PRIESTS SAY THE DARNEDEST THINGS: I'll link you all to the video of my panel at that Fordham U. "Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church" conference [ETA: when it is posted]. I'd intended to do a full set of notes on the conference but really I think I only have one thing to say, which is that I noticed a recurring theme of putting (what I consider to be) overly-intense pressure on what is said by priests.

You guys already know that I am basically anti-clerical in attitude. And I completely realize that my stance can be self-centered and adolescent. Viewing priests merely as sacrament-dispensing machines, as I tend to do, leaves the layperson shallow and the priest without either the support he needs to exercise his ministry or the pressure he needs to spur him to perform well. Priesthood is a leadership role, and leaders need both support and challenge in order to wield authority effectively and well.

That said, here are some reasons not to picture a priest when you picture the Catholic Church. These are reasons that a layperson-to-priest attitude of empathy at best, wry distance at worst, will serve both parties much better than a surfeit of awe.

1. Priests will inevitably say very stupid or inappropriate or hurtful things. They will sometimes say these things while specifically claiming to speak for the Church. They are wrong. Don't give priests the power to define the Church or Her teaching in your mind.

2. Priests know they mess up, and they feel a lot of stress and sorrow over their own mistakes and flaws. Fr. John P. Duffell, a gritty New York guy of the old school whom I very much liked on a personal level (despite one thing he said which I thought was seriously, deeply wrong), made this point explicitly at the conference.

3. It's easy to resent priests if you view them as wielding power, rather than making themselves radically available (even disposable) to their people.

4. The laity's awe makes it easy for priests to cover up for their own or others' sins. I don't really think I need to give evidence of this claim. When the coverup ends, then, the awe (which should never have been extended in quite the way it was, in the first place) then curdles into furious mistrust of authority. This isn't in any way to let priests who abuse people's trust off the hook, just to suggest that the attitudes of the laity can make a bad situation worse.

5. At the conference many people conflated the hierarchy of the church--the priests and archbishops and cardinals and popes, all those men in odd hats--with the teaching of the Church. This allowed them to force a wedge between the Body of Christ and those aspects of the Catholic faith with which they disagreed, such as sexual morality. It also meant that the validity of the teaching stood or fell based on the personal holiness of the hierarchy. Without this conflation one would have to admit that the teaching of the Catholic Church--including Her hardest lessons--stands closer to the lives of the saints than to the lives of the popes.

A conversation in the taxi on the way back from the conference underscored some of these issues in my mind. One of the other panelists and I were talking about how institutions gain loyalty and love through creating personae. The other lady asked, "So who is the person who represents the Church, then? The Pope, I guess."

I really don't think it's the Pope, and I said so. I fumbled around with some unhelpful attempts at alternative images before I figured out what I wanted to say. I said that I picture the Bride of Christ, the bride from the Song of Songs; or sometimes Mary. Those are my icons of the Catholic Church.

ORDER FROM CONFUSION SPRUNG: As promised, some thoughts on the problems with the "intrinsically disordered" jargon the Church currently uses to describe homosexuality.

I want to open by saying that the Catholic Church speaks a lot of languages. I have a really hard time with natural-law talk, for example, and also with Carmelite spirituality, even though both of those are really different! Whereas I respond really strongly to "theology of the body" and, to a certain extent, Christian neo-Platonism. But the great thing about the Church is that you do not have to buy in to any one particular vocabulary.

The fact that the Church currently uses a certain way of talking about gay people (and, for that matter, the fact that "gay identity" as such is just over a century old--that doesn't make it fake, it just makes it one way among many of talking about same-sex desire) doesn't mean that you need to buy the vocabulary in order to live out the teaching. If the way the Church talks gets in the way of your chastity, ignore it. (Or I guess I should say, try to find and develop other ways of talking about gay life; but reworking the Church's language might not be part of your vocation, in which case I think ignoring the language while living by the teaching is the best way to operate.) Your chastity and your unstinting fidelity to Christ are so much bigger and more beautiful than any one theological framework. So yeah, don't have gay sex; but you can think about that sacrifice and challenge in a whole lot of different ways, including ways which might shock your local priest.

Having said that, here's my problem with the "intrinsically disordered" language: I think it relies on a mechanistic understanding of eros. If sexual desire can be easily tweezed away from nonsexual longing and love and adoration then yeah, sure, I guess I can see the point of calling homosexual desire "disordered." But that's not how eros actually works! My lesbianism is part of why I form the friendships I form. It's part of why I volunteer at a pregnancy center. Not because I'm attracted to the women I counsel, but because my connection to other women does have an adoring and erotic component, and I wanted to find a way to express that connection through works of mercy. My lesbianism is part of why I love the authors I love. It's inextricable from who I am and how I live in the world. Therefore I can't help but think it's inextricable from my vocation.

And what's funny is that even the defenders of the "intrinsically disordered" language are defending so little. Basically all of them say one of two things: either "everything you do which is influenced by your lesbianism is tainted," which is bleakly hilarious if you've ever nursed a sick woman through her illness in part because you loved and were attracted to her; or "it just means that your eros can never be acted on, whereas even wrongly-directed heterosexual eros might be in some hypothetical made-up world." Which is like... do we really want to be encouraging unhappily-married heteros to think, "I could totally act on this desire and it would be ordered!... you know, if the old ball-and-chain died, or we got an annulment"? I mean, at that point literally nothing is added by the "explanatory" language of disorder which wasn't already stated by the bare moral teaching: You don't get to have sex with ladies, case closed. I knew that already! What extra work is this jargon doing? It doesn't even make straight people feel superior, since none of them know or think about it unless their kids are gay.

I am a lot more tentative about proposing alternate ways of understanding Catholic moral teaching on sexuality, alternate vocabularies. I think this post, where I describe what lesbianism feels like to me, might be a starting point.

I genuinely believe that eros requires that the focus of our desire be Other in some important way. And so the process by which homosexual desire transforms members of one's own sex into Other--the process by which pretty girls become iconic women, and therefore available for me as focus points of my eros--is fascinating to me, and I think it's genuinely sublime. That said, I don't think it's too hard to do the math on "eros is directed toward the Other + sex difference, la difference, is the fundamental difference in human nature = homosexuality requires an alienation from self, from eros, or from the beloved, so that likeness can begin to seem Other when in fact it is not."

I'm not sure yet if that's how I want to talk about Catholic theology of sex. But I do think we can all try to work through what being gay feels like, and thereby come up with a vastly broader and better set of vocabularies than the ridiculously, painfully limited set the Church is working with right now.

One final note, which is maybe bitchy but I don't know a better way to do this: Please don't use the Church's current failures and lacunae and flinching uncourtesy as an excuse to wallow in self-pity. Yes, the "intrinsically disordered" language sucks and is a mark of privilege, the kind of thing you only say if you don't feel it yourself or don't care about the other people who feel it. But if you focus on the failures of the Church's language, not only do you lose the opportunity (which, again, may not be your vocation) to improve that language, but you also lose out on everything else the Church offers. Self-pity is I think the least Christian emotion in the history of ever, and it's worth thinking hard about whether and to what extent and where your problems with the Church are really problems with the way the Church hierarchs express themselves right now. In which case, prayers to Joan of Arc would seem to be in order.

And in general, if you have to entertain negative emotions toward the Church (and God knows I do), I highly recommend bitchy and bitter over self-pitying comfort. That's my considered aesthetic judgment and I'll stick to it until you pry my rosary out of my cold, dead hands.