Quest

John Ashman

Robinson, J. Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus. The Columba Press. ISBN 9781856076605.

Six years ago on the recommendation of a friend I read Rabbi Jesus, an Intimate Biography by Bruce Chilton, an American Episcopalian (i.e. Anglican) priest and professor. Drawing on recent archaeological discoveries, new translations and interpretations of ancient texts, Chilton makes some astonishing claims about the life, influences, and teachings of Jesus. Had those claims been made in earlier centuries Chilton would almost certainly have been condemned as a heretic and thus suffered the consequences, possibly even leading to his execution. It was one of the books that I could not put down as it rewards the reader with a refreshing, revolutionary and, indeed, shocking portrait of Jesus’ ideas and beliefs that certainly challenge – many would say, undermine – the Church’s understanding of the identity of the central figure of the Christian faith.

Fortunately I suffered no ill effects, no lightning strikes, or loss of faith as a result of reading Rabbi Jesus, but I was left wondering whether the Jesus we seek to serve and follow has been masked, even distorted, by the present structures, historic teachings and doctrines that have accumulated over two millennia. We are entitled to ask, as the disciples once did, ‘If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly’. The present Pope has contributed volumes to increase our understanding of Jesus, including his remarkable two volume work, Jesus of Nazareth, but he has done so from within the rarefied atmospheres of, first, academia and, latterly, the Vatican. Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, who was auxiliary Bishop in the archdiocese of Sydney from 1984 to 2004, is exceptional in that he dares to say that one of the ugliest events to emerge from the Catholic Church, namely the sexual abuse of minors and the concealment of that abuse by church authorities, stands in complete contradiction of everything that Jesus lived and taught. In Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church he speaks not only as a bishop who, in 1994, was elected by his fellow Australian bishops to head the National Committee for Professional Standards, coordinating the response of the Church in Australia to revelations of sexual abuse, but, he confesses he was himself the victim of sexual abuse when he was a child, albeit the abuser was not a priest or religious. Read more…

Kevin T. Kelly

Todd A. Salzman & Michael G. Lawler, The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology. Georgetown University Press, 2008.

Salzman and Lawler are two lay and married moral theologians in the US. They have made a name for themselves as challenging thinkers, especially in the field of sexual ethics. In The Sexual Person they offer a thorough overhaul of sexual ethics in the light of the person-centred theological vision undergirding Vatican II. I suspect that very many of my fellow moral theologians will accept, as I do, much of what is found in this book, both at a general theoretical level and in their teasing out the implications for everyday life.

They take their starting point from Vatican II’s emphasis on the nature of the human person, as found in the Pastoral Constitution, Gaudium et Spes (GS). GS’s opening chapter is entitled, “The Dignity of the Human Person”. That is a kind of banner headline for its approach to morality, including issues in the field of sexual and marital ethics. A few bishops at Vatican II argued that sexual acts as such had their own specific nature over and above the nature of the human person. This was not accepted and n.51 of GS was worded very precisely to bring out this point. (cf. my New Directions in Moral Theology, pp.29-30) Moreover, the Drafting Committee insisted that this was “a general principle” which applied right across the board: “Human activity must be judged insofar as it refers to the human person integrally and adequately considered”. In fact, Humanae Vitae provoked such widespread criticism precisely because it seemed to disregard this key principle. The same is true regarding the current official teaching of the Church denying the goodness of sexual love in faithful homosexual relationships. Read more…

Benedict Luckhurst

“That night they caught nothing” (John 21:3)

A feature of my nearby county town is the river that runs through its heart. For decades, however, the town has largely ignored the river. As a result it is mostly hidden from view by factories, a large brewery, and retail parks. Someone, however, has now woken up to the possibility of utilising the river as a focal point for leisure and a potential tourist lure by submitting an application for a floating restaurant adjoining a local park; the only open space on the banks of the river nearest to the town centre.

Objections to the scheme were initially raised by the unlikely alliance of the local police force and gay activists, the latter arguing that it will harm the openness, natural character and freedom of the area. In fact, the proposed three-deck floating restaurant is close to an area used by male and female cruisers and cottagers. A gay website describes it as a place where “fun can be found in-car and in the bushes as well” but warns ‘fun lovers’ “don’t leave your sex litter behind though, it gives us a bad name.” The police have since said they have not objected to the planned restaurant, but warned the town council that there could be a clash of interests between locals and cruisers. The local lesbian and gay alliance posed the question: ‘What about the needs of the gay community? How are they being met in terms of bars and clubs and social spaces?’ Read more…

Mark Dowd

From his new home in Madrid, former Quest chair, Mark Dowd, reports on the difficulties that gays still face despite having some of the most liberal sexuality laws in Europe. A case perhaps of the Spanish equivalent of ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’ (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

Summer 2005. I am in Valencia on Spain’s east coast having swapped my London flat in a holiday exchange for a pad just a stone’s throw from the city centre. Tuning in to the evening news, there is a feature on a male couple. They are the first in the country to have taken advantage of the country’s new gay marriage legislation. The crew from TV España film their first full day as a married couple. And it rather resembles a scene from La Cage Aux Folles as the cameras capture them walking the dogs and ambling down to the bakery for pastries. You can tell that the reporter is keen to inject some tension into the piece by trying to find some detractors. She approaches a gaggle of elderly ladies dressed in solemn clothes. Surely they´ll provide a bit of homophobic opposition? Franco turning in his grave at the thought of same-sex marriage blessed by the state; that sort of thing. When I heard the vox pops, I knew that these new legal changes weren’t just superficial.

“Aren’t they lovely? Why shouldn’t they marry?” asked one woman in a severe black mantilla. “They’re very good with dogs…that’s what I like,” said her elderly companion. In the end, the reporter confessed she’d spoken to a lot of people but failed miserably to come up with any ammunition. So all is well in Spain then? It’s the new gay nirvana?

Well not quite. Read more…

Benedict Luckhurst

According to a press report, the actress Keira Knightly deliberately ignores her mobile when it rings, much to the displeasure of her mother. Keira said: “My mobile phone doesn’t really get answered a lot. I don’t like talking on the phone, which is a nightmare because my mother does.” Doubtless Keira’s celebrity status is the principal reason why she ignores phone calls, but I am pleased to be in such good company. Indeed, I will take my aversion a step further and pronounce a curse on the day the telephone was invented and a thousand curses on the day the mobile telephone was conceived.

I am in a deep sleep or enjoying an afternoon nap, the phone rings. I am praying, the phone rings. I am cooking, the phone rings. I am eating, the phone rings. I am washing up, the phone rings. I am reading, the phone rings. I am in the bathroom, the phone rings. I am watching a favourite TV programme, the phone rings. I am listening to music, the phone rings. It can only be the invention of Satan!

Irascible, belligerent, irritable: I admit to them all when it comes to life with the telephone. In my increasing desire for solitude and to taste something of the eremitical life, the culmination of many years of searching, the sound of a telephone ringing is an intrusion and a source of constant irritation. The answer would be to remove the irritant completely, landline and mobile; but, for the time being, this is not a viable option.

Read more…

Michael Bennett

Paul Bailey. Chapman’s Odyssey. London: Bloomsbury, 2011.

This book is well worth reading; it is in turn funny, witty and touching in places and tells a good story.

The narrative is set in a hospital ward as an older gay man, Harry Chapman, hears ‘many voices’ and recalls memories from his life. Whilst he awaits surgery/investigations, the detailed and rich drama of recollections happens over a period of days nearly a week, but spanning all of Harry’s life! The voices are from his past plus a few historical surprises too! Paul Bailey is a master with words, so much so that by the end of reading this book you know Harry‘s character and his response to a lifetime of pain and pleasure.

I did wonder at one time if Harry was a stereotyped gay man – very arty, cultured and a writer of some sorts, but on the whole he is likeable for what he is .

The ending was a surprise to this reviewer, but I agree with Ali Smith who has some blurb on the back cover: ‘I love this beautiful book’.

Kieran Bohan

Barbara Glasson. The Exuberant Church: Listening to the Prophetic People of God. Darton, Longman & Todd. ISBN 978-0-232-528619

One of the speakers at the Quest Conference in 2010 was the Reverend Doctor Barbara Glasson, a Methodist minister currently working in Bradford. Previously she led Somewhere Else, the community which hosts meetings of the Quest Liverpool group. As she prepared to leave Liverpool Barbara began a series of conversations with Kieran, other representatives of Quest and Storm, an ecumenical LGBT Christian group, and other people marginalised by mainstream faith groups. Her newly published book, The Exuberant Church, is the result of these conversations about how LGBT Christians, and other ‘coming-out people’, may be prophetic examples of the potential for new life and growth in the faith communities from which they spring. The text of her Conference talks form the basis of this book, hence they could not be published on the Quest website as usual. Barbara plans to launch her book at the Quest conference [This text was published in Spring 2011 - editor] this summer in recognition of the contribution this ‘prophetic community’ has played in the formation of this work. Here Quest Liverpool Convenor Kieran Bohan reflects on the coming out experience, based on Barbara’s pastoral and theological  insights. 

In writing about the process of ‘coming out’, Barbara Glasson describes how it takes ‘an unusual and specific sort of courage’. As a gay Christian man I can vouch for this from my own experience. And, as the convenor of the Quest group in Liverpool, and the co-ordinator of an LGBT youth group in the city, I think I can say with some authority that courage is indeed a defining characteristic of the process of questioning your identity and becoming something which defies the dominant norms of culture, society and faith. Read more…

David Walsh

Leviticus 18:22, “Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abhorrence” – This one sentence from the Torah has caused debate, heartache, and controversy for thousands of years, but it is only in the last few decades after much activism, argument and reinterpretation that some movements in Judaism, notably the progressive ones, have found an accommodation which allows gay Jews to be able to live a Jewish life, as recognised by a community without foregoing their homosexuality as either a ‘lifestyle’ or an ‘identity’. The same, however, cannot be said for Orthodox movements.

Jews of non-Orthodox persuasions, be they Reform, Liberal, Masorti (Conservative) or Reconstructionalist may have pointed differences between them, and yet they all have one basic belief in common. It is generally accepted that the Torah was not neatly transmitted in a packaged form from the heavens as the infallible ‘Word of God’ but was rather the beautiful result of divine inspiration, debate and the experiences of the Jewish people at the time. The key issue here being that the Torah is very much of its time, steeped in the culture and society within which it was created. It is within this context that many progressive Jews have explained away seemingly prohibitive verses with allegedly relate to homosexual behaviour, in much the same way as other practices have been abandoned over the past few thousand years. Read more…

Benedict Luckhurst

Glitter and Be Gay is the title of a song from Leonard Bernstein’s operetta Candide, based on a novella by Voltaire. The sexuality of the composer and conductor Bernstein (1918-90) has long been the subject of speculation and debate. Humphrey Burton’s significant biography, published in 1995, several times suggests that his subject may have been gay. Certainly, while still a student at Harvard, Bernstein befriended many of the leading musical figures in New York, a large number of whom were gay; composers such as Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, Samuel Barber, Gian-Carlo Menotti and, later, Stephen Sondheim, who collaborated with Bernstein on West Side Story. In this respect, Bernstein, like many of his contemporaries, guarded his privacy. Arthur Laurents, another of Bernstein’s collaborators on West Side Story, said that he was “a gay man who got married. He wasn’t conflicted about it at all. He was just gay.”

In Candide, Cunegone, the daughter of a baron, escapes a war that destroyed her family. She is forced to maintain her lifestyle by sharing herself with several important Parisians, thus she sings of her need to conceal her unhappiness by laughter and a cheerful demeanour. Read more…

John Ashman

As from September 2011, Catholics in England and Wales will be given the opportunity to savour the words of the new English translation of the Roman Missal. The translators of this third edition of the missal had very clear instructions from Rome. They were to produce a translation that is more faithful to the Latin.

Right at the outset this reviewer must come clean and admit to being one of tens of thousands who put their names to a Facebook page calling on Rome to wait and take account of criticisms of the translation before authorising the missal for use. Needless to say, those views were ignored. Wikispooks carries a 29 page document listing the mistranslations, poor grammar, bad punctuation, etc that is about to be inflicted upon the English-speaking world. As usual, it is a case of ‘Rome knows best’ or, in the words of a joke going the rounds, Q: What is the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? A: You can negotiate with a terrorist.

What is the purpose of this DVD? The Become One Body One Spirit in Christ website says it is ‘an interactive DVD, for use on computers, exploring the depth, richness, and layers of meaning of the liturgical texts of the Roman Missal. Five commissioned foundational essays provide the themes and pathways of this resource which uses video, text, graphics and music to help the user enrich their understanding and deepen their appreciation of the Eucharist.’ Read more…