Back in the 1950s, Father Leonard Feeney made headlines by proclaiming loud and long that no one could go to heaven except members of the Roman Catholic Church. For that he was excommunicated from membership in the Roman Catholic Church.
Years later Feeney and his followers were officially reconciled with the Church, but their take on Catholic life (ostensibly “hardline” but actually just weird) has not changed substantially.
And now the Feeneyites (officially, the “Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary” out of the Saint Benedict Center in Harvard, Mass.) are back in the headlines. The principal of their school, Brother Thomas Dalton, withdrew his student band from marching in Boston’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade on the mere prospect that the kids would be marching down the same street as Mass Equality, a gay pride group.
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| Brother Thomas Dalton |
Defending his position in a letter to the Boston Globe, Brother Thomas explained his opposition to associating with the gay marchers:
Jesus Christ once compared the Kingdom of Heaven to a wedding feast. When the king saw a guest not properly attired, he said to his servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (Matthew 22:13). All that over improper dress; what would he have done to a group parading unnatural lust?
To many readers, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, this talk of “unnatural lust” probably sounds like typical Catholic teaching: backward and mean-spirited and exclusionary. In fact, Brother Thomas’ sentiments are backward, mean-spirited, and exclusionary--but they are not Catholic teaching.
Brother Thomas is, of course, entitled to his own opinion (as well as to his dubious misinterpretation of a Biblical parable), and he even has the authority to impose his opinion on his students. In fact, when the gay marchers were finally rejected, Brother Dalton reinstated his children in the parade and led them in applauding their “victory.” All under the guise of providing a “Catholic education.”
But Brother Thomas is not entitled to his own facts--and he is not entitled to speak for the Church, let alone speak falsely. In a time when Pope Francis is finally at long last reversing the appallingly bad (and mostly deserved) PR the Catholic Church has received over the last 20 years, the last thing we need is some loud voice distorting our Catholic identity in public view.
But I fear that many Catholics secretly (or even openly) share this man’s views, or at least believe that these are the Church’s views. So a little plain talk about the Church’s teachings on homosexuals is timely. Here they are, drawn from the Catechism of the Catholic Church and from statements by the Vatican and the US Bishops:
1. Homosexual orientation is most often experienced as given and discovered, not chosen--and is not in itself morally wrong or sinful.
2. Given the inherent dignity of every human person, the Church teaches that “homosexual persons, like everyone else, should not suffer from prejudice against their basic human rights.”
3. Violence in speech or action against homosexuals “deserves condemnation from the Church’s pastors wherever it occurs.”
4. “Every sign of discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”
5. Nothing in the Bible or Catholic teaching can be used to justify prejudicial or discriminatory attitudes and behaviors toward homosexual persons.
Note than none of this stopped Brother Thomas Dalton from using the Bible to imply that Catholic teaching DOES justify his discriminatory attitude.
Of course, Catholic moral teaching also finds no justification for homosexual acts. But the moral objections are essentially the same as the Church’s objections to masturbation, artificial contraception, pre-marital sex, adultery, coitus interruptus, oral and anal sex, etc.—namely, that only marital procreative sex is morally legitimate. Everything else—not just gay sex—violates natural law.
In other words, official Catholic morality opposes all those acts but not the people who perform them. Such opposition therefore provides no grounds for treating those people differently from anyone else--and that goes for homosexuals as well as for all the others!
Thus gays and lesbians have the same basic rights as all other human beings, and must be protected from discrimination like anyone else. This principle holds even if we accept official church teaching on homosexuality as a “disordered” orientation.
In short, the Church sees active homosexuals as sinners. But to be consistent, to avoid discrimination, one must treat them as we do any others whose behavior is called immoral.
Thus a true “hardline” would insist that the Saint Patrick’s Day parade exclude anyone who engages in masturbation, premarital sex, oral or anal sex, adultery, contraception, theft, lying, slander, cheating, etc—as well as any Catholics who deliberately ate meat the previous Friday (the second Friday in Lent).
This would result, of course, in a very short parade, made up mostly of marching Protestants. Throw in the exclusion of those engaging in drunkenness and natural lust, and there would be precious few onlookers left to cheer the children marching (practically alone!) for Brother Thomas Dalton’s school.
So singling out gays is wrong, not because we are not entitled to disapprove of their behavior, but because we are not entitled to judge them while ignoring everyone else.
When Pope Francis famously said “Who am I to judge?” with reference to gays, he was thinking of two things. First, Catholic tradition dictates that only one person can judge whether someone has sinned--namely, the sinner himself! That’s why Catholics confess their sins, rather than being denounced for them. Sin requires that one violate one’s conscience--and no one knows my conscience but me.
Second, the pope had already described himself as “a sinner.” His point, of course, is that Catholics believe that sin is a universal phenomenon within the human family. We all sin. To judge that homosexual activity is sinful merely lumps gays in with the rest of us. Far from justifying their exclusion, it confirms their inclusion in the company of sinners.
In this sense, the Saint Patrick’s Day parade is a parade of sinners, cheered on by thousands more sinners. And it always has been. Who are we to judge that gays have no place among us?
Certainly, any such judgment cannot claim to represent true Catholicism. And any event in honor of a Catholic saint is hardly enhanced by the proclamations of those who distort Catholicism and confuse the public. If we believe Saint Patrick was Catholic—and he was—then our celebration should reflect Catholic tradition, not distort it.
God willing, Brother Thomas Dalton’s band will someday learn about true Catholicism—but not, I fear, at his school.
