COMMENTARY: Does Infallibility Mean the Pope Can’t Learn?

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.) (UNDATED) Perhaps the pope, an aging Atlas bent under the weight of the world, should reflect on […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.)

(UNDATED) Perhaps the pope, an aging Atlas bent under the weight of the world, should reflect on the alternatives to the way he presently relates to Catholics who would like to enter a conversation with him on subjects about which they may have as much, and perhaps more, information and understanding than he.


Having a dialogue with John Paul II on homosexuality is operationally impossible for scientists, researchers, and even Christian moralists and Catholic pastors who have learned a great deal about the subject.

When the pope suggests, as he has, that dissent comes from forces inimical to the Spirit, Catholics wonder if his inaccessibility to discussion on a range of subjects, especially those related to human sexuality, is not, in fact, his own idea rather than of some nameless forces in the Vatican bureaucracy. Indeed, the world has often seen flashes of his fire-tried will of resistance and his wagging finger of correction as, for example, in his suppression of liberation theology several years ago.

Welcoming astronomers and physicists to Rome, the pope is the very model of a great man still ready to learn from those who are masters of what is known about the unknown in our galaxy-spangled universe.

Why, then, on homosexuality or other sexual subjects _ about which, as in cosmology and astrophysics, the unknown stretches like the night sky above our barely kindled campfire of knowledge _ is he reluctant, indeed determined, to close the discussion without listening to people who know something _ indeed, perhaps more than he does _ about this aspect of humanity?

This past week the pope expressed his resistant and resentful feelings about homosexuality from a balcony above St. Peter’s Square, thus symbolically massing the weight of the institution behind him. His words sounded more like those of a father irritated with offspring he judges to be disobedient than those of pastor made heartsick by children struggling to understand themselves.

“In the name of the church of Rome,” he said, pushing forward all the chips of papal persuasion, “I cannot not express bitterness for the affront to the Grand Jubilee of the year 2000 and for the offense to the Christian values” represented by the gay pride festival in Rome.

For months, The New York Times reports, “church officials lobbied to cancel the festival.” The pope’s address “was a sign of how strongly he feels about an issue that still divides many Catholics.” It is unusual but informative when the story becomes the depths of the pope’s own feelings on the subject.


Thus invested fully in his message, he repeated the notion the church would fail if it did not distinguish “what is good from what is evil,” a moral statement. He then classified homosexuality as “this inclination, objectively disordered,” a scientific statement.

These extraordinarily confident assertions reflect the pope’s indignation untempered, as any statement he might make on astronomy would be, by openness to experts or welcome to a conversation with them.

The pope also made a pastoral statement about treating gays with “respect, compassion and sensitivity,” sentiments strongly at variance with the words he had just uttered and the tone in which he spoke them.

His deeper attitude was expressed a few months before in his approval of the Vatican’s barring Sister Jeannine Gramick from pastoral ministry to gays. This was the punishment medieval: She was not only forbidden to do good, she was forbidden to speak about the Vatican investigation. In short, she was shamed publicly for her 25 years of trying to understand and assist gays spiritually, left in the modern equivalent of the stocks, exposed to public judgment but unable to defend herself.

Such incidents puzzle Catholics who admire and want to support the pope but who also want to share with him what they know from their research and close experience with gays.

Every Catholic family has a gay member who is accepted and loved and whose description as being “evil” and “objectively disordered” does not match what they know of him or her.


What might the pope learn just from them?

The pope should open the door he has closed on scientists, philosophers, theologians, parents and pastors who, in a variety of ways, almost surely know more than he does about the little about homosexuality that we do understand.

A starting point for a conversation might be this: One thing we do know is that homosexuality is not more _ but it is surely not less _ than a way of being human.

DEA END KENNEDY

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