Revelation.

The Holy Spirit Will Fail to Overcome Religious Pluralism at the Papal Conclave

Pope Francis died on April 21 at the age of 88.  The papal conclave to select the new pope must begin between 15 and 20 days after his death, which will be sometime between May 6 and May 11.  

On the first morning of the conclave, the cardinals will assemble in Saint Peter's Basilica to celebrate Mass.  In the afternoon, they will process to the Sistine Chapel while singing Veni Creator Spiritus ("Come, Creator Spirit"), which is an old Christian hymn that invokes the Holy Spirit as it descended upon the Apostles in Jerusalem at Pentecost, which is considered the beginning of the Christian Church (described in the second chapter of Acts).  Christians believe that this fulfilled Christ's promise to send the Holy Spirit to all believers, and this inspiration by the Holy Spirit would reveal God's truth to all faithful believers.

If this is true, then we would expect the Holy Spirit to reveal to the cardinals and to all Christians who is to be the true apostolic successor to Saint Peter as the Head of the True Church.  It is easy to predict, however, that this will not happen.  The Holy Spirit's message will not be revealed to all the cardinals, who will disagree as to who should be the next pope.  And even if most Catholics accept the election of the new pope, the non-Catholic Christians will not.           

As I have argued previously, the Holy Spirit cannot overcome religious pluralism by revealing the one true church for all believers.  This shows that the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence is pluralistic in that human beings will always disagree in what they believe to be the true religious experience of the transcendent world.  There has never been a divine revelation of the religious truth clear enough to bring religious believers to agreement.  This confirms Locke's argument that since "every church is orthodox to itself," government must practice religious toleration, so that every church is a voluntary association that cannot rightly employ force in compelling belief in its orthodoxy.

                                                        

 

This belief in the Holy Spirit is beautifully conveyed in the pictures above from St. Peter's Basilica.  These images are from the apse at the end of the central nave.  There is an online virtual reality tour of the apse.

In the center of the apse is the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter.  Peter is the "rock" of the Church through whom has passed the apostolic succession linking the popes to Christ.  Beneath the Chair are four huge statues (over 16 feet tall).  The two outer statues are figures of the Latin Church: St. Ambrose and St. Augustine (in the bottom picture above).  The two inner statues are of two Doctors of the Greek Church:  St. Athanasius and St. John Chrysostom.  Thus, it is suggested that these theologians from both the Latin and Greek churches have a consistent teaching that is descended from the Apostles through Peter.

Above the Chair of Peter is a brilliant dove that is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church through Peter, his papal successors, and the theologians to the truth of revelation.

Pope Gregory I (the Great), Pope from 590 to 604.  He is Writing in his Study.  The Holy Spirit as a Pentecostal Dove Whispers in His Ear.  Below, Scribes Copy His Work.  A Tenth-Century Ivory, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

In the history of the Catholic Church, there has been disagreement over the best procedure for choosing a new pope that allows for the intervention of the Holy Spirit.  In the first thousand years of the Church, the selection of the Bishop of Rome, who became the Pope, was by acclamation or the consensus of the clergy and laity in Rome.  (For this history, see Frederic J. Baumgartner, Behind Locked Doors: A History of Papal Elections [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003].)

As Pope Pius XII indicated in his bull Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis (December 8, 1945), this mode of acclamation was considered the best sign of quasi afflati Spiritu Sancton ("as if by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit") (par. 66).  Surely, a clear revelation by inspiration of the Holy Spirit would be manifest in the unanimity of the clergy and laity in Rome.

But then, in 1059, the Church decided that the College of Cardinals should be the electors of the Pope.  Some factions in the Church wanted a unanimous decision from the cardinals, but since this was usually impossible, the Church had to decide how to resolve disagreements.  One method was "compromise," where the College of Cardinals would agree to appoint a small group of cardinals with the right to make the decision for the entire College.

A third method was to allow the cardinals to decide by either a simple majority of votes or by a super majority of two-thirds.

The current procedure that will govern the coming papal conclave was set down by Pope John Paul II in his bull Universi Dominici Gregis (February 22, 1996), which was slightly revised by Pope Benedict XVI.  John Paul said that the cardinals should "accept the interior movements of the Holy Spirit."  But he rejected the method of election by acclamation, which he called quasi ex inspiratione ("as if by inspiration"), because "it is no longer an apt means of interpreting the thought of an electoral college so great in number and so diverse in origin."  Thus, he rejected as unrealistic the possibility that the "interior movements of the Holy Spirit" could inspire unanimity in the cardinals' decision.

He also rejected the method of "compromise"--appointing a select group of cardinals to decide--because he wanted all the electors to express their choice personally.

This left the third procedure--election by secret ballot with the decision made by majority vote.  John Paul favored a simple majority.  But Benedict changed this to a two-thirds supermajority.

John Paul says that the cardinals should pray for "the assistance of Almighty God and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit," so that they will be "likeminded in their task."  But clearly he did not expect that the "likemindedness" induced by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit could secure unanimity.  

Isn't it obvious that the voting of the papal conclave in May will be decided not by the Holy Spirit but by Church politics?  On the one side are the liberals (or progressives) who want to continue the left-wing Catholicism of Francis.  On the other side are the conservatives (or traditionalists) who want to revive the traditionalism of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  In the middle are the centrists (or moderates), who will probably decide the election.  Donald Trump will surely be endorsing Cardinal Raymond Burke, a conservative who has supported Trump.

One might have assumed that the most traditionalist Catholics would want to claim that the conclave will be decided by the "interior movements of the Holy Spirit" in the minds of the cardinals.  But even the traditionalist Catholics are analyzing the upcoming conclave as if it were a purely political expression of Machiavellian church politics.

For example, the "Catholic Family News" is one of the staunchest traditionalist publications, and yet in the April 2025 there is an article by Serre Verweij on "Decisive Cardinals During the Upcoming Conclave," which explains the various factions at work here--conservatives, moderates, and liberals--and argues that if the conservatives can persuade most of the moderates to vote for an "orthodox candidate," then the next Pope will almost certainly be conservative.  Nothing is said about the Holy Spirit's influence in the conclave.

This confirms Locke's claim that not just "every church is orthodox to itself," but even "every man is orthodox to himself," so that even within the Catholic Church, the conservative Catholics think themselves more orthodox than the liberal Catholics.  Religious pluralism is manifest within every church.

Pinker and the Pope Condemn Religious Violence

Steven Pinker and Pope Benedict XVI seem to agree with one another in condemning religious violence.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Pinker explains the Darwinian evolutionary process by which violence has declined in human history.  For Pinker, one manifestation of this evolutionary shift is that while "the Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery," most biblical believers today--Jews and Christians--reject the sanctified cruelty of the Bible.  "Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible.  They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles" (10-12).

Pinker explains this as showing the "benevolent hypocrisy" of biblical believers:

Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people.  Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado.  The question is why they don't, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good.  The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology.  When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years.  But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful. (17)

A few days ago, the Pope acknowledged that violence has often been religiously motivated, while insisting that religious people should find this disturbing, and Christians should feel shame for the history of Christian violence.

As a Christian, I want to say at this point: yes, it is true, in the course of history, force has also been used in the name of the Christian faith.  We acknowledge it with great shame.  But it is utterly clear that this was an abuse of the Christian faith, one that evidently contradicts its true nature.  The God in whom we Christians believe is the Creator and Father of all, and from Him all people are brothers and sisters and form one single family.  For us the Cross of Christ is the sign of the God Who put 'suffering-with' (compassion) and 'loving-with' in place of force. . . . It is the task of all who bear responsibility for the Christian faith to purify the religion of Christians again and again from its very heart, so that it truly serves as an instrument of God's peace in the world, despite the fallibility of humans.

In other statements, the Pope has made clear that what he is condemning, in particular, are the faults of the Catholic Church in sanctioning the propagation of the faith through violence--as in the Inquisition and the Crusades.

But while Pinker sees this as the "benevolent hypocrisy" of biblical believers who reject the religious violence of the Bible, the Pope sees this as recognizing that religious violence is "an abuse of the Christian faith."

In asking forgiveness for the faults of the Church in promoting religious violence, Pope Benedict XVI continues a position that began with his predecessor--John Paul II.  This is remarkable, because as far as I know, this is the first time in the history of the Church that Popes have asked forgiveness for the sinfulness of the Church in supporting unjustified violence.

As Cardinal Ratzinger, and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Pope has previously endorsed a remarkable statement of the International Theological Commission (ITC) in 1999 on "The Church and the Faults of the Past." 

Following the lead of Pope John Paul II, this statement explores the reasoning for the Church's confession of faults and asking forgiveness.  This is recognized as a radical move: "in the entire history of the Church, there are no precedents for requests for forgiveness by the Magisterium for past wrongs" (1.1).

This is an amazing confirmation of Pinker's argument about the power of the evolutionary historical forces in pushing for a decline in violence, including religious violence.

As the ITC statement makes clear, there are two interrelated problems.  How can the Church confess the faults of the past without denying the divine authority of the Church?  And how can the Church condemn the religious violence of the Bible without denying the divine authority of the Bible?

To the first question, the answer is that the Church is "at the same time holy and ever in need of purification" (sec. 3).  This is supported by Thomas Aquinas's claim that the Church cannot be sinless in its earthly pilgrimage, because the fullness of its holiness will be achieved only in Heaven (3.3, quoting ST, III, q. 8, a. 3, ad 2).

To the second question--about the authority of the Bible--the answer is ambiguous.  The ITC statement agrees with Pinker's comment about the Bible--particularly, the Old Testament--being "staggering in its savagery."  It is troublesome, then, that the Old Testament never shows the people of Israel asking forgiveness for their unjustified violence against their enemies.  Although we see people confessing their sins before God, we don't see them confessing their sins before the people they have injured.  Why not?

We can propose various hypotheses in response to this question.  First, there is the prevalent theocentrism of the Bible, which gives precedence to the acknowledgement, whether individual or national, of the faults committed against God.  What is more, acts of violence perpetrated by Israel against other peoples, which would seem to require a request for forgiveness from those peoples or from their descendants, are understood to be the execution of divine directives, as for example Gn 2-11and Dt 7:2 (the extermination of the Canaanites), or 1 Sm 15 and Dt 25:19 (the destruction of the Amalekites).  In such cases, the involvement of a divine command would seem to exclude any possible request for forgiveness.  The experiences of maltreatment suffered by Israel at the hands of other peoples and the animosity thus aroused could also have militated against the idea of asking pardon of these people for the evil done to them. (2.1)

If one reads this passage carefully, one can see a quiet admission that we must recognize that the Bible is mistaken when it reports God as commanding unjust violence.  The people of Israel saw no need to be forgiven for acts of violence that they "understood to be the execution of divine directives," and thus "the involvement of a divine command would seem to exclude any possible request for forgiveness."  Is this a hint that they were mistaken?  That what the Bible reports as "divine directives" for unjust violence is wrong?

Turning to the New Testament, the ITC statement emphasizes that the "frailties of Jesus' disciples" are acknowledged, especially in the gospel of Mark, and this includes Peter, whom the Church regards as the first Bishop of Rome and the source of the apostolic succession for the divine authority of the popes (2.2).

And yet, the New Testament never shows the first Christians confessing the faults of the Old Testament past.  Consequently, John Paul II's calls for admitting the guilt of the Church in religious violence "do not find an exact parallel in the Bible" (2.4).

So how do we explain this move by John Paul II, which has been continued by Benedict XVI?  One answer suggested by the ITC statement is that there has been a "paradigm change":

While before the Enlightenment there existed a sort of osmosis between Church and State, between faith and culture, morality and law, from the eighteenth century onward this relationship was modified significantly.  The result was a transition from a sacral society to a pluralist society, or, as occurred in a few cases, to a secular society.  The models of thought and action, the so-called "paradigms" of actions and evaluation, change.  Such a transition has a direct impact on moral judgments, although this influence does not justify in any way a relativistic idea of moral principles or of the nature of morality itself. (5.1)

Pinker stresses the importance of Enlightenment thought in supporting the "humanitarian revolution" (129-188) as one of the historical trends favoring a decline in violence.  This was part of a larger shift in thought towards classical liberalism, in which religious belief became a matter of individual liberty and conscience expressed in the voluntary associations of civil society but not coercively enforced by government.  Now, it seems that the Catholic Church has embraced liberalism in accepting the move from a premodern "sacral society," in which violence could be used to enforce religion, to a "pluralist society" or "secular society," based on religious toleration and nonviolence.

Rather than seeing this as a break from traditional Christianity, we might see it as a return to the position of the first Christians in the New Testament.  After all, with the possible exception of the book of Revelation, the Christians of the New Testament are never presented as using coercive violence to compel religious belief.  Believers punish heretics by expelling them from their churches, but they never try to execute them.  The execution of heretics in the Inquisition had no clear basis in the New Testament.  That's why Christians like Roger Williams could argue that a policy of absolute toleration--even for atheists--was part of the New Testament teaching of Christianity, as opposed to the theocracy of the Old Testament.

The evolutionary history of strengthening the "better angels of our nature" to promote a decline in unjustified violence can be rightly understood as a fulfillment of true Christianity.

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Does the New Testament Teach Classical Liberalism?

The second half of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (Parts 3 and 4) is devoted to the interpretation of the Bible.  For many readers today, this seems odd, because giving so much attention to biblical theology seems out of place in a treatise of political philosophy.  When the Leviathan is used as a text in undergraduate political science classes, it's common for the teacher not to assign any reading from the second half of the book.  Some editions of the Leviathan reprint only the first half of the book.  But having just completed another reading of the whole of the Leviathan in my graduate seminar on Hobbes, I am reminded of how important the interpretation of the Bible has been for the history of political philosophy, and particularly for the history of liberal political philosophy.

A new book that has helped me to see this is Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture, 1300-1700 by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker (Crossroad Publishing Company, 2013).  Hahn and Wiker show how the "historical-critical method" in the scholarly study of the Bible arose in the 19th century as the culmination of a political interpretation of the Bible that began with Marsilius of Padua and continued with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke.  The purpose of that political interpretation of the Bible was to secularize politics and privatize religious belief so that the aim of politics would be securing the peace and security of the body rather than the salvation of the soul.  (Hahn has summarized the argument of his book in a YouTube video lecture.)

Hahn and Wiker repeatedly quote a remark by Jon Levenson that "historical criticism is the form of biblical studies that corresponds to the classical liberal political ideal," and they say that Levenson "has hit the bull's-eye" (7-9, 11, 296, 364, 388).  Their book is an elaborate argument to demonstrate this claim--that the historical-critical method for studying the Bible was developed to advance classical liberal politics.  That's their explicit argument.  Their implicit argument is that this liberal bias requires a distorted interpretation of the Bible.

I am persuaded by their explicit argument but not by their implicit argument.  I agree with them that some of the early modern political philosophers initiated a tradition of Biblical interpretation that would support classical liberalism by radically separating Church and State, doing this in such a way as to promote the liberal principles of political secularism, religious liberty, and the privatization of religious life.  I don't agree, however, with their implied claim that this liberal interpretation of the Bible is clearly contrary to the true teaching of the Bible (see, for example, 11, 364, 445, 484).  I would argue that the secularization of politics through the liberal principles of religious toleration and privatization of religious belief is largely a product of New Testament Christianity.  In other words, the liberal reading of the Bible is a plausible reading.  Indeed, it's so plausible that most Christians today--including the Catholic Church--have embraced this liberal interpretation of the Bible.  I suspect that even Hahn and Wiker ultimately accept Biblical liberalism.

It might seem odd, however, to put Hobbes in the tradition of Biblical liberalism.  After all, much of what Hobbes says about church-state relations seems illiberal in that he argues for the absolute power of the political sovereign over an established church, which includes the right of the sovereign to interpret the Bible, so that the sovereign acts as the "supreme pastor," who "ought indeed to direct his civil commands to the salvation of souls" (ch. 33, 254-55 [268-69]; ch. 36, 283-85 [298-300]; ch. 39, 306 [321-22]; ch. 43, 355-56 [372-73], 379 [396]).

And yet one should notice that Hobbes's illiberal argument for the political regulation of an established church is based on his interpretation of the Hebrew theocratic state in the Old Testament, and as he moves into the New Testament, he begins to move towards a separation of church and state.  Critical for Hobbes's political interpretation of the New Testament is the declaration of Jesus that "my kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36) and that Christ's kingdom will not begin until his second coming.  During the first three centuries of Christianity, the Christian churches were voluntary organizations that enforced doctrinal orthodoxy through the threat of excommunication from the church but without any coercive force or violent persecution of heretics or infidels.  Hobbes concludes that among the early Christians, "there was then no government by coercion, but only by doctrine, and persuading" (ch. 42, 348 [365]).  The political enforcement of church authority did not arise until the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312 AD (ch. 42, 322 [338], 342-44 [359-61]).

By the time he reaches the end of Leviathan, Hobbes is ready to endorse the position of the Independents in Parliament, who wanted no politically enforced church at all and free toleration of religious diversity.  "And so we are reduced to the Independency of the primitive Christians, to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best," and if this promotes religious peace, it is "perhaps the best" (ch. 47, 456 [479-80]).

Thus does Hobbes move towards complete religious toleration and the privatization of religious belief as rooted in the New Testament as the best way to secure peace.  In effect, Hobbes adopts the interpretation of the Bible advanced by Roger Williams, who argued that while the Old Testament teaches theocratic enforcement of religious belief, the New Testament teaches religious toleration.  As I have argued in a previous post, Williams was right in interpreting the New Testament as supporting a classical liberal conception of religious toleration and liberty.

We should realize, however, that Hobbes was right in arguing that no matter how much religious liberty might be allowed, even in a state that practices toleration, the sovereign must have the ultimate power to rule against religious doctrines that promote violence, and in that way the sovereign is still the "supreme pastor." 

Consider, for example, what happened after the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001.  When it was discovered that the terrorists were members of al-Qaida, who believed they were obeying the teaching of the Koran in commanding holy war against infidels, this provoked a political debate over whether Islam was a threat to the peace of the world, which would make it impossible to tolerate Islam in a liberal regime that must suppress religious violence. 

In his speech to a Joint Session of Congress, nine days after the terrorist attack, George Bush had to offer his own authoritative interpretation of the Koran.  He said that the terrorists "practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam."  He declared that the teachings of Islam "are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah." 

Bush is a Christian who interprets the New Testament as teaching that religious belief is a voluntary activity of private individuals that can be properly protected from coercive persecution.  But any religious belief that promotes unjustified violence cannot be tolerated by any government that aims to secure peace and liberty.  Consequently, Bush believes that government can rightly interpret religious doctrines to protect the peace while generally tolerating religious beliefs and practices that are non-violent.

This is the Christian understanding of liberal toleration that emerged in the English Civil War and in the writings of Roger Williams.  It was later elaborated by Spinoza, Locke, and others.

Do Hahn and Wiker agree with this interpretation of the Bible as supporting liberal toleration?  They are strangely evasive about this.  They generally present the liberal interpretation of the Bible as driven by a liberal bias that is not really true to the Biblical text.  But then they sometimes speak of liberal toleration as something that "may appear quite ordinary to us," as if they endorse it (446).  Moreover, they often concede that the liberal interpretation of the Bible was an understandable reaction against the brutal violence and moral corruption of the Catholic Church in its exercise of authority over politics (15, 390-91).  And yet they never explicitly concede that the liberal reading of the Bible is plausible.

Hahn and Wiker claim to be following the recommendation of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, who called for "a criticism of criticism" in Biblical interpretation (8).  But they are oddly silent about the statements of Pope Benedict XVI that support the liberal interpretation of the Bible, particularly the liberal argument that the violent persecution and brutality of the Old Testament must be seen as morally inferior to the peaceful toleration and love of the New Testament.

In his Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini (November 11, 2010), Benedict XVI indicated that the Old Testament had "dark passages" containing "violence and immorality" (sec. 42).  We must remember, he advised, that "biblical revelation is deeply rooted in history."  He explained: "Revelation is suited to the cultural and moral level of distant times and thus describes facts and customs, such as cheating and trickery, and acts of violence and massacre, without explicitly denouncing the immorality of such things."  Notice the implication here that "the cultural and moral level" of the Old Testament was lower than that of the New Testament, because the God of the Old Testament did not explicitly denounce the immorality of the unjust violence perpetrated by the Hebrew people.

Moreover, Hahn and Wiker are silent about the actions of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI in asking forgiveness for the history of religious violence condoned by the Catholic Church.

They are also silent about how the Catholic Church endorsed liberal toleration as rooted in the New Testament in the "Declaration of Religious Liberty" (1965) at Vatican II.

Would Hahn and Wiker agree with these moves of the Catholic Church towards liberal toleration?  Hahn seems to agree with this in his book Reasons to Believe: How to Understand, Explain, and Defend the Catholic Faith (Doubleday, 2007).  Throughout this book, he uses persuasion to try to convert his readers to Catholicism, but he never suggests that violent persecution or coercion would ever be justified by the Catholic Church.  He writes: "We cannot impose orthodox conclusions on our unbelieving friends.  To borrow words from Benjamin Franklin: The mind changed against the will is of the same opinion still.  God endowed every human being with freedom, and we are always free to choose unbelief" (39).  So here he seems to accept Franklin's argument for toleration and conversion only through peaceful persuasion.

And yet I can't be completely sure about this, however, because of what Hahn says about papal infallibility.  He says that although the popes have made some mistakes, they are infallible in matters of Christian faith and morals.  "God has never permitted even the scoundrels to teach error in matters of faith and morals" (130).

This is disturbing.  Does he really mean to say that all the popes who authorized the persecution of heretics--for example,  Innocent IV in his Bull Ad Extirpanda--were infallible?  If so, then were John Paul II and Benedict XVI fallible in asking forgiveness for such religious violence?  Does Hahn agree with Thomas Aquinas that the Church can even authorize the execution of heretics (ST, II-II, q. 11, a. 3)?

I have elaborated some of these points in previous posts here, here, here, here, and here.

Darwinism and the Catholic Church

In 1633, the Catholic Inquisition condemned Galileo as a heretic for endorsing the Copernican heliocentric theory of the Earth as moving around the Sun, because this seemed to deny those Biblical passages that spoke of the fixity of the Earth. Galileo was sentenced to house arrest, and his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was put on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books.

By contrast, Darwin's theory of evolution has never been officially condemned by the Vatican, and his books were never been put on the Index, although a book by his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was put on the Index.

The Catholic Church's condemnation of Galileo has often been cited by those who argue that there must be perpetual warfare between Biblical religion and modern science. But the Church's handling of the debate over Darwinian evolution shows that the Church's hierarchy learned a lesson from the Galileo affair--that it was a big mistake to interpret the Bible as contradicting modern science.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Pope Pius XII praised Galileo as an intellectual hero and declared in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis that there was no necessary conflict between Biblical faith and the theory of evolution. Pope John Paul II apologized for the condemnation of Galileo, and in 1996 he declared that the Church did not oppose Darwin's theory. A few years ago, I wrote a short essay on John Paul's statement.

We now have more information about the history of the Vatican's deliberations about evolution. In 1998, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) authorized the opening of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican. This congregation was originally called the Holy Roman Inquisition, which goes back to the beginnings of the Inquisition in 1231. This Archive includes the records of the Vatican's handling of the evolution debate at the end of the nineteenth century.

This archival material has become the basis for a book--Mariano Artigas, Thomas Glick, and Rafael Martinez, Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877-1902 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). The book studies the cases of six Catholic authors who argued for the compatibility of evolution and Christianity. Of these, the most fascinating case, I think, is that of John Zahm, an American priest at the University of Notre Dame who provoked controversy with his book Evolution and Dogma (1896), which defended theistic evolutionism. The case of Zahm was complicated by the fact that he was identified as a proponent of "Americanism"--a movement among American Catholics to celebrate the moral and political principles of American life (such as the separation of Church and State) as a guide for Catholics.

Zahm defends the theory of evolution as superior to the theory of special creation. God did not have to miraculously create each form of life, because He could employ the "secondary causes" of evolution to carry out His creative purposes. Against the view of many Catholic theologians that God had to miraculously create the body of the first man, Zahm suggests that the human body could have originally evolved naturally from primate ancestors. But then the human soul had to be created immediately by God. To defend his position, Zahm had to argue that the Bible should not be read literally as a text of science, and that the distinction between God as Primal cause and nature's secondary causes allowed natural evolution as a creative process.

The newly available archival material shows that while Zahm's book was condemned by Church authorities, this condemnation was not published or officially sanctioned by the Holy See, and his book was not listed in the Index.

What one sees in this and the other cases is that the Vatican was cautious in not wanting to publicly condemn evolution for fear of falling into something like the Galileo affair.

Pope John Paul II's statement in 1996 shows how far the Church has moved towards accepting Darwinian evolution. In effect, as I argue in my essay on the Pope's message, he adopted St. George Jackson Mivart's position that while the human body and all other forms of life might be products of Darwinian mechanisms, the human soul must have been created directly by a miraculous intervention of God into nature.

As I indicate in my essay, the next good step for the Vatican would be to recognize that even the human soul could have arisen by a natural process of emergent evolution in which differences in degree become differences in kind after passing over a critical threshold in the size and complexity of the primate brain.

As indicated in a recent article in Scientific American, comparisons of the genomes of humans and chimpanzees suggests that the uniqueness of human beings could have arisen from some uniquely human DNA sequences that regulate the development of the human cerebral cortex and neural mechanisms that control the human capacity for speech.

If our being created in God's image is manifested in our uniquely human capacities for reason and speech, the emergent evolution of the brain to support those capacities could explain the natural basis for that creative activity.

The Pope on Theistic Evolution

Many times on this blog, I have argued that there is no necessary conflict between Darwinian evolution and biblical religion, because Darwinian science leaves open the question of First Cause, which allows for theistic evolution. Traditionally, the Catholic Church has taken this position. Pope John Paul II affirmed this in 1996.

In recent years, there has been some speculation that the new Pope might take a different position--perhaps even endorsing "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. But now there is a story in the NEW YORK POST reporting that Pope Benedict XVI has reaffirmed theistic evolution, so that the Church can accept Darwinian science as compatible with Biblical revelation.

The Hypocritical Homosexuality of the Catholic Church: A Defense of Frederic Martel's Book

Almost a thousand years ago--in 1049--Saint Peter Damian published his book The Book of Gomorrah, condemning the practice of "sodomy" (sodomia)--a word that he invented--by the priests, monks, and bishops of the Catholic Church.  Pope Leo IX endorsed the book and proposed to purge the Church of this "crime against nature."  But if the Pope tried to do this, he failed.

Now, with the simultaneous publication in eight languages of Frederic Martel's In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, we have a new book arguing that the majority of the Church's prelates are secretly homosexual, and that this explains the Church's rigid teaching about sexual morality, its condemnation of homosexuality, and its coverups of priestly sexual abuse.  Martel concludes: "Those who preach abstinence before marriage, refuse divorce, denounce homosexuality, and make believers feel guilty for their behavior ae in fact the biggest hypocrites of them all.  They practice in secret what they denounce in public."

The sexual abuse scandals have created a crisis for the Church, but now this book creates an even deeper crisis--comparable to the Protestant Reformation--that could explode the institutional structure of the largest Christian organization in the world.

The Catholic criticism of Martel's book has come from both sides in the current split between the two living popes--the progressive left on the side of Pope Francis and the traditionalist right on the side of Pope Benedict XVI.  The Catholic left says that Martel's book provides a weapon for the Catholic right in arguing that the Vatican has been corrupted by a homosexual lobby that supports Francis's pro-gay agenda.  The Catholic right says that Martel's book is a defamatory attack on those priests and prelates who oppose the homosexual lobby because he falsely charges them with being practicing homosexuals themselves and thus hypocritical.

A good internet symposium on Martel's book includes Martel's response to his critics.  It also includes a good example of the Catholic left-wing critique from Father James Martin, SJ, the editor-at-large of the Jesuit magazine America.  An example of the Catholic right-wing critique has been written by Father Paul Mankowski, SJ, at First Things.

Since I find Martel's book largely persuasive, I will defend it against five kinds of criticisms.  I will also suggest that the book points to the need for a revised Thomistic natural law of sexuality that conforms to the truth about evolved sexual desires of human nature.

Before doing that, I will start by summarizing Martel's conclusions as conveyed in what he identifies as the 14 Rules of The Closet.


14 RULES

1.  For a long time, the priesthood was the ideal escape-route for young homosexuals.  Homosexuality is one of the keys to their vocation (8).

2.  Homosexuality spreads the closer one gets to the holy of holies; there are more and more homosexuals as one rises through the Catholic hierarchy.  In the College of Cardinals and at the Vatican, the preferential selection process is said to be perfected; homosexuality becomes the rule, heterosexuality the exception (10).

3.  The more vehemently opposed a cleric is to gays, the stronger his homophobic obsession, the more likely it is that he is insincere, and that his vehemence conceals something (34).

4.  The more pro-gay a cleric is, the less likely he is to be gay; the more homophobic a cleric is, the more likely he is to be homosexual (41).

5.  Rumors, gossip, settling of scores, revenge and sexual harassment are rife in the holy see.  The gay question is one of the mainsprings of these plots (60).

6.  Behind the majority of cases of sexual abuse there are priests and bishops who have protected the aggressors because of their own homosexuality and out of fear that it might be revealed in the event of a scandal.  The culture of secrecy that was needed to maintain silence about the high prevalence of homosexuality in the Church has allowed sexual abuse to be hidden and predators to act (92).

7.  The most gay-friendly cardinals, bishops, and priests, the ones who talk little about the homosexual question, are generally heterosexual (123).

8.  In prostitution in Rome between priests and Arab escorts, two sexual poverties come together: the profound sexual frustration of Catholic priests is echoed in the constraints of Islam, which make heterosexual acts outside of marriage difficult for a young Muslim (129).

9.  The homophiles of the Vatican generally move from chastity towards homosexuality; homosexuals never go into reverse gear and become homophilic (169).

10.  Homosexual priests and theologians are much more inclined to impose priestly celibacy than their heterosexual co-religionists.  They are very concerned to have this vow of chastity respected, even though it is intrinsically  against nature\ (176-77).

11.  Most nuncios are homosexual, but their diplomacy is essentially homophobic.  They are denouncing what they are themselves.  As for cardinals, bishops, and priests, the more they travel, the more suspect they are (311).

12.  Rumors peddled about the homosexuality of a cardinal or a prelate are often leaked by homosexuals, themselves closeted, attacking their liberal opponents.  They are essential weapons used in the Vatican against gays by gays (388).

13.  Do not ask who the companions of cardinals and bishops are; ask their secretaries, their assistants or their proteges, and you will be able to tell the truth by their reaction (537).

14.  We are often mistaken about the loves of priests, and about the number of people with whom they have liaisons: when we wrongly interpret friendships as liaisons, which is an error by addition; but also when we fail to imagine friendships as liaisons, which is another kind of error, this time by subtraction (538).

Of these rules, the most important one for the argument of this book is #4--the more homophobic a cardinal or a priest is in public, the more likely he is homosexual in private, the worst form of hypocrisy.

The next most important rule is #6--the culture of secrecy necessary to maintain silence about homosexuality in the Church explains why priests and bishops have hidden priestly sexual abuse of boys and seminarians, for fear that any public exposure of this would reveal the prevalence of homosexuality.

One should note that in his investigation of homosexuality in the Catholic Church, Martel did not attempt to study lesbianism, because he believes one would probably have to be a woman to carry out that investigation, although he does speculate "that female religious life in the closet is as dominated by the prism of lesbianism as the life of the male clergy is by the gay question" (535).

To be continued . . .

The Homosexuality of the Catholic Church (2): Innuendo Rather Than Proof?

Most of the criticisms of Martel's book have come under five categories: innuendo rather than proof, a "gay" style of writing that is offensive, the failure to recognize the faithful Catholics among the priests and prelates, blaming homosexuals for the sexual abuse scandals, and ignorance of the theological implications of sexual morality.  Let's start with the first one: Does Martel present us enough reliable evidence to prove his claims?

The wide range of Martel's research is impressive.  His investigation was carried out over four years, in Italy and in over thirty other countries.  Between 2015 and 2018, he lived in Rome an average of a week a month.  During some of this time in Rome, he was lodged within the Vatican and in other residences in the holy see.  He also went to about fifty Italian cities.  The thirty other countries included Argentina, Chile, Peru, Cuba, Mexico, Spain, Poland, Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States.  Most of his interviews were recorded, with the agreement of those being interviewed, so that he now has over four hundred hours of recordings.  He worked with over 80 collaborators around the world, who worked as translators and researchers.

He conducted over 1,500 face-to-face interviews, which included 41 cardinals, 52 bishops and monsignori, 45 apostolic nuncios, secretaries of nunciatures or foreign ambassadors, 11 Swiss Guards, and over 200 Catholic priests and seminarians.  There were 130 interviews with the 41 cardinals.  Of these 41, 34 are named, while 7 remain anonymous because they asked to speak "off the record."  Martel says that he did not wish to "out" any living priests, and therefore he has covered many people in anonymity.  All of his 28 sources within the Roman Curia, who were openly gay with him, remain anonymous.

Martel is a well-known French gay journalist, and his being gay allowed him to gain access to the hidden gay community in the Vatican and elsewhere.  Although he was baptized in the Catholic Church as a child, he now identifies himself as a "Catholic atheist," as someone who values the Catholic cultural traditions of France, but without any Catholic faith.

Martel's book also relies on many written sources: there are over a thousand references to books, articles, and other documents (including police reports), with citations in a document of 300 pages available online (www.sodoma.fr).

The breadth of Martel's research and the number of sources he can cite to support his claims are stunning to many of his readers.  Nevertheless, many of his critics--like James Martin and Paul Mankowski--say that he has no proof for anything, and they use words like "innuendo," "gossip," "guessing," "imagining," and "bitchiness."  One reason for this, is that Martel often has to shroud his sources in anonymity, and so, his critics complain, his readers are forced to trust Martel to be a reliable reporter.

Mankowski complains about Martel's "shoddy use of sources":

"When the source is named, the offending cleric he informs against is not ('Sometimes I find monsignori, archbishops and cardinals making passes at me'); conversely, when the offending cleric is named, the source who informed on him is not ('I was told by someone close to him . . .').

"One jaw of the vise is always missing; they never come together in a grip.  Martel's revelations, even when most useful in the course of reform, all slip away into innuendo: '[Archbishop Paul] Marcinkus was homosexual: he had a weakness for Swiss Guards.  He often lent them his car, a metallic grey Peugeot 504 with a lovely leather interior.  At one point I remember that he was going out with a Swiss Guard, and it lasted for some time.'  The source?  'A layman close to the archbishop who worked in the Vatican at the time.'"

Mankowski is mistaken, however, in saying that "one jaw of the vise is always missing," because there are many cases in Martel's book where he names both the accuser and the accused.  For example, one of Martel's first contacts within the Vatican was Francesco Lepore, who had been Pope Benedict's Latin translator.  Lepore identified himself to Martel as a gay priest.  A few months after first meeting Martel in 2015, Lepore sent a letter to Pope Francis telling him that he was leaving the priesthood and coming out publicly as gay.  Lepore provided extensive testimony about the gay underworld in the Vatican, and he told Martel that around 80 per cent of the Vatican was homosexual (18-19).  Some of the people who protected Lepore as a practicing homosexual in the Vatican are named.  When some of Lepore's superiors wanted to remove him from the Vatican, Mgr Stanislaw Dziwisz, the personal secretary to Pope John Paul II, intervened and had him appointed private secretary to Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, who was aware of Lepore's homosexuality.  Later, the pain of living a double life became so unbearable for Lepore that he intentionally used his Vatican computer to access various online gay sites and left his session open so that it could be spotted.  He was asked to leave.  Tauran rebuked him--not for being gay but for being so stupid as to be caught (20-21).

Martel reports:

"Over the course of about a dozen interviews, Francesco Lepore told me about the mad gaiety of the Vatican.  His testimony is incontestable.  He has had several lovers among archbishops and prelates; he has been propositioned by a number of cardinals, whom we discuss: an endless list.  I have scrupulously checked all of those stories, making contact myself with those cardinals, archbishops, monsignori, nuncios, assistants, ordinary priests or confessors at St. Peter's, all basically homosexual" (19).

But still the "endless list" here remains anonymous to the reader, which is why Mankowski complains that we are forced to trust Martel without being able to see the proof for ourselves. In his response to his critics, Martel explains:

". . . To demand concrete proof of the homosexuality of the majority of cardinals is to consign oneself to failure from the outset, because even when you have such proof (which I do for the majority of them), the law prohibits the disclosure of their private lives.  As I specify at the end of the book, by indicating their names, I had fourteen lawyers working with me on In the Closet of the Vatican.  It is not difficult to infer that some tangible evidence could not be published.  In France, Italy, the U.S., and the United Kingdom, among other countries, the law is such that revealing the homosexuality of a person, even if you have proof, may be considered an invasion of privacy.  But it is not simply a legal problem--it is also a moral one.  Journalistic integrity--at least mine--forbids 'outing' people.  I made the choice not to 'out' living cardinals and priests; I stand by this choice, and I have stuck to it . . . . In the end, I would rather be accused of 'insinuations' than to commit 'outings.'"

". . . Requiring 'proof' either naively ignores this situation, or it functions to silence the researcher and the journalist.  It deprives us of a key to general understanding of the system.  One may very well have reliable information, written documents, and firsthand testimony--as I do--but it is impossible to produce them legally.  The demand for the publication of evidence encourages the continuation of the lie and possibly also the cover-up of sexual abuses. . . . Rejecting my book on the ground of 'innuendo,' 'insinuations,' and 'gossip' thus comes down to maintaining a 'state lie' and, in a way, to allowing the crisis of sexual abuse to continue."

Much of what Martel presents is a matter of public record where both the accusers and the accused are named.  That is so, for example, with the case of the Marcial Maciel scandal.  The founder and leader of the Legion of Christ, Maciel was one of the most influential clerics in the Catholic Church.  Beginning in the 1940s, he was accused of sexual abuse.  In 1956, he was suspended by the Vatican. But then he was pardoned and found innocent by Pope Paul VI and John Paul II, although the Vatican had a thick file of complaints against him.  Eventually, hundreds of victims, including children and seminarians, were identified.  It was also found that he had six children by two women, and he had sexually abused his own sons.  Although John Paul II was repeatedly informed of Maciel's crimes, the Pope refused to have his friend Maciel punished.  In 2005, Benedict XVI stripped Maciel of his duties, but there was no other punishment: he was not arrested or excommunicated.  He died in 2008.  And thus one of the greatest sexual predators of the past 50 years lived out his life while being protected by the Church.

Martel has also been challenged by some readers who say that he has no proof or evidence to support his account of Jacques Maritain as a latent homosexual.  This is an important point for the general argument of Martel's book, because of the prominence he gives to "the Maritain Code" in the history of homosexuality in the Catholic Church.  Maritain was a Thomistic philosopher and theologian who had great influence over the Catholic Church, particularly at Vatican II and during the papacy of Paul VI, who was a friend of Maritain's.  Maritain condemned homosexuality as a mortal sin, and he tried to persuade his homosexual friends--Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau, Julien Green, and Maurice Sachs--to suppress their homosexual inclinations.  Martel argues that he was thus recommending his own choice as a homophilic man sexually attracted to men who chose to suppress and sublimate his homophilic desires so that he never engaged in homosexual acts, and so that he could channel his erotic longings towards the love of God.  He was a homophile but not a homosexual.

Martel suggests that a majority of the post-war cardinals and bishops chose this same psychic strategy--the sublimation of their homophilic sexuality into faith and chastity.  This was the "Maritain Code."  This prevailed until the end of Paul VI's papacy.  But then with Pope John Paul II's papacy, most of the cardinals and bishops shifted to practicing their homosexuality in secret, while condemning it in public.  This history is conveyed in the 9th Rule: "The homophiles of the Vatican generally move from chastity towards homosexuality; homosexuals never go into reverse gear and become homophile" (169).

Martel has three kinds of evidence that Maritain was a sublimated or repressed homophile.  The first is the fact that he surrounded himself with homosexual friends.  The second is that, as Jean-Luc Barre reported in his biography of Maritain and his wife, when they married, they made a secret pact to remain chaste, so that they could devout all of their eroticism to the love of God.  They never had children, and it's possible that they never consummated their marriage.

The third line of evidence for Maritain being a homophile is his passionate love in his youth for Ernest Psichari, who died in World War I in 1914.  Through Jean-Luc Barre, Martel has had access to the unpublished correspondence between these two young men--175 love letters.  Here are some excerpts from Maritain's letters to Psichari (166).  "I feel that our two strangers are penetrating one another gently, timidly, slowly."  "Ernest, you are my friend.  You alone."  "Your eyes are splendescent [sic] lighthouses.  Your hair is a virgin forest, full of whispers and kisses."  "I love you, I live, I think of you."  "It is in you alone that I live."  "You are Apollo."  "I love you, I kiss you."  Well, you get the idea.

Barre has said in interviews with Martel that Maritain was surely sexually attracted to men, even if he never acted on his inclinations and remained chaste.  (Martel identifies Barre as one of the "main editors" for Martel's book.)  If so, then Maritain practiced what his teacher Thomas Aquinas identified as "loving friendship" (amor amicitiae), as contrasted with "concupiscent love" (amor concupiscentiae).

Remarkably, this seems to be what Ratzinger has recommended, and what has been put into the Catechism of the Catholic Church--that those with homosexual "inclinations" can strive for "Christian perfection" by being chaste in refraining from homosexual "acts."  But even if such a chaste Platonic homophilia is achievable by a few people like Maritain, one must wonder whether this would be unnatural for most homosexuals.

Scruton on Religion

Roger Scruton has posted a statement on religion at the "Right Reason" blog. He prepared this for a debate with Richard Dawkins on the question of whether "we would be better off without religion." Since Scruton is the leading conservative philosopher in Great Britain, I am pleased to see that he largely agrees with what I have written on this blog and in Darwinian Conservatism about religion and evolution.

He agrees with me in accepting the truth of evolutionary science and in seeing that there is no necessary conflict between evolution and religion, because religion answers questions about ultimate meaning and purpose that go beyond the realm of scientific reasoning. Moreover, he also agrees that religion provides support for morality and communal identity that can sustain a healthy community.

He also recognizes, of course, that religion can be harmful, even disastrous, when it promotes fanatical violence and brutality. But this only shows that we need to look to the proper development of the religious urge. Like many human goods, religion can be bad when it is practiced in the wrong way.

That Darwinian evolution and religious belief can be compatible has been the general position of the Catholic Church. But recently some Catholic leaders--such as Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn--have professed allegiance to "intelligent design theory." Now we have a news story about a new book that includes comments by Pope Benedict on this issue. Apparently, Benedict is defending a form of "theistic evolution" that would accept evolutionary history, but see it as guided by God's will. This news story does not provide a clear, detailed statement of the Pope's position. But it does seem that he rejects "intelligent design theory."