Actually building a bridge: a compassionate response to Father James Martin’s essay
This is an essay that I wrote for my zine Sad Gay Catholic which you can get on my website :)
In the aftermath of the 2016 mass shooting in Orlando, which happened in a gay club and at the time was the biggest mass shooting in the history of the United States, Father James Martin wrote a short book about the role of catholicism in the oppression of LGBT people, titled “Building a bridge: how the Catholic Church and the LGBT community can enter into a relationship of respect, compassion and sensitivity”. James Martin is an american catholic priest who has been a spokesperson for the catholic church for years now, doing a lot of outreach and also becoming the target of a lot of hatred from christian fundamentalists for his welcoming stance towards the LGBT community. We definitely don’t agree on a lot of issues (abortion is probably the biggest one) but he is a person for which I have a lot of admiration, and who I recognise is doing a lot of work for the LGBT community in his own sphere.
I suspect that many LGBT folks will look at James Martin’s attempts with distrust, so I want to reassure the queer folks who are reading this essay that my heart will always lie with the queer community: that is the group that has accepted me wholeheartedly, that provided me the tools to understand who I am and what I want from life, and my loyalty is not shaken. It’s very important to remember that our fight for acceptance does NOT need the Church’s approval, in fact historically speaking the strategies that have improved our material conditions the most have relied specifically on opposing the Church’s teaching. If we actually want to build a bridge, I think it’s important to ask the Church to do more than half of the work, because historically speaking they have been doing way more than half of the damage.
I’m not the one to hold grudges though. The fact that James Martin is so prolific in his outreach, and so patient with the parts of the Church that are the most difficult to talk to, makes him an ally worthy of the queer community’s trust, at least in my opinion. James Martin seems, at least to me, to operate in genuine good intentions, with humility and wisdom, and hearing someone who has a certain degree of authority within the Church talk about the Orlando shooting moves me. The first time I read “building a bridge” I felt nothing but fury, because it felt like I was asked for a second chance from someone who didn’t do anything to deserve it. But I have mellowed out since then, met a lot of souls who taught me a lot of things, and my adamant “no” has turned into a very cautious “maybe”.
I think I’ve been asking the wrong question: “is the Catholic Church good?” is not a particularly useful way to frame the issue, since we’re talking about an institution that is so vast and so long lived. It’s impossible to give an actual answer that is not just a glorified going in circles of pseudo-philosophising. Were the Crusades good? What about the burning of Giordano Bruno? Does it matter that they apologized for the treatment of Galileo? Is 1000 years too much time for it, or should we always be open to forgiveness no matter what? Historically and philosophically, these are all very interesting issues to discuss, but none of them cuts to the core of what I actually am seeking out. I don’t care quite as much about Galileo, because the wrong question I’ve been asking for all these years is “why did you hurt me, when you said you loved me?”. It’s much more childish, much more vulnerable. And to that question, there is no answer, it’s not an effective way to work through grief. So I want to take step zero in my forgiveness, and change my question to a more productive one: what would I need from the Church to forgive it? What would I consider a true and meaningful step in the right direction, from them? James Martin’s essay is meant to be a starting point, so I’ll try to build on top of it.
It’s incredibly important for me to specify that I can really only speak for myself. The LGBT community already has a problem -shared by most minorities- where the opinion of one member is held as the opinion of all, and I need my readers to actively reject this mentality. Many LGBT people have no need for religion, many see it as an active force of evil in society, and it is very important that the need to be accepted by the Church does not shape the activism we do: I have seen many queer catholics downplay the harm that the Church has happened, preferring to put the blame for the schism in the hands of our own community’s “disrespect” instead of any other place, probably because our community feels easier to change and control. Folks who feel rejected by the Church would love for that schism to be smaller than it is, and psychologically have an incentive to downplay it, but acceptability politics has never worked, don’t fall for it. This essay is political, but please don’t understand it as a manifesto: I am simply working through my feelings and coming out the other side with, hopefully, some useful insights. If someone hurt me and then asked for forgiveness, I have learned it is important to ask myself what I need to change for that forgiveness to happen, otherwise I am simply setting myself up for more hurt, and robbing the person who hurt me of an important chance for growth. So, with all the humility I can muster, here is what pillars I’d like the Catholic Church to lay down, for the bridge to happen.
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I will not hold back my criticism of the Church in the later paragraphs, but in the spirit of the book I’m starting my critique within my own community. I think James Martin’s requests for the LGBT community are very reasonable: he asks to not mock priests and bishops for their vow of celibacy or for their (holy) clothing, to respect the Church’s hierarchy, to set aside us vs them mentality, to listen to the teachings (not just when it’s about LGBT issues, but also when the Church speaks about the poor, the refugees, those who suffer etc.), to pray for others, to put effort into actually understanding what the life of those who work in the Church looks like. I’d also like to add that the idea that priests are secretly gay, and therefore deserving of our ridicule, is just homophobia with extra steps so let’s cut that out. Also, let’s not forget that historically speaking, many gay men and lesbians made a vow of celibacy to avoid the duties of straight marriage, so while publicly the Church was a source of oppression, in private it was providing solace and refuge to the folks who came before us. Those who think we don’t belong in the Church forget that we’ve always been here, we’ve always been everywhere.
There are plenty of queer people who think that no attempt should be made whatsoever to integrate the Catholic Church and the LGBT community, and these folks sometimes will mock the other queer folks who believe or take it as a personal insult when someone within their community goes to church, almost as if the queer christians were secret agents of the enemy infiltrating our spaces. Now, I don’t think the anti-church part of the lgbt community is completely out of line. As I said before, it’s very important that we don’t let “being accepted by the church” shape our activism: for example, it is silly to push the narrative that the reason why we’re hated and discriminated by religion is because a handful of people dance around half naked with crosses during Pride parades. I’m not a giant fan of these spectacles either, and I would love for my fellow Pride attenders to rely less on the us-vs-them rhetoric to express their rage and make their political points, but homophobia existed centuries before pride and most of it was religiously motivated. Much like in our private lives, it is never our responsibility to make sure someone doesn’t abuse us. The idea that we are causing this to ourselves is a psychological response to feeling helpless, it’s a lie that our brain tells us because it’s hurting. We feel there is no hope for acceptance and the Church will never change, so we find something else to blame that we feel we have more control over, usually within our own community, so we feel like the problem is still solvable. We can’t let this mentality shape our pragmatic response as activists. So no, it’s not “our fault” we become the target of bigotry, it’s the fault of the bigots, as you will learn from studying literally any moment in queer history.
But once we put aside the silliness of respectability politics, the folks who think that any outreach whatsoever is pointless are, quite frankly, being obtuse: religion is arguably the most consistent element of human civilization. Or maybe the second one, we might wanna reserve the first spot for being horny and a bit bisexual. My point is that many people seem to have a fundamental need to connect with something other than themselves, a higher power so to speak, and to mock that need is a misunderstanding of what makes humans happy. Especially in a community that experiences so much shame for every single thing that makes us happy, we should make an effort to keep the shaming of each other at bay: sometimes, queer joy happens in finding God, and the only appropriate response for that is tolerance.
Furthermore, the Catholic Church is literally the longest living institution in western society, with ramifications into every single branch of modern life. In many rural areas, churches are the only third place left that doesn’t charge people money for being there, representing a source of intergenerational community that is almost impossible to find anywhere else. Appealing to the Church shouldn’t be our priority, but it is undeniably a good thing that some LGBT people and allies are working to make churches more inclusive. It is a good thing if LGBT people who grow up in religious families experience less hatred from their communities, it is a good thing if grandmas change their minds about their trans grand-daughter because of their local priest, it is a good thing if less money flows from the Catholic Church into the pockets of conversion therapy centers, it is a good thing when bigoted christians fundamentalists are challenged and outnumbered by welcoming christians within their own community, it is a good thing if young queer people are able to meet peers that genuinely accept them while volunteering for their local church. I understand where people who mock religion are coming from: you’re talking to a recovering debate atheist wannabe edgelord, I am fluent in your language and in your pain. The idea that one can be queer and religious feels like a joke, and it brings up a lot of envy: why does this person get to have a good religious upbringing, and I’m paralyzed by shame? Why do they get a good relationship with their family and their community, while my parents only seem to understand the terrible sides of religion? I get that. But so much of building the LGBT community is working on ourselves, managing the grief that comes with meeting people who have it easier than us. The reward is that we get to be happy for each other, to bask in each other’s queer joy, and I think that’s worth it. The Catholic Church is an immense entity with an unfathomable amount of institutional power: the folks who are trying to reduce its power from the outside and the folks making it more progressive from the inside are on the same side.
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Let me turn my critique now to the Catholic Church. James Martin has a lot of notes in his book for his own community, and I interpret this as an ability on the part of the Church to introspect and change, which I am genuinely grateful for. I think that his pledge to use the right vocabulary, to not fire LGBT people from the Church for coming out, to celebrate masses with LGBT people, to help LGBT people be welcomed in the Church, to speak publicly in favor of the LGBT community and have them in their prayers, to take a genuine interest in our lives and ask us questions about our identities and faith, to recognise the unique gifts that LGBT people bring to the Church (both as a community and as individuals) are important messages that lots of Church-goers need to hear. Many people in the west will find this message disheartening, a sort of “wow we’re so behind that we still need to remind people that gay men are not struggling with homosexual feelings??” but, as James Martin himself points out, we need to remember that the Catholic Church is huge, and what seems outdated in New York might be revolutionary in a small village in Latin America. He calls us “beloved children of God” which makes me produce one (1) serotonin so thanks for that. I also really appreciate how he points out that the majority of bishops he knows want to reach out to the LGBT community, and that the Pope himself seems a lot more open to the bridge than his predecessors and he is more important than the local priests. Furthermore, James Martin reminds the Church about its duty to stand with the marginalized: in some countries people can be jailed and executed for being LGBT, and in those countries the church has an absolute duty to stand with them and help them. Publicly. Always remember that fascism’s greatest ally is the silent majority, because fascists often make up the lie that everyone “secretly” agrees with them and are just too scared to speak up.
James Martin asks us for the gift of time, which to a community so young and so impatient like the queer one, feels like asking for the moon. The cynical part of me wants to respond that well, it’s not like we have a choice, really. The more vulnerable part of me wants to look at Pope Francis’s declaration that the Church should apologize to the lgbt community for marginalizing them, and see a glimmer of hope there. The Catholic Church is so hard to love back, as a queer person, it’s a constant frustrating tango of one step forward and two step backwards. When I’m asked to just look at the steps forward, the drag queen inside me wants to scream. But hey, at least it’s something. I try to remind myself that every progress is progress, and what is for me cringe and not enough, might bring a lot of joy to some other queer person, somewhere else. It’s truly magical how I always find more hope, the second I start thinking about my queer siblings. Precisely because of this deep sense of connection that I feel towards other lgbt folks, I feel emboldened to wish big.
The Bible passage that James Martin offers for reflection is Psalm 139:14, which goes “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” and he says this is the passage that resonates the most with the LGBT community. I find it easy to believe: it’s wholesome and beautifully made, but it also repeats the core of what many LGBT people have needed to tell themselves in order to survive. The core of the divide between the Catholic Church and the queer community, from an ideological and philosophical point of view, seems to be that being queer is condemned as a sin by the church, and celebrated as a gift by our community. The reason why so many queer people resonate with this Bible passage is because, in my experience, many of us understand our queer identities as fundamental parts of ourselves. Being lgbt is something that runs deep: it’s not just who we want to sleep with, it’s also the way we love, the way we move (or don’t move) through the world, the body we have. It’s almost impossible to believe in God, be queer and not see our queerness as something that God Himself put in our souls. I don’t mean to dismiss the experience of the queer folks who think their identity is no big deal by the way, I think it’s very valid to see ourselves as “more than just a queer person”. I personally think of myself as a tapestry, an intricate entanglement of many colors, and I think of my identity as the red thread: I am not a red tapestry, that would be quite boring, but I also can’t remove the red without undoing the whole art piece. This is why we resonate so much with the “fearfully and wonderfully made” passage, and why so much of queer tradition is rooted in the “born this way” rhetoric, because emotionally speaking it’s easy to understand and resonate with: if God is real, he definitely put that red thread there Himself. As the prophet Lady Gaga said, “God makes no mistakes”.
I wish that homosexuality wasn’t considered a sin. I understand that this is a very tall order, and I don’t really have a rational way to justify it or a perfectly crafted argument to get us there. I have a feeling that religious things are designed to elude reasoning. What I do know is that when I kiss women my soul sings. If we all agree that there is a little speck of divinity in me, then we need to accept that it’s a very bisexual speck. I wish homosexuality wasn’t considered a sin, because frankly I think it isn’t. It doesn’t corrupt the soul, it doesn’t push us away from God, it doesn’t hurt anyone. Queer joy is divine, and we are fearfully and wonderfully made.