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Children, Labels and Love
12 years ago
GeoffroiDeCharnyBrothers and Sisters,
I (Geoffrey) want to first of all say how happy I am for Matthias and his family, that they are going to have their little Angie baptized. I'm very glad for the good care and love that they have shown her, both physically (I assume they're excellent and devoted parents, judging by Matthias' character) and spiritually. I have no doubt that they will fulfill their vows to raise Angie up in the Faith. Congratulations.
That said, I also have something for which to thank God. My wife (whom I will call 'Lucy') and I are about nine weeks pregnant, and expect our first child sometime in January. We found out on Mother's day, and have been working hard since to prepare our little apartment. We're overjoyed, and can't thank God enough.
Now we come, though, to the ‘meat’ of the journal, something which I feel it is important to share among you, my Brothers and Sisters, along with the larger community here at FA. I read a blog called BadCatholic in which a Fransican University of Steubenville student and ardent Thomist presents solid Catholic commentary in the (sometimes shocking) language of the secular culture. I began to read it because it has several articles on pornography and how to best fight it in both your own soul and in the wider culture, but today I stumbled upon his response to a “gay” catholic priest’s “coming out.”
The Priest, Fr. Gary M. Meier, is releasing a second edition of his book “Hidden Voices, Reflections of a Gay, Catholic Priest,” which apparently is causing some controversy in the Church. Some may say we should be scandalized. After all the Church teaches that homosexual acts are gravely disordered. (CCC 2357) Others, likely including some Christian groups here on FA, may consider it a triumph and feel that congratulations are in order. Needless to say, people will talk. People will point fingers, and claim that the Church is either too lenient to this priest or that we are too ‘old-fashioned’. Either way, Fr. Meier’s voice has been heard by Marc (the author of BadCatholic), and his response was spot on.
The response was to get to the root of the problem, which is a cultural and philosophic one. He recognizes that the problem in Fr. Meier’s thinking is that he labels himself according to what he’s sexually attracted to, or what he does, reducing his God-granted personhood to “gay”. Others may reduce themselves to being “straight”, and others “pansexual”, or “zoophiles.” We label ourselves, and we tend to label others as well. The pernicious example of that old and dry accusation of “Priestly Pedophiles” reduces men, however sick or twisted, from the divinely crafted Image of God to a thing which only puts on clerical robes and preys on altar boys. Homosexuals may, in a strange though rare misogynistic twist, be antagonistic to females by labeling them “breeders.” Outside of the sexual realm, we may reduce people to politically ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’, as if these were adequate ways of describing thousands and thousands of complex human beings.
The reason we do this is because it’s rather easy. I could point a finger at a person, call it a thing, and dismiss it offhand because of my preconceived notion of what that means, in a matter of seconds. The truth is hard to face, so we prefer to mask it with words that ultimately mean “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” To give an example, I’ll express some of the things I run in to when evangelizing family and friends. I personally, being a sinful man, spent a lot of time dismissing the beliefs of those in my family who practiced Wicca without really listening to them, simply because it was “Wiccan religious banter”. More recently, preferring what I consider to be more faithful to the Liturgical Tradition of the Church, I have been guilty of ignoring some of the more recent traditions (such as the hand-holding during the Our Father). This is in part because I don’t really get why it’s there, and haven’t really asked questions about it. Others, and one can see this especially in online debates, prefer to talk at a person and decide for them what they believe. A friend of mine here on FA did that to me recently, deciding for me that because I pray to Mary I must consider her a sort of God. When I told him I don’t consider Mary a god he ignored me and insisted I do. I assume this was because of his training, not because he wanted to win or simply didn’t care. He was told that Catholics worship Mary, and so I was an ‘idolater’. End of story.
Now we have to ask, how do we as faithful Catholics approach this situation? The same way we always do: we love people. We don’t just love people in the sense the world expects, but we go beyond all expectations, giving every last bit of ourselves in imitation of Christ the King. We need to tear down this language of labels in the public square, in scientific circles, in private conversation, and we need to love people. We need to be welcoming to all people, including those who have same-sex attraction. (CCC 2358) We need to care for the needs of others, including rapists, murderers, bigots, and churls by helping their reforms. We need to be understanding (in the sense of seeking to understand) the creeds and philosophies of others, and to have respectful dialogue with them. It works. That was how I became Catholic. (Though, to be honest, I wasn’t always kind back, for which I am sorry.)
In general, this love will mean two things:
1.) We must love our neighbor as ourselves. We must look at our sinful or mistaken neighbor and see that, except for the grace of God, that person would be us. We must look at them as a whole person, and not label them according to certain characteristics. We must value their good, and pity their evil.
2.) We must love God first and foremost. Since God is Truth, we must hold to Truth as if our lives depended on Him. Because they do. We must constantly be looking outside ourselves and into the Face of God, which can be found literally everywhere. God reveals His truth in nature, in the Scriptures, through miracles, through the Family of God (read: the Church), and in each and every person.
But also this love will mean change in our very way of doing things. We must, as the Church Christ established, stop pointing fingers at people. Our labeling is harmful. It sets a bad example and encourages false ideas. By stating that someone’s a liberal or conservative Catholic we are saying that ‘there is more than one type of Catholic’, and often we’re putting ourselves at odds unnecessarily with our Brothers and Sisters. Let’s say I describe myself as a “conservative Catholic” for being pro-life and holding to a traditional understand of marriage. Then I describe my brother as a “liberal Catholic” for embracing abortion and sanctioning homosexual actions, then I am implying that those things are just a different kind of Catholicism. At least for us Catholics, we must hold to the teachings of Christ and say “this is the Catholic faith, there is no room to fudge it.” If we don’t, we’re leading our Brothers and Sisters into sin.
We must also learn who we are as a faith. If we don’t, we will crumble. We will be, as we already see, a house divided. We must look outside ourselves, to Christ and His Church, in order to love fully. We must learn the Truth before we can give Him to others. We must learn our relationship with other faiths, we must learn what they actually teach, and we must engage them on their ground. We must know the people of other faiths, and what they believe, better than they do, so that we can help them to grow in their journeys towards God.
Lastly, we need to lead people in righteousness. We need to lead by obedience. We need to lead by path-finding in the academic and political world. We need to lead in the arts. We need to lead through service and mercy. We need to ask the questions that need asking, because that is how we meet the needs of our fellow men. We need to see the wounds of the world accurately, not through the lenses of labels, and we need to treat those wounds accordingly. We need to be ready for thanklessness or hostility, we need to be ready to defend our own and give of ourselves completely. We need to be ready to intercede, because we are the body of Christ, and the body of Christ was offered on Calvary.
So how should we, practically, respond to Fr. Meier? How should we act towards each other when we fail? The response must be to hold firm in the Truth, as given by God through His Church, but to do so with love and with encouragement towards the Good. We must be among our sinful Brothers and Sisters (within reason, so as not to approve sin or have our own salvation jeopardized), and we must encourage them in their growth towards God. We must always be respectful of them as the image of God, and never reduce them to their sins. We must sow seeds among them, must not push those seeds down their throats, and must surround them with good examples. The Church is a hospital for the sinful. Let us be hospitable and loving to those who need us.
+JMJ+
[Edited 6/113 @ 12:13 PST to fix a broken link. Then again at 12:45 because they were almost all broken.]
Precisely because of labels I've been trying to reclaim the "Christian" label from Protestants and so, while I still recognize Pope Francis as the Vicar of Jesus Christ, I don't like to call myself "Catholic" unless I have to. But I'm not going to look down on those who continue to do so.
I think how Jesus treated the adulteress gives us the best way of dealing with these matters. She was caught in the act of adultery and the Pharisees brought her to Jesus, using her to try to trip Jesus up in what He would say about it. When Jesus says "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", I see it as saying "If you love God enough to be without sin yourself, your desire to stone her is a mercy, showing the true mercy behind the Law He gave to Moses; if not, your desire to stone her is hypocritical, for personal reasons, and therefore violates 'Thou shalt not kill'." He neither said that she must be stoned as the Law said, nor did He say she must not. They all dropped their stones and left, but she stayed.
And when it became clear that no one was left to condemn her, Jesus said "Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more." He did not condemn her, but He did also caution her not to sin again. He loved the sinner but condemned the sin.
It's not always easy to do that. All people are good as we are made by God and so capable of doing good--and while we all sin, we as Christians must remember that God is the foundation for the existence of everything and everyone, including the worst of sinners. They are only doing what they're doing because God allowed it, and God only ever allows evil that a greater good might come of it. Therefore there's no reason to resent them for what they're doing--we need to focus on what we can control, not what they can but we cannot. Show them the right way if they don't know--by example more so than just word--but recognize our own limitations as well. We might take pity on someone who got a speck in his eye and sincerely want to help--but if we have logs in our own eyes we can't see and can't help, much though we might want to. We must trust to God.
Please pray for me that I might take this to heart, especially in the next few months.
I'll see if I can't get a few saints backing you up too.
+JMJ+
Animals mate without much in terms of external debate. Whether they actively question whether mating is a good idea or not at a given time is probably unknowable. However, we humans can think not only about sex but the consequences of sex. We choose to have it or not have it. We can choose various ways to prevent conception if we want to have sex without worrying about offspring. It'd be nice if we were only capable of desiring sex when we want to have kids or could only have kids once we were married, but it doesn't work like that. And it doesn't help to describe what someone else feels as being 'flawed'; that tends to put people on the defensive and anything else you say - however valid - is going to be blocked or seen as an attack on the person.
If you have a way to suggest people speak on these subjects that does not at the same time say that which is sinful is not sinful then we are very interested to hear it. But The Church has always directed people to the Truth with charity, love, and mercy, forgiving as often as Christ has forgiven. If our priests and Bishops have not always been as Christ-like as we should hope, let us recall that they are inheritors of the Apostolic office. Of the twelve Apostles, one betrayed Jesus, one denied Him, nine ran away and hid, and only one stayed by the Cross and yet still didn't understand the Resurrection when he was staring into the empty tomb. They are people too and need to be treated with the same charity that we ask for all sinners.
Dominus tecum
I think the main problem is addressing the attraction to start with. There has to be some way of saying "I'm attracted to the same gender" and getting some form of support for this without being judged on it or having it be the only thing a person ends up being identified as. Hiding emotions under the rug never works out well in the long run. Confession helps, but it helps to have other people to talk to who feel the same way.
This was extremely good and well written by the way. I've always known that there was something off about the labeling of sexuality. It's not so irrelevant that it's not important to note, but people get way to caught up in the notion that being a certain thing makes them "unfit" to be something else. It irritates me because people see is as being this huge rift that makes them think they're cut off from something else. I shouldn't be irritated though. I should be loving.
All indications show that Fr. Meier is openly promoting a "homosexual lifestyle", and is stating that it is moral to commit homosexual acts. His book and his recent statements, one of which is posted above, show that he considers homosexual acts to be a licit response to the "way God created [homosexuals] to love", and that it is not an intrinsic disorder. He states that the Church is anti-gay, which is an example of his thinking in labels.
Needless to say, my personal belief is that the Father doesn't understand the teaching of the Church on homosexuality, nor on chastity. However, the nature of chastity will have to be another post down the line.
I encourage you to do just what you said: be loving. Irritation is a legitimate feeling, but we have to be examples to the world. Accept that you're irritated and chose to love as God loves.
As far as cutting themselves off, that's very true. In this example the thought is "if I'm homosexual I can't be Catholic." Well, that's not entirely true. First of all, we'd think more in the terms of "I'm attracted to the same sex", not "I am a homosexual". I am not summed up by what I'm attracted to. Secondly, the Church has never turned people away from them because of a desire or attraction, even if it's for a sinful or strange thing. The Church recognizes that people deny Christ both by word and deed. And so the Church wants those people who have denied Christ to accept Him again through Confession and the forgiveness of their sins. However, there's a real sense in which one can disagree with the Church privately but still obey by word and by deed, not encouraging others to disobey the Church. If they submit to Church teaching, even while disagreeing, they're not in sin. Nor is the person who submits and accepts Church teaching, and recognizes that disordered attractions are the gift of a cross to bear. If they seek to live a good Christian life, and do so in accordance with a well-formed conscience, they're just doing what the rest of us do with our own temptations. You accept that they're there and do the good things God gave you to do despite the temptations. /toomuchinfo
Dominus tecum
While I understand the tendency of people to label others to make those people fit into the labeller's understanding of the world, it is amazing how narrowing those labels can become. For example, I am a pagan and an anthro-artist which, to most people must mean I am a liberal politically speaking (I am not, I am a small government/Constitutional conservative) and socially speaking (I stick with "don't know, don't want to know" when it comes to other people's private lives) and probably none too fond of Christians (while I am pagan, about the only organize religion that I am not fond of is Islam, as it is practiced by the fundamentalists of the Taliban or Iranian variety...I am interested in national security and defense so learning those who have declared themselves our enemies believe is a must, after all Sun Tzu starts the Art Of War with a discussion of the importance of knowing thy enemy as a must in any form of war) . Labels just don't work to make sense of someone like me.
Labeling yourself as one thing isn't doing yourself any favors either. I don't understand why people choose to let any one thing, like sexual orientation, political bend or religion...or job title (yes, I have met people who define themselves by the job title...outside of work) . It would seem to me that reducing one's "God-given personhood to 'gay'" isn't really doing one or one's cause any favors. It turns off anyone who isn't entirely pro-openly gay. (if I had my way, there wouldn't be anyone openly anything, PDAs are annoying, gay or straight). It makes the whole darn discussion about one, single aspect of a persons life. It is extremely narrowing.
Labeling also strikes me as lazy and an excuse not to get to know someone as an individual (which might upset their carefully constructed little worlds and their version of "orthodoxy"....people who fit this description get a little weird and a bit scary when that orthodoxy is challenged) . We really should get to know people before we make a judgement about them. I have also found that, on a darker note, it makes it much easier to explain to other people (if you have to) why you don't like to work or deal with someone, should such a situation arise. It also helps to know whether or not you can trust someone. I have seen one too many situations (at work in particular) where a snap judgement has caused problems for someone I know but not for me (ie I got to know the person and found a valuable source of work information and a good person to talk to, while my friend didn't and got herself a thorn in the side due to her snap-judgement).
Labels, as Marc from Badcatholic said, try to build communities where there isn't in most cases. What he meant by that is that a label is used to imply that the people under such a label believe "x, y, and z." For example, when people are labeled as "gay" it's used to imply that they're for homosexual PDA, they're for gay marriage, and they're actively homosexual. It's readily seen that not all people who have same-sex attraction fit those assumptions.
To move into the religious realm, let's look at paganism and Protestantism. You described yourself as a "pagan". A lot of people would jump to label you over that, as you've mentioned. But you could just as easily be a Hellenistic stoic as a Norse-god-worshiping neo-pagan. You may be a wiccan or a satanist, or none of the above. Pagan implies those who have religion but are not Christian. It's a simple descriptor that's been blown out of proportion into a label. Different pagans may be part of different communities, and so may be opposed to each other.
Protestantism is much the same way. Whether you're looking at Protestantism as a whole, in which there's thousands and thousands of denominations, or even looking at, say, the Episcopalian Church. To be a protestant means simply that your branch of Christianity can be traced back (at most) to the 14th century and the writings of Luther. Because different Protestants are part of different communities with different theologies, they are necessarily opposed to each other in a lot of ways.
I'm curious what you'd say, though, if I suggested that Catholicism is a different beast all together. My personal feeling, which I also pulled from BadCatholic, is that Catholicism is what labels generally try to be. When one says "I am Catholic", there's a holistic aspect to that statement. To be Catholic means that you have ordered your entire self to follow the teachings of Christ as He presents them through the Church. Far from being a limiter, far from taking only one aspect of yourself into consideration, to be Catholic is a quite freeing description of the complete person. Catholicism is truly a community with set dogma, which allows people to be unified there. We are part of one family, united by Christ in the Eucharist. From that source of unity, Catholics then go out into the world and may be one of thousands of different things. So the label "Catholic" does not describe a "thought-construct", but an actual reality that can be verified. I suggest looking into the link I provided, as Marc puts it much better than I do.
We all could say we're ourselves and we like what we like but then where is the defining factor of our personality? It would be really hard to distinguish one person from another if we say that guy or that girl. Labels are everywhere, you can't escape them. I honestly wish I were way more feminine but I'm male and the stereotype of "obviously you're gay" begins to play a part. I am gay but labels also pertain to certain characteristics such as a gay male being very flamboyant. Labels also hurt people in unintended ways. Such as "You're a furry? So you like doing stuff with animals right?". Labels are created through distinguishing traits that stand apart from another common interest or belief.
I challenge you to go one full day without labeling people or things, I bet you can't. Labels are the backbone of everything and you can't escape them. Labels don't only apply to sexuality or the similar, it applies to literally everything.
My personal opinion is that the real defining "label" of an individual is their character. Are they a hard worker, are they honest, ect. That's at least what I was taught in scouts though, to only look at an individual by their character.
I have bias towards certain sects of Christianity but only because of personal experiences that really caused Catholicism and more or less Christianity as a whole to lose total appeal to me. It left such a bad taste that I originally hated every Christian I met. Through opening my mind to other ideas, I learned that there are those Christians who follow the bible as a moral compass and not a reason just to hate me because they don't like me. I don't identify with any belief as I really don't feel the need for one.
I hope I didn't offend anyone and if I did, I'm actually sorry but this is what I've observed from my knowledge of sociology, psychology, personal belief, and experience.