Outside the act of sexual intercourse between a husband and wife lies a seemingly endless range of possibilities for what one might do with one’s reproductive organs. If stealing is your thing, there are billions of shops across the globe you could steal from. But whether you steal from a small corner shop in Yorkshire or a luxury jeweller’s in Knightsbridge, what marks you out as different from those who choose not to steal is that you choose to steal. And stealing is wrong. The moral character of an act does not change according to the identity, preferences or inclinations of the person performing it. Stealing remains stealing, whoever does it, wherever they do it, and however they might feel about it.
Likewise, sexual activity that takes place outside a marital relationship is wrong. All of it. Always. The world is awash with sexual sin, normalised through our mind-moulding media and now our so-called educational establishments too. Masturbation, multiple partners, anal sex, all kinds of deviancy which that über-pervert, the Marquis de Sade, would have loved… (and hated) in equal measure, given his bizarre preoccupations with domination and submission. People who experience same-sex attraction don’t have a monopoly on perversion, sin or sexual deviancy.
But blimey, you’d think they did!
Let me break it to you, gays. We don’t need to know.
Not wanting to know about your personal peccadilloes is not the same as wanting to throw you headfirst off a multi-storey car park. Stop with the dramatics.
People who experience same-sex attraction are not some subhuman species. They are human beings, bound by the same natural law that binds us all. To suggest otherwise is unbelievably rude, disrespectful and undignified. The Church does not have one moral law for heterosexuals and another for homosexuals. Nor does it have one understanding of sin for one group and an entirely different understanding for another. We are all fallen, all sinners and all in need of repentance. The world is gonna world, whether we like it or not, and it will eat itself one day. But the Church, and particularly the priests of the Church, should not be adopting the lies of this world. What’s that about?
In the early part of the twentieth century, Our Lady appeared at Fatima to three children. St Jacinta Marto relayed a warning from Our Lady that more souls go to hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason. The warning concerns impurity, lust and unchastity, sins to which the whole of fallen humanity is susceptible. Sister Lucia added that the danger of these sins lies not simply in their gravity but in how readily they are excused and left unrepented.
Which brings us to the purpose of the Church and her Priests.
What is the Church for? What are priests for? If those questions are too complicated to answer now, we can at least say with certainty what priests are not for. They are not there to lead souls to hell by diminishing sin and failing to call for repentance. The Church exists to bring souls to Christ, not to reassure them that the things which separate them from Him are of no consequence. And if repentance is necessary for salvation, then surely the last thing anyone needs is a priest who appears to redefine what it is we ought to repent of.
And that seems to be what wonderfully predictable Fr James Martin is doing. His organisation, Outreach, has published a prayer styled as a Confiteor for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two-Spirited and plus people (whom, we must assume, are not quite like the rest of humanity, since the rest of us already have a perfectly good Confiteor).
This prayer, published for a particular group, goes like this:
I confess to our Loving God and to you, my siblings, that I have fallen short in my prejudiced thoughts and my biased judgements in my careless words and my degrading self-talk in what I have done to cooperate with injustice and in what I have failed to do to resist it;
Through my fear, through my complacency, through my worst errors. Therefore I ask all my spiritual ancestors, queer saints, and you, the human family, to pray with me, that together we might build a better tomorrow. Amen.
Queer saints? What exactly is a queer saint? We are about to celebrate the wonderful arrray of saints in heaven. Kings and queens, beggars and scholars, mothers and fathers, priests and religious, sinners who repented and souls who struggled heroically against temptation. So many wonderfully weird saints with one thing in common….any one want to guess what it is? - I’ll give you a clue, it’s not what they chose to do with their reproductive organs. It is, instead, that they all did that Mary thing - they all relinquished their own desires and demands and said instead ‘Your will be done’, and meant it!
The fiat that changed the world. The fiat that gave us life eternal. This is what the saints have in common, not some small, reductionist, hollow, boring, selfish and utterly meaningless worldly detail, that they took a shine to someone who had the same genitalia as them.
Sanctity does not consist in membership of a particular social or sexual category, but in our response to the grace of God. Saints are saints because they became holy, not because of the labels by which the world might choose to identify them. What, then, is gained by introducing a category of sanctity defined by sexual identity? To become ‘holy’ means to become whole - to be restored to the ‘you’ God created before sin and death claimed you.
And what of the confession itself? The traditional Confiteor is an acknowledgement of our sins, of what we have done and what we have failed to do, and an appeal for the prayers of Our Lady, the angels and saints, and our brethren. This alternative prayer speaks instead of prejudice, biased judgements, degrading self-talk, injustice and the need to build a better tomorrow. It would be unrecognisable to 98% of Catholics across all nations and all times - thus rendering it…er…not Catholic!
There was a time in the USA when black people were not allowed to share restrooms, restaurants or schools with white people. My old man remembers a time when there used to be signs on the pubs over here saying ‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’. Why is it that we can see what is wrong with this, yet we can’t see a problem with the same segregation at work in the hands of those who feel the need to carve out a seperate creed for people who have a strong desire to fondle the private parts of those which match their own.
Why should people who share the same human nature, the same need for redemption and the same call to holiness require a separate expression of confession on the basis of their sexual identity? What is the purpose of dividing people into categories when the Church has always taught that the call to repentance is universal?
Fr James Martin’s Outreach may intend this prayer as an expression of welcome and inclusion but the reality is it divides and excludes. There is something profoundly unkind about suggesting, even inadvertently, that one group of people needs a different account of sin, repentance and sanctity from everybody else.
The Church does not need a separate moral law for gay people, nor a separate understanding of holiness, nor a separate route to salvation. It needs to proclaim the same truth to every human being, without favour, without exception and without apology. To do otherwise is not compassion. It is to risk withholding from souls the very truth which the Church exists to proclaim.
And where, exactly, is the justice in that?
There is an anger to these contributions by Fr Martin. He knows what he is doing, and the ripples this will cause. He's really not here to help. The real concern is the protection he enjoys.
Great article Katherine.
That guy gives me the creeps. Enough said.