The Last Thing Needed

There’s a moment in the movie The Queen when “Tony Blair” is watching the royal family on television. “Somebody has got to save these people,” he says, “from themselves.”

Which is a little like how I feel about Joe Ratzinger, as he prepares to leave his church in an absolute mess.

Consider it—we have a secret report that only the pope knows about and only the next pope will see. This couldn’t be more made-for-television.

Nor does the response from the Vatican do anything to calm the waters. They come out swinging, accusing the media and other enemies of the church of attempting to influence the election of the next pope.

Things settle down for a day and then BAM! A top Catholic in Great Britain, a cardinal, steps down after four people came forward with allegations of abuse from the 1980’s. So he’s out, and cancels his trip to Rome to elect the next pope.

Unlike the cardinal of Los Angeles, who has been rebuked as well as stripped of his diocesan duties by his successor. Well, he’s in Rome now, having been deposed in a civil case over the weekend.

And he’s fighting—he’s just written in his blog about how hard it is to forgive his enemies, to love them, to take to heart Jesus’ message of love and forgiveness. So screw you to the 10,000 Los Angelinos who have signed a petition saying he’s hardly qualified to select the next pope.

Well, that does seem sensible. Whatever his “diocesan duties” are, they can’t be more important that a papal conclave, right?

He makes, by the way, a good point. Here’s the Los Angeles Times:

"I can't recall a time such as now when people tend to be so judgmental and even self-righteous, so quick to accuse, judge and condemn," Mahony wrote on his personal blog. "And often with scant real facts and information.  Because of news broadcasts now 24/7 there is little or no fact checking; no in-depth analysis; no context or history given.  Rather, everything gets reported as 'news' regardless of the basis for the item being reported -- and passed on by countless other news outlets." 

Well, Jack would agree—he’d be howling in pain at the quality of journalism today. But it is a matter of record that the diocese of Los Angeles has had to cough up 660 million in a settlement with abuse victims. Oh, and Mahony was in charge there for about thirty years.

So we’re in Roman or Vatican fever. What’s really going on, what’s in the secret report, and mostly….

…what’s next?

Because it feels both that the ship is completely rudderless and that the seas have started roiling.

The pope, says a biographer who interviewed the pope’s brother, is losing sleep at night, sweating and tossing in bed as he thinks about the abuse scandals. The ordeal has ruined his health and wrecked his papacy. All he wanted was to retire, get the hell out of town, and go back to academia. He presented his resignation three or four times to John Paul II, and always the resignations were rejected.

Yeah? It may be true. It may also be that the pope is caught in a terrible time trap—he’s living in a world that no longer exists.

There was a time when the Catholic Church ruled—and no, it wasn’t as far back as the Middle Ages. Remember The Bells of St. Mary’s? It was a film from 1945 about a wonderful, dedicated, just a bit unconventional priest who fights to save his inner-city high school, assisted by that wonderful, dedicated, not-quite-so-unconventional Mother Superior. Bing Crosby played the priest, Ingrid Bergman the mother superior—and when Crosby sings the title song, surrounded by all the nuns in the immaculate wimples and veils, you’d better have at least fifty units of insulin in the syringe. It goes through sugary, and travels across saccharine and ends up, finally, nauseating.

The reality was different.

“We’d go to class all day, and then head down to the Gold Coast, where we saw most of our classmates and a lot of the faculty,” said a friend in Chicago, remembering his seminary days.

The Gold Coast was a gay bar.

And it was the seventies—times had changed, the cops were no longer raiding the bars, people were coming out and discovering an amazing truth: it was no big deal. Families got over it. The woman who 30 years ago would call from Puerto Rico wanting to speak to her son and refused to talk to me?

She was reading names on Plaza de Armas last Saturday, supporting a project of mine. And telling me she loved me and was proud of me.

Over fifty percent of the seminarians are gay, says Mark Dowd, himself a former Dominican friar. Here’s what he has to say about the subject:

Building on this, the lesbian writer on queer theology, Elizabeth Stuart, in a fascinating deconstruction of "liturgy queens", made the observation that in her experience it was more often than not the very closeted clergy who deployed an almost neurotic obsession with the size and length of the altar cloth and ecclesiastical protocol as "their own way of dealing with their demons". We have to be careful of a simplistic reductio ad absurdum here. Love of aesthetics in liturgy does not automatically prove anything about one's sexual orientation. But I think Stuart had a point.

Well, I think she had a point too. The more you suppress it, the more you get it, as a friend used to say.

The Catholic Church has always known it—some of it highest officials, including popes, have not been celibate. And no—we’re not talking Medieval Era, but the Modern Era.

Whatever or wherever Ratzinger’s sexuality is or isn’t, his temperament is intellectual and theoretical, not administrative and organizational. His was to be a teaching papacy, and the problem?

It was the last thing needed.