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’s Press.)

(UNDATED) The stories ran close in time but were worlds apart.

On page one of The New York Times we began at the end of the extraordinary narrative of Pope John Paul II’s long ago tendered forgiveness of the man who almost killed him, Mehmat Ali Agca.

The pope used the Vatican’s diplomatic influence to obtain a pardon for the once boyish, now silver-haired 42-year-old former hit man. The story appeared after he was already back in Turkey.

It was a remarkable example of Christianity in action, of the forgiving our enemies that is so easy to talk about and so hard to do. Good for the pope.

Hidden, like her life of devoted service, on an inner page of a Saturday edition was the story of the way the fully deployed Vatican bureaucracy had dealt with a nun who brought not death to others, as did the wily Agca, but life, as did the guileless Jesus. Sister Jeannine Gramick, whose hair had grown silver in her long years of pastoral ministry to homosexuals, was sent away from the Vatican and, in all liklihood, out of her beloved School Sisters of Notre Dame, for allegedly failing to uphold church teachings on homosexuality. Sad for the pope.

The cold and merciless tone of her being separated from her work alerted all the angels of the imagination. Had she worn epaulets on her habit, they would have been ripped off righteously in St. Peter’s Square. To top off her ousting, she was also asked to sign an agreement never to speak of or reveal the processes of investigation to which she and co-worker, Father Robert Nugent, had been subjected.

It cannot be true that if you shoot the pope, you can be forgiven and become a poster boy for Christian clemency, flown home to be pardoned soon for other crimes, all this in a haze of deflected papal glory. If, however, you preach the gospel to homosexuals to encourage and help them, you are not only suspected of doing evil but you are tried, dismissed, silenced and shipped home in a haze of unearned shame.

Officials will tell you that Father Nugent and Sister Gramick were not sufficiently orthodox in holding that homosexuals carry within them what the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has clumsily termed an “objective disorder” and that they have not been clear enough in telling them that, in effect, the church looks down on you as it demands perpetual and perfect chastity from you. Sister Gramick’s grave offense is that she has been good to those the church says are bad.

Sister Gramick has cooperated fully with the Vatican examination of her work. As moving as forgiving a murderer is her reported patience, generosity, and unwillingness to criticize the church or her accusers during this ordeal.

Now found guilty of doing good, she honors herself and all believers by refusing to accept the judgment, the shame, or the silence that self-satisfied men want to impose on her.

With Thomas More, she refuses to sign an oath that falsifies her conscience by accepting the silence and exile ordered by Vatican officials in what they termed a “clarification” of the ban placed on her work last summer.

That the would-be assassin is set free while the giver of life is forced out of the church is so flooded with the substance that all such Vatican announcements should carry a warning label: Contains deadly doses of unacknowledged irony and is definitely dangerous to your spiritual health.

Many Catholics would like to find a way to excuse the official church for a blunder whose twinning with the Agca “go now and sin no more” makes it seem right out of some tangle-footed political campaign. But if the pope and bishops wonder why Catholics no longer hang on their every word, it is because by just such flexes of power they weaken their authority.

The truth is that nobody knows enough about homosexuality either spiritually or psychologically to make the unforgiving judgments the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has so confidently issued about it over the last quarter century. But everybody knows enough about the way Jesus treated sinners, harlots, and even tax collectors, to reject the blanket ban on homosexual ministry that, through this case and other actions, such as denying church hospitality to meetings of the gay Catholic group, Dignity, indicate the Vatican’s unconditional surrender policy toward homosexuals.

We wonder at the anger directed toward a good and gentle woman and at something else as well: Why are Vatican officials so terrified of homosexuality? There’s irony in the real answer to that question, too.

DEA END KENNEDY