It may well be one of the craziest things the Pope has said up to this point in his… um, what do I call it… Reign? Rule? Pontification?
According to Eve Tushnet from Vox:
On June 26, while flying back from a trip to Armenia, Pope Francis told a reporter that he agreed with Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Germany: The Catholic Church owes an apology to gay people.
The pope's comments were short but rambling — not as deft and pithy as his well-known statement from an earlier airplane interview, "If [gay people] accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them?"— but even the best apology is only a beginning. Good apologies allow us to live together instead of separately, and therefore they challenge us to live in new ways we couldn't have come up with on our own. So here are a few thoughts on how Catholics can begin to walk through the door our pope has opened.
To be honest, I had to look up Cardinal Marx to find out just what was said, and it turns out, he’s pretty extreme. According to the National Catholic Reporter that he…
wants the church to do more than apologize to gay people -- a statement Pope Francis affirmed June 26. He said society must create structures to respect their rights, like civil unions, and the church should "not to be against them."
My choice of the word extreme in this case is that he’s saying something that really goes against the mainstream of Catholicism—not to mention Christianity. But then this Pope has been a bit extreme when it comes to the Catholic Church’s position on a lot of social issues. He seems determined to introduce Jesus back into Christianity.
A lot of people are going to note that he used the term: union rather than marriage. I don’t know if it was on purpose, but I suspect it was. Still, this is a big deal. I’m not going to debate semantics here, though I’m not denying that they should be debated. What I’m saying is this: the largest Christian organization on earth is grappling with the damage they have done to gay people over the years, and they’re finally at the point of seeking real atonement.
There will be those that will refuse to accept the apology. Their go-to response is: “Too little too late!”
I hate that term: Too little too late. While it makes sense in the short-term, it’s sort-sighted. Life is a crazy, long, zee-shaped road that sometimes takes so many twists and turns and that you never quite know when and where you’re going to end up. For some of us, of course it is too little, or too late, but for the general trajectory that is life, that’s not necessarily true. Hell, evolution itself has taken eons to get us to this point now.
It’s also true that I don’t have to accept every apology I’m offered, but that an apology is being offered is significant. Is it sincere? From this Pope, I think it is. Will it matter? I think more than we can ever know, and here’s why...
As a non-Christian—more precisely, as an EX-Christian, I am constantly hit with Pascal’s Wager.
Blaise Pascal postulated that it would payoff either way. If you lived as a Christian, and it turned out that there was no god, you’ve lost nothing. However, if you lived your life as a non-theist, and there was a god, then you’ve lost everything.
What he didn’t mention though, and what nobody else does either, is the true cost of embracing any God—particularly this god. This god demands that if I’m to embrace him, I must surrender my soul.
Let’s explore that. I must cede my values and dreams to someone else. I’m literally ‘outsourcing’ my ‘morality’ to bronze-aged men whose ideas of right and wrong are completely against my values.
Consider what this might look like:
After surrendering my soul, my daughter is raped. And let’s just assume that it was a “legitimate rape." Having ceded my soul, I am “morally” obligated to ferret out whether or not it was an enjoyable rape, or an easy rape—in which case, she is only getting what she deserved.
Let’s say that even after I took her to the emergency room for her shot of estrogen (emergency rape), she still ends up pregnant. Well, then, this is a Gift from God rape. The fact that she would even consider an abortion shows that she has still not ceded her soul to God, since this is what God intended. And if she still choses the abortion, then I must abandon her. The owner of my soul says I must, regardless of how much I love her.
As someone who kept my soul instead, I have better options. I can comfort my daughter. I can listen as she shares her anger, her fear, her frustration, and her confusion. I can be a safe place for her to grieve and heal. If she gets pregnant, I can support her choice—whatever that choice may be. Together the two of us can look for ways to handle this crisis in a way that supports us as human beings, and father and daughter.
Or let’s take another scenario:
My son comes out to me as gay. Having ceded my soul, I am morally obliged to confront him: I must demand that he, too, surrender his soul or suffer the wrath of God. I must remind him that if he continues, he will suffer the wrath of God.
- If I had cede my soul like Pastor Dennis Leatherman, I would know that homosexuality is so wrong that I would regularly struggle with killing my son myself.
- If I had ceded my soul like Curtis Knapp, of New Hope Baptist Church in Kansas, I could insinuate that the Constitution guarantees a more perfect union by “killing the gay away.”
- If I had ceded my soul like Sean Harris, Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, NC, I could just punch my son in the mouth.
- If I had ceded my soul like Charles Worley, Providence Baptist Church, Maiden, NC, I could just suggest we “Build a great, big, large fence, 150 or 100 mile long. Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals, and have that fence electrified till they can't get out. Feed 'em. And you know what? In a few years they'll die out. You know why? They can't reproduce.”
But since I’ve refused to surrender my soul, I can take a human approach. I can love my son, embrace him, support him, and let him teach me about his life—and what being a gay man entails in a soulless world so opposed to him. I can teach him how I learned to love the best I know how, and that love, and loving, are things we do not only to make ourselves feel better, but also to bring humanity together. I can support his search for happiness, his right to be happy, and experience joy. I can also do my best to keep him safe from a legal perspective.
So what does this have to do with the apology?
And this is why I think the apology is such a big deal. It means, that the church, and the leader of the church, is considering taking back his (their) soul, and in doing so, taking a more human approach to the human condition.
This is not only a good start, it’s a return to humanity. Once they are again responsible for their own soul, they’ll be able to relate to humanity in a far more humane fashion.