Andrew Sullivan is certainly being castigated for his negative opinion of Ratzinger, the new Pope. Citizen Smash has a good roundup of posts. But Professor Bainbridge actually calls him an ass. But since Bainbridge is both a lawyer, (yuck) and a proffessor at (double-yuck) UCLA, I don't see where he's earned any moral superiority marks.
I was actually slumming over at XLRQ's blog. and I'd meant to just point out to him an article on the "Gay Panic" defense that he once challenged me on. (Whether it existed.) But then I started reading some of the nasty comments about Sullivan.
Really, while granted that Sullivan is a drama queen, having read his posts over the years, I do judge him as someone who does care deeply about his faith. Sullivan may simply be having a childhood flashback. Of course, Ratzinger and myself go way back as well....
Sullivan and I are probably about the same age. I'm a little fuzzy on the timing, but I think I first heard the name "Ratzinger" while I was still in my teens. This is when he published his famous "homosexuality is an intrinsic evil" pamphlet. I remember being rather frightened at the time. It seemed entirely opposite from the image of the Pope I'd gotten when he had last been in town. But now the Vatican
When you are a young gay teenager, you already think the world is against you, so his little tirade didn't exactly make me feel welcome in my own Church, since at that time I was still Catholic. I remember going to classes that day at my Catholic High School
It's funny in retrospect, but Ratzinger's missive made it clear to me that priests were not to be trusted as far as being someone I could talk to about these kinds of personal issues. Of course, many years later, we find out that was a good instinct on my part, although for different reasons.
Ratzinger's letter was the first big ole honking nail in the coffin of my belief and faith in a Church as a moral authority.
At that time I knew that I was gay, but I was still a virgin, unlike most of my straight Catholic friends. So I hadn’t acted on any of my feelings.
But still, here was this guy, basically a bookworm, sitting in another country in a nest of paper like a hamster making a special effort to point the finger of moral condemnation at me, on the other side of the globe, whom he didn't even know. He judged me and every gay like me as "intrinsically evil". Regardless of my actual actions.
But I just couldn't understand how I could be any more "intrinsically evil" than the straight guy sitting next to me in homeroom. Funny, I didn't feel like the Spawn of Satan when I got up that morning, but apparently that’s what I was.
I'm sorry, but I just can't accept that straight people are somehow "intrinsically" a morally superior life form of life. Because if homosexuality is an intrinsic evil then heterosexuality must also be an intrinsic virtue. So do straight people wake up in the morning feeling more virtuous because they are not gay? Or maybe they are just relieved. They should be.
My grandmother was a Catholic Ratzinger would love. Went to Church every day, was always reading the Bible and carrying a rosary. But the older she got, the more hypocritically judgmental she got. Mean people don't become less so with age; they simply become even meaner and older people. So it wasn't too much of a surprise when I heard from her a few years later, after my name had appeared in the paper in connection with a gay-straight student alliance club I was involved with. She had suspected I was gay before this but she had never said anything about it to me directly.
She called me up to yell at me and disown me from her side of the family. She made a special effort to tell me how ashamed she was of me. And true enough, that side of the family didn't speak to me again. I wasn't invited to Thanksgiving dinners or weddings or any of that stuff. I found that once I got over being a drama queen, I didn’t miss it that much. I didn’t need it anymore to determine my place in the grand scheme of things. I also had loving and supportive friends who acted more like family than well …family.
My grandmother based her moral outrage on the teachings of the Church. Of course, as I realized later in retrospect, she was probably more upset with the idea that she was going to have appear in public as the grandmother of a fag at the next church social.
But that was the final nail in the coffin for me as far as the Catholic Church goes. Or Christianity in general for that matter. If this was an example of “family values” I wanted no part of it.
While I would continue to respect individuals who were Christian, I wouldn’t automatically do so because they appeared to be “religious”. I would watch how they acted when they thought no one was looking and particularly how they treated other people.
In a way I have to really thank Ratzinger. His stupid little missive made me realize that priests and churches weren't really to be taken seriously any more as moral authorities. If they had their time, it was now past. Perhaps they realize this and it’s the reason so many preachers are getting into politics. They have lost a great deal of their temporal power and they want it back.
Ratzinger pushed me away from embracing a religion that was a blind obedience to rules rather than to God. It turned me away from the false comfort of knowing “for a fact” that I was right because a priest said it or it was written in a book.
Instead I was pushed away and I started down the road to a deeper and more meaningful understanding of God. My faith will never give me the certainty of a Ratzinger. But I do think it gives more of a grasp of the concept of humility in the truest sense of the word. It’s simply a more realistic knowledge of my place in this world. Neither angel nor devil. And I’m certainly not more “intrinsically evil” than anyone else on the planet. I’ve found direct faith in the Creator to be much more illuminating of God’s plan for me than anything a priest or book has ever said. I guess Ratzinger just helped me to get rid of the middleman.
Comments