{"id":246,"date":"2018-11-25T18:37:54","date_gmt":"2018-11-25T10:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesus4lesbians.com\/?p=246"},"modified":"2018-12-06T08:00:30","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T00:00:30","slug":"the-fundamentalist-takeover-of-the-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/Jesus4lesbians.com\/?p=246","title":{"rendered":"The fundamentalist takeover of the Church"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have already observed that Cardinal Ratzinger formulated his analysis of homosexuality and of same-sex marriage without any intention of consulting the world-wide bishops for their input or for their approval.[i]<\/a>\u00a0 Furthermore, we observed that he never organized theological or pastoral commissions that were charged to investigate the contemporary homosexual phenomena and to offer theological, psychological, and sociological guidelines for responding charitably and justly in the name of the Gospel.\u00a0 Rather, he took the course of publishing his own views, getting John Paul II to sign on, and then distributing a fait accompli<\/em> to the bishops scattered throughout the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"How do we judge this?\u00a0 Cardinal Ratzinger is a very intelligent and dedicated man, but no matter how intelligent, his gut reactions to homosexuality were formed in his personal experiences (which, following the Germanic scholarly tradition, he hides from his readers).\u00a0 Moreover, he wrote in complete isolation from the very priests and religious who had dedicated their lives to bring healing and holiness to gays and lesbians.\u00a0 Surely these persons would have to be consulted and their views taken into account if the Church was to have a safe and sure guide to assess the challenge of correctly understanding and ministering to gays and lesbians within the modern Church.\u00a0 But, for reasons unknown to us, Cardinal Ratzinger decided that he could not trust these people.\u00a0 Their compassion must have led them astray.\u00a0 He could not even trust the input of bishops who were dealing with this issue in widely diverse cultural and sociological contexts.\u00a0 Hence, taking the burden upon himself and trusting his Germanic training, he moved ahead with the dogged determination to bring gays and lesbians and their allies back on track.\u00a0 But this is exactly the arrogance that comes with fundamentalism that the Pope warns us against.<\/p>\n

With such a defective process, is it any wonder that it produced such a misguided and misleading doctrine?\u00a0 Is it any wonder that such a one-sided and misinformed policy would rip into the soul of Catholic communities and tear them apart?\u00a0 And we judge this as the evil that comes in the wake of the Ratzinger Doctrine.<\/p>\n

However, there are at least two sides to every issue:<\/p>\n

On one side there are those who are proud to be Catholics because their Church finally stands up against homosexual organizations and their supporters who are pressuring the whole nation to give them the rights and privileges for recognizing a lifestyle that is an abomination before God and a sure formula for civil disintegration.\u00a0 These are the folks who believe that parents who have blurred sexual identities as \u201cmale\u201d or \u201cfemale\u201d end up confusing their children until they end up thinking of themselves as \u201chomosexuals.\u201d\u00a0 Here, too, are the folks who believe that the teaching profession[ii]<\/a> and the priesthood[iii]<\/a> should be purged of all homosexuals because they invariably fail to provide healthy \u201crole models\u201d for children trying to discover themselves as either \u201cmale\u201d or \u201cfemale.\u201d \u00a0Still others fear homosexual teachers, homosexual day-care providers, and homosexual priests because they are invariably inclined toward the sexual exploitation of children.\u00a0 This is the side that embraces and applauds the Ratzinger Doctrine.<\/p>\n

On the other side are those who are confused or angry with Cardinal Ratzinger because he artificially reduces homosexuality to \u201csexual functioning\u201d and, as such, judges it as \u201cunnatural,\u201d \u201cdisordered,\u201d \u201cunfruitful,\u201d and \u201cimmoral\u201d\u2014hence certainly not something deserving the recognition and protecting that has hitherto been accorded a marriage between one man and one woman. \u00a0Cardinal Ratzinger, had he been more forthright, could have said that homosexual sex is first and foremost \u201cjust plain disgusting\u201d and that \u201cit is abhorrent for me as an educated man to even think about it or to imagine myself to ever being able to like it.\u201d\u00a0 This honesty would have been refreshing because it would eventually have allowed him to entertain the thought that his way of being in his own skin was not as absolute and universal as he thought.\u00a0 Under the right circumstances, he might even come to admire a few gays and lesbians as talented and sophisticated persons like himself.\u00a0 And this would have caused him a deep crisis.\u00a0 Who so?\u00a0 Because now he would have to come to grips with the reality that, in the domain of sexuality, that these admirable individuals move to the beat of a different drummer that is just as normative for them as Ratzinger\u2019s heterosexuality is normative for him.\u00a0 Once this occurs, it would become impossible for him to judge the worth of \u201cthe other\u201d by standards worked out within the heterosexual community.\u00a0 But Cardinal Ratzinger is unwilling and perhaps even incapable of going there.<\/p>\n

So, what does he do?\u00a0 He conveniently closes his eyes to \u201cthe other\u201d and persists in believing that there is one, universal norm for human sexuality and that he had defined it and that God himself approves of it.\u00a0 And since he is comfortable with being in the majority and having power over the minority, he quietly loses sight of the instinctual \u201cjust plain disgusting\u201d aspect of homosexual sex that undergirds his ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY in this matter.\u00a0 Even if the Bible were completely silent on this matter and even if same-sex couples could be shown to love and to raise healthy children that were never inclined toward homosexuality, Cardinal Ratzinger would still have the feeling in his gut that gay sex life was \u201cjust plain disgusting\u201d and accordingly \u201cjust plain wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cardinal Ratzinger cannot acknowledge the impact of his gut experience on his moral reasoning.<\/span>\u00a0 Why not?\u00a0 Because he has been taught to conceal his emotions and to rely exclusively upon rational arguments.\u00a0 So, he has cobbled together a careful list of rational arguments.\u00a0 When one examines them carefully as we did in Chapter Two, it quickly appears that his arguments don\u2019t hold up under close examination.\u00a0 So why didn\u2019t someone do what I did in Chapter Two much earlier?\u00a0 Fear.\u00a0 If big name theologians were being called on the carpet and being silenced right and left, what chance would I have to be heard?\u00a0 What chance would I even have to be published?\u00a0 The climate of oppression within the Catholic Church is so thick that Catholic publishers have willingly taken off the shelves and shredded thousands of copies of book titles that they decided were too risky to sell<\/span> because they came down on the wrong side of the issues considered \u201cclosed\u201d by the U.S. bishops.[iv]<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>Self-censorship within Catholic publishing houses<\/h6>\n

I recently published an Amazon eBook entitled, The Seven Errors of our Catholic Bishops<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 For a full year I sought to find a Catholic publisher in the USA, in Canada, or in the UK.\u00a0 In all, I identified and contacted ten publishers who had already marketed some moderately provocative critical studies.\u00a0 Six turned me down on the grounds that my book would \u201cnot fit into their current marketing categories.\u201d\u00a0 Four of the presses never responded even when I prompted them to do so after two months.\u00a0 Only one publisher, a scholar who trusted me, could tell me that the free and open discussion that Pope Francis revived during the two recent Synods has not yet caught on within the editorial boards of Catholic publishers.\u00a0 \u201cThey are still in the mode of self-censorship as the necessary precaution to insure the ongoing episcopal approval upon which their survival depends.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, there you have it.\u00a0 The bishops, for the most part, have been groomed to trust only compliant authors.\u00a0 And Ratzinger has been \u201cthe bulldog of the Vatican\u201d insuring that deviant authors would be exposed, silenced, and, if necessary, purged from the Church.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Absolute rules laid down for moral sex in the past<\/h6>\n

At this juncture, Cardinal Ratzinger become a sympathizer with the millions of solid and upstanding Southern gentlemen who knew that \u201cmarriage between a White man and a Nigger\u201d was \u201cunnatural,\u201d \u201cdisordered,\u201d and \u201cimmoral\u201d\u2014something that no decent, God-loving society could ever approve.[v]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 These Southern gentlemen had their favorite Bible passages and they had the hard-won wisdom of their fathers and grandfathers guiding their judgment.\u00a0 But even if the Bible was completely silent on this matter and even if interracial couples could be shown to truly love and truly cherish each other, they would still rely upon the feeling in their gut to uphold their ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that interracial marriages were \u201cdisgusting\u201d and \u201cmorally intolerable.\u201d\u00a0 And even though they knew that their \u201cgrandpappies\u201d had plenty of sex with the attractive female slaves in the barn, they would swear on the Bible that this sexual dalliance never diminished by even a hair\u2019s breadth the absolute devotion their grandfathers had for their Southern wives and their Southern children and their Southern God.<\/p>\n

In the past, sincere individuals maintained various absolute constructs of when sexual activity was permitted and when it was banned.\u00a0 Here are three such positions:<\/p>\n