LGTBIQ+: Impure in the Church

Recently, James Martin, well-known United States Jesuit and writer, sent a letter to Pope Francis with the three questions that he most often receives from Catholic LGTBIQ+ people (lesbians, gays, transexuals, transgenders, bisexuals, intersexuals, queer and other sexual identities and orientations).  A few days ago the Pope’s response was published.

Here you have the questions and answers and my comments: 1) J. Martin: “What would you say that LGBT people should know about God?”. The Pope: “God is a father and does not deny any of his children.”. I miss “not even”, but it can be understood in the sentence: “God” (father) denies not even any of his LGTBIQ+ children. 2) J. Martin: “What would you like LGBT people know about the Church?”. The Pope: “I would explain to them that it is not the Church who rejects them, but some persons within the Church”. It should also be explained to them the enormous responsibility that the teaching of the hierarchy has in that rejection, even though the hierarchy is not “the” Church. 3) J. Martin: What would you say to an LGBT Catholic who has experienced the Church’s rejection?”. The Pope: “A ‘selective’ Church, a ‘pure blood’ Church, is not the Holy Mother Church, but a sect”. Let LGTBIQ+ people know, then, that the Church also accepts them too, at the price, yes, of becoming itself impure for it…

One does not need to be a Freudian to recognize that there are lapses in language that betray deeply ingrained emotions and convictions, which are often unconscious and always linked to personal experiences, but also to interests and alienating mechanisms of the cultural system that governs us, and that we justify and “rationalize” with convenience arguments. In the language of the Pope’s answers I see lapses that reveal old taboos, cultural stigmas and prejudices related to sexuality and gender that we still carry over and that are deeply ingrained in theology, the Cannon Law and the entire clerical Roman Catholic institution. Superficially, his answers defend LGTBIQ+ people, but deep down they offend and hurt them even more, because they suggest that those persons do not really deserve to be accepted by the Church or even by God. Those answers disqualify the Church they want to safeguard. And make incredible “God the merciful Father” that they invite to believe in.

His answers remind us of the famous answer that 9 years ago, at the beginning of his pontificate, the same Pope gave to several journalists on the plane returning from Brasil in 2013: “if a gay person is seeking God and has good will, who am I to judge that person?”. Again, the same lapse in his language. The Pope represses his condemnation of the gay people, but he subtly suggests that the term indicates to him something bad and reprehensible. With due respect, I ask him today the same question that at the time I asked him: So, you would certainly judge the gay person if he does not seek what you call “God” nor does he have “good will”?. And if a journalist would have called to your attention the heterosexual orientation of any other person, would you have answered “I am not the one to judge that person?”.

I do not at all doubt Pope Francis’ best of intentions in answering to Fr. James Martin’s questions, nor his personal humane and welcoming attitude towards LGTBIQ+ people. But it is not enough. The problem, at least in this case, is not the Pope himself but the system of the papacy that supports him and that he himself supports. Deep down, the problem is the old cosmovision, the old anthropology and the old theology upon which traditional Christianity and the ecclesial model still rest. In part, in spite of the Pope, and in part, also, due to the Pope.

It is the old theology the one that must change entirely, so that nobody can still feel, think or say, like Pope Francis said in spite of all his kindness and sanity: “there is no basis to assimilate or establish even remote analogies between homosexual unions and God’s plan for marriage and the family” (Amoris Laetitia 251, 2016); “matrimony, as a sacrament, is between a man and a woman and the Church cannot deny its truth” (on the plane returning from Budapest and Slovakia in 2021); the theory of gender is “a colonizing ideologization” (to the bishops of Poland in 2016), and it is “oriented to eliminate sexual differences” (catechesis in 2015) and “it empties the anthropological basis of the family” (Amoris Laetitia 86), “it goes against natural things” and “it is diabolical” (dialogue with Jesuits in Slovakia in 2012).

All that has become anti-human and anti-evangelical. And in no way should the Pope teach it, either expressly or subtly, not even if the entire Bible, the unanimous tradition of the Church or the very historical Jesus would so teach it –which is not the case. Because the Spirit, from the depths of all that is, continues renovating creation, life and the word forever.

I can only imagine Jesus telling a lesbian, gay, transexual, transgender, bisexual, intersexual, queer and any person with another identity and sexual orientation: “My friend, uproot that cultural and ecclesial stigma that weighs you down and hurts you. You are healthy and holy if you love as you are. Acknowledge it in spite of the social prejudices and the ecclesial institution still in force. Be and love the way you were made and inspired by God or Life or the Holy Creativity or the Soul that vivifies it. Stand up and walk”.

Aizarna, May 12, 2022

www.josearregi.com

Translated by Mertxe de RenobalesScheifler