Theology and Ethics

What I would like to share with you is a sense of fun. I think being Catholic is huge fun. A huge roller-coaster ride into reality propelled by God, borne up on safe wings, gestated by the loving self-giving of Our Lord in his crucifixion, watched and smiled over by his Holy Mother, played into being like a virtuoso first performance of an unknown masterpiece by the adventurous coaxing of God’s Holy Spirit. And right now one of the best places from where we can get a rich sense of how much fun this adventure is, is by looking at matters gay and their incidence in the life of the Church.

What I want to do instead is to pose the hypothetical question: “Let us imagine, hypothetically, that it were true that being gay or lesbian is a non-pathological minority variant in humanity. How might this impact the discussion concerning the relationship between faith and reason in our respective religious groups?” In other words, I’m proposing a test case: what would it look like for our group to undergo some sort of learning in this sphere on its own terms? That phrase “on its own terms” is the one that is important to me here. I’m absolutely not interested in some general theory of secularization, which disdains the particular ways of doing things of particular religious groups. What I am asking for are accounts of how particular religious groups come, over time, to discover things that are true about being human on this planet such that this discovery of what is true can be seen to have been the outworking of their own inner resources and then becomes a stable and creative part of how that religious group envisions the world in which we live.

The first point which I’d like to make, in a sense, is a big sigh of relief. And the sigh of relief is as follows: if faith were an ideology, and gay were a pathology, how easy this conference would be! Because if faith were an ideology, it would merely say “nyet” to us, and if being gay were a pathology, then we would merely go “oh poor little me”; and the matter would be over. Unfortunately for people who try to present things in the way that makes faith into an ideology, and being LGBT into a pathology, this world has collapsed. The world in which faith is an ideology, and ‘LGBT’ is a pathology, has collapsed. Our ability to have survived into what might pass as adulthood in some of our cases, seems to have borne witness to this. We’re no longer run by the world in which faith is an ideology, and being LGBT is a pathology. But getting out of some of the tracks of thinking, to which many of us have got used, which did rather regard it as though we were perpetually stuck between those two, has taken time.

I’d like to go back to the little boy, or little girl, and share with you what I have learned to pray for. It took me a long time to be able to pray for this, but I think it’s the prayer the little nine-year-old wanted to pray. It’s a prayer for four things: a home; a heart; a husband; and a ministry.