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Gay and Lesbian Catholics
From: Cambridge University Press
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Michele Dillon |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Sex and sexuality provide an endless source of controversy in many religions, not least among Roman Catholics. Yet, those who find themselves marginalised by the institutional church find a welcome with associations such as "Dignity," a national US association of gay and lesbian Catholics. In an effort to understand the experience of those Catholics who are officially excluded from their church, sociologist Michele Dillon spent time talking to members of the Boston chapter of Dignity. |
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| Dignity/Boston can be characterized as a responsive community that aims to be responsive to the "true needs" of all. | |
 t is not possible to quantify how many gay and lesbian Catholics leave the church on account of the church hierarchy's teachings on sexuality. Clearly some join other denominations or refrain from participating in institutionalized religious activity at all. On the other hand, as is highlighted by the religious involvement of Dignity participants, many gay and lesbian Catholics choose to continue to be actively committed to Catholicism notwithstanding the Vatican's condemnation of their sexuality. Interview data from Dignity participants invariably focused on the pull of belonging to what respondents saw as the larger culture, history, and tradition of Catholicism. The "gene thing" serves as an appropriate metaphor to synthesize most respondents' understanding of both the given nature of their religious identity and the fact that it is experienced as something that respondents cannot easily discard. Regardless of whether respondents had positive or negative experiences growing up as gay or lesbian Catholics, the Catholic doctrinal and communal tradition provides them with the framework infusing their sense of what comprises a "legitimate" identity. In other words, although Dignity participants actively challenge the official boundaries of Catholicism, their sense of identity is both nurtured and constrained by a strong consciousness that they are Catholic and thus part of a larger tradition. The interpretive autonomy of Dignity, and of individual members to construct an identity that is both gay and Catholic, is thus informed by what "feels right" in terms of Catholicism. |
Identity and inclusion
Almost all (88%) of the Dignity survey respondents stressed the personal importance they attach to inclusion in the broader church community and their quest, as one member stated, for full acceptance as "part of the Body of Christ." Yet this acceptance, clearly, has to integrate members' identity as gay and lesbian Catholics. Thus, for example, several respondents stated that the original reason they were attracted to Dignity was to reconcile their faith and their sexuality, and they attributed their continuing regular participation in Dignity to the way in which the Dignity community nurtures their dual identities as gay or lesbian Catholics. A professional man in his mid-thirties reflected the views of many when he said: "My faith is very important to me. But I didn't want to give up my sexuality." Other respondents stated that they wanted to be "in the company of other men and women who are celebrating their religion and sexuality." Another professional man said that he "was looking for a supportive setting .... a community which integrates spirituality and sexuality in a healthy, life-giving way." |
For the vast majority of Dignity participants it was evident that personal narratives were deeply embedded in specific communal attachments. For them, community was not something that could simply be picked up or created out of whole cloth. The attraction of the Dignity community appeared rather to be grounded in the commitments and ties by which it linked members to Catholicism. Many of the respondents expressed the emotive pull they felt toward retaining their links with the broader Catholic tradition and remaining an accepted part of what Robert Bellah and colleagues (Habits of the Heart, 1985, p. 153) would call their "community of memory." |
Bellah and his coauthors lament the weakness of communal bonds that are grounded in egocentric individualism and the shifting superficiality of self-oriented relationships. They argue that in the absence of collectively shared "communities of memory" inscribed with links and obligations to larger civic or religious traditions, community "for the therapeutically inclined ... is something hoped for, something yearned for, something sadly missing most of the time ..." (Bellah et al., 1985, pp. 134-38). In contrast to the therapeutic culture central to Bellah and associates' characterization of American middle-class life, Dignity participants were searching, as different respondents indicated, for "a worship community," "a faith community that shared [their] beliefs, social justice views and gayness," a faith community that would, in short, challenge them to "keep priorities right." For almost all of the respondents, then, it seemed "natural" that this community be Catholic because even for two Dignity respondents in the sample who converted to Catholicism, Catholicism was a formative source in grounding their values and identity. |
The context in which Dignity respondents affirm their faith, therefore, must not only be open to their sexuality but in continuity with what they hold to be their Catholic heritage. One woman phrased the sentiment of many respondents when she said: "I wanted a place where I could feel connected with my spirituality in a community related to my Catholic heritage. I wanted a community not only based in faith but also based in the celebration and validation of my life." One middle-aged man said: "The Catholic religion is my heritage.... Dignity is my spiritual home." Another man said: "I wanted to maintain my Catholic tradition but never felt as though I really belonged at any mainstream parish." Participation for others was explained simply as "Catholicism is inescapably part of my life," or "Catholicism is an encompassing identity for me." Being Catholic thus assumes a certain overarching character for the Dignity respondents. They experience it as an inherent part of their self-understanding and consequently find that its rumbling presence in their lives cannot easily be silenced. Catholicism's institutionalized collective memory (cf. M. Schudson, Watergate in American Memory, 1992, pp. 2-3) connects Dignity respondents to the past as well as shaping their present and future practices in ways that demand continuity with a communal tradition that transcends the diverse experiences of participants' lives. |
Cycles of return
The pull toward Catholicism is clearly not experienced as a process of unruptured involvement in the church. One man whom I interviewed, Cole, presented a somewhat typical profile of the cyclical fall away from and return to the church and to Dignity that characterized many of the Dignity respondents. Cole's narrative captures how various doctrinal and social pressures can lessen involvement in religious activities. It also illuminates how life cycle fluctuations in participation in institutionalized religion in general are reflected in Dignity as the church writ small. Cole is currently active in Dignity, and his story is one of the recovery of religious self-fulfillment; importantly, this is not solely a privatized fulfillment but one achieved through communal participation.
"When I was just out of college in the mid-80s I had already known about Dignity so I went a few times and I didn't really feel comfortable with the surroundings I guess at the church. At the time they were meeting in the basement of a church. Somehow I just didn't really feel like it was for me. I felt it might have been too progressive. Not quite what I wanted, not traditional enough. So I stopped going. Maybe I'd gone about three or four times. And I stopped going for about six years. And then I stopped going to church altogether and I was involved in other things. I was studying for exams and I needed to concentrate a lot of time on that and so I was ignoring my spirituality. And in a way I kind of felt lost. I was really kind of sad in a way. I was really missing out on something. And I couldn't figure out what it was. I didn't know how to get that back or even really what it was I was really missing. And then I was talking to a friend...and he was involved in Dignity. And I said maybe I should go back and try it again. And this was spring of '92. And it kind of clicked that time ... The homilies were very special, very personal. It's the first time I could really relate to homilies and to what the priest was saying to me. And it was really an incredible feeling. I have a lot of other activities. I do volunteer work. I play sports ... So I was heavily involved in all of these other activities and they are all still important to me but over the years Dignity has become more important and the other activities have become a little less important ... When I was growing up my family was always involved with the church. I liked the church. We never heard any horror stories at church [that sex was sinful]. My parents were pretty conservative ... but they were never bigots. They were really open minded and fair and I think by example they passed that on to all their kids without knowing it. So I always had a good church experience and I think that continued and I really missed that when I was not going to church. I always felt a strong spirituality and a strong connection with God. So I felt good that I went back. It has changed my life a lot. It has actually helped me through a lot of hard times, being back in church and being more focused."
Although Dignity participants' desire to worship communally as gay and lesbian Catholics is not driven by a therapeutic ethos, their community practices are not devoid of expressive and therapeutic elements. Dignity values expressivity, indicated in particular by a strong emphasis on communal singing during Mass. The therapeutic needs of the individual are also integrated as part of communal worship. This is perhaps best illustrated by the inclusion of a "healing ceremony" midway through the Mass, generally on a monthly basis. During one such occasion it was striking how the presiding priest linked the more therapeutic elements of personal healing with the doctrinal emphasis in Catholicism on social relationships. The priest focused his homily on compassion. Speaking about God as a God whose "first outburst is always compassion," the priest's message stressed that "God wishes to care for us, to heal us, to bind up our wounds," and importantly, that God gives people the energy to be compassionate toward others. The priest's perspective on compassion was noteworthy in that it challenged the values of self-fulfillment and individual autonomy that dominate American culture (e.g., Bellah et al. 1985; Etzioni 1996). He stressed that compassion was not so much a feeling, but an energy and a deeply experienced awareness of our connectedness to one another and to nature. Being connected, the priest acknowledged, is a cliché, but to really be connected, he argued, we must act out of our interdependence in a time when people are "compassion fatigued." At the end of his homily, the priest invited three "healing teams" or what Dignity calls "anointing groups," each comprised of three Dignity members, to take their respective places in the church, one on either side of the altar and one at the right side of the church. Then the whole congregation stood up and recited a special healing prayer distributed at the beginning of Mass, after which those who wished to be prayed over and anointed were invited to approach any of the three groups. With piano and guitar music as background, several people, mostly men, went up individually to the respective groups where they quietly talked and prayed together. Once the healing encounters were over, the Mass liturgy continued. |
An emphasis on healing is not a Dignity innovation per se, since the sacrament of reconciliation or "confession" is central to the Catholic doctrinal tradition. Yet since most Catholics today tend to go to confession infrequently, it is striking that Dignity participants have established a refashioned healing ritual as a regular feature of their Mass. The inclusion of healing ceremonies may reflect Dignity members' quest for some kind of therapeutic outlet, but it may also be seen as indicative of members' commitment to communally enacting various elements of Catholicism. |
Tradition
Clearly, gay and lesbian Catholics own the Catholic identity in ways that are different from those of other Catholics. The preceding discussion highlights the fact that one facet of their identity negotiation is the self-conscious aspiration that their identity be Catholic and that it be celebrated in a communal setting with other gay and lesbian Catholics. For Dignity participants, the voluntarism of American religion (cf. R. S. Warner, "Work in progress toward a new paradign for the sociological study of religion in the United States," American Journnal of Sociology 98, 1993, pp. 1074-1080) is manifested by their choice to stay Catholic and to live a Catholicism that openly affirms their identity as gays or lesbians notwithstanding the church hierarchy's declaration of the contradictory nature of these dual identities. Despite the declining significance of denominational identity for the post-World War II generations of religiously involved Americans (R. Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion, 1988), Dignity respondents demonstrate that denominational attachments still matter in particular contexts. Unlike their gay and lesbian peers who join explicitly nondenominational Christian churches such as the "gay" Metropolitan Community Church, Dignity participants want a gay and lesbian worship community that specifically invokes Catholic identity and tradition. Although religious identity may be less "primordially rooted" (Warner, op. cit., p. 1077) than it was in past times, Dignity participants experience Catholicism as a tradition that they do not want to forget even while that same tradition is used by the church hierarchy to denounce their sexuality. |
The specifically Catholic identity of Dignity thus contrasts with the communal basis of some contemporary religious congregations where the importance of a shared doctrinal identity is underemphasized. Stephen Warner's study (1988) of evangelical Protestants in Mendocino, California, found that a common migratory history rather than denomination was a central dimension of the congregation's collective memory. Similarly, although the Metropolitan Community Church has communal worship and uses an eclectic mix of Christian liturgical forms (R.S. Warner, "The Metropolitan Community Churches and the Gay Agenda," Religion and the Social Order 5 (1995), p. 88), the primary bond that unites MCC participants is to a large extent their gayness and not the sharing of a specific denominational tradition, even though, as Stephen Warner (ibid.) observes, the church does have an evangelical Pentecostal culture. Dignity participants, by contrast, do not uncouple their religious-communal worship from its specific doctrinal roots. For them it is important that their community be a community of religious memory rather than one based on other commonalities of sociobiographical history. In short, for gay and lesbian Catholics in Dignity/Boston, the salience of their Catholic heritage cannot be split from other aspects of their personal biographies. For them, Catholicism is important precisely because it integrates them with a larger communal tradition, one whose collective historical memory is inscribed in their personal memories. |
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