In this end of year-beginning of year blog I am embarking on an ambitious task.
I want to use the revolutionary mission of Jose Rizal for the liberation of the Filipino people from Spanish and friar suffocation (murder) – as something of a model for the liberation of LGBT people of the Philippines from the suffocation of homophobic religion and society.
I am inspired by Floro C . Quibuyen. I recently had a chance to meet Dr. Quibuyen, attend his lecture on Rizal as a revolutionary, and purchase his revised scholarly study of Rizal, “A Nation Aborted.”
I apologize that I cannot do justice to this incomparable study of Rizal. I can only attest to its being a source of immense inspiration to me. This is first because the subject is very near and dear to my heart, and second because of the impeccable literary and scholarly methodology which enhances its credibility and appeal.
And so, the project I am embarking on combines my two research and literary “loves,” Rizal and LGBT liberation.
I never regretted that I joined the left-leaning and short-lived “Gay Liberation Front” in 1971. It had a revolutionary concept that I have never let go of since.
This present day project will consist of a pattern of inspirational quotations from Dr. Quibuyen’s work followed by a commentary on LGBT liberation. The “lead” quote regarding Rizal will be 100% fact. The follow up commentary will be largely wishful fiction – in some ways like unto the wishful fiction of the Noli and Fili.
The biggest wish would be to see the work have even a fraction of the influence on LGBT liberation that the Noli and Fili had on the liberation of the Filipino people.
Surely this work, like Rizal’s works, will play a role in clarifying what LGBT people need liberation “from” and perhaps will even chart a course for reaching that much-hoped-for liberation.
(Let me note that there are multiple delightful scholarly “angles” explored and commented on by Dr. Quibuyen. Regretfully in this “short” project, for the sake of focus, I will avoid discussion of “side issues” that add so much richness to Professor Quibuyen’s work.)
(Let me note also from the beginning that there is no evidence to support stating that Rizal was gay in the sense of having an amorous, loving relationship or attraction to persons of the same sex, just as there is no evidence to indicate that Jesus, who had a “beloved disciple,” was gay, or that (future) King David of Biblical fame, who had a sworn relationship with Jonathan, was enjoying a sexual relationship with the one whose love “surpassed that of women.” Those are not issues of this discussion. Rizal did indeed exhibit finer sensibilities often associated with gay men. Here, the real issue is whether gay men, lesbians and women who love women, and bisexuals, and transsexuals can learn from the revolutionary insights of Rizal and apply them for the liberation of the LGBT people from the terrors and tyranny of heterosexist and homophobic domination and persecution?)
My first Rizal inspiration selection is from page 10 of the second edition of A Nation Aborted.
“Rizal’s vision was of a nation as an ethical community…
He was convinced that the road to national liberation, freedom, and justice was not via the violent seizure of state power… but through local, grass-roots community oriented struggles in civil society…
What if [such] local efforts and projects were replicated throughout the Philippines?”
[My comment: he knew about, read about and studied the French and American revolutions, and he developed a different idea of how to go about it.]
Philippine LGBT commentary
Gay was not born yesterday. Nor was Lez. They knew about stonewall. They knew how LGBT people around the world had been marching for freedom and justice for more than 25 years.
They were Filipino(a) to the core — in mind and spirit. They idolized Jose Rizal and their consciousness was slowly awakening to the magnitude of Rizal’s contribution to the liberation of the Filipino(a) people.
Even before Starbucks they sat down over coffee. They talked about what needed to be done for LGBT people of the Philippines. They talked about Rizal’s vision for liberation, freedom, and justice. Then Gay said, “Surely, 25 years after Stonewall the time has come for a Rizal-type revolution in the Philippines for the oppressed LGBT people.”
Lez replied, “I suppose Rizal had similar ideas when he thought how long it had been since the shameful execution in 1872 of the Gomburza fathers. You know, Gay, we are both active and experienced in civil society. We have seen a lot of action, demonstrating, marching. Let’s do all that, but let’s have a long term plan.”Yes, a master plan,” added Gay.
“Hold on,” Lez cut in. “Let’s make another commitment.”
“What’s that?” Gay asked.
“I would like for us to make a commitment from the start to recognize the equality of all people.”
“Yes, yes,” said Gay, “I am all for that.”
“We can start out,” Lez explained, “by emphasizing our attitude of equality by using inclusive language, language that includes everyone, not just men or women, but both.”
“Of course,” Gay assured her, “I am for that. Give me an example.”
“I said we need a long term plan. You said we need a master plan. You see the master is the ‘boss man’ and that does not emphasize equality.”
“Ah, I see,” said Gay, as if awakening from sleep. “I need to be alert and clean up my masculine dominated language.”
“Well,” Lez said with a cheerful smile, “Let’s get back to our long term plan.”
“We can’t do it alone,” Gay said. Rizal could not do it alone. Bonifacio could not do it alone. I am sure we both know like-minded people. I have a friend named Tran, who is even school-trained with a master’s in activism, or something like that. I will invite her to meet with us.”
“I was thinking of my very wise friend, Bi,” Lez replied. He could help us develop these ideas.”
It took time. Others came forward. Gay had a friend, known as Pastor Gay who had organized a church for reform and action on the religion front. They recognized the same kind of abuse against LGBT people in today’s society that the friars had imposed on the native people of the Philippines in general.
Within a year the dyed-in-the-wool activists formed themselves into an organization to do what they do best – street action, demonstration, and attention getting.
Pastor Gay and Gay Pro, a leader in the activist group, got together and got their groups, which were the first openly out and activist groups in the country, to co-sponsor the first LGBT march and rally in the country on the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, and it turned out to be the first such march and rally in the whole of Asia.
Bi observed in the coffee shop discussions that “there was a lot of publicity in newspapers and television, and even magazines, about this first small march, but did we know how, did we have a plan for getting the most out of this publicity for the liberation of our people?”
One day at the coffee shop Lez announced, “We have gathered together women who love women, and we are already talking about what we need to do most. Some think it is ‘sisterhood.’ Others think the sisters need to help each other understand what it means to be a ‘sister.’ They are already planning to write a book about it.”
Pastor Gay said, ”That’s what we are doing. We have a church of LBGT Christians and we teach ourselves that God loves us LGBT people unconditionally, and nobody can take that away from us. We don’t just have Sunday sermons, but we have week night discussions on our right to have and claim the love our God offers us, with no strings attached.”
Then the political activists got together and started talking about what laws were needed for LGBT people.
Gay Pol came to the coffee shop and explained, “The political activists are convinced that what we need to start with is an anti-discrimination bill. Gay Abro, who also had been involved in starting an activist LGBT group on the university campus, took on the job of writing the anti-discrimination bill.”
That was exciting news for the coffee shop talk group. Soon they found out that the bill was introduced into the congress by Rep. Etta Rosales. Members of the coffee shop group testified for it in hearings in congress. It passed the House of Representatives. Sadly it died for lack of action in the Senate. (This was the fate of hundreds of other bills, so Gay Pol said, “At this time we cannot see the hand of homophobia in the lack of Senate action at this time.”)
So they talked at the coffee shop. Gay Pol announced that the political activists would hold a weeklong workshop to study the manifestations, extent, and effects of homophobia and discrimination. That project resulted in a Noli Me Tangere of “evils” that LGBT people were experiencing.
Now over the years while all this scattered action was developing, Gay, Lez, Bi, Tran , Pastor Gay, Gay Pol and friends formed a coalition composed of representatives from all the groups to keep the annual marches marching every year. In 1998 the LGBT parade even marched in front of the President of the Republic in the Centennial Citizens Freedom Parade.
As the years went by with parades every year, with many organizations doing their thing, Gay, Lez, Bi, Tran and friends were reflecting on the scattered efforts that were made at Rizal’s time. A little activity here and there, books were published, magazines were written, the Liga was started, Rizal was arrested and sent into exile, the Katipunan secretly began. But nothing was happening to bring about the dream of freedom from injustice.
In the coffee shop, by now it was Starbucks and competitors, the long term plan was slowly evolving.
They did not debate whether Rizal “recanted” or not. They focused their whole attention, energy, brain power and zeal on bringing freedom and justice to their people.
Lez said, “I am appalled by the abuses our people continue to suffer.”
“For me,” Gay said, “I am deeply saddened, driven to action, when I realize that year after year the Anti Discrimination Bill of Rep. Etta Rosales does not get passed in both houses of the Congress.”
“You know,” Bi said, “This year it was deliberately blocked by the political anti LGBT maneuvers of a certain Protestant bishop who is a member of the House. Just plain bigotry, and he got away with it because of the apathy of the others.”
Tran told them that she “would like to get married just like her sister did with a beautiful wedding, marching down the aisle in her fabulous wedding gown and veil, but we all know that fighting for same-sex marriage is not our priority in itself. Respect, equality, yes, and marriage is surely a symbol of equality.”
Then they put their heads together. Gay said, “We can look back in history and see that nothing was happening for decades as the colonial abuses continued from Gomburza to Rizal, and before and after. Rizal had a dream, a vision, an idea for a liberated nation of free people. But nothing happened.”
Lez pleaded, “Let’s don’t continue this scattered ineffective approach.”
Pastor Gay said, “Let’s look at Rizal’s vision again. He wanted the Philippine nation to be an ethical society. What in the world is an ethical society?”
"But what did Rizal mean,” Lez asked, “by local grass-roots community oriented struggles in civil society?”
“Then the question is,” Bi asked, ”What are the local projects that can be replicated throughout the Philippines so that our people can be set free and enjoy justice?”
They agreed the time for just talk talk was over. The time was long past for a long term plan, inspired by Rizal, that could be followed to bring about freedom and justice for the LGBT people of the Philippines.
To be continued.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Merry Christmas -- all year round
Merry Christmas -- all year roundThat's my Christmas message this year.
It's a message originally designed for "lovers."
But I am sure we can find many applications.
My Christmas message this year, for my first octogenarian Christmas, can be a wonderful experience for you in many situations in your life.
When people come to us for a Holy Union, we discuss with them at some length a concept of "love" which I call, "Love's Bottom Line."
I started this practice only about 3 and half years ago, and I wish I had started 30 years ago.
NOW I am getting emails from around the world, "Since our wedding in your chapel 2 years ago, we have been living happily together in London -- so grateful that you taught us Love's Bottom Line. It has made our life together very happy." Maybe you can discover the secret of :"Merry Christmas -- all year round."
Love's Bottom Line
"God is love, and wherever love, God is; those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them." I John
"The greatest love one can have is to lay down one's life for one's friend."
ByFr. Richard R. Mickley, O.S.Ae., Ph.D.
In a retreat I facilitated for 36 college students they were assigned in small groups to define "love." That triggered a lot of discussion, but hours later (well after midnight) there was a near unanimous agreement that -- it is not possible to have a definition of love which does not include the idea of "giving."
For a moment we got scriptural and reminded ourselves that God, who is Love, "so loved the people of the world that God gave Jesus…" We decided that it is pretty hard to "show" love without "giving."
When people come to us for a Holy Union to unite themselves in a loving and holy union, it's usually quite obvious that they "love" each other and are in "in love."
But we go on to explore what is the "bottom line" that makes their wedding, their union, their life together, their love make sense.
Everyone who is honest and realistic admits that they have arguments and disagreements, and sometimes some admit they have rather nasty brawls. What's at the root of these unpleasant glitches in their "love affair"? They usually agree that it's because one of them insists on "doing it my way," or saying, "I'm right and you are wrong," or saying, "I don't care what you say, I want this." Often the root of the problem is the desire, the drive, to win, to come out on top.
Now, when that happens, it leads to a deadlock, an unhappy hour or two hours, or an unhappy relationship, depending on how long the stubbornness, the obstinacy, continues.
Remember we are talking about love, about a so-called loving relationship. You can have disagreements at work, but the dynamics are quite different. You can want your own way in the work-place, but there the solution will be probably be solved on the basis of "authority" or the "good" of the work."
In a loving couple, in our day and age, we usually don't have a "boss" of the relation ship. It is now more common to think and act in an "equal relationship." (By the way, if you choose to have one person as the "boss" of the relationship, you should have some well-understood guidelines on how and when the "authority" operates.)
In a loving equal relationship you can learn to interact by following accepted methods of negotiation and compromise. Of course that takes not only some know-how, but also some practice. For most people, these skills don't come automatically, probably because of lack of good role models in our families and in society around us. I have a chapter on this in my book, Sharing and Growing, which is a full length how-to-do-it manual for building a stronger and more harmonious relationship.
Having said that, let's go back to the "bottom line." In short, the bottom line is what you have when all is said and done. In business the bottom line is what you still have left (hopefully) after the expenses are subtracted from the income.
In a relationship, the bottom line is the one thing that is the most important, most sensible reason for being together. (Or, the only sensible thing that is left after all the crazy stuff is ruled out.)
In business, people work together as partners to make money. Why do two people come together in love as a couple? We are not talking about teaming up to make money. Is it to have their own way? Is it to win arguments? Is it to fight, argue, disagree (or even agree) all the time?
Why are two people together as a couple? Is the argument you have today, or winning it, going to be important a year from now? A month from now? Will you even remember what it was about a week from now? Will it even matter tomorrow? On the other hand does it matter that both of you will have been unhappy because of it all this time?
Well, then, is the purpose of the relationship to win every argument, to be grouchy, cranky, unpleasant, downright sad because you don't get your way?
What is the one thing that makes sense? What is the one thing that makes it sane and good and pleasant for two people to be together? To call themselves a couple? If you have the answer to that for you and your partner, you will know the bottom line. Let me just note, that some of the elements could differ from couple to couple in how they go about it. (The same thing will not work for everybody. Some people seem to be born to argue, and really can't be happy unless they are arguing. And that could work for them – if both partners have this insatiable urge to be happy by arguing. There are some people who say, "Wouldn't life be boring if you never have an argument?")
So, the bottom line is not necessarily agreeing all the time. What is it? You can, and probably should, learn guidelines for negotiation and compromise, but what's the object of it all?
Especially, what is the whole idea, the sensible pujrpose, of getting together for a life of togetherness?
Both negotiation and compromise require some "giving" from each partner. So, what we want to stress is that nothing will work if it is not "two-sided" giving. And that holds doubly true for the "bottom line" for couples in a loving relationship. Remember, we suggested there can be no definition of love without including the concept of "giving."
Are you together to be unhappy? Are you together to make each other miserable? What is the one thing that makes sense? Yes. It is, "We are together to make one another happy." That's the bottom line. To make it practical, we can put it this way, in every situation, "
What can I do to make my partner happy?
How Can I Make My Partner Happy?
If I know my loved one is blissful when I bring a rose or a dozen roses, would I wait a year to bring a rose or roses? If I know my partner is a movie buff and really enjoys having me in the next seat at the cinema, will I always say, "No, I hate movies"?
Sometimes this is a hard thing to deal with. What if one likes dancing more than the other? "How can I make my partner happy?" Perhaps without a lot of explaining, perhaps this time I will go to the movie with my partner, and the next time I will go dancing with my partner, so we both have a chance to make the other happy. If one is a vegetarian, that does not mean the other has to make the supreme sacrifice and unhappily become a vegetarian, but it presents a challenge, "What can I do to make my partner happy?"
Smoking and drinking, spending money, and going out with friends can present similar challenges. If you know your partner is sick and hungry, will you set out food, or will you beg for company on the dance floor? What will bring happiness at that moment?
There is always a way when the bottom line is the starting point, and a bit of unsophisticated compromise is thrown in. (Like: My partner hates smoking; I will never smoke in my partner's presence. It's up to me to decide if my love requires me to give by "giving up" smoking.)
Going back to the definition of "love" -- giving -– if I want to give love to my partner, I find a way to show it by asking myself, "What can I do (give of myself) to make my partner happy?"
Perhaps becoming human with us, with all our suffering and pain and hardships, may not have been the most pleasant thing the Word of God could desire, but love was foremost in the being of Jesus, so that he gave himself to the fullness of human life, healing, going about doing good, but enduring hunger and sweat and suffering, and eventually torture and death as well, all because of love.
If we want to say with St. Paul, "I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me," Can we put easy limits on what we are willing to do to make our partner happy?
God is Love, and those who live in love, live in God, and God lives in them. Great things are about to happen when the starting point, the beginning attitude is not "How can I win?" but "How can I make my partner happy?"
Stop and think. What would be the result in your life? If each time you felt like prolonging an argument, you asked yourself, "How can I make my partner happy?" Or if each time your partner felt like intensifying a fight, suddenly there would be a reflection, "What can I do to make my partner happy?"
Note: this a question one asks oneself (internally). It is not something one throws in te face of the other.
Of course it takes two. It works best if both partners are saints. If both are not saints, wouldn't it be great if both tried to be – in this regard, at least. Unfortunately, the world has all too seldom witnessed the peace and joyful togetherness experienced by the couple who elevate their love to this level.
Even if the world has not seen it, you will enjoy the most wonderful, most happy, most fulfilling relationship ever possible in the history of the world if you mutually base you attitude and love on Love's Bottom Line: "How can I make my partner happy?"
St, Francis of Assisi gives us some hints on how to do this in his beautiful prayer for peace:
Lord,Make me an instrument of your peace:
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury – pardon;
Where there is doubt – faith;
Where there is darkness – light;
Where there is sadness – joy.
O Divine master,Grant
that I may not so much seek;
To be consoled – as to console;
To be understood – as to understand;
To be loved – as to love.For…
It is in giving – that we receive;
In pardoning – that we are pardoned; and,
It is in dying – that we are born to eternal life.
[In summary:It is in giving -- that we love;
It is in loving -– that we find happiness.]
(This summary added to St. Francis' prayer.)
Fr. Richard R. Mickley, O.S.Ae., Ph.D.
The Order of St. Aelred (O.S.Ae.)
St. Aelred Friendship Society (SAeF)
E-mail: saintaelred@gmail.com
Website: http://www.geocities.com/staelredmonasterymanila
Monday, December 1, 2008
HIV
Today is World AIDS Day, and I think it is timely to remind our Friends of some alarming facts about what is happening in our country. Men who have sex with men are now the leading “cases” HIV in this country.
When I came to this country 17 years ago, I was surprised that MSM sex was not the leading cause of HIV spreading in this country. I came from Los Angeles where 50 of my friends died of AIDS because they did not know what was causing AIDS (and most of them were infected even before scientists knew there was a virus and virus transmission involved).
Now we all know where HIV comes from, not from sex, but from unprotected sex.
I give only the first few scary paragraphs here. Read the whole article on Inquirer.net (Just click on the link that follows.)
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20081201-175389/Govt-warns-vs-HIV-danger-in-MSM-sector
SPECIAL REPORT: Gov’t warns vs HIV danger in MSM sector
By Diana G. Mendoza
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 04:31:00 12/01/2008
MANILA, Philippines — Amid the celebration of World AIDS Day on Monday, the health department is grappling with the problem of declaring an epidemic of HIV infection among a sector it calls MSM, or men having sex with men.
Increasingly, recent victims are students and young professionals.
The huge problem is that it could not declare this epidemic in the same way it does an outbreak of dengue fever because of the “gay” stigma implicit in it.
Dr. Eric Tayag, head of the health department’s National Epidemiology Center, sounded the alarm in October during the Philippine National AIDS Convention, a biannual event of the NGO AIDS Society of the Philippines.
Citing the health department’s HIV/AIDS Registry, a collection of reports from hospitals, clinics and treatment centers of laboratory-confirmed HIV tests, Tayag noted sudden, steep increases in HIV infection among MSM in the last three years.
The registry recorded 210 new infections among MSM in 2005, 309 in 2006 and 342 in 2007.
This year, from January to September alone, there were already 395 cases, up 96 percent since 2005.Tayag said there was nothing like this in the 21 years since the government kept an official record of HIV infections starting in 1984 when the first AIDS case was reported in the Philippines.
Because the cases were tremendously in excess of what was usually expected, Tayag concluded that there was “an ongoing HIV and AIDS epidemic among the MSM.”
“Several factors may be responsible but we believe MSM has become the new sexual norm (in HIV transmission),” he said.
Independent behavioral studies, he said, have shown widespread unsafe sex in this group, such as the nonuse of condoms during anal sex.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
To Borrow a Title -- Culture and Health
Following the bordering-on-the-frivolous announcement of my reaching the age of old age in my immediately preceding blogs, and gratefully having answered the dozens of personal greetings, I want to discuss a very serious issue.
This serious thinking is prompted by today’s Inquirer column by Dr. Michael Tan, the UP anthropologist-columnist, who writes on almost anything with great wisdom and insights into human nature -- and how some humans thwart human nature.
I write on sex-positive theology. My topics often have an anthropological angle, and when Dr. Tan writes about them, the terminology sometimes comes out different, but today I am amazed at the bottom line coming out so much alike.
Culture and Health
Mike’s topic today is “Culture and Health.” My interest often turn to culture, tradition, religious beliefs and spiritual health (which cannot be separated from emotional, intellectual physical health).
He says “we hear a lot these days about cultural barriers to good health.” I often write about cultural barriers gay and lesbian people, LGBT people in general, face not only to good health, but to survival.
The “Culture” of Prejudice
Let me digress for a moment to look at what happened when the people of California overcame racial prejudice and voted on November 4th to elect a black man president of the United States, but on the same day the people of California perpetuated prejudice against LGBT people by voting to deny them equal marriage in the state. Now there certainly are some mind-boggling issues involved in that phenomenon.
I have watched panels where it was debated that this is a terrible cultural contradiction as opposed to those who argued that the two are unrelated issues -- racial prejudice and sexual orientation prejudice.
Reproductive Health
The underlying issue of Dr. Tan’s column is the Reproductive Health Bill currently being debated in the House of Representatives. I choose to believe the authors that it has absolutely nothing to do with abortion. That is does have to do with the health of adult human beings.
That bill is being opposed by the same religious entities who oppose recognition of the rights of persons with same-sex attraction to have the mental, emotional, physical, and emotional health of expressing their same-sex love in a manner appropriate for their God-given sexual orientation (which is indeed, a given, not a choice, as one prominent TV commentator said just today). Note: see the “list of donors, including the Roman Catholic Bishops, posted on our SAeFfriends Yahoo Group by our Friend George DiCarlo
Repressive and Oppressive: Moral Slavery
In connection with reproductive health rights, Mike uses the terms repressive and oppressive to refer to certain cultural influences.
In recent years I have been using “moral slavery” to put a label on the oppression that is used to cut off the rights of people in sexual matters. We have been made moral slaves by such cultural (religious) norms as
*“The Bible condemns same-sex love.” FALSE
*“Masturbation is a sin.” WHY? (Thou shalt not commit adultery.)
*“Only heterosexual love and sex is not sin (under the right circumstances).” Why? Adam and Eve were told to increase and multiply.)
*“People with same sex attraction are not allowed any sex, at any time, in any way, in their entire life.” WHY? (Because Adam and Eve were told to increase and multiply and not commit adultery.)
When a couple comes to me for a same-sex wedding, I have a discussion with them, illustrated by a PowerPoint presentation, about the formation of conscience and the role of conscience in combating repression and oppression. I ask them if they think their love is a sin. Very often they ask, “How can love be a sin?” Simple and beautiful answer.
Conscience
I proceed to show them how that simple answer is the product of their good thinking . They have made a decision of conscience and did not even know it.
Conscience is the moral judgment, the decision, which is made after considering the facts, the “evidence,” available to make the decision. For a Christian, conscience is a “Christian Moral Judgment.” So you look at the factors which make it “Christian.” You listen to the church, the Bible, Jesus. You listen to human nature, the real life human situation, the psychological and economic factors involved. Your decision depends on the evidence you find.
“Is Your Love a Sin?” Is it a sin to kill?
Is it a sin to kill” Yes, of course. But somebody always remembers that ‘it depends…” If a one year old child picks up a gun and kills someone, it is not a sin because it depends on the child’s ability to commit sin. If a murderer is about to plunge a knife into your heart or your sister’s heart, or a an innocent victim’s heart, can you pull the trigger and kill that would-be murderer? Yes. It depends, on self-defense, defense of the defenseless, etc. That’s conscience.
Thus, not even killing is black and white, yes or no, “It depends…”
Is it a sin not to use condoms?
Is it as sin to use condoms. Yes, of course, the church says so. But that depends, too. Here’s what Mike Tan says that 69 Ateneo professors have to say,
“We ask our bishops
to respect the one in three (35.6%)
married Filipino women who
in their ‘most secret core and sanctuary’ or conscience,
have decided
that their and their family’s interests
would best be served
by using a modern artificial means of contraception.
Is it not possible
that these women were obeying
their well-informed and well-formed consciences
when they opted to use [condoms or pills]?”
That’s a monumental recommendation from 69 faculty members of a prestigious Filipino Catholic University. It echoes what Fr. Andrew Greeley, a Chicago-based priest sociologist has been saying for years…
This serious thinking is prompted by today’s Inquirer column by Dr. Michael Tan, the UP anthropologist-columnist, who writes on almost anything with great wisdom and insights into human nature -- and how some humans thwart human nature.
I write on sex-positive theology. My topics often have an anthropological angle, and when Dr. Tan writes about them, the terminology sometimes comes out different, but today I am amazed at the bottom line coming out so much alike.
Culture and Health
Mike’s topic today is “Culture and Health.” My interest often turn to culture, tradition, religious beliefs and spiritual health (which cannot be separated from emotional, intellectual physical health).
He says “we hear a lot these days about cultural barriers to good health.” I often write about cultural barriers gay and lesbian people, LGBT people in general, face not only to good health, but to survival.
The “Culture” of Prejudice
Let me digress for a moment to look at what happened when the people of California overcame racial prejudice and voted on November 4th to elect a black man president of the United States, but on the same day the people of California perpetuated prejudice against LGBT people by voting to deny them equal marriage in the state. Now there certainly are some mind-boggling issues involved in that phenomenon.
I have watched panels where it was debated that this is a terrible cultural contradiction as opposed to those who argued that the two are unrelated issues -- racial prejudice and sexual orientation prejudice.
Reproductive Health
The underlying issue of Dr. Tan’s column is the Reproductive Health Bill currently being debated in the House of Representatives. I choose to believe the authors that it has absolutely nothing to do with abortion. That is does have to do with the health of adult human beings.
That bill is being opposed by the same religious entities who oppose recognition of the rights of persons with same-sex attraction to have the mental, emotional, physical, and emotional health of expressing their same-sex love in a manner appropriate for their God-given sexual orientation (which is indeed, a given, not a choice, as one prominent TV commentator said just today). Note: see the “list of donors, including the Roman Catholic Bishops, posted on our SAeFfriends Yahoo Group by our Friend George DiCarlo
Repressive and Oppressive: Moral Slavery
In connection with reproductive health rights, Mike uses the terms repressive and oppressive to refer to certain cultural influences.
In recent years I have been using “moral slavery” to put a label on the oppression that is used to cut off the rights of people in sexual matters. We have been made moral slaves by such cultural (religious) norms as
*“The Bible condemns same-sex love.” FALSE
*“Masturbation is a sin.” WHY? (Thou shalt not commit adultery.)
*“Only heterosexual love and sex is not sin (under the right circumstances).” Why? Adam and Eve were told to increase and multiply.)
*“People with same sex attraction are not allowed any sex, at any time, in any way, in their entire life.” WHY? (Because Adam and Eve were told to increase and multiply and not commit adultery.)
When a couple comes to me for a same-sex wedding, I have a discussion with them, illustrated by a PowerPoint presentation, about the formation of conscience and the role of conscience in combating repression and oppression. I ask them if they think their love is a sin. Very often they ask, “How can love be a sin?” Simple and beautiful answer.
Conscience
I proceed to show them how that simple answer is the product of their good thinking . They have made a decision of conscience and did not even know it.
Conscience is the moral judgment, the decision, which is made after considering the facts, the “evidence,” available to make the decision. For a Christian, conscience is a “Christian Moral Judgment.” So you look at the factors which make it “Christian.” You listen to the church, the Bible, Jesus. You listen to human nature, the real life human situation, the psychological and economic factors involved. Your decision depends on the evidence you find.
“Is Your Love a Sin?” Is it a sin to kill?
Is it a sin to kill” Yes, of course. But somebody always remembers that ‘it depends…” If a one year old child picks up a gun and kills someone, it is not a sin because it depends on the child’s ability to commit sin. If a murderer is about to plunge a knife into your heart or your sister’s heart, or a an innocent victim’s heart, can you pull the trigger and kill that would-be murderer? Yes. It depends, on self-defense, defense of the defenseless, etc. That’s conscience.
Thus, not even killing is black and white, yes or no, “It depends…”
Is it a sin not to use condoms?
Is it as sin to use condoms. Yes, of course, the church says so. But that depends, too. Here’s what Mike Tan says that 69 Ateneo professors have to say,
“We ask our bishops
to respect the one in three (35.6%)
married Filipino women who
in their ‘most secret core and sanctuary’ or conscience,
have decided
that their and their family’s interests
would best be served
by using a modern artificial means of contraception.
Is it not possible
that these women were obeying
their well-informed and well-formed consciences
when they opted to use [condoms or pills]?”
That’s a monumental recommendation from 69 faculty members of a prestigious Filipino Catholic University. It echoes what Fr. Andrew Greeley, a Chicago-based priest sociologist has been saying for years…
Is your love a sin?
So what’s the relevance to our couples who are preparing for the highlight of their life -- their same-sex wedding. First I monitor their conscience. Do they believe their love is a sin or a gift from God?
One staunch Catholic male couple came to me for a nice garden wedding. They told me, “We know it is a sin, but…” I said “But, what?” No amount of teaching on my part could help them “change their conscience.” I told them, “If a person thinks something is a sin, and does it, then it is a sin. I don’t want to be part of your sin. My whole ministry is based on the unconditional love of God and the assurance that God is Love, and God is smiling on our same-sex love. If you think it is a sin, I cannot participate in your ‘sinful’ wedding.” And they left.
I am gratified that most couples nowadays have (perhaps unknowingly) solved their conscience before they come to me. That makes it easy to explain to them that they have formed their conscience, and that that they have a basic human right to do that.
And that is one aspect of culture and health for LGBT people.
So what’s the relevance to our couples who are preparing for the highlight of their life -- their same-sex wedding. First I monitor their conscience. Do they believe their love is a sin or a gift from God?
One staunch Catholic male couple came to me for a nice garden wedding. They told me, “We know it is a sin, but…” I said “But, what?” No amount of teaching on my part could help them “change their conscience.” I told them, “If a person thinks something is a sin, and does it, then it is a sin. I don’t want to be part of your sin. My whole ministry is based on the unconditional love of God and the assurance that God is Love, and God is smiling on our same-sex love. If you think it is a sin, I cannot participate in your ‘sinful’ wedding.” And they left.
I am gratified that most couples nowadays have (perhaps unknowingly) solved their conscience before they come to me. That makes it easy to explain to them that they have formed their conscience, and that that they have a basic human right to do that.
And that is one aspect of culture and health for LGBT people.
Good for the Health
Same-sex sexual health is good for the health.
In conclusion, I will quote and get in synch with a pertinent UN document which Mike quotes, “From within the same cultural matrix, we can extract arguments and strategies for the degradation or ennoblement of our species, for its enslavement or liberation, for the suppression of its productive potential or its enhancement.”
Liberation from moral slavery is good for the HEALTH.
It ennobles and enhances the health of the person.
Then Mike concludes, and we can conclude, along with his wisdom, “More than a simple declaration, that passage should be taken as a challenge to Filipinos and people throughout the world to take culture and health seriously.”
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Octogenarian Musings
I’ve been thinking about jotting down and blogging a few thoughts for my birthday this month.
An Epitaph
I got sidetracked a few minutes yesterday when an Inquirer columnist wrote her own epitaph. Pondered it awhile. I remembered the prayer we said every night in seminary when I was 13 and 14 years old “Life is short, and death is sure. The hour of death remains obscure. Waste not your time, while time shall last, for after death, tis ever past.” Morbid then. But I tried to live by that for the next 70 years, and it doesn’t seem morbid at all now.
That’s just the way it is.
And I decided not to write any more epitaph, Let me just quote today’s message to me from one of my best friends in the world, Fr. Paul in California: “Today's Message of the Day is: Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably. And never regret anything that made you smile.Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here, we should dance”(That ought to make all the hard shell conservatives smile.}
Born in Danville
It’s true that 80 years have passed since that day at 4:00 in the afternoon on November 12, 1928 on Mickley Street in Danville in the hills of Ohio when Clara Mae Hammond Mickley, wife of Raymond Albert Mickley, brought forth her first born (of ten). A year earlier both had finished a year or two of college (she at Ohio Weslyan and he at Ohio University) and they decided to get married. They had met in high school where Clara rode her horse and buggy to school and Raymond walked to school (the same school that still stands in the center of Danville).
What’s memorable
What’s memorable for me in the eight decades since that day? I could not answer that in 80 pages. I will just go back to my original idea – and jot down a few thoughts.
My siblings
I have always cherished my nine siblings – and their multiple offspring. I was born a year and a month after the marriage of my parents on october 12, 1927. Every one of nine siblingsw, a success in their careers, from wife of the long time mayor of our hometown, to the retired state parole officer and university professor. Three achieved high levels in the professional plumbing profession; an advanced level carpenter, a retired colonel of the United Air Force. Their judgment of me: best educated, poorest.
My Greatest Treasures
My greatest treasures came about one a year or so apart, from John in 1958 to Paul in 1968, with Jane, Michael, Julie, Rick, Bob, Pete, and Mary in between. And they in turn have added additional treasures. Never could I have guessed that God would be so good in giving such treasures and giving them the world’s most outstanding mother and grandmother.
Yes, indeed, I could fill many pages about my greatest treasures, their mother, and their wonderful grandparents, grandma Florence and Grandma Mickley, both of happy memory.
Latin and Religion
When I came back from the Korean War, I taught junior high for a year and spent a decade as a high school Latin teacher, working on my masters in Latin and spending a summer in Rome studying Latin and archeology on a scholarship.
That all came after I sent many years in a religious community learning Latin (sixteen semesters of it) and religion and getting a basic classical education and ministry training that have served me so well all these years.
Sexuality at 15
When I was 15, the specter of sexuality already was haunting my young life (as a Roman Catholic seminarian). So when we had our couple of weeks at home that summer, I asked my mom to take me to see Dr. Graham, whom I knew to be a Protestant doctor.
In the privacy of Dr. Graham’s clinic, I told him about the terrible “illness’ that was gripping me, and it was so sinful, so shameful, so embarrassing. I just knew I was the only disgusting person in that religious house who was overpowered by this awful condition.
“I just can’t keep from doing it,” I told him. “No matter how much I pray before the altar of Our Blessed Mother, even if I put pebbles in my shoes for pain and penance and punishment, it still happens every week.”
The priests I confessed to were wonderful men of God who have gone now to their reward, but they could not be described as empathic with me in my illness. Sometimes silent, but never explaining human nature to me.
Dr. Graham, on the other hand, with the most kindly eyes and caring tones, did explain things to me. “Young man, you can pray all you want, but pebbles in your shoes are not prescribed in this situation. You don’t have an illness. You are normal. It may help you to know that any student in your school who does not ‘do it’ is probably not normal. No doubt, they are all doing it. Don’t ever think you are the only one. And probably the teachers do it, too.”
After that startling revelation, I felt like saying, “My God, Doc, the teachers are all priests.” I just kept quiet because I knew that being a Protestant, he did not understand about priestly celibacy.
But, for me, his explanation of psychology was reassuring. You can believe that his “secret information” was a big boost for mental health, if not for my spirituality.
Integration of Sexuality and Spirituality
It was many many years later that I began to learn and teach about integrating (uniting) sexuality and spirituality. The good priests in my society were not able to teach that. It was not their theology. Now they have more guidelines from the Vatican (this one just this week), “A 2005 Vatican document said men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies shouldn't be ordained, but that those with a "transitory problem" could become priests if they had overcome them for three years. The Vatican considers homosexual activity sinful.The new guidelines reflect the earlier teaching, stressing that if a future priest shows "deep-seated homosexual tendencies," his seminary training "would have to be interrupted."The guidelines say priests must have a "positive and stable sense of one's masculine identity" and the capacity to "integrate his sexuality in accordance" with the obligation of celibacy.” Yes, if they only knew how to do that positively without all their sex negative prejudice.
Having written some 200 pamphlets and books by now on such subjects, I quickly look back at some of the influences that help bring me to this point in my life.
Spirituality
My spirituality was indeed positively formed by all those years in the religious order (with a positive bottom line in spite of the sex negative theology.)
The Cusilllo
Probably the next big influence was the Cursillo movement, which convinced me, then as a lay person, that Christianity can work and is a really powerful spirituality. Having served several years in a national leadership role, I was able to help spread the influence of the Cursillo throughout the United States.
Ralph Martin and Steve Clark
Through the Cursillo I met Ralph Martin and Steve Clark (authors well-known in the Catholic reading world, but close personal friends of mine as I was deeply influenced by their personal spirituality (though they had xero tolerance for same sex love). I still see Ralph Martin bringing inspiring messages to thousands televised on EWTN and FamilyLand TV.(as he did when we traveled around the US conducting seminars in the 60’s).
I was with them as they founded the wide-spread Catholic Charismatic Movement from Michigan to around the globe. I was with them, on the team, as they developed the original Life in the Spirit Seminar. I benefited a lot from them and the movement.
Sexuality
I got a lot of help with my sexuality from Dr. Charles Kuell in Van Nuys, CA. He tutored me through my doctoral program in clinical psychology with emphasis on same-sex relationship. I attended his “group therapy” sessions for gay men for years, and that experience became the inspiration for my more than ten years leadership of the Gay Men’s Support Group here in Manila.
Reading Fr. John McNeil’s books and Fr, Normal Pittenger’s books, and many more sex-positive theologians, helped me integrate my knowledge of psychology, my experience of spirituality, and personally begin to attain a balanced life of integrated spirituality and sexuality (and finally be in a position to help others in the process.
Experiences
Yes, in the 8 decades, I have lived through the lifetime of Dr. Martin Luther King
a little more than 4 decades ago, Then the dynamic founding of MCC by the Rev.Troy Perry, just 40 years.
Troy Perry
Then the inspiring opportunity to work side by side with the living prophet of the LGBT movement, Troy Perry, in his office for several years and actually produce the monthly magazine which spread the good news of his spiritual movement to integrate spirituality and sexuality with the underlying message of God’s unfailing unconditional love, and working side by side with such spiritual giants as Fr. Paul Breton (wise counsel and support) and, of course Rev Troy Perry, Rev. Charlie Arehart, Bishop Stan Harris, Rev. John Fowler and so many others.
The Gay Liberation Movement
MCC was founded in 1968, a year before the Stonewall riots which began the gay and lesbian movement. Within a year after Stonewall, I joined The Gay Liberation Movement in 1970, and have been in it, under various names, ever since.
The Path to Manila
I had the opportunity, after several years working at the bedside of persons with AIDS in Los Angles, to work with the wonderful people of new Zealand as pastor of MCC for several years.
Then it was off to Manila where there was no one available to spread the Good news that God Smiles upon our love. I came here for an exploratory visit in 1991, not knowing a soul. After five weeks, 40 some people signed a petition for me to come back and officially start the work here. On September 7, 1991, I came back and founded MCC Manila, which became the first openly gay and lesbian organization in the country.
The First Gay and Lesbian Pride March in Asia
In i994 Oscar Atadero, a officer of Progay Philippines which had begun functioning in Manila, was also an officer in MCC. We began talking about Stonewall, and, noting that it was the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, we convinced ourselves and our administrative bodies that it was time to bring Stonewall to the Philippines.
I had proudly marched down the streets in huge Pride marches in LA, (and highly spirited ones in New Zealand ) where they had been happening and growing ever since the first anniversary of Stonewall in 1970.
It was time. So Progay and MCC cosponsored the first Pride March in Manila on June 26, 1994, and it turned out to be also the first Pride March in Asia. I gave the keynote speech and celebrated a Pride Mass in Quezon Memorial Circle.
Publicity and Action
The massive publicity generated by that small beginning brought about a wildfire of activity through the country, which saw media appearances by me and many others, the founding of more LGBT organizations, and the awakening of a an LGBT movement in the country.
This year Task Force Pride. of which we are founding members, is celebrating its 10th year of sponsorship and the 14th Manila Pride March.
Barach Obama: Overcoming Prejudice
My heart leaps for joy this week. Around the world it has been like New Year’s Eve, Milennium New Year’s Eve, as blacks in Kenya celebrate, Indonesians rejoice in Jakarta, tens of thousands explode with frenzy in New York, tens of thousands shake rattle and roll with excitement in Chicago – and around the world. Commentators say they have never seen anything like it the day after an election. Barach Obama, a Democrat, an African American, has been elected President of the United States.
Those of us who have experienced homophobia can imagine what it must be like to experience prejudice in a predominantly white country. Politics. I am decidedly a Democrat. I was very much for Hilary. When Barach got more votes than she did, I was still a Democrat. The Republicans are the enemy in many ways. Because of them I do not have Veterans Health care in the Philippines (outside US soil). They, with their conservative majority, have never been anything but enemies of LGBT people.
Nelson Mandela
I have lived to see Nelson Mandela, another great idol of freedom and justice, get out of prison and become president of the country which put him in prison (for 27 years) for being Black.
I have lived to see the barriers of discrimination broken, at least there. And. 42 years after Martin Luther King delivered his immortal “I have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C, a black man has become president of the United States
Discrimination in California and the Philippines
I have lived to see Discrimination perpetuation on the same election day in California where the people voted to discriminate against equal marriage for same-sex couples, after the Supreme Court had ruled that non-equal marriage was non-equal rights of citizens. It is no surprise that the majority voted to take away the rights of the minority. It is a surprise that Barach Obama was elected on the same day as the people of California discriminated against LGBT people.
I live in the country which is the only country in the world which does not have divorce. It is caused by the same forces which deny the people of this country the right to get out of something that does not work (as every other country in the world has done)(might does not make right, nor does a majority, but if every country in the world recognizes the human need for divorce, that is a strong testimony about human nature and human need).
These are the same forces which defeated the ballot issue which perpetuated discrimination against LGBT people in California. It is the Catholic bishops, who cowtowed and catered to Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship and begged him not to allow divorce, also fought equal rights in California, and are fighting the reproductive health bill in the Congress, who blocked even the anti-discrimination bill, which we hoped for through the last decade. (I testified numerous times in congress. We did not ask for any special rights, or anything to do with marriage or co-habitation – just protection from discrimination – and they crushed it with their oppressive power.) Might does not make right.
Barach Obama
I never thought I would live to see a Black man President of the United States. I never thought I would live to see even one country recognize equal marriage for all its people. But I have not only seen Barach Obama elected, but I have lived to see five countries (The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa) and two States of the US recognize equal marriage rights. And I have lived to see the majority people of California take that way from the minority people of California. Might does not make right.
I have lived to see a lot, certainly too much to retell here. Maybe in my memoirs. Maybe in a series of memoir blogs after I retire. When can I retire? Would I ever even think of it. Nature may be the one to decide. I have never had a treadmill test. I have never had a physical exam like executives have. I don’t know what the future holds. It occurred to me that some old men develop limitations.
The Rev. Ceejay Agbayani
For the last several years, I played a minor role in sponsoring a young man, C. J. Agbayani in seminary. This former Franciscan and member of our Order, studied full time at the prestigious Union Theological Seminary in the province near Manila and persevered to get his Master of Divinity (M.Div) degree.
He attended a Methodist and United Church of Christ Seminary as an openly gay man and an open Catholic. He held his head high and, got his degree and was ordained by MCC, the Rev. Ceejay Agbayani. He had a right to hold his head high. He hung in there against all odds. And made it. And founded a church, MCC Quezon City, 15 years after I founded the “mother church,” MCC Manila.
I am very proud of Ceejay. I have begun to work with him as my backup in the wedding ministry. Three years ago, I was in hospital for two weeks and could not get out for a scheduled wedding which really upset the plans of the couple.
So now, Rev. Ceejay will be available to step in in situations like that. But, gradually, perhaps I will turn over the entire wedding business to this dynamic disciple, filled with the Spirit of ministry. God is blessing his zeal. I will not in any way interfere or be connected with his pastoral ministry. But I will refer wedding ministry to him.
Ordained a bishop
I have lived to receive the fullness of the priesthood in my ordination to the Holy Orders of Bishop through the trust and confidence of Bishop James Burch of the Catholic Diocese of One Spirit. As Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of One Spirit, Philippines, I have been able to offer ordination to the priesthood in apostolic succession to qualified Order of St. Aelred Seminary graduates. See my blog, “Thankful to be a Priest (Novemeber 9, 2008).”
Conclusion
Thus, through my publications, through the thousands I have talked to in university symposia and various seminars and conferences, through the millions I have talked to on television, and through the hundreds of partners, relatives, and guests I have talked with in Holy Union settings, through ten years of regular Gay Mens Support Group meetings every Friday evening, through the prayers and ministry of the Order of St. Aelred, I have tried to do my best to spread the good news that our God is the author of both spirituality and sexuality, that our God is Love, and our God is smiling on our love, that our God invites us into friendship because our God is not only Love, but, as St. Aelred says, our God is Friendship.
How can I thank and express my love and friendship for the hundreds of friends throughout the world in our network of friends who have been at the very nerve center of my life and ministry through the years. I cannot even begin to mention names. If I did, I would want to start with my friends who are living with HIV, and then I would want to mention David and all in our group here, and then Peter and Roy, who were here for friendship and a Holy Union many years ago, but are together now in Saudi Arabia. If I wanted a really fitting epitaph, I would ask that every one, all the hundreds, of your names be placed on my “epitaph.” That would be a reminder and would begin to say what you have done for me.
And last and most, through the support and constant help and encouragement of my personal partner, though very busy in his professional career, I have been indeed blesssed with a very fulfilling decade together. For that and for him, I am prayerfully grateful.
I have to stop here, not the end of my memoirs, but the stopping point of this much longer than expected bit of sharing.
In Friendship,
Richard at 80
An Epitaph
I got sidetracked a few minutes yesterday when an Inquirer columnist wrote her own epitaph. Pondered it awhile. I remembered the prayer we said every night in seminary when I was 13 and 14 years old “Life is short, and death is sure. The hour of death remains obscure. Waste not your time, while time shall last, for after death, tis ever past.” Morbid then. But I tried to live by that for the next 70 years, and it doesn’t seem morbid at all now.
That’s just the way it is.
And I decided not to write any more epitaph, Let me just quote today’s message to me from one of my best friends in the world, Fr. Paul in California: “Today's Message of the Day is: Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably. And never regret anything that made you smile.Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here, we should dance”(That ought to make all the hard shell conservatives smile.}
Born in Danville
It’s true that 80 years have passed since that day at 4:00 in the afternoon on November 12, 1928 on Mickley Street in Danville in the hills of Ohio when Clara Mae Hammond Mickley, wife of Raymond Albert Mickley, brought forth her first born (of ten). A year earlier both had finished a year or two of college (she at Ohio Weslyan and he at Ohio University) and they decided to get married. They had met in high school where Clara rode her horse and buggy to school and Raymond walked to school (the same school that still stands in the center of Danville).
What’s memorable
What’s memorable for me in the eight decades since that day? I could not answer that in 80 pages. I will just go back to my original idea – and jot down a few thoughts.
My siblings
I have always cherished my nine siblings – and their multiple offspring. I was born a year and a month after the marriage of my parents on october 12, 1927. Every one of nine siblingsw, a success in their careers, from wife of the long time mayor of our hometown, to the retired state parole officer and university professor. Three achieved high levels in the professional plumbing profession; an advanced level carpenter, a retired colonel of the United Air Force. Their judgment of me: best educated, poorest.
My Greatest Treasures
My greatest treasures came about one a year or so apart, from John in 1958 to Paul in 1968, with Jane, Michael, Julie, Rick, Bob, Pete, and Mary in between. And they in turn have added additional treasures. Never could I have guessed that God would be so good in giving such treasures and giving them the world’s most outstanding mother and grandmother.
Yes, indeed, I could fill many pages about my greatest treasures, their mother, and their wonderful grandparents, grandma Florence and Grandma Mickley, both of happy memory.
Latin and Religion
When I came back from the Korean War, I taught junior high for a year and spent a decade as a high school Latin teacher, working on my masters in Latin and spending a summer in Rome studying Latin and archeology on a scholarship.
That all came after I sent many years in a religious community learning Latin (sixteen semesters of it) and religion and getting a basic classical education and ministry training that have served me so well all these years.
Sexuality at 15
When I was 15, the specter of sexuality already was haunting my young life (as a Roman Catholic seminarian). So when we had our couple of weeks at home that summer, I asked my mom to take me to see Dr. Graham, whom I knew to be a Protestant doctor.
In the privacy of Dr. Graham’s clinic, I told him about the terrible “illness’ that was gripping me, and it was so sinful, so shameful, so embarrassing. I just knew I was the only disgusting person in that religious house who was overpowered by this awful condition.
“I just can’t keep from doing it,” I told him. “No matter how much I pray before the altar of Our Blessed Mother, even if I put pebbles in my shoes for pain and penance and punishment, it still happens every week.”
The priests I confessed to were wonderful men of God who have gone now to their reward, but they could not be described as empathic with me in my illness. Sometimes silent, but never explaining human nature to me.
Dr. Graham, on the other hand, with the most kindly eyes and caring tones, did explain things to me. “Young man, you can pray all you want, but pebbles in your shoes are not prescribed in this situation. You don’t have an illness. You are normal. It may help you to know that any student in your school who does not ‘do it’ is probably not normal. No doubt, they are all doing it. Don’t ever think you are the only one. And probably the teachers do it, too.”
After that startling revelation, I felt like saying, “My God, Doc, the teachers are all priests.” I just kept quiet because I knew that being a Protestant, he did not understand about priestly celibacy.
But, for me, his explanation of psychology was reassuring. You can believe that his “secret information” was a big boost for mental health, if not for my spirituality.
Integration of Sexuality and Spirituality
It was many many years later that I began to learn and teach about integrating (uniting) sexuality and spirituality. The good priests in my society were not able to teach that. It was not their theology. Now they have more guidelines from the Vatican (this one just this week), “A 2005 Vatican document said men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies shouldn't be ordained, but that those with a "transitory problem" could become priests if they had overcome them for three years. The Vatican considers homosexual activity sinful.The new guidelines reflect the earlier teaching, stressing that if a future priest shows "deep-seated homosexual tendencies," his seminary training "would have to be interrupted."The guidelines say priests must have a "positive and stable sense of one's masculine identity" and the capacity to "integrate his sexuality in accordance" with the obligation of celibacy.” Yes, if they only knew how to do that positively without all their sex negative prejudice.
Having written some 200 pamphlets and books by now on such subjects, I quickly look back at some of the influences that help bring me to this point in my life.
Spirituality
My spirituality was indeed positively formed by all those years in the religious order (with a positive bottom line in spite of the sex negative theology.)
The Cusilllo
Probably the next big influence was the Cursillo movement, which convinced me, then as a lay person, that Christianity can work and is a really powerful spirituality. Having served several years in a national leadership role, I was able to help spread the influence of the Cursillo throughout the United States.
Ralph Martin and Steve Clark
Through the Cursillo I met Ralph Martin and Steve Clark (authors well-known in the Catholic reading world, but close personal friends of mine as I was deeply influenced by their personal spirituality (though they had xero tolerance for same sex love). I still see Ralph Martin bringing inspiring messages to thousands televised on EWTN and FamilyLand TV.(as he did when we traveled around the US conducting seminars in the 60’s).
I was with them as they founded the wide-spread Catholic Charismatic Movement from Michigan to around the globe. I was with them, on the team, as they developed the original Life in the Spirit Seminar. I benefited a lot from them and the movement.
Sexuality
I got a lot of help with my sexuality from Dr. Charles Kuell in Van Nuys, CA. He tutored me through my doctoral program in clinical psychology with emphasis on same-sex relationship. I attended his “group therapy” sessions for gay men for years, and that experience became the inspiration for my more than ten years leadership of the Gay Men’s Support Group here in Manila.
Reading Fr. John McNeil’s books and Fr, Normal Pittenger’s books, and many more sex-positive theologians, helped me integrate my knowledge of psychology, my experience of spirituality, and personally begin to attain a balanced life of integrated spirituality and sexuality (and finally be in a position to help others in the process.
Experiences
Yes, in the 8 decades, I have lived through the lifetime of Dr. Martin Luther King
a little more than 4 decades ago, Then the dynamic founding of MCC by the Rev.Troy Perry, just 40 years.
Troy Perry
Then the inspiring opportunity to work side by side with the living prophet of the LGBT movement, Troy Perry, in his office for several years and actually produce the monthly magazine which spread the good news of his spiritual movement to integrate spirituality and sexuality with the underlying message of God’s unfailing unconditional love, and working side by side with such spiritual giants as Fr. Paul Breton (wise counsel and support) and, of course Rev Troy Perry, Rev. Charlie Arehart, Bishop Stan Harris, Rev. John Fowler and so many others.
The Gay Liberation Movement
MCC was founded in 1968, a year before the Stonewall riots which began the gay and lesbian movement. Within a year after Stonewall, I joined The Gay Liberation Movement in 1970, and have been in it, under various names, ever since.
The Path to Manila
I had the opportunity, after several years working at the bedside of persons with AIDS in Los Angles, to work with the wonderful people of new Zealand as pastor of MCC for several years.
Then it was off to Manila where there was no one available to spread the Good news that God Smiles upon our love. I came here for an exploratory visit in 1991, not knowing a soul. After five weeks, 40 some people signed a petition for me to come back and officially start the work here. On September 7, 1991, I came back and founded MCC Manila, which became the first openly gay and lesbian organization in the country.
The First Gay and Lesbian Pride March in Asia
In i994 Oscar Atadero, a officer of Progay Philippines which had begun functioning in Manila, was also an officer in MCC. We began talking about Stonewall, and, noting that it was the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, we convinced ourselves and our administrative bodies that it was time to bring Stonewall to the Philippines.
I had proudly marched down the streets in huge Pride marches in LA, (and highly spirited ones in New Zealand ) where they had been happening and growing ever since the first anniversary of Stonewall in 1970.
It was time. So Progay and MCC cosponsored the first Pride March in Manila on June 26, 1994, and it turned out to be also the first Pride March in Asia. I gave the keynote speech and celebrated a Pride Mass in Quezon Memorial Circle.
Publicity and Action
The massive publicity generated by that small beginning brought about a wildfire of activity through the country, which saw media appearances by me and many others, the founding of more LGBT organizations, and the awakening of a an LGBT movement in the country.
This year Task Force Pride. of which we are founding members, is celebrating its 10th year of sponsorship and the 14th Manila Pride March.
Barach Obama: Overcoming Prejudice
My heart leaps for joy this week. Around the world it has been like New Year’s Eve, Milennium New Year’s Eve, as blacks in Kenya celebrate, Indonesians rejoice in Jakarta, tens of thousands explode with frenzy in New York, tens of thousands shake rattle and roll with excitement in Chicago – and around the world. Commentators say they have never seen anything like it the day after an election. Barach Obama, a Democrat, an African American, has been elected President of the United States.
Those of us who have experienced homophobia can imagine what it must be like to experience prejudice in a predominantly white country. Politics. I am decidedly a Democrat. I was very much for Hilary. When Barach got more votes than she did, I was still a Democrat. The Republicans are the enemy in many ways. Because of them I do not have Veterans Health care in the Philippines (outside US soil). They, with their conservative majority, have never been anything but enemies of LGBT people.
Nelson Mandela
I have lived to see Nelson Mandela, another great idol of freedom and justice, get out of prison and become president of the country which put him in prison (for 27 years) for being Black.
I have lived to see the barriers of discrimination broken, at least there. And. 42 years after Martin Luther King delivered his immortal “I have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C, a black man has become president of the United States
Discrimination in California and the Philippines
I have lived to see Discrimination perpetuation on the same election day in California where the people voted to discriminate against equal marriage for same-sex couples, after the Supreme Court had ruled that non-equal marriage was non-equal rights of citizens. It is no surprise that the majority voted to take away the rights of the minority. It is a surprise that Barach Obama was elected on the same day as the people of California discriminated against LGBT people.
I live in the country which is the only country in the world which does not have divorce. It is caused by the same forces which deny the people of this country the right to get out of something that does not work (as every other country in the world has done)(might does not make right, nor does a majority, but if every country in the world recognizes the human need for divorce, that is a strong testimony about human nature and human need).
These are the same forces which defeated the ballot issue which perpetuated discrimination against LGBT people in California. It is the Catholic bishops, who cowtowed and catered to Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship and begged him not to allow divorce, also fought equal rights in California, and are fighting the reproductive health bill in the Congress, who blocked even the anti-discrimination bill, which we hoped for through the last decade. (I testified numerous times in congress. We did not ask for any special rights, or anything to do with marriage or co-habitation – just protection from discrimination – and they crushed it with their oppressive power.) Might does not make right.
Barach Obama
I never thought I would live to see a Black man President of the United States. I never thought I would live to see even one country recognize equal marriage for all its people. But I have not only seen Barach Obama elected, but I have lived to see five countries (The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa) and two States of the US recognize equal marriage rights. And I have lived to see the majority people of California take that way from the minority people of California. Might does not make right.
I have lived to see a lot, certainly too much to retell here. Maybe in my memoirs. Maybe in a series of memoir blogs after I retire. When can I retire? Would I ever even think of it. Nature may be the one to decide. I have never had a treadmill test. I have never had a physical exam like executives have. I don’t know what the future holds. It occurred to me that some old men develop limitations.
The Rev. Ceejay Agbayani
For the last several years, I played a minor role in sponsoring a young man, C. J. Agbayani in seminary. This former Franciscan and member of our Order, studied full time at the prestigious Union Theological Seminary in the province near Manila and persevered to get his Master of Divinity (M.Div) degree.
He attended a Methodist and United Church of Christ Seminary as an openly gay man and an open Catholic. He held his head high and, got his degree and was ordained by MCC, the Rev. Ceejay Agbayani. He had a right to hold his head high. He hung in there against all odds. And made it. And founded a church, MCC Quezon City, 15 years after I founded the “mother church,” MCC Manila.
I am very proud of Ceejay. I have begun to work with him as my backup in the wedding ministry. Three years ago, I was in hospital for two weeks and could not get out for a scheduled wedding which really upset the plans of the couple.
So now, Rev. Ceejay will be available to step in in situations like that. But, gradually, perhaps I will turn over the entire wedding business to this dynamic disciple, filled with the Spirit of ministry. God is blessing his zeal. I will not in any way interfere or be connected with his pastoral ministry. But I will refer wedding ministry to him.
Ordained a bishop
I have lived to receive the fullness of the priesthood in my ordination to the Holy Orders of Bishop through the trust and confidence of Bishop James Burch of the Catholic Diocese of One Spirit. As Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of One Spirit, Philippines, I have been able to offer ordination to the priesthood in apostolic succession to qualified Order of St. Aelred Seminary graduates. See my blog, “Thankful to be a Priest (Novemeber 9, 2008).”
Conclusion
Thus, through my publications, through the thousands I have talked to in university symposia and various seminars and conferences, through the millions I have talked to on television, and through the hundreds of partners, relatives, and guests I have talked with in Holy Union settings, through ten years of regular Gay Mens Support Group meetings every Friday evening, through the prayers and ministry of the Order of St. Aelred, I have tried to do my best to spread the good news that our God is the author of both spirituality and sexuality, that our God is Love, and our God is smiling on our love, that our God invites us into friendship because our God is not only Love, but, as St. Aelred says, our God is Friendship.
How can I thank and express my love and friendship for the hundreds of friends throughout the world in our network of friends who have been at the very nerve center of my life and ministry through the years. I cannot even begin to mention names. If I did, I would want to start with my friends who are living with HIV, and then I would want to mention David and all in our group here, and then Peter and Roy, who were here for friendship and a Holy Union many years ago, but are together now in Saudi Arabia. If I wanted a really fitting epitaph, I would ask that every one, all the hundreds, of your names be placed on my “epitaph.” That would be a reminder and would begin to say what you have done for me.
And last and most, through the support and constant help and encouragement of my personal partner, though very busy in his professional career, I have been indeed blesssed with a very fulfilling decade together. For that and for him, I am prayerfully grateful.
I have to stop here, not the end of my memoirs, but the stopping point of this much longer than expected bit of sharing.
In Friendship,
Richard at 80
At 80, Thankful to be a Priest
Thankful to Be a Priest
Father Richard R. Mickley, O.S.Ae., Ph.D., abbot of the St. Aelred Friendship Society, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of One Spirit.
Leaning on the threshold of my 80th birthday, I have been thinking of the things I am thankful for. Among many persons and things I am thankful for, I am thankful to be a priest in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church of Jesus Christ.
By the time I was 10 years old, I was sure God was calling me to be a priest. And by the grace of God, there was a sign. I wanted very much to be an altar boy, but in those days altar boys had to memorize a long list of Latin prayers. Memorizing was always a problem for me – and now in Latin! (Years later I became a Latin teacher, but at the age of 10, it was indeed a challenge.)
With the grace of God and the patience of the senior altar boy, who was assigned to teach me, Stewart Sidell (later Dr. Stewart Sidell, M.D.), I learned all those Latin prayers by heart – and we weren’t allowed to use cue cards. When the priest said in Latin, “I will go unto the altar of God,” it was my cue to respond in Latin, “Ad Deum Qui laetificat juventutem meam…to God who gives joy to my youth….”
I felt that joy then, and really forever after as God led me, guided me, directed me through a long, sometimes circuitous, sometimes road-blocked path to the day when I would say officially, “I go unto the altar of God…”
I praise and thank God for the calling and the joy of sharing in the priesthood of Jesus Christ. What an awesome responsibility – to have the children of God turn to one, not only for God’s blessing, but for guidance on the path to union with God.
The privilege of standing at the altar and praying those words Jesus chose to make it possible for the priest to bring the very presence of Jesus on the altar and to be united with his friends. That privilege alone makes the priesthood an unbounded gift of God. Each of the thousands of times I have stood at the altar and prayed those words of Jesus, “This is My Body,” I have been filled with awe by the power of God acting through me.
And what a joy to officiate as a priest at Baptism, and to give assurance to God’s children that God forgives them when they confess their failings to God, and to bring the message of God’s unconditional love to all God’s people with no exceptions, and to be the one who anoints the hand and holds the hand of one who is about to depart this world and live forever in the eternal embrace of God’s friendship. And, yes, for me to experience over and over the joy of proclaiming God’s blessing for those who come together in love for a wedded and holy union.
Late in life, through the trust and kindness of Bishop James Burch, I was honored with the fullness of the priesthood by ordination with apostolic succession as a bishop in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church of Jesus Christ, and grateful as I am for that opportunity to serve God’s people, no privilege will ever surpass the privilege of offering one Mass as a priest of God
Even as I strive conscientiously to assume the very personality of the ever-loving, ever-giving Jesus Christ whom I serve, I can never be sufficiently thankful for the most sacred trust and privilege and responsibility of being “another Christ.” To God I commend all those men, women, children, gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual down through the years whom God has given me the privilege of serving in some way for well over a half a century.
Thanks be to God.
Father Richard R. Mickley, O.S.Ae., Ph.D., abbot of the St. Aelred Friendship Society, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of One Spirit.
Leaning on the threshold of my 80th birthday, I have been thinking of the things I am thankful for. Among many persons and things I am thankful for, I am thankful to be a priest in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church of Jesus Christ.
By the time I was 10 years old, I was sure God was calling me to be a priest. And by the grace of God, there was a sign. I wanted very much to be an altar boy, but in those days altar boys had to memorize a long list of Latin prayers. Memorizing was always a problem for me – and now in Latin! (Years later I became a Latin teacher, but at the age of 10, it was indeed a challenge.)
With the grace of God and the patience of the senior altar boy, who was assigned to teach me, Stewart Sidell (later Dr. Stewart Sidell, M.D.), I learned all those Latin prayers by heart – and we weren’t allowed to use cue cards. When the priest said in Latin, “I will go unto the altar of God,” it was my cue to respond in Latin, “Ad Deum Qui laetificat juventutem meam…to God who gives joy to my youth….”
I felt that joy then, and really forever after as God led me, guided me, directed me through a long, sometimes circuitous, sometimes road-blocked path to the day when I would say officially, “I go unto the altar of God…”
I praise and thank God for the calling and the joy of sharing in the priesthood of Jesus Christ. What an awesome responsibility – to have the children of God turn to one, not only for God’s blessing, but for guidance on the path to union with God.
The privilege of standing at the altar and praying those words Jesus chose to make it possible for the priest to bring the very presence of Jesus on the altar and to be united with his friends. That privilege alone makes the priesthood an unbounded gift of God. Each of the thousands of times I have stood at the altar and prayed those words of Jesus, “This is My Body,” I have been filled with awe by the power of God acting through me.
And what a joy to officiate as a priest at Baptism, and to give assurance to God’s children that God forgives them when they confess their failings to God, and to bring the message of God’s unconditional love to all God’s people with no exceptions, and to be the one who anoints the hand and holds the hand of one who is about to depart this world and live forever in the eternal embrace of God’s friendship. And, yes, for me to experience over and over the joy of proclaiming God’s blessing for those who come together in love for a wedded and holy union.
Late in life, through the trust and kindness of Bishop James Burch, I was honored with the fullness of the priesthood by ordination with apostolic succession as a bishop in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church of Jesus Christ, and grateful as I am for that opportunity to serve God’s people, no privilege will ever surpass the privilege of offering one Mass as a priest of God
Even as I strive conscientiously to assume the very personality of the ever-loving, ever-giving Jesus Christ whom I serve, I can never be sufficiently thankful for the most sacred trust and privilege and responsibility of being “another Christ.” To God I commend all those men, women, children, gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual down through the years whom God has given me the privilege of serving in some way for well over a half a century.
Thanks be to God.
Monday, September 8, 2008
August 2008 is over
That's it! One more phone call: How are you? It's September 5th. August has faded away. 8-8-8 is gone for a thousand years!
Yes. I am here. But, yes, I have been here, there, and everywhere. And that's why so many were calling to ask: Why no blogs? Why no emails?
Yes, August was a humdinger, as we used to say down in the hills of my childhood days in the beautiful hills of central Ohio. Yes, it was a humdinger. For one thing we had more weddings than any other month ever. We had guy-guy weddings, gal-gal weddings, guy-gal weddings, and some weddings where gender was no issue at all. And isn't that the way it is supposed be really, in justice, all the time? Isn't it really about love? Instead of gender?
Well, we had weddings here; we had weddings in Mindanao, and weddings all over Luzon.
It reminds me of a humorous footnote in my ministry in Manila. In 1994 one of the tabloids ran a four-day series of page-one stories about our "same-sex weddings." So many of them, they said, that Rev. Mickley is calling Los Angles for two more priests to handle all the weddings. That was 14 years ago back when we were having one wedding a month. I had to go down to the newspaper office and virtually threaten the editor to "stop the untrue publicity."
Now, Rev. Mickley is sending out a general S-O-S. This time it is true. We do need help in this ministry. The call is to those who have ministry experience, the call is to those who have only the love of God and love of people in their hearts. They can qualify for the ministry in our St. Aelred Seminary and any other orthodox seminary.
You know I was asked last month on a national television talk show, "Is love ever mentioned in these same-sex weddings?" What an insulting question! I gave a long answer, but the bottom line was: "It is all about love."
That incident brings out a terrible misconception so many people have about same-sex love. Do you know how the natives of Lindustristan make love? You probably think they do some really weird things. But do you know? What do you know? You don't know. And that's the way it is with people who don't know that "it's all about love" in same-sex relationships. It is "all about love."
And now we need priests who will carry that message to us LGBT people, and their parents, and their families, and their neighbors, and all the people up and down the archipelago.
Two mothers recently came to see me, demanding that I cancel the wedding of their sons to one another. "It's against the faith, against the church we love so much. How can this be in this country? How can this be happening to my son?" One mother was separated from the boy's father and living with another man without benefit of marriage. I asked what her church thought of that? The other mother told her son, "If you have that wedding, don't come back. You have no mother." She knew as much about her son's love as you know about love-making among the natives of Lindustristan.
The Order of St. Aelred needs priests, one two, or ten who can wipe out that ignorance, and let the truth of our love be known. Ignorance begets prejudice. Your vocation is between you and God. Ask God what God is saying to you? Ask yourself: What am I replying to God?
Some countries are slowly wiping out societal prejudice against black people and against women.
Five countries (The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, and South Africa) have equal marriage (no gender test). Added to that are California and Massachusetts which are states that have equal marriage. Many other jurisdictions have recognition of same-sex relationships under a name other than marriage.
I don't think the legislators of the Philippines are courageous enough to do what the legislators of Spain (another Catholic country) have done. Our legislators are quite allied with the Catholic bishops. The bishops hold the legislators in their hands (shall we say like puppets) on birth control, on same-sex recognition, on divorce, and, and, and… And we remain the only country in the world (along with Malta) which does not have divorce!
We cannot, and have no intention of trying to change the teachings of Islam, the Catholic Church, or any other religion. They have a right to teach their followers their teachings. But do they have the right to hold the whole country hostage to their teachings -- say on divorce, and, and, and??? You know I am not anti-Catholic. I pray a Roman Catholic mass every day with Roman Catholics. I am anti-sex negative theology, wherever it is.
Bishop Burch recently sent me a wonderful article by the priest-sociologist and prolific author, Fr. Andrew Greeley. I first encountered Fr. Greely's wisdom when I was researching my first book in 1974-75. As he has done for the 30 some years I have been reading his works, he makes sense, sense, and more sense in a Catholic world which does not talk sense on sexual matters. Again he made the important point that many good Catholic people cannot and do not follow the church's directives on many sexual matters (birth control, love, and divorce) because they don't make sense.
So, I am here and I have run out of time. I will just add Father Greeley's article, so you can read some good solid sense.
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COMMONWEAL
August 15, 2008 / Volume CXXXV, Number 14
Signs of Life
A Sociologist Looks Ahead
Andrew M. Greeley
By way of setting the assumptions: Don't expect real reform in the Catholic Church until the Roman curia is brought under control of local bishops. Vatican II was the most successful reform council in Catholic history-until the world's bishops left Rome and the curia took control again. Now we hear that the council didn't change a thing but was merely an exercise in continuity.
Unfortunately, the leadership that should have guided the energies released by the council elected to suppress them, and the Spirit has been forced to rely on the lower clergy and the laity to restructure the church. None of us will live to see an authentic post-Vatican II church emerge.
In many parts of the world, Catholic seminaries are nearly empty, parochial schools are closing, churches are locked during the day, and rectories, convents, and novitiates are vacant. Ideologues, representing no one but themselves, fight over the ruins. Still, there are signs of the times on the horizon, no bigger than the size of a man's hand, that suggest enormous vitality in Catholicism and give grounds for hope. Some of these signs are validated by data, others by strong impressions, and others by unobtrusive measures. Most will be dismissed as meaningless by partisans of both the Left and the Right.
There are a lot more Catholics in the United States than anyone has been able to count, perhaps 15 million more than current estimates. There are no reliable data about the size of the Mexican-American population of the United States, legal and illegal. Thirty million would be a low estimate, and most are Catholic. While the Catholic Church loses some to Evangelical churches (especially when they display statues of Guadalupe), at least 75 percent of these immigrants remain Catholic. They are, for the most part, devout family people for whom religion and family are connected in an intimate way. "We believe," a Latina graduate student told me, "that God is part of our family, and that when we have a celebration in the family, God comes and rejoices with us." Not only are Latinos a new source of energy in Catholicism; they bring a dimension of joy that is difficult for anglicized Celts like me to attain. They are not a new obligation for ministry but a sacrament of joy the chur ch desperately needs.
The identity of American Catholics is rooted in the Catholic imaginative and narrative tradition. Dean R. Hoge of Catholic University has asked Catholic laity what they consider the essential components of their heritage. Responses to his "cafeteria" of possible identity items-and they remained invariant across age and locales-emphasized the Resurrection, the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, God in the sacraments, concern for the poor, and Mary the mother of Jesus. These essentials have remained unchanged for about a thousand years. So the news couldn't be much better, because these are the vessels of faith, the raw materials of theological reflection, the first fruits of the Catholic analogical imagination.
In the forty years since Humanae vitae, the birth-control encyclical, Catholics have learned to be Catholic on their own terms. When Humanae vitae appeared in 1968, some thought dissenting Catholics would either have to leave the church or stop practicing artificial birth control. Two generations later, it's clear a majority of married Catholics maintain their love for the church while continuing to practice birth control. They do so by appealing to a God whom they believe understands married love. Despite constant denunciations from those in authority, and even suggestions from some that these so-called cafeteria Catholics should simply leave the church, such married Catholics stubbornly refuse to do so.
After forty years, the crisis does not seem likely to go away. There is not a country in the world (including Poland) where the majority of Catholics accept the church's sexual ethic. As Margaret Daw, an Australian sociologist, has said, Catholics practice a "rationality of symbol." They may not accept everything the pope teaches, but they still identify with him as representing the church and cheer him during papal visits. This is good news in the sense that the crisis has not torn the church apart. Neither side will change its position. The leadership is not prepared to excommunicate the dissenters, and the dissidents are not ready to decamp. How long can this crisis last? After forty years, is it still a crisis? In her Vatican II: A Sociological Analysis of Social Change (Princeton University Press), Melissa Wilde has suggested that it might take another council to salvage the wisdom of traditional Catholic sexual teaching-for which the writings of the past two popes on t he spousal image of God might provide a frame.
Catholics have become more tolerant of homosexuals. In 1973, the first year of the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey, 76 percent of Protestants and 71percent of Catholics asserted that homosexual sex was always wrong. In 2007, the percentages had declined to 65 percent and 47 percent, respectively. Much of this change, like most change of attitudes, is not the result of individuals changing their minds but of cohort replacement-younger respondents replace those who have died. Thus, in the cohort born before 1910, 86 percent thought that homosexual sex was always wrong, while in the cohort born after 1980, the rate has fallen to 38 percent.
Volunteer movements, strong among Catholics, touch on the essence of Catholicism: serving the least of one's brothers and sisters. In parishes with an intelligent, emotionally secure pastor, volunteers abound-ministers of welcome (ushers), ministers to the sick, lectors, cantors, Eucharistic ministers, youth ministers, CCD teachers, sports ministers, parish and financial council members, school-board members, and parish trustees-there are scores of parishioners eager to assume responsibility for needed activities. In my parish in Tucson, there are seventy-five organizations cheerfully keeping the ship afloat. We have a mission in Haiti where young people spend their summer vacations building houses, teaching kids, visiting the elderly, and trying to bridge ethnic divisions. But too many parishes are innocent of this frantic activity. The pastor does not want anyone messing with his administration of the parish. And too many bishops have weak benches-not enough men who are pr epared to minister to the tidal waves of eager laity.
Popular devotions, some scorned by liturgists, remain strong. The Sorrowful Mother novena and Sunday-afternoon Benediction have not survived, but adoration chapels, festivals in honor of the Eucharist (especially Corpus Christi processions), and devotion to Mary have. The mother of Jesus has managed to escape the silly sentimentality of the old Mariology and the one-dimensional ideology of radical feminists. Small wonder. Any symbol that suggests God loves us like a mother cannot but appeal. Latinos are adding their popular devotions. Guadalupe will simply not go away. Neither will other popular devotions. The artificial conflict between liturgy and devotions is a construct the Catholic people will never accept. Devotions are not superstitious. They remystify the world through the insight that grace is everywhere.
Last Holy Saturday I wandered over to Barrio Libre in Tucson, to the chapel of St. Martin De Pores, to participate in the Pascua Yaqui Passion Play. That particular part of the play included Judas being blown up by a barge of firecrackers. At first, some of this Lent-long play may hardly appear Catholic. In fact, it is certainly Catholic, despite the mix of folk religion. We should welcome such phenomena and respect the serious intentions and artistic sensibility of those involved.
Easter and Christmas attendance has replaced Sunday Mass as an identifying norm of Catholic behavior. Half our regular parish attendees show up in church a couple of times a month. The other half are enthusiastically present at the two major feast days. They don't believe that they will go to hell for all eternity for missing a Sunday Mass. If asked why they don't go more often, the answer is obvious: They don't get anything out of it. The sermons are terrible, the music is horrible, and it takes too long. Yet the Eucharist remains important in their lives.
Despite the church's lack of interest in teenagers and young people, the enthusiasm of young Catholics in some of the new movements is a remarkable, if underappreciated, phenomenon. By "new movements" I do not mean Opus Dei or the Legionaries of Christ but groups that have grown up around some of the religious orders, such as the Jesuit Volunteers, the Vincentian Volunteers, the Claretian Volunteers, Amate House, and Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) program. When I was a much younger priest, I tried to nurture enthusiasm among the young, without much success. Their families did not want such enthusiasm to interfere with their children's careers. I have been impressed by ACE and the discipline and skill I have seen in its members. At one alumni meeting last summer, I witnessed a great sense of enthusiasm. By combining intense educational and spiritual formation with a shared common life, ACE teams create an elan that is both exciting and demanding. When ACEr s finish their two-year stint, 75 percent continue to teach, half of them in Catholic schools. I attended an hour-long seminar with ACE graduate students who were doing research on Catholic education. Similarly, in the Arizona desert last year we had two ACE teams working in impoverished communities (the only places ACE serves). Now there is a demand for more.
Friendship networks among Catholics are strong manifestations of Catholic community. In my current study of the Archdiocese of Chicago, I have discovered that 44 percent of Catholics say their five best friends are also Catholic, an almost tribal manifestation of community. There is evidence of this phenomenon in other dioceses. Being Catholic correlates positively with loyalty to the church, Mass attendance, refusal to leave, sympathy for the clergy and respect for leaders, agreement that Catholics should listen to papal teaching on the war, activity in the parish and other measures of affiliation, and financial contributions. Before developing this data, I wasn't aware of such community networks, and I'm not sure many priests are aware of them even now. Yet these are enormously important resources. This is where all the volunteers come from.
Many fallen-away Catholics are merely waiting for invitations to return. My research in the Archdiocese of Chicago suggests there are some four hundred thousand "fallen away" Catholics. About half have left because of a mixed marriage. The other half have left because of the "other" issues-authority, sex, or a conflicted family background. Nearly half admit to occasional thoughts about returning, and 17 percent say that they think of it "sometimes" or "often." Thus, there are roughly sixty-eight thousand "fallen-aways" in Cook and Lake Counties who might be open to invitations to return, and sixteen thousand who could be just waiting for an invitation. I know of no organized effort in Chicago to reclaim these lost sheep. In my parish in Tucson, the monsignor has been running a series for Alienated Catholics Anonymous for almost two decades. He presides over three series a year, and estimates that perhaps six hundred people have "come home to stay" since the program began. So me have become active parishioners-volunteers, in other words.
Barrio Libre, ACE, Alienated Catholics Anonymous, Guadalupe, the analogical imagination, cheers for the pope-these will never recreate the orderly, disciplined immigrant church into which I was ordained. But they suggest that something new and exciting is aborning. I look back on my eight decades with hope and, yes, delight.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Andrew M. Greeley
Rev. Andrew M. Greeley is a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago. He is the author of The Catholic Revolution: New Wine in Old Wineskins (University of California Press), Priests: A Calling in Crisis (University of Chicago Press), and The Truth about Conservative Christians (University of Chicago Press), with Michael Hout. Commonweal 475 Riverside Drive, Rm. 405, NY, NY 10115 212 662 4200 Privacy Policy Copyright © 2008 Commonweal Foundation [and hundreds of other books and novels, yes, sexy novels.]
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Yes. I am here. But, yes, I have been here, there, and everywhere. And that's why so many were calling to ask: Why no blogs? Why no emails?
Yes, August was a humdinger, as we used to say down in the hills of my childhood days in the beautiful hills of central Ohio. Yes, it was a humdinger. For one thing we had more weddings than any other month ever. We had guy-guy weddings, gal-gal weddings, guy-gal weddings, and some weddings where gender was no issue at all. And isn't that the way it is supposed be really, in justice, all the time? Isn't it really about love? Instead of gender?
Well, we had weddings here; we had weddings in Mindanao, and weddings all over Luzon.
It reminds me of a humorous footnote in my ministry in Manila. In 1994 one of the tabloids ran a four-day series of page-one stories about our "same-sex weddings." So many of them, they said, that Rev. Mickley is calling Los Angles for two more priests to handle all the weddings. That was 14 years ago back when we were having one wedding a month. I had to go down to the newspaper office and virtually threaten the editor to "stop the untrue publicity."
Now, Rev. Mickley is sending out a general S-O-S. This time it is true. We do need help in this ministry. The call is to those who have ministry experience, the call is to those who have only the love of God and love of people in their hearts. They can qualify for the ministry in our St. Aelred Seminary and any other orthodox seminary.
You know I was asked last month on a national television talk show, "Is love ever mentioned in these same-sex weddings?" What an insulting question! I gave a long answer, but the bottom line was: "It is all about love."
That incident brings out a terrible misconception so many people have about same-sex love. Do you know how the natives of Lindustristan make love? You probably think they do some really weird things. But do you know? What do you know? You don't know. And that's the way it is with people who don't know that "it's all about love" in same-sex relationships. It is "all about love."
And now we need priests who will carry that message to us LGBT people, and their parents, and their families, and their neighbors, and all the people up and down the archipelago.
Two mothers recently came to see me, demanding that I cancel the wedding of their sons to one another. "It's against the faith, against the church we love so much. How can this be in this country? How can this be happening to my son?" One mother was separated from the boy's father and living with another man without benefit of marriage. I asked what her church thought of that? The other mother told her son, "If you have that wedding, don't come back. You have no mother." She knew as much about her son's love as you know about love-making among the natives of Lindustristan.
The Order of St. Aelred needs priests, one two, or ten who can wipe out that ignorance, and let the truth of our love be known. Ignorance begets prejudice. Your vocation is between you and God. Ask God what God is saying to you? Ask yourself: What am I replying to God?
Some countries are slowly wiping out societal prejudice against black people and against women.
Five countries (The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, and South Africa) have equal marriage (no gender test). Added to that are California and Massachusetts which are states that have equal marriage. Many other jurisdictions have recognition of same-sex relationships under a name other than marriage.
I don't think the legislators of the Philippines are courageous enough to do what the legislators of Spain (another Catholic country) have done. Our legislators are quite allied with the Catholic bishops. The bishops hold the legislators in their hands (shall we say like puppets) on birth control, on same-sex recognition, on divorce, and, and, and… And we remain the only country in the world (along with Malta) which does not have divorce!
We cannot, and have no intention of trying to change the teachings of Islam, the Catholic Church, or any other religion. They have a right to teach their followers their teachings. But do they have the right to hold the whole country hostage to their teachings -- say on divorce, and, and, and??? You know I am not anti-Catholic. I pray a Roman Catholic mass every day with Roman Catholics. I am anti-sex negative theology, wherever it is.
Bishop Burch recently sent me a wonderful article by the priest-sociologist and prolific author, Fr. Andrew Greeley. I first encountered Fr. Greely's wisdom when I was researching my first book in 1974-75. As he has done for the 30 some years I have been reading his works, he makes sense, sense, and more sense in a Catholic world which does not talk sense on sexual matters. Again he made the important point that many good Catholic people cannot and do not follow the church's directives on many sexual matters (birth control, love, and divorce) because they don't make sense.
So, I am here and I have run out of time. I will just add Father Greeley's article, so you can read some good solid sense.
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COMMONWEAL
August 15, 2008 / Volume CXXXV, Number 14
Signs of Life
A Sociologist Looks Ahead
Andrew M. Greeley
By way of setting the assumptions: Don't expect real reform in the Catholic Church until the Roman curia is brought under control of local bishops. Vatican II was the most successful reform council in Catholic history-until the world's bishops left Rome and the curia took control again. Now we hear that the council didn't change a thing but was merely an exercise in continuity.
Unfortunately, the leadership that should have guided the energies released by the council elected to suppress them, and the Spirit has been forced to rely on the lower clergy and the laity to restructure the church. None of us will live to see an authentic post-Vatican II church emerge.
In many parts of the world, Catholic seminaries are nearly empty, parochial schools are closing, churches are locked during the day, and rectories, convents, and novitiates are vacant. Ideologues, representing no one but themselves, fight over the ruins. Still, there are signs of the times on the horizon, no bigger than the size of a man's hand, that suggest enormous vitality in Catholicism and give grounds for hope. Some of these signs are validated by data, others by strong impressions, and others by unobtrusive measures. Most will be dismissed as meaningless by partisans of both the Left and the Right.
There are a lot more Catholics in the United States than anyone has been able to count, perhaps 15 million more than current estimates. There are no reliable data about the size of the Mexican-American population of the United States, legal and illegal. Thirty million would be a low estimate, and most are Catholic. While the Catholic Church loses some to Evangelical churches (especially when they display statues of Guadalupe), at least 75 percent of these immigrants remain Catholic. They are, for the most part, devout family people for whom religion and family are connected in an intimate way. "We believe," a Latina graduate student told me, "that God is part of our family, and that when we have a celebration in the family, God comes and rejoices with us." Not only are Latinos a new source of energy in Catholicism; they bring a dimension of joy that is difficult for anglicized Celts like me to attain. They are not a new obligation for ministry but a sacrament of joy the chur ch desperately needs.
The identity of American Catholics is rooted in the Catholic imaginative and narrative tradition. Dean R. Hoge of Catholic University has asked Catholic laity what they consider the essential components of their heritage. Responses to his "cafeteria" of possible identity items-and they remained invariant across age and locales-emphasized the Resurrection, the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, God in the sacraments, concern for the poor, and Mary the mother of Jesus. These essentials have remained unchanged for about a thousand years. So the news couldn't be much better, because these are the vessels of faith, the raw materials of theological reflection, the first fruits of the Catholic analogical imagination.
In the forty years since Humanae vitae, the birth-control encyclical, Catholics have learned to be Catholic on their own terms. When Humanae vitae appeared in 1968, some thought dissenting Catholics would either have to leave the church or stop practicing artificial birth control. Two generations later, it's clear a majority of married Catholics maintain their love for the church while continuing to practice birth control. They do so by appealing to a God whom they believe understands married love. Despite constant denunciations from those in authority, and even suggestions from some that these so-called cafeteria Catholics should simply leave the church, such married Catholics stubbornly refuse to do so.
After forty years, the crisis does not seem likely to go away. There is not a country in the world (including Poland) where the majority of Catholics accept the church's sexual ethic. As Margaret Daw, an Australian sociologist, has said, Catholics practice a "rationality of symbol." They may not accept everything the pope teaches, but they still identify with him as representing the church and cheer him during papal visits. This is good news in the sense that the crisis has not torn the church apart. Neither side will change its position. The leadership is not prepared to excommunicate the dissenters, and the dissidents are not ready to decamp. How long can this crisis last? After forty years, is it still a crisis? In her Vatican II: A Sociological Analysis of Social Change (Princeton University Press), Melissa Wilde has suggested that it might take another council to salvage the wisdom of traditional Catholic sexual teaching-for which the writings of the past two popes on t he spousal image of God might provide a frame.
Catholics have become more tolerant of homosexuals. In 1973, the first year of the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey, 76 percent of Protestants and 71percent of Catholics asserted that homosexual sex was always wrong. In 2007, the percentages had declined to 65 percent and 47 percent, respectively. Much of this change, like most change of attitudes, is not the result of individuals changing their minds but of cohort replacement-younger respondents replace those who have died. Thus, in the cohort born before 1910, 86 percent thought that homosexual sex was always wrong, while in the cohort born after 1980, the rate has fallen to 38 percent.
Volunteer movements, strong among Catholics, touch on the essence of Catholicism: serving the least of one's brothers and sisters. In parishes with an intelligent, emotionally secure pastor, volunteers abound-ministers of welcome (ushers), ministers to the sick, lectors, cantors, Eucharistic ministers, youth ministers, CCD teachers, sports ministers, parish and financial council members, school-board members, and parish trustees-there are scores of parishioners eager to assume responsibility for needed activities. In my parish in Tucson, there are seventy-five organizations cheerfully keeping the ship afloat. We have a mission in Haiti where young people spend their summer vacations building houses, teaching kids, visiting the elderly, and trying to bridge ethnic divisions. But too many parishes are innocent of this frantic activity. The pastor does not want anyone messing with his administration of the parish. And too many bishops have weak benches-not enough men who are pr epared to minister to the tidal waves of eager laity.
Popular devotions, some scorned by liturgists, remain strong. The Sorrowful Mother novena and Sunday-afternoon Benediction have not survived, but adoration chapels, festivals in honor of the Eucharist (especially Corpus Christi processions), and devotion to Mary have. The mother of Jesus has managed to escape the silly sentimentality of the old Mariology and the one-dimensional ideology of radical feminists. Small wonder. Any symbol that suggests God loves us like a mother cannot but appeal. Latinos are adding their popular devotions. Guadalupe will simply not go away. Neither will other popular devotions. The artificial conflict between liturgy and devotions is a construct the Catholic people will never accept. Devotions are not superstitious. They remystify the world through the insight that grace is everywhere.
Last Holy Saturday I wandered over to Barrio Libre in Tucson, to the chapel of St. Martin De Pores, to participate in the Pascua Yaqui Passion Play. That particular part of the play included Judas being blown up by a barge of firecrackers. At first, some of this Lent-long play may hardly appear Catholic. In fact, it is certainly Catholic, despite the mix of folk religion. We should welcome such phenomena and respect the serious intentions and artistic sensibility of those involved.
Easter and Christmas attendance has replaced Sunday Mass as an identifying norm of Catholic behavior. Half our regular parish attendees show up in church a couple of times a month. The other half are enthusiastically present at the two major feast days. They don't believe that they will go to hell for all eternity for missing a Sunday Mass. If asked why they don't go more often, the answer is obvious: They don't get anything out of it. The sermons are terrible, the music is horrible, and it takes too long. Yet the Eucharist remains important in their lives.
Despite the church's lack of interest in teenagers and young people, the enthusiasm of young Catholics in some of the new movements is a remarkable, if underappreciated, phenomenon. By "new movements" I do not mean Opus Dei or the Legionaries of Christ but groups that have grown up around some of the religious orders, such as the Jesuit Volunteers, the Vincentian Volunteers, the Claretian Volunteers, Amate House, and Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) program. When I was a much younger priest, I tried to nurture enthusiasm among the young, without much success. Their families did not want such enthusiasm to interfere with their children's careers. I have been impressed by ACE and the discipline and skill I have seen in its members. At one alumni meeting last summer, I witnessed a great sense of enthusiasm. By combining intense educational and spiritual formation with a shared common life, ACE teams create an elan that is both exciting and demanding. When ACEr s finish their two-year stint, 75 percent continue to teach, half of them in Catholic schools. I attended an hour-long seminar with ACE graduate students who were doing research on Catholic education. Similarly, in the Arizona desert last year we had two ACE teams working in impoverished communities (the only places ACE serves). Now there is a demand for more.
Friendship networks among Catholics are strong manifestations of Catholic community. In my current study of the Archdiocese of Chicago, I have discovered that 44 percent of Catholics say their five best friends are also Catholic, an almost tribal manifestation of community. There is evidence of this phenomenon in other dioceses. Being Catholic correlates positively with loyalty to the church, Mass attendance, refusal to leave, sympathy for the clergy and respect for leaders, agreement that Catholics should listen to papal teaching on the war, activity in the parish and other measures of affiliation, and financial contributions. Before developing this data, I wasn't aware of such community networks, and I'm not sure many priests are aware of them even now. Yet these are enormously important resources. This is where all the volunteers come from.
Many fallen-away Catholics are merely waiting for invitations to return. My research in the Archdiocese of Chicago suggests there are some four hundred thousand "fallen away" Catholics. About half have left because of a mixed marriage. The other half have left because of the "other" issues-authority, sex, or a conflicted family background. Nearly half admit to occasional thoughts about returning, and 17 percent say that they think of it "sometimes" or "often." Thus, there are roughly sixty-eight thousand "fallen-aways" in Cook and Lake Counties who might be open to invitations to return, and sixteen thousand who could be just waiting for an invitation. I know of no organized effort in Chicago to reclaim these lost sheep. In my parish in Tucson, the monsignor has been running a series for Alienated Catholics Anonymous for almost two decades. He presides over three series a year, and estimates that perhaps six hundred people have "come home to stay" since the program began. So me have become active parishioners-volunteers, in other words.
Barrio Libre, ACE, Alienated Catholics Anonymous, Guadalupe, the analogical imagination, cheers for the pope-these will never recreate the orderly, disciplined immigrant church into which I was ordained. But they suggest that something new and exciting is aborning. I look back on my eight decades with hope and, yes, delight.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Andrew M. Greeley
Rev. Andrew M. Greeley is a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago. He is the author of The Catholic Revolution: New Wine in Old Wineskins (University of California Press), Priests: A Calling in Crisis (University of Chicago Press), and The Truth about Conservative Christians (University of Chicago Press), with Michael Hout. Commonweal 475 Riverside Drive, Rm. 405, NY, NY 10115 212 662 4200 Privacy Policy Copyright © 2008 Commonweal Foundation [and hundreds of other books and novels, yes, sexy novels.]
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Wednesday, May 28, 2008
May 28th Quick Update
May 28th, near the end of May, soon the month of June.
My dear friends, plural, wherever you are, I just want to let you know that I survived the house move, and am beginning to get settled at 82-D Masikap Street.
Actually it's just a short walk from Quezon City Hall.
The house is spacious, with a ground floor mini chapel which can serve for prayer uses and small weddings. The entire GDC-RR LGBT Library of the Philippines is already on shelves at one end of the chapel.
Then there is the big kitchen [with lots of cupboards].
The second floor has a nice central office and lounge area and three spacious bedrooms with large built-in clothes closets.
I was able to bring my entire plant and rock garden, but have not had time to do any arranging.
During the weeks since my homophobic, born again preacher land owner evicted me, and I began packing up everything in hundreds of boxes, so many things happened in the world that I would have wanted to make separate blogs on. Some of them will still be forthcoming.
One of them was the Supreme Court of California declaring that marriage for same-sex couples must be legal. And then my entertainment idol Ellen Degeneres declaring that she will get married in California with her lover Portia.
One of them was the Manila cardinal and other bishops of the Roman Church denouncing the participation of transvestite "queens" in the May processions in honor of the Blessed Mother. Oh my, more of the same! I did not reply publicly. Our movement spokespersons, Danton Remoto and Jonas Bagas did an excellent (page one) job of responding in the media. My comment is that they love the Blessed Mother, and the Blessed Mother loves them. God loves them and is smiling upon them. Nobody can take that away from them -- or you -- or me. St. Paul said it first: "No power [anywhere] can separate us from the love of God."
One of them was an ugly incident in a hospital where doctors removed a cylindrical object from a gay man's anal canal and it was recorded and made its way to a blog with dirisive anti-gay snide remarks and giggles. I did not comment publicly. Again our spokespersons did a masterful job even in the face of the Catholic bishop's comments that it was not doctors who did wrong (in violating the person's privacy), but the one who had gay sex that was wrong. Oh my, more of the same.
Then there was one of our OSAe members who wanted to go with his lover to the World Youth Day gathering in Sydney this year. He went to the Australian embassy to get a visa and they told him he must have a bishop's endorsement to get a visa. He and his lover went to the Catholic Bishop Conference of the Philippines Office, and said they were ecumenical. The nun told them they could not get the cardinal's endorsement because they were not Catholic (meaning Roman Catholic). They said, what can we do? She said, "Don't go." They went to the embassy again. The embassy said that any bishop will do. So they came to me, any bishop, and they got a Letter of Endorsement from the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of One Spirit Philippines. We'll see.
And there were indeed other incidents and issues. Hopefully we'll hear more about them as time goes on and I begin to get back to my neat and orderly self. (Those who know me are laughing. Hehehehe)
The day after I got everything moved in (in a pile, as it were), I had a morning wedding in a provice two hours in one direction, and an afternoon wedding in another province four hours in the opposite direction, and came home by midnight with a bad cold from the aircon on the buses. But, people say why do you do it? I never think of that. It's what I do. It's what I have the privilege of doing. It's what God called me here to do. It's what I do with the Lord to bring people closer to the Lord who wants them to "have life, and have it more abundantly." And that is why I am eternally grateful to some of my former MCC co-ministers and other friends who sent enough cash to make the next-to-impossible move possible. I know they know that it is for the very reason that I am here that they helped make it possible.
My dear friends, plural, wherever you are, I just want to let you know that I survived the house move, and am beginning to get settled at 82-D Masikap Street.
Actually it's just a short walk from Quezon City Hall.
The house is spacious, with a ground floor mini chapel which can serve for prayer uses and small weddings. The entire GDC-RR LGBT Library of the Philippines is already on shelves at one end of the chapel.
Then there is the big kitchen [with lots of cupboards].
The second floor has a nice central office and lounge area and three spacious bedrooms with large built-in clothes closets.
I was able to bring my entire plant and rock garden, but have not had time to do any arranging.
During the weeks since my homophobic, born again preacher land owner evicted me, and I began packing up everything in hundreds of boxes, so many things happened in the world that I would have wanted to make separate blogs on. Some of them will still be forthcoming.
One of them was the Supreme Court of California declaring that marriage for same-sex couples must be legal. And then my entertainment idol Ellen Degeneres declaring that she will get married in California with her lover Portia.
One of them was the Manila cardinal and other bishops of the Roman Church denouncing the participation of transvestite "queens" in the May processions in honor of the Blessed Mother. Oh my, more of the same! I did not reply publicly. Our movement spokespersons, Danton Remoto and Jonas Bagas did an excellent (page one) job of responding in the media. My comment is that they love the Blessed Mother, and the Blessed Mother loves them. God loves them and is smiling upon them. Nobody can take that away from them -- or you -- or me. St. Paul said it first: "No power [anywhere] can separate us from the love of God."
One of them was an ugly incident in a hospital where doctors removed a cylindrical object from a gay man's anal canal and it was recorded and made its way to a blog with dirisive anti-gay snide remarks and giggles. I did not comment publicly. Again our spokespersons did a masterful job even in the face of the Catholic bishop's comments that it was not doctors who did wrong (in violating the person's privacy), but the one who had gay sex that was wrong. Oh my, more of the same.
Then there was one of our OSAe members who wanted to go with his lover to the World Youth Day gathering in Sydney this year. He went to the Australian embassy to get a visa and they told him he must have a bishop's endorsement to get a visa. He and his lover went to the Catholic Bishop Conference of the Philippines Office, and said they were ecumenical. The nun told them they could not get the cardinal's endorsement because they were not Catholic (meaning Roman Catholic). They said, what can we do? She said, "Don't go." They went to the embassy again. The embassy said that any bishop will do. So they came to me, any bishop, and they got a Letter of Endorsement from the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of One Spirit Philippines. We'll see.
And there were indeed other incidents and issues. Hopefully we'll hear more about them as time goes on and I begin to get back to my neat and orderly self. (Those who know me are laughing. Hehehehe)
The day after I got everything moved in (in a pile, as it were), I had a morning wedding in a provice two hours in one direction, and an afternoon wedding in another province four hours in the opposite direction, and came home by midnight with a bad cold from the aircon on the buses. But, people say why do you do it? I never think of that. It's what I do. It's what I have the privilege of doing. It's what God called me here to do. It's what I do with the Lord to bring people closer to the Lord who wants them to "have life, and have it more abundantly." And that is why I am eternally grateful to some of my former MCC co-ministers and other friends who sent enough cash to make the next-to-impossible move possible. I know they know that it is for the very reason that I am here that they helped make it possible.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Novena in Honor of St. Aelred
The Feast of St. Aelred, March 3, came during our Lenten retreat this year, so we have postponed the Novena until after Easter.
It is, of course, a nine day Novena. You can actually choose your most convenient nine days.
Here’s how the Novena works. Each day of the nine day novena visit our e-group and read the Novena commemoration of St. Aelred and the St. Aelred Novena prayer. (This time you are not asked to pass it on to nine people or any of those superstitious things.) Just visit the e-group and participate in the St. Aelred commemoration of the day.
Day 1. We remember Aelred as a youth and teenager.
Aelred was born in Hexam in 1110 in northern England where his father was “pastor” of the Roman Catholic Church at Hexam. For priests to marry was considered sinful, but it was so common that it was not a scandal. Many years later, in Aelred’s lifetime, his father gave up the “parish” and his wife and entered a monastery for the remainder of his life on earth. Hexam was a parish which had many relics (tombs, bones, bodies of famous English saints). Aelred acquired his father’s devotion to these saints and later wrote about them.
At the age of 15 or thereabouts, Aelred’s father sent him to live in the court of King David of Scotland. He spent 10 years there and became a trusted aide of the King, who also was later proclaimed a saint of the church. At the court Aelred got a good education, but his greatest delight, he tells us, “was to love and be loved.” He had loves and friends, but he also had a broken heart many times. In the intrigues of the court, True Friendship of the type Aelred yearned for, was virtually unknown.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 2. Aelred enters novitiate and takes up “religious life.”
At age of 25 in the year 1135, Aelred abruptly left the court and entered the new monastery in northern England which St. Bernard, the abbot of Clairvaux in France, had sent some monks to establish just two years before. It was a hard life and the weather was cold and severe (which may account for the mere 57 years of Aelred’s earthly life). They “camped” in temporary huts along the beautiful, but often ice and snow covered, River Rye, while they and the workers constructed the monastery that eventually became the largest in all England.
While trying to adjust to this life so different from the court, Aelred began to yearn again for true friendship, and to see the possibility in a community centered on Christ. Slowly he began to explore what True Friendship could be. Within eight years he was named novice master, with the heavy responsibility of guiding the spiritual formation of the new monks which were already entering the monastery in increasing numbers.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 3. Abbot of Revesby
The Abbey of Rievaulx decided to establish a “daughter house” at Revesby, further to the east, but still in northern England. This was the first of the five daughter houses of Rievaulx. Aelred was selected to be the first abbot of the new Abbey. So he left whatever small comforts had been built into Rievaulx in those first ten years and went to Revesby and started all over again, with cold temporary huts, and much manual labor, back-breaking work that he flung himself into for the next two years from 1145-to 1147.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 4. Abbot of Rievaulx.
In 1147 the first abbot of Rievaulx died, and Aelred was elected to return from Revesby and become the Abbot of the “Motherhouse,” Rievaulx. It is located in a scenic valley, dubbed the “valley of light,” ever massaged with the sound of water running through the monastery grounds in the stream of the River Rye. (This, by the way, is the inspiration of our monastery fountain of bubbling water.)
For the next 20 years St. Aelred was distinguished as a capable, gentle, and caring administrator of an ever-growing abbey, one who never expelled a monk in 20 years. It reached a peak of 500 priests, brothers, and workers, and even today the massive shells of chapels, chapter rooms, dining halls, and dormitories are still a tourist attraction in northern England.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 5. Holy Abbot.
In addition to his administration of the Abbey, St. Aelred began to work on the writings which have earned him enduring recognition as one of the “late fathers of the church.” His writings embrace a vast array of writings on saints, history, love, friendship, religious life, and uncounted sermons and spiritual works.
Slowly in the monasteries of today his works are being translated from the original Latin into today’s English. (A few years ago I asked a Trappist monk from Boston if he “ever heard” of St. Aelred. He informed naïve me that he was the one who is translating St. Aelred’s sermons.)
St. Aelred wrote the lives of several English saints, and became a sought-after preacher for special occasions. He delivered the funeral sermon when King St. David died in 1153.
He began works on two of his best-known works, The Mirror of Love, and Spiritual Friendship. It was the well-known Cistercian (Trappist) saint of Clairvaulx, St. Bernard, who asked him to write a book on love, after their discussion of love when Aelred visited Clairvaux after a mission to the pope in Rome.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 6. The Feast of St. Aelred. Apostle of Friendship.
In Spiritual Friendship St. Aelred gives us his classic definition of “Friendship.” He says “Friendship is oneness of heart, mind and spirit, in things human and divine, with mutual esteem, and kindly feelings of approval and support.”
In Mirror of Love he departs from generalities and gets down to the nitty gritty of what a True Friend is and does. It is one with whom I deeply united in bonds of love, can find rest, pour out my heart, have sweet conversation, find a harbor of calm, lay bare my secrets, receive a comforting kiss, cry with and rejoice with, talk with for advice, feel togetherness even when we are far apart, and with heart and mind together we are bound in the closest ties of love.
There can be no doubt what Aelred means by True Friendship. And that is his lifelong gospel. It is not that he deviates from the Gospel of Jesus or the teachings of John. He theologizes that if God is love as St. John teaches, then God is Friendship.
“St. Aelred is known as a Christocentric twelfth-century monastic humanist. His most famous work, Spiritual Friendship, which explores the relationship between spiritual and human friendship in a monastic context, reveals his own conscious homosexual orientation and gives love between persons of the same gender its most profound expression in Christian theology.” (Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Vol. 4, American Council of Learned Societies.)
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 7. Lover, Friend, Christian Humanist.
St. Aelred was very personal and honest in his writings about love and friendship. St. Anselm and some of Aelred’s other contemporaries wrote about love and friendship, but in a much most clinical way, even though they were also gay. Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx wrote about his teenage loves, about his “true” loves in the monastery, about his own yearnings and experiences.
In asserting the need for friendship and love. Aelred legitimized the physical and spiritual embrace of other human beings – and in the context of a religious community. In this context, all loves are reconciled in Jesus and all are at peace in the love of the community. Honored as a medieval Christian humanist, Aelred had a great optimism about the capability of human beings to love each other in good communities centered on Jesus. When he entered the monastery, he did not leave the world made by God or the exercise of love which gives harmony to every day life. The whole world is God’s world.
St. Aelred found his answer to the meaning of life in its human dimension in the love of the brothers at Rievaulx – brother to all in community life, lover to some in his True Friendships. He found the love of God made real and physical by experiencing together love of God and individual human beings.
St. Aelred unabashedly insisted on the need for human loves, and in his Mirror of Love he pours his heart out in lament over the death of the monk Simon, with whom he felt a True Friendship.
“St. Aelred deserves to be the patron saint of gays and lesbians because he was true to himself – never covering up his sexuality which was same-sex attraction, and he was not pulled fully into the prevailing sex-negative anti-body dualistic philosophy of St. Augustine,” writes a participant at the conclusion of a seminar on the life and works of St. Aelred.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 8. Suffered from arthritis.
We all identify with Jesus who took on all the weakness and limitations of humanity to be one with us and died for love of us in the agonizing suffering of the passion and Cross.
St. Aelred especially identified with the sufferings of Jesus for us. The last ten years of his life on earth he was wracked with excruciating pain of arthritis. His sufferings were intensified with the unbearable pangs of kidney stones.
Sometimes when he had to stay in a little room near the infirmary, his friends would gather around his bed to cheer him up. (One’s imagination runs wild if gays were as cheerful then as they are now in the Philippines.)
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 9. Patron of OSAe, patron of responsible sexuality.
Many scholars have turned their attention to St. Aelred studies. Worldwide today there is an elite corps of “St. Aelred Scholars.” They are somewhat divided between those who speak frankly and openly of his same-sex orientation and those who would prefer, if they could, to sweep it under the rug. There are rumors that the Trappists don’t allow the monks to read Aelred’s works without permission. But Thomas Merton, a great world-renowned Trappist writer wrote a biography of St. Aelred. The rumors are untrue. The Trappists revere St. Aelred, and I spoke to a Trappist monk who is translating into English the sermons of St. Aelred..
The Trappists and Benedictines and other orders are fearful that the monks will follow St. Aelred’s teachings of love and friendship in the monastery. Because of homophobia they are trying to be on guard against “special friendships.”
Our reason for choosing St. Aelred as our patron is primarily because of the holiness of his life and his inspiration for us to give our all for Jesus. The name of Jesus was always on his lips and the love of Jesus was always in his heart, but he felt that his love of Jesus could be strengthened by following the teachings of St. John that love of neighbor translates into love of God. “Those who live in love, live in God, and God lives in them.”
St. Aelred was not a modern day gay activist. There is no doubt that he sincerely embraced the celibate life of his vocation. He was a product of his times and caught up in the sex-negative theology of St. Augustine, but he was liminal, way ahead of his times, in his honesty about love and his loves. He is not a role model of gay activism, but a role model of holiness, and honesty, and coming out as appropriate in one’s state of life.
“St. Aelred deserves to be the patron saint of gays and lesbians because his philosophy of the unity of the flesh and spirit does not follow the hateful language of homophobic official literature, and he led a life of honest openness about loving people of the same sex physically,” wrote Oscar Atadero at the conclusion of a seminar on St. Aelred.
We celebrate the feast of St. Aelred because our understanding of life and love is enhanced by this great saint whom we have chosen as our patron.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Special request
Please send your comment about the experience of the Novena to Fr. Richard saintaelred@gmail.com
It is, of course, a nine day Novena. You can actually choose your most convenient nine days.
Here’s how the Novena works. Each day of the nine day novena visit our e-group and read the Novena commemoration of St. Aelred and the St. Aelred Novena prayer. (This time you are not asked to pass it on to nine people or any of those superstitious things.) Just visit the e-group and participate in the St. Aelred commemoration of the day.
Day 1. We remember Aelred as a youth and teenager.
Aelred was born in Hexam in 1110 in northern England where his father was “pastor” of the Roman Catholic Church at Hexam. For priests to marry was considered sinful, but it was so common that it was not a scandal. Many years later, in Aelred’s lifetime, his father gave up the “parish” and his wife and entered a monastery for the remainder of his life on earth. Hexam was a parish which had many relics (tombs, bones, bodies of famous English saints). Aelred acquired his father’s devotion to these saints and later wrote about them.
At the age of 15 or thereabouts, Aelred’s father sent him to live in the court of King David of Scotland. He spent 10 years there and became a trusted aide of the King, who also was later proclaimed a saint of the church. At the court Aelred got a good education, but his greatest delight, he tells us, “was to love and be loved.” He had loves and friends, but he also had a broken heart many times. In the intrigues of the court, True Friendship of the type Aelred yearned for, was virtually unknown.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 2. Aelred enters novitiate and takes up “religious life.”
At age of 25 in the year 1135, Aelred abruptly left the court and entered the new monastery in northern England which St. Bernard, the abbot of Clairvaux in France, had sent some monks to establish just two years before. It was a hard life and the weather was cold and severe (which may account for the mere 57 years of Aelred’s earthly life). They “camped” in temporary huts along the beautiful, but often ice and snow covered, River Rye, while they and the workers constructed the monastery that eventually became the largest in all England.
While trying to adjust to this life so different from the court, Aelred began to yearn again for true friendship, and to see the possibility in a community centered on Christ. Slowly he began to explore what True Friendship could be. Within eight years he was named novice master, with the heavy responsibility of guiding the spiritual formation of the new monks which were already entering the monastery in increasing numbers.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 3. Abbot of Revesby
The Abbey of Rievaulx decided to establish a “daughter house” at Revesby, further to the east, but still in northern England. This was the first of the five daughter houses of Rievaulx. Aelred was selected to be the first abbot of the new Abbey. So he left whatever small comforts had been built into Rievaulx in those first ten years and went to Revesby and started all over again, with cold temporary huts, and much manual labor, back-breaking work that he flung himself into for the next two years from 1145-to 1147.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 4. Abbot of Rievaulx.
In 1147 the first abbot of Rievaulx died, and Aelred was elected to return from Revesby and become the Abbot of the “Motherhouse,” Rievaulx. It is located in a scenic valley, dubbed the “valley of light,” ever massaged with the sound of water running through the monastery grounds in the stream of the River Rye. (This, by the way, is the inspiration of our monastery fountain of bubbling water.)
For the next 20 years St. Aelred was distinguished as a capable, gentle, and caring administrator of an ever-growing abbey, one who never expelled a monk in 20 years. It reached a peak of 500 priests, brothers, and workers, and even today the massive shells of chapels, chapter rooms, dining halls, and dormitories are still a tourist attraction in northern England.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 5. Holy Abbot.
In addition to his administration of the Abbey, St. Aelred began to work on the writings which have earned him enduring recognition as one of the “late fathers of the church.” His writings embrace a vast array of writings on saints, history, love, friendship, religious life, and uncounted sermons and spiritual works.
Slowly in the monasteries of today his works are being translated from the original Latin into today’s English. (A few years ago I asked a Trappist monk from Boston if he “ever heard” of St. Aelred. He informed naïve me that he was the one who is translating St. Aelred’s sermons.)
St. Aelred wrote the lives of several English saints, and became a sought-after preacher for special occasions. He delivered the funeral sermon when King St. David died in 1153.
He began works on two of his best-known works, The Mirror of Love, and Spiritual Friendship. It was the well-known Cistercian (Trappist) saint of Clairvaulx, St. Bernard, who asked him to write a book on love, after their discussion of love when Aelred visited Clairvaux after a mission to the pope in Rome.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 6. The Feast of St. Aelred. Apostle of Friendship.
In Spiritual Friendship St. Aelred gives us his classic definition of “Friendship.” He says “Friendship is oneness of heart, mind and spirit, in things human and divine, with mutual esteem, and kindly feelings of approval and support.”
In Mirror of Love he departs from generalities and gets down to the nitty gritty of what a True Friend is and does. It is one with whom I deeply united in bonds of love, can find rest, pour out my heart, have sweet conversation, find a harbor of calm, lay bare my secrets, receive a comforting kiss, cry with and rejoice with, talk with for advice, feel togetherness even when we are far apart, and with heart and mind together we are bound in the closest ties of love.
There can be no doubt what Aelred means by True Friendship. And that is his lifelong gospel. It is not that he deviates from the Gospel of Jesus or the teachings of John. He theologizes that if God is love as St. John teaches, then God is Friendship.
“St. Aelred is known as a Christocentric twelfth-century monastic humanist. His most famous work, Spiritual Friendship, which explores the relationship between spiritual and human friendship in a monastic context, reveals his own conscious homosexual orientation and gives love between persons of the same gender its most profound expression in Christian theology.” (Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Vol. 4, American Council of Learned Societies.)
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 7. Lover, Friend, Christian Humanist.
St. Aelred was very personal and honest in his writings about love and friendship. St. Anselm and some of Aelred’s other contemporaries wrote about love and friendship, but in a much most clinical way, even though they were also gay. Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx wrote about his teenage loves, about his “true” loves in the monastery, about his own yearnings and experiences.
In asserting the need for friendship and love. Aelred legitimized the physical and spiritual embrace of other human beings – and in the context of a religious community. In this context, all loves are reconciled in Jesus and all are at peace in the love of the community. Honored as a medieval Christian humanist, Aelred had a great optimism about the capability of human beings to love each other in good communities centered on Jesus. When he entered the monastery, he did not leave the world made by God or the exercise of love which gives harmony to every day life. The whole world is God’s world.
St. Aelred found his answer to the meaning of life in its human dimension in the love of the brothers at Rievaulx – brother to all in community life, lover to some in his True Friendships. He found the love of God made real and physical by experiencing together love of God and individual human beings.
St. Aelred unabashedly insisted on the need for human loves, and in his Mirror of Love he pours his heart out in lament over the death of the monk Simon, with whom he felt a True Friendship.
“St. Aelred deserves to be the patron saint of gays and lesbians because he was true to himself – never covering up his sexuality which was same-sex attraction, and he was not pulled fully into the prevailing sex-negative anti-body dualistic philosophy of St. Augustine,” writes a participant at the conclusion of a seminar on the life and works of St. Aelred.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 8. Suffered from arthritis.
We all identify with Jesus who took on all the weakness and limitations of humanity to be one with us and died for love of us in the agonizing suffering of the passion and Cross.
St. Aelred especially identified with the sufferings of Jesus for us. The last ten years of his life on earth he was wracked with excruciating pain of arthritis. His sufferings were intensified with the unbearable pangs of kidney stones.
Sometimes when he had to stay in a little room near the infirmary, his friends would gather around his bed to cheer him up. (One’s imagination runs wild if gays were as cheerful then as they are now in the Philippines.)
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Day 9. Patron of OSAe, patron of responsible sexuality.
Many scholars have turned their attention to St. Aelred studies. Worldwide today there is an elite corps of “St. Aelred Scholars.” They are somewhat divided between those who speak frankly and openly of his same-sex orientation and those who would prefer, if they could, to sweep it under the rug. There are rumors that the Trappists don’t allow the monks to read Aelred’s works without permission. But Thomas Merton, a great world-renowned Trappist writer wrote a biography of St. Aelred. The rumors are untrue. The Trappists revere St. Aelred, and I spoke to a Trappist monk who is translating into English the sermons of St. Aelred..
The Trappists and Benedictines and other orders are fearful that the monks will follow St. Aelred’s teachings of love and friendship in the monastery. Because of homophobia they are trying to be on guard against “special friendships.”
Our reason for choosing St. Aelred as our patron is primarily because of the holiness of his life and his inspiration for us to give our all for Jesus. The name of Jesus was always on his lips and the love of Jesus was always in his heart, but he felt that his love of Jesus could be strengthened by following the teachings of St. John that love of neighbor translates into love of God. “Those who live in love, live in God, and God lives in them.”
St. Aelred was not a modern day gay activist. There is no doubt that he sincerely embraced the celibate life of his vocation. He was a product of his times and caught up in the sex-negative theology of St. Augustine, but he was liminal, way ahead of his times, in his honesty about love and his loves. He is not a role model of gay activism, but a role model of holiness, and honesty, and coming out as appropriate in one’s state of life.
“St. Aelred deserves to be the patron saint of gays and lesbians because his philosophy of the unity of the flesh and spirit does not follow the hateful language of homophobic official literature, and he led a life of honest openness about loving people of the same sex physically,” wrote Oscar Atadero at the conclusion of a seminar on St. Aelred.
We celebrate the feast of St. Aelred because our understanding of life and love is enhanced by this great saint whom we have chosen as our patron.
Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.
St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.
Special request
Please send your comment about the experience of the Novena to Fr. Richard saintaelred@gmail.com
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