Sex, lies, and Catholicism

Seventh-century icon of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, 4th-century martyrs who some believe united in a wedding-like ritual of "adelphopoiesis". Via Wikipedia.

The money grafs, for me, in the Times coverage (by Jason Horowitz, and really worth reading) of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò's lurid accusations that Pope Francis has been orchestrating a multiyear coverup of the sins of Cardinal McCarrick isn't the fact that Viganò was involved in a coverup himself, while he was serving as nuncio in the US in April 2014, when he ordered a halt to investigations of sexual misconduct with adult men and seminarians on the part of Archbishop John Niestedt of St. Paul, which I more or less knew, or that he was responsible for embarrassing the pope by arranging a meeting for him with Kim Davis, the gay marriage-license martyr town clerk from Kentucky, which I used to know, but the way he fought against being shipped to the US in the first place:

Throughout his power struggle, Archbishop Viganò had been writing urgent appeals to Benedict to stay in the Vatican.

He said he needed to stay because his brother, a Jesuit biblical scholar, was sick and needed care, and he accused Cardinal Bertone of breaking his promise to promote him to the rank of cardinal....

But Archbishop Viganò’s brother, Lorenzo Viganò, told Italian journalists that his brother “lied” to Benedict that he had to remain in Rome “because he had to take care of me, sick.” To the contrary, he said he had lived in Chicago and was fine and hadn’t talked to his brother in years over an inheritance dispute.

Viganò is really a big liar, a shameful thing to say about a 77-year-old archbishop. If you read his scabrous letter with the understanding that he's probably lying, it reads more coherently, and if conservative Catholics down to our own nuncio Monsignor Douthat are taking it seriously, it's because they really, really want to—Douthat shows he doesn't really believe it by offering his own fictional account of the McCarrick business in which Viganò's accusations are false but Francis is still sort of guilty:

he might have been given some knowledge, by Viganò and others, of the allegations against McCarrick but either assumed they couldn’t be that bad (at this point the cardinal mostly stood accused of imposing himself on seminarians, not teenage minors) or else chose to believe a denial from the accused cardinal himself. Why? In part because of perceived self-interest: Francis needed allies, McCarrick was sympathetic to the pope’s planned liberalizing push, and the pope wanted his help reshaping the ranks of American bishops. In this scenario Francis would be guilty of self-deception and incuriosity but not as nakedly culpable as Viganò implies. 

That's so Ross: "Even if Archbishop Viganò is lying, he could still be right, basically, so can't we just go on with that assumption?" Not saying, just saying.

I would like to pontificate a bit myself, if you don't mind, because there's so much I like in that church myself, though I'd never be able to bring myself to believe. There are two issues involving sex among the celibate clergy in its single-sex communities: the one we really ought to be concerned about, sexual abuse, especially of kids, which is really horrible and seems more pervasive every time somebody takes a good look, till you want to burn the whole cult down and leave it for dead; and the practice of what you might call adult, resolved homosexuality, of gay priests and monks and nuns who, living together in the hothouse atmosphere, inevitably get involved with each other, fall in love, and certainly at least sometimes form healthy marriage-like attachments (but deeply unhealthy in that they have to be kept secret). Ultra-conservative Catholics like Archbishop Viganò have seemed unable to take the former seriously, but the latter fills them with panic and paranoia; they talk about a Lavender Mafia, trying to take over the church, and of course they think it's inevitably Liberal, Madonna mia!, and likely to lead to even worse horrors, like allowing divorced people to take Communion or disbelieving in Hell.

Getting these two issues mixed up with each other is a cause of great distress and inability to fix the situation. It leads the authoritarians to claim that homosexuality and beastly Modernism are the cause of the abuse that has been revealed in recent years, as if it hadn't been going on for centuries. It makes it impossible for even the best people inside the church, including Francis, to be honest about it, because of course it's church dogma that sodomy is a grave mortal sin, even when it's not violent at all and an expression of sincere love, so it's only us outside the church who can talk about it straight.

The first, violent and criminal, thing is endemic at least among men in any constrained all-male environment—prison, the old sexually segregated military, college wrestling as we've recently been reminded by the case of the late Coach Richard Strauss and the vile Representative Jordan (R-OH), and as we know the guys who do the assaulting don't even typically regard themselves as gay, merely entitled. That's why authoritarians in the hierarchy can't convincingly pretend to be bothered by it. They aren't. It's rough discipline, punishing the crybabies. But it's gross and criminal, and it really shouldn't be allowed, and institutions that can't prevent it shouldn't exist. Hurray for the integrated military!

But there are undoubtedly plenty of gay men in the priesthood as well, in a harmless sense (if I was in a joking mood I'd suggest they like it for the drag), who don't treat anybody violently and who just want a little happiness. Their thing is deeply subversive, and that's why the authoritarians hate it so much. But I think if the church is to survive another two thousand years it is going to have to do not just the one thing of allowing a married clergy, as they did for the first thousand, it is going to have to allow same-sex marriage, right in the ranks, as well. The only way to end the horrors of these abuse scandals is to let men find a healthy and adjusted and nonviolent way of being sexual, and if they can't do it they're always going to be like this. Francis isn't going to like that at all, I'm afraid.