Pope Francis, Yet Again, Takes Aim at Sacred Homosexuality
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It would seem that the mainstream media has finally had enough of Pope Francis' mind games with self-identified LGBTQ people. Last year, the pope's comments endorsing civil unions for same sex couples made headlines all over the world, and for days on end. Yet last week, Pope Francis' remark to his fellow Jesuits that the Catholic Church is “afraid to accompany people with sexual diversity" barely registered in secular media, save this article in Reuters and a few other outlets.
Needless to say, to speak of “sexual diversity" connotes a progressive attitude toward human sexuality; it is the pope's way of saying “I'm an ally with modern, hip constructions of sexuality." Yet, in fact, the only reason he wants priests of the Catholic Church to " accompany” same sex couples is to eventually convince such couples to give up homosexuality. If the scant media coverage of the pope's most recent “sexual diversity” remarks is any indication, it may be a sign that the secular press has finally realized that Pope Francis is playing by the James Martin playbook: co-opt the language and symbols of the gay rights movement - meaning the rainbow flag and every newfangled letter that gets applied to the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup - so as to win the moral trust of said population, and then go for the jugular by convincing them that God wants them to give up their sex lives.
Yes, in a spiritual tradition whose founder taught that spiritual brotherhood must never be based upon manipulation, it is sad that James Martin, in his sixties, and Pope Francis, in his eighties, still seemingly take such intellectual delight in pulling the wool over the eyes of LGBTQ people. For them, it's a rhetorical chess match, like high school students in a debate club needing to prove to themselves, even more than their audience, that they can outwit their opponent. Until recently, Pope Francis’ and James Martin's more clever and souped up “love the sinner, hate the sin" strategy has been aided and abetted by a secular press corps too busy to probe any deeper into what these men are doing. When you're on deadline, it seems a mere rainbow flag on a priest's Twitter account and a priest’s incessant repetition of the letters LGBTQ is confirmation that such an individual is an ally in the cause of homosexuality acceptance. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, and we may finally be seeing signs that members of the secular press corps no longer want to be the happy-go-lucky bell boys carrying Pope Francis’ and James Martin's 100 lb baggage load of internalized homophobia.
Despite those modest signs of improvement, I still believe that the LGBT movement itself, because it was birthed in secularism and has been molded by secular aims, remains the biggest obstacle to Christian men in realizing and actualizing the God-given homoerotic potential that lives within them.
Below is a reprint of an article from last year addressing this very subject. Published in the November 22nd, Sunday edition of the Albany Times-Union, the only thing that has changed since then is that the president of the Human Rights Campaign, Alphonso David, was fired for his activities in defense of former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo. Everything else in the article is germane to the unfortunate situation we have today: the demonstrative inability of a secular-born social movement to speak to the legitimate concerns many Christian men have about homoerotics, and most importantly, why those concerns should never, ever preclude them from pursuing profound intimacy with other men.
LGBTQ+ and the debate within Christendom: A secular dogma collides with the gospel.
By Timothy Villareal
Last month, Pope Francis sent shockwaves throughout all of Christendom by endorsing civil unions for same-sex marriage, even though he still opposes homosexuality. Also last month, in Albany, Episcopal Bishop William Love decided to resign over his refusal to accept The Episcopal Church's embrace of same-sex marriage. Virtually every major Christian denomination in the Western world has grappled with controversies surrounding homosexuality over the last decades, and last month's developments in the Catholic and Episcopal churches indicate such controversies will not abate anytime soon. Indeed, until the coronavirus derailed their 2020 conference, the United Methodist Church was set to finalize an official schism plan of their own over homosexuality. One UMC church in Savannah, Georgia has already decided to split.
The fact is that the LGBT movement, now LGBTQ+, is a thoroughly secular movement in origin and content. It is not that the movement is per se hostile to religious questions, but the basic priority of the movement is to ensure that religious institutions conform to its baseline conception of homosexuality - namely the movement's deeply-held dogma that homosexuality is attributable to an immutable sexual orientation - and to get those institutions to support the public policies that flow from that dogma.
This foisting of an entirely secular construct of homosexuality onto theologically-defined institutions oftentimes makes for strange bedfellows, and can make for extremely dangerous psychological formulations. Case in point: Alphonso David, president of the largest U.S. gay rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, gave a ringing endorsement of Pope Francis' civil unions remarks; an endorsement that has the effect of sending a signal to uninformed, unchurched people who may be insecure about their homosexuality that they will find a "welcoming and affirming environment" at their local Catholic church. In fact, they are more likely to encounter a priest who teaches that homosexuality is an offense to God and that same-sex attracted persons should live as celibates if they want to get to heaven. Yet such spiritual intricacy does not matter to a secular institution like HRC; all that matters is that Pope Francis is now on board with civil unions. In that secular mindset, the pope is but a political box that can be checked, not a man who has real, imminent potential to do grave spiritual and psychological harm to vulnerable people who were misled into thinking their sexuality would be accepted by the Catholic Church.
The evidence we have of Jesus's teachings on the subject of human sexuality all point to one common thread: lust, even within heterosexual marriage, is an affront to God. A LGBT Christian activist's boiler plate talking point that "Jesus never once mentions homosexuality" simply does not resonate with any traditional Christian who is witnessing a society convulsed by lust.
Progressive Christian activists who adopt the secular-born LGBT template to advance more embracing ecclesiastical stances on homosexuality will eventually find themselves up against a brick wall. It's not merely that their extant theological argumentation is always on the defensive - heaven forbid they go on the offensive to explain how sacred homoaffection can enhance the spiritual life - it's that the very purpose of the gospel, vis-à-vis the subject of human sexuality, is to confront and counter lust, not to create social and political networks for its flourishing.
So long as a philosophical template born entirely of the secular world - the secular dogma of sexual orientation - is clumsily foisted onto theologically-defined institutions, the embrace of sacred homosexuality within Christendom be far from universal. It is time for Christians who believe in the sacredness of homosexuality to stop using the old wineskins of the LGBT movement as their emotional carrying case for the God-given wine of same-sex love and intimacy.