In All Things
Gays, Galileo, and the Message of the Manger
The BBC has the correct headline on Pope Benedict’s curial speech story. "Pope attacks blurring of gender" is far more accurate than all those headlines claiming that "saving gay people is as important as saving the rainforests", and similar riffs on Reuters’ misleading -- see Fr Jim and MSW on this -- interpretation.
The essential theological point in the Pope’s intriguing address is that going green while erasing God from Creation is a contradiction. Nature, he says is "the gift of the Creator, with certain intrinsic rules that offer us an orientation we must respect as administrators of creation.”
And he goes on: "That which is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender’ in the end amounts to the self-emancipation of the human person from creation and from the Creator. Human beings want to do everything by themselves, and to control exclusively everything that regards them. But in this way, the human person lives against the truth, against the Creator Spirit.”
It’s worth placing this papal observation alongside the tribute Benedict XVI paid last Sunday to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) on the 400th anniversary of the condemned astronomer’s telescope.
Galileo, you will recall, was declared a heretic by the seventeenth-century Church for supporting Nicholas Copernicus’ discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun (church teaching at the time placed the Earth at the centre of the universe). For centuries the Galileo condemnation has been used by secularists as a symbol of all that is incompatible between faith and science.
Last weekend, the Vatican sought to reverse that symbolism, building on Pope John Paul II’s 1992 apology and dusting off Galileo as a shining representative of faith and reason working together.
(Ma non troppo. According to this interesting AP report, the Vatican turned down the offer of a statue, to be located inside the Vatican gardens, donated by the Italian aerospace giant Finmeccanica SpA).
Galileo and other scientists had helped people better understand and "contemplate with gratitude the Lord’s works", Pope Benedict said.
The astronomer is not a bad poster boy for the marriage of faith and reason: he was devout, as well as being a brave scientist. He looked through his telescope and saw the glory of God behind the amazing architecture of the universe -- as did Jesuit astronomers at the time and continue to today. That is a very different way of looking through a telescope to that of the nineteenth-century atheists, who used it to declare the non-existence of angels.
Only, I can’t help but spot an irony.
Galileo was condemned, at the time, because he was held to subvert the God-ordained nature of things. One can imagine Pope Urban VIII in 1633 using words similar to Pope Benedict’s to the Curia: that nature has "certain intrinsic rules that offer us an orientation we must respect as administrators of creation.”
But it wasn’t long before the "intrinsic rules" were overturned by the evidence. It turned out that putting the Earth at the centre of the universe was not God’s plan at all.
Mark Dowd, gay ex-Dominican and strategist for the Christian environmental group Operation Noah, is widely quoted in UK press reports as saying that in his curial speech Benedict XVI betrayed "a lack of openness to the complexity of creation" -- in other words, that papal faith in the fixity of male-female gender roles may be misplaced.
At the moment, there seems little room in the Catholic Church’s "human ecology" for a possible divine purpose for homosexuality -- just as in the seventeenth century there wasn’t much space for the idea that God has arranged the universe with the sun at its centre. It would be syllogistic to suggest that because the Church was wrong on the second it will turn out to be wrong on the first.
But it’s striking how the homosexual orientation appears in church teaching as "intrinsically disordered" -- in other words, as contrary to the way God arranged the universe -- in the same way as the Copernican view appeared in the seventeenth century.
And it isn’t a bad thought, at Christmas, to remember that the Creator of the Universe is capable of subverting its laws for the sake of His creatures.
Things are never so finally fixed that God can’t rearrange it all. The arrogance of scientists, of clergy, of the wise, our own arrogance -- all get dethroned tonight by the Great Event: the manger-child, born of a refugee couple and the Holy Spirit, in a cave, in a place somewhere off the map, to where the centre of the Universe quietly relocates. Happy Christmas.
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The Church leadership screwed up at that particular time in the 17th Century because it followed Luther's lead, the scripture alone approach. Had they been more Catholic than Protestant, more Robert Bellarmine than Martin Luther, Scripture/Tradition/Reason over that of Scripture, then it would never have happened.
Pope Benedict like Robert Bellarmine appeals to reason.
Annibale Fantoli concludes [GALILEO: FOR THE CHURCH AND FOR COPERNICANISM] that the problem lay in Galileo's breaking his promise to Urban VIII that he would calm down on his claims about the heliocentric system, since he - Galileo - could not prove it. Tycho Brahe did a better and complete job of accounting for the astronomical phenomena - no heliocentrism there.
Galileo's was an incomplete mathematical construct - no gravity, the orbits as perfect circles, the revolution of the earth around its axis proved by the tides, &c. Facts are such a nuisance.
How could this statement possibly be True? We know, simply because it can sustain Human Life, the Earth has the preferred location in God's Universe.
From God's perspective, we are the Center of His Universe. His desire is that we make Him the Center of ours.
"For God so Loved the World, that He sent His only Son..."
May the Peace of Christ be with you Today and Always.
But an awareness of the variance of gender is certainly in the tradition; one has only to read the Jewish Talmud to be acutely aware of the ancient rabbinic awareness of gender fluctuation.
God Bless
It is certainly worthwhile to investigate deeper why it is the case that we are made and woman in such a way that homosexuality is wrong. (Or to try to argue this is false.) The complementarity of conjugal love will be an essential point for the one upholding the Church's position; and this goes to the heart of the Pope's observation, that there is a difference between man and woman. Perhaps deep philosophical reflection and explication of this and related points is called for.
What he always leaves out, and fails to recognize, is that there is no such thing as a pure male and a pure female, no matter the chromosome count. Elements of both genders exist in every human being on the planet. Its an essential human characteristic. Men and women are after all, the same species, not separate. Currently the Pope and the Church appear to treat them as distinct, when they are not, entirely.
Thus the Pope and the Church fail to grasp and apreciate fully the inherent grace and beauty of not only homosexual relationships, but heterosexual relationships as well. The joining of male to female to make the one flesh is more complex. Its the joining of the principles of male and female, as they exist, in each partner, to the others counterpart.
Does God create human sexual morality for His own sake or for ours? Was man created for sexual morality or was sexual morality created for man? What about for those who were created gay and lesbian? Is or is not sex and sexual expression a gift from God?
How would the Jesus who cured on the Sabbath answer this question? How is calling someone's sexuality disordered making their yoke easy and their burden light and how is it not?
Being wrong for 2000 years does not make something right.
I just finished reading a book on Copernicus by Jack Repcheck, ''Copernicus' Secret.'' It is written for the lay (non-scientist) reader. When I read this article, I had a greater appreciation for the author's point-of-view. It's interesting that Martin Luther, who was a contemporary of Copernicus, although Copernicus never matriculated at the University of Wittenberg, railed against the heliocentric hypothesis based upon tons of observations and mathematical evidence proposed by Copernicus. Martin Luther was the greater reformer who saw the hypocrisy of the church, but he couldn't accept that God's creation was mutable.
During Copernicus' life, his work was welcomed by the church. The bishop of Chelmno urged Copernicus to publish his work. Copernicus hid his 100 page book, ''On the Revolutions...'' for fear that he would be ridiculed by the scientific community, and it wasn't until Kepler that his view became accepted by the scientific community, but it was Galileo who made his work comprehensible to the populous. Copernicus' work was highly technical and difficult for the scientist of the day to understand. It was a Lutheran mathematician and fellow astronomer/astologer by the name of Rheticus who visited Copernicus (Lutherans were banned from Warmia, where Copernicus lived) and persuaded him to publish the work. The scientific world was standing on tiptoe to read his study; although it was unaccepted by the majority of scientists for decades, as I mentioned above.
Now, here we are again on the brink of another paradigm shift...What does it mean to be male? To be female?...we need the light of the Spirit, but as Emily Dickinson writes, ''Tell all the truth but tell it slow...'' ...through a circuitous route...otherwise the light is blinding.
I am attracted by the Dominican charism of prayer and study...''Contemplare et contemplatus alius tradere.'' It is interesting that a former Dominican is carrying the torch to bring light.
The message might be the last ''The arrogance of scientists, of clergy, of the wise, our own arrogance -- all get dethroned tonight by the Great Event: the manger-child, born of a refugee couple and the Holy Spirit, in a cave, in a place somewhere off the map, to where the centre of the Universe quietly relocates. Happy Christmas''
Another message to this assembly of scribes in the words of St Francis:
''Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words!''
Happy New Year!
"I give you a new Commandment, Love one another as I have Loved you."- Christ
We are to use Christ's definition of Love, not our own. He is the Word of Love Made Flesh.
Love is not possessive nor does it serve to manipulate.
The church's teaching on homosexuality and the ban on the ordination of women are the two reasons she no longer goes to church.
She says she knows gay couples who are faithful to each other and raising children in a loving manner, and she points to many heterosexual couples who fail to do the same.
And she describes the ban on female priests as the last great effort on the part of men in the church to maintain control of the operation.
I can't argue with her on the female priest issue, and my comments on the ''disordered'' nature of gay sex seem increasingly hollow in the face of her anecdotal response.
The gay issue for me is one of God's deep, dark mysteries for which I used to have a ready answer, but no longer do.
Michael, because we are called to have Loving relationships. Love unites, it does not possess.
Marianne, the Pope did not say that homosexuality is a God- given sexual orientation.
The purpose of Sexual Love is what God intended.
He could have made us all one sex but obviously, He didn't.
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