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RETURN TO > HISTORIC DOCUMENTS > ARCHIVES > WHAT IS DIGNITY? > HOME
Sermon in Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of Dignity/New York
John J. McNeill is a noted author, psychotherapist, and former Jesuit priest who has been involved with DignityUSA for over 30 years. In 1997, he received DignityUSA's Life Achievement Award.
I am deeply grateful to all of you for making it possible for me to come home to New York City and join you, with my lover, Charlie, as one of Dignity's co-founders in this celebration of its 30th anniversary!
I would like to share with you some personal reflections on what I think should be the attitude in Dignity toward the hierarchical Church after 30 years of history.
I will build my reflections tonight on a single simple verse in the gospel according to Mark 11:11. After the triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Mark tells us, "Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the Temple. He looked all around him, but it was now late, he went immediately out to Bethany with the twelve."
I think this verse gives us an indication of Jesus' attitude toward the institutional church of his day and, thus, gives us a clue as to what our attitude in Dignity should be toward the hierarchical Church.
(Some of the ideas I will present this evening are based on the writings of James Alison, a gay Catholic theologian, from his most recent lecture given at the Pacific School of Religion: Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at Berkeley, California entitled: Challenges for Gay and Lesbian Ministry.)
The story goes that the Holy Trinity — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — met in heaven to plan a vacation on Earth. Discussing where they should visit, the Son suggested they come to New York City.
"No way," said the Father, "they are so confused about my identity, they don't know if I am Father or Mother."
"Well," said the Spirit, "what about Jerusalem?" "By no means," said Jesus, "Been there, done that! You know what happened last time. I have no intention of going there again!"
"What about Rome?" suggested the Father.
"Oh, I would love that," said the Spirit. "I've never been there!"
I certainly don't believe that Christ's Spirit has never been to Rome. There were strong signs of the Spirit's presence in the pontificate of John XXIII and during the deliberations of Vatican II. But not much since.
I shall never forget the excitement we felt at the first meeting of Dignity 30 years ago. We had put a small notice in the Village Voice. We had hoped for a few people. But over a hundred people crowded into the room we reserved at Good Shepherd Church in Gramercy Park. Obviously, we were meeting a strongly felt need in the Catholic lesbian and gay community. I remember saying at that first meeting: "Dignity is not something that we can give ourselves, but with God's grace, it is something that we can give each other!"
We had a simple plan: To bring the message of God's love to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and transsexual people. (I always tend to leave one of those categories out, so Charlie suggested an easy mnemonic: Gay BLTs). Secondly, by giving witness to the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we hoped to enter into dialogue with the institutional Church to bring about a change in its teaching about homosexuality, a change fully justified by our new understanding of scripture, tradition and the new understanding of human psychosexual development. Our cry here was that what is bad psychology has to be bad theology. The evidence was in that those who tried to live out Church teaching on homosexuality frequently destroyed their mental health.
We were full of the hope and enthusiasm of Vatican II, which had redefined the Church as "The People of God"! Our naïve hope that the Church would change seemed confirmed a few years later when my book: The Church and the Homosexual, which seriously challenged Church teaching was given a nihil obstat by the General of the Jesuits, Pedro Arrupé (an action for which he paid heavily later by being deposed as General by the Pope) and I was granted permission to publish.
Now thirty years later, although the Holy Spirit has abundantly blessed our ministry to bring the message of God's love to our sisters and brothers, I am sorry to have to report that in terms of dialogue with the hierarchy it has been mostly downhill ever since. One year later, I was ordered to silence on homosexual issues and forbidden to publish anything further. Dignity was ordered to vacate any Catholic property. I will never forget the night we marched in procession from St. Francis Xavier to the Gay Community Center. Priests were forbidden to say mass for us. A series of homophobic documents have been issued from Rome. The most egregious document reads: "The homosexual inclination, though not in itself a sin, must be considered objectively disordered," a statement in blatant contradiction of Peter's statement in Acts: "God has shown me that I should not call any human profane or impure!"
Now I read that a document has been prepared in Rome, using this teaching on "objective disorder," that forbids any seminary from accepting a gay candidate no matter how qualified, and forbids Bishops to ordain an openly acknowledged gay candidate.
This should come as no surprise. Twenty-five years ago, friends in the Vatican sent me a copy of a secret letter sent by the Congregation that deals with seminaries on the issue of accepting gay candidates for the priesthood. At that time the Congregation asked all Seminary directors to carefully scrutinize gay candidates and determine whether their homosexuality was egosyntonic or egodystonic. This psychological jargon distinguishes those who accept and are comfortable with their homosexuality over against those who see their homosexual orientation as something to be hated and rejected. Only those candidates whose homosexuality was egodystonic should be accepted as candidates for the priesthood. In other words, only the mentally sick should be accepted and the healthy should be turned away.
Because of the incredible success Dignity and other gay liberation groups have had over the last 30 years, very few gay candidates for the priesthood today have an egodystonic attitude of self-hatred. So the Vatican is forced to take a more radical stand. It seems obvious that the Vatican has decided to scapegoat the Catholic gay community rather than acknowledge any failure or sinfulness on their part. I admire the shrewdness of the Holy Spirit. I can think of no action the Vatican can take that would guarantee the total collapse of the cultic priesthood limited to professed celibate males, whether heterosexual or repressed homosexualsãa collapse that will necessarily lead to a new form of shepherding. In my own experience over the years, if I met a priest who is an exceptionally good pastor, loving and compassionate, I could be close to certain that I was dealing with a gay priest. The prime example of that was my friend, Father Mychal Judge.
Jesus gave us a marvelous example of how to deal with scapegoating in the Story of the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5. We are told that the Gerasene community had picked one troubled individual and made him their scapegoat, throwing him out of town. The demoniac had accepted their judgment on himself and interiorized self-hatred, tearing off his cloths, breaking the chains that bound him, howling and gashing himself with stones. As soon as Jesus entered his presence, he became aware of divine love and that he himself was not evil but worthy of love and compassion. Jesus, by his love, drove out the legion of demons of self-hatred and self-destruction. They entered into a herd of pigs and their destructive evil was immediately manifested by the fact that the pigs rushed down the hillside and threw themselves off a cliff into the sea. The people of the village came out and found the former demoniac "sitting peacefully, fully clothed and in his right mind." The people of the village became frightened because they had lost their scapegoat and begged Jesus to leave. The former demoniac asked Jesus to take him with him, but Jesus refused and instead told him: "Go home to your people and tell them all the good things the Lord has done to you," Give witness to God's love for you! So the man went off and proceeded to spread throughout the Decapolis all that Jesus had done for him. And the people were amazed."
There is parallel here with us lesbian and gay Catholics. We too are being scapegoated by our Church. Many of us in the past interiorized the Church's homophobia, resulting in self-hatred and self-destructiveness. But Jesus' Spirit at one point touched our hearts and freed us from all self-rejection by giving us a clear, undeniable experience that God loves us in our gayness. Our ministry, like the former demoniac, is to witness then to our people all the great things that God in her mercy has done for us. Our first task was to call in the Holy Spirit to grant us such an overwhelming experience of God's love that we are healed of all self-hatred and self-rejection.
We gays and lesbians must not let our enemies outside ourselves define who we are. We must let the Spirit of God, the Spirit of love dwelling in our hearts, define who we are. And then give witness to all the great things the Lord has done for us.
What should be our attitude toward the hierarchical Church as we make our way through this life as lesbian and gay Catholics? Alison suggests we should have the same attitude toward the institutional church as Jesus had toward the temple, supreme detachment and indifference. At the last supper, Jesus told his disciples that it was necessary for him to go away in order for the Spirit to come to them. Jesus was referring to a maturing process for which we gay and lesbian Catholics have a special need. We must detach ourselves from all external authority and learn to hear what the Spirit has to say to us directly and immediately in our own experience.
"If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit of love will dwell in your heart and lead you into all truth."
In Jesus' ministry the Temple was always there in the background but appears to have little relevance to Jesus' mission. As Mark noted: "He came into Jerusalem, entered the Temple and looked around but immediately left for Bethany with the Twelve. Bethany was where the action was. Bethany was where the household of Martha and Mary, who I can imagine to be a lesbian couple, was located and their gay brother Lazarus, who was Jesus best friend. Here was Jesus' church ® a true community of love.
We must fight to free ourselves from any attachment to the hierarchical Church whether that be the need to have their approval or the attachment that come from the anger at the Church's injustice. We should see ourselves as equals and siblings to Church authorities and pray for them as they struggle to find the Spirit of God in their lives. Leave the hierarchical church in God's hands. We should be grateful to them for the gifts they helped bring to us like the scriptures and the sacraments. But we should not waste one ounce of energy dealing with the Church but commit ourselves to the positive ministry of love to which God has called us.
James Alison shares with us his experience of being called by God to ministry to the lesbian and gay community. He was on retreat in a Jesuit retreat house in Santiago in Chile. He had been dismissed from the Dominican order for acknowledging his gayness. The first grace he received from God was a profound awareness that all the homophobic violence and injustice in the Church has nothing to do with God. This is the human church caught into its own blindness and sinfulness. He was trying to discern what was God's will for him. One day he went on a walk in a gay cruising area, He found himself looking at some young gay men cruising in the park and felt a strong feeling of liking these young men and wishing them well. When he returned to the retreat house, he went into the chapel feeling somewhat guilty about his mixed motives for going to the cruising area. He was suddenly given the grace to realize that the warm affection he felt toward the gay young men was just not his feeling but the feeling of the Spirit dwelling in his heart. Then he heard a profound voice telling him "Feed my sheep."
He realized that that voice was God directly calling him to a ministry to lesbians and gays and that call from that moment on was an essential part of his identity, a call to priestly ministry that he could never deny or run away from without denying an essential dimension of himself. This call in no way depended on validation from the institutional Church but was his direct and immediate commission from God.
The primary obstacle to our developing a healthy and freeing ministry to gays is our fascination with the institutional Church and a continued emotional involvement. With God's grace, the cure is to achieve indifference.
Ezekiel in Chapter 33 saw God in a vision detaching himself from the Temple in the shape of a chariot and becoming flexible and mobile. Ezekiel then had a vision of God upbraiding the shepherds of Israel for having failed to feed his sheep and then God revealed a new understanding of shepherding in which God himself will undertake the shepherding. "Behold I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out. I myself will be shepherd of my sheep."
Judaism and Christianity are both religions of the collapsing Temple. There is always a connection between the collapse of the Temple and God bringing into existence a new form of shepherding. In Judaism, it was the collapse of the Temple in the year 587 BC which led to the creation of a text-based Judaism and the collapse of the Temple in AD 70, which led to the creation of Rabbinic Judaism. In every case, the collapse is part of God's plan to get through to us and help us get beyond something that is unworthy of us. It took a long time but only after Ezekiel achieved a certain form of indifference to the fate of the Temple was he able to receive the vision of God shepherding his people himself without an intermediary.
In the gospel of John, Jesus identifies the new Temple with his body and the body of all who have the indwelling Spirit. "Where ever two or three are gathered together in My name, I am in the midst of them." Alison feels sure that anyone who has experienced God's love and has been freed from self rejection, and then takes the final step of freeing themselves from dependency on Church authority will also hear that same call to ministry in their hearts.
There is no doubt in my mind that we are in a new stage of the collapsing Temple and the emergence of a new form of shepherding. Many pastors have neglected and abused their sheep. The Bishops in Dallas threw their priests to the wolves. The Vatican has deserted the American Bishops in order to uphold their power and authority. Joachim of Flores prophesied in the 13th century that there would come a day when the hierarchical Church, becoming superfluous, would in time dissolve and in its place will emerge the Church of the Holy Spirit.
Ministry in the Church of the Holy Spirit will come from the direct call of the Holy Spirit. The task of authority will be to listen prayerfully to what the Holy Spirit is saying through the people of God. This Church must become a totally democratic Church with no caste system, no higher or lower, everybody totally equal, women with men, gays with straights, everyone possessing the Holy Spirit within themselves, everyone an authority,
For example, who knows what God wants from lesbians and gays? --- Obviously, only lesbians and gays. No one can tell us from outside what God wants of us. We are alone in knowing with an experiential knowledge that our love for each other contains the divine spirit and brings with it that kind of peace and joy that indicates the presence of God's Spirit.
So if anyone today wants to be where the action of the Spirit is when they come to New York City, tell them to go to St. Patrick's Cathedral look around and then hurry down to the Village to St. John's church because it is here that the action is, the loving liberating action of the Holy Spirit. "My Church will be a church for all people."
Congratulations Dignity/New York on thirty years of faithful service to the Catholic lesbian and gay community. You have prayerfully discerned and carried out the commission the Spirit has given you. You are a foreshadowing of the future Church of the Spirit. Continue to prayerfully discern what the Spirit is asking of you and follow that voice. Keep in mind this famous insight of Maurice Blondel: "Our God dwells within us and the only way to become one with that God is to become one with our authentic self."
John J. McNeill
27 October 2002
