Tag: 04 Lecture Transcript

You see, in the city in which I live, a city of eighteen million or so people, and one where the annual Gay Pride parade features a minimum of three million people – and that’s the police estimate – there is no Catholic LGBTQ pastoral. In a city named after the apostle Paul which is also the largest city in the country with the largest Catholic population in the world, our Church is entirely absent from any realistic involvement in the life of the segment of society which in Brazil goes by the name of “GLS” – Gays, lésbicas e simpatizantes – Gays, Lesbians and those with similar affinities. And here we are back to a different sort of impossibility. For of course, our Church is dependent on the same teaching in Brazil as it is everywhere else. The current teaching of the Roman Congregations, which has as its premise that all humans are intrinsically heterosexual, and that gay people are objectively disordered. Defective heterosexuals if you like.

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.