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.

The assertion of this book, first published in 2007, is that the source of the abuse scandal is rooted in the power structures of the Church. He calls for nothing less than a thorough restructuring, a ritual cleansing, of the Catholic Church, including a constitutional papacy, arguing that: “Papal power has gone too far and there are quite inadequate limits on its exercise.”

Bishop Robinson lays the blame for the crisis firmly at the feet of Pope (now Blessed) John Paul II: “I am convinced that if the Pope had spoken clearly at the beginning of the revelations, inviting victims to come forward so that the whole truth, however terrible, might be known and confronted, and firmly directing that all members of the Church should respond with openness, humility, honesty and compassion, consistently putting victims before the good name of the Church, the entire response of the Church would have been far better. With power go responsibilities. The Pope has many times claimed the power, and must accept the corresponding responsibilities.”

In order to reclaim the spirit of Jesus in the Church, the bishop advocates far-reaching changes. In the firing line are the present teachings on divorce and remarriage (about which “many bishops are uneasy”), sexuality (including homosexuality), papal infallibility, collegiality, mandatory priestly celibacy, the ordination of women; he even suggests that some phrases in the Nicene Creed might need tweaking. The list is comprehensive, even down to questioning the need for bishops to wear mitres (to be “consigned to the dustbin of history”).

Bishop Robinson has paid a price for his outspokenness and, naturally, he is a prime target for the venom of certain “faithful catholic” bloggers. One such says of him: “Bishop Robinson is a lover of this world with a haughty contempt for the Church of Christ”. This is certainly not my understanding based upon my reading of his book. Other dissenters have paid a higher price. A fellow Australian bishop, Bishop William Morris, was removed from his diocese in 2011 for publishing a pastoral letter in which, among other things, he set down certain options to meet the declining number of priests in his diocese, such as the ordination of married men and of women. Discussion of the latter is apparently now taboo. In 1994, John Paul II published a document in which he declared that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women”. The present Pope in an elucidation, when he was at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said that this definitive teaching had been decided ‘infallibly’.

Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, a Franciscan Capuchin priest and Preacher to the Papal Household, once said that the primary aim of all evangelisation and catechesis was not teaching people a certain number of eternal truths or of passing on Christian values to a rising generation, but to “bring people to a personal encounter with Jesus Christ the only Saviour by making them his ‘disciples’” (quoted by James Alison in Knowing Jesus, SPCK, 1993). Reading Bishop Robinson’s book, and his thoughtful meditations at the end of each chapter, it is clear that the author believes that Jesus Christ and his teachings are of inestimable value to humanity. In a profound and provocative way he desires that we should all grow – Pope, bishops and the whole church – in holiness, compassion, and humility. In his own words in the final Meditation: “The most fundamental change of heart and mind required of us is that of a constant return to the Great Tradition, the person and story of Jesus Christ, and the song that he sang”.

This text has originally been published in the Quest Bulletin no. 62 (Winter 2012)

John Ashman

Of Gods and Men (2010, in Arabic and French with English subtitles)

On the night of 26-27 March 1996, seven Trappist monks from the monastery at Tibhirine in Algeria were kidnapped by Islamist militants during the Algerian Civil War. Two months later, on 23 May, their kidnappers reported in a communiqué that the monks had been killed on 21 May. On 31 May the Algerian government announced that the monks’ heads had been discovered but their bodies were never found. Ever since, controversy has raged about the kidnappings and killings. The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) claimed responsibility for both, but the then French Military Attaché reported that the monks had been accidentally killed by an Algerian army helicopter during an attack on a guerrilla position, then beheaded after their death to make it appear as though the GIA had killed them. It has also been claimed by conspiracy theorists that the GIA cell responsible had been infiltrated by the Algerian secret service.

Whatever the truth behind this appalling tragedy, what lies at the heart of this film is the rhythm and witness of this contemplative community in an Islamic country, 34 years after independence from France, in the increasingly tense final months before the murders. The names of the monks are real and, while the screenplay draws on documents, including the journal of the prior, Christian de Chergé, the characterisations of necessity are fictional.

Having spent a few weeks ten years ago living with a community of Trappist monks, I can say that the film captures with astonishing accuracy the austerity of their way of life. At times I felt that I was watching a documentary. Overall there was a serenity permeating this film arising from the community’s prayer life and its closeness to the villagers among whom they live and for whom they provide an outpatients’ clinic. And yet, paradoxically, this serenity is mixed with an underlying tension; we, the audience, know how this is going to end.

When the local chief of police offers the community protection, following the murder of Croatian construction workers nearby, there is dissent among the community about the Prior’s decision to refuse it without first consulting the other members. The community is divided over whether to leave or continue to serve the villagers. One monk in particular has his faith in God severely tested as he contemplates the fate that could be befall him by remaining in the village. By the end of the film, however, the discord has dissipated and all agree by a show of hands to stay. This was for me the most contrived part of the film, although others have been critical of the “Last Supper” scene which is its climax. The community gathered in the refectory is served with red wine by Bro Luc, the physician among them, while overture from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake plays on a cassette player in a corner of the room. At first this scene struck me as out of place until it gradually dawned on me that we could read into the expression on the monks’ faces their different emotions, encompassing resignation, fear, joy, anticipation regarding what the future might bring.

There is a suggestion in a couple of scenes that perhaps the Algerian government was complicit in the killings. Bro Christian is asked by the military to identify the body of a dead terrorist the local garrison, the leader of a group that had visited the monastery on Christmas Eve, seeking medical attention for injured comrades. The officer in charge is angered first of all by Christian’s implied criticism of the treatment of the man’s body and then by the silent prayer the Prior offers for the dead man. Later, as the monks are in their chapel, a military helicopter threateningly circles the monastery, almost drowning out the singing of a psalm.

An added bonus on the DVD is a short documentary featuring interviews with members of the monks’ families, a Cistercian monk who represented the Vatican at their funeral, and a priest who each month visits the now deserted monastery. This feature ends abruptly, perhaps indicating a fault on my disc, but before it did so, I was interested to discover that the Carmelite Seminary in Paris which Christian had attended has now established an exhibition in the room he formerly occupied. One wall consists of the testimonial he left with his family two years before the tragedy, to be opened in the event of his death. This testimony is reproduced on pages 10 and 11 of this issue.

This is a powerful film and one that does not give its audience a suffocatingly pious depiction of religion. The ‘F’ word even creeps in a moment of irritation between two monks on kitchen duty. I have not heard such language used when visiting monasteries, but it served its purpose in showing that even monks can sometimes speak out of anger.  Above all, this film is a testament to hope, one that invites reflection and involves us in a bit of heart-wrenching in its portrayal of the healing power of faith and community.

This text has originally been published in the Quest Bulletin no. 62 (Winter 2012)

The then Chair, Peter Rodgers, asked Guy Torrance to draft a response on behalf of Quest. The summary of our response stated that the scope of the consultation and its proposals were too narrow in that faith groups might be protected from legal challenge in choosing not to allow their buildings to be used for civil partnerships but that government might itself be open to such challenge. The Quest response made clear its concern that Government may be seen to be legitimising discrimination by faith groups whilst those groups are fulfilling state functions (whether as to premises or persons). Currently the Catholic Church fulfils a state function when it registers marriages in its churches.

Quest’s submission acknowledges that faith groups who welcome LGBT worshippers as the greater or smaller part of their membership will be allowed to go a stage further towards equality in registering civil partnerships in their buildings. Quest wishes those faith groups well and looks forward to faith groups having and sharing their own Civil Partnership Registrars.

The response calls for a complete reform and coherence in legislative provision for all religious partnership formation on an equal basis leading to buildings simply being deemed suitable for Partnership Formation, irrespective of the gender of the parties, whether marriage or Civil Partnership. It suggests that where faith groups, such as the Catholic Church, do not wish to conduct partnership formations (either weddings or civil partnerships) on an equal basis, they should no longer exercise civil (i.e. state) functions. This would mean a complete separation of the civil element in space and time from the faith based celebration of the event, akin to the system in France.

In November the Government Equalities Office published a summary of the responses it had received including draft regulations to implement the proposals consulted on. These do not include the stipulation that those faith groups who do not wish to register civil partnerships should no longer be allowed to register marriages in the context of religious ceremonies. The Government is confident that there is protection for faith groups from the risk of successful legal challenge, but the risk remains that the Government itself could be open to legal challenge on the grounds of legitimising inequality.

Subject to the will of Parliament, it is expected that the regulations necessary to implement section 202 of the Equality Act 2010 will provide the framework to allow for civil partnerships to be registered on religious premises from early 2012.

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.

It is for this same reason that Salzman and Lawler are critical of the inadequacy of much of the magisterial teaching, i.e. because “the emphasis in its teaching continues to be on the ‘nature’ of the act rather than on the ‘nature’ of the human person and his or her acts.” (p.3) That emphasis would condemn homosexual acts as “unnatural”, whereas for Salzman and Lawler, since “homosexuality is a way of being before it is a way of behaving” (p.216), “homosexual acts are ‘natural’ for people with a homosexual orientation, just as heterosexual acts are ‘natural’ for people with a heterosexual orientation.” (p.227) However, our two authors recognise that the theological meaning of ‘natural’ demands a fuller explanation than that. It is about our being truly human. Hence, they lay great emphasis on the totality of what it means to be human. “To be truly human, and therefore reasonable and moral, a sexual act must be integrated with the whole self, biologically, personally, relationally, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. An essential part of the human person and of his or her constitution, and therefore an essential part of self-integration … is sexual orientation.” (p.65) Hence, they go on to argue that “holistic complementarity – an integrated orientation, personal, and biological complementarity – is a more adequate theological anthropology of the human sexual person and foundational principle for comprehending human sexual relationships and morally assessing sexual acts.” (p.90)

Twice in the book they cite a text from Margaret Farley, which presents a similar position to their own even more forcefully: “Sex between two persons of the same sex (just as two persons of the opposite sex) should not be used in a way that exploits, objectifies, or dominates: homosexual (like heterosexual) rape, violence, or any harmful use of power against unwilling victims (or those incapacitated by reason of age etc) is never justified: freedom, integrity, privacy are values to be affirmed in every homosexual (as homosexual) relationship; all in all, individuals are not to be harmed, and the common good is to be promoted.” (p.161) I tried to say something similar, perhaps even more positively, in a letter to The Tablet (13/2/10): “I now believe that God’s call to lesbians and gays is to accept themselves as they are as a gift from God, a.v. to accept their homosexual orientation as the way God has gifted them to live their lives as loving persons. Consequently, provided their loving tries to be self-giving, faithful, life-enhancing, just, mutually respectful and not self-centred nor exploitative (all demands applying equally to heterosexual loving), then their relationship and their loving can truly be experienced as a sharing of God’s love in their lives – and, in that sense, sacramental.”

This is not an easy book to read, perhaps because the authors are so thorough in trying to counter every aspect of the official teaching with precise argumentation of their own, almost after the style of a medieval disputatio. I would love them to write a more popular volume in simple and accessible language, portraying the beauty of the positive mind-set of their Vatican II ‘sexual person’ and the attractiveness of their life-style. I should add that the book also deals positively with the issues of gay parenting and adoption. (pp.229-230)

Not surprisingly, the book has its critics, most notably the Committee on Doctrine of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. In September 2010 they published a document pin-pointing a number of what they called “inaccuracies” in the text. Their rejection of the book’s position on homosexuality is not simply because it is counter to the Church’s teaching. They critique the whole approach to theological and ethical methodology on which it is based. In fact, the bishops’ document is carefully argued and is far from being a purely negative condemnation. Moreover, far from hiding behind bureaucratic anonymity, the members of the Committee have all signed their names to the document. Perhaps this offers an opportunity for dialogue with the bishops. In an on-line moral theology discussion forum I challenged US moral theologians to show their professional solidarity with Salzman and Lawler by critiquing the objections raised by the bishops. Sadly none of them have as yet responded to this challenge.

Dr. Kelly is a moral theologian and a retired priest of the Liverpool archdiocese. He was a speaker at the 2005 Quest Conference in Liverpool.

This text has been originally published in the Quest Bulletin, Spring 2011

“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?’

We are still in the Easter season, and the gospel passage from which the extract above is drawn is one of the most powerful among Our Lord’s resurrection appearances. John 21:1-19 is the gospel passage designated for the 3rd Sunday of Easter in Year C and it crops up again as a weekday Mass reading, divided between Easter Friday (vv1-14) and the Friday in the 7th week of Easter (vv15-19). “That night they caught nothing”. This was the bitter experience of Peter and his companions after an exhausting night of fishing. It is the same experience that many women and men have had over the course of many days and nights when they produce nothing. Night, in this instance, is not just a temporal notion, it is the sign of the Lord’s absence and the dismay it causes. It is the sign of so much effort in vain. I would dare to suggest that it is also applicable to the desperate action taken by gay and bisexual men in particular who seek anonymous sex in outdoor cruising. Ultimately, it is an unsatisfying as well as a dangerous activity. The health risks and threat of violent attack are set to one side because for some it is a way of life, an addiction; for many men there is a certain thrill or excitement attached to cruising and cottaging, but should we not view this as a sad reflection of the dark side of gay life and as something of a cri de coeur?

“Haven’t you caught anything, friends?” (21:5)

At dawn, a man came near to the exhausted disciples and found them disappointed. Whether we recognise it or not, the coming of Jesus brings the end of night and, more importantly, the beginning of a new day and a new life. The stranger asks whether they have any fish to eat. Peter and his six friends (note: seven is a symbol of universality and represents here the first seed of the Church) were forced to admit their poverty and powerlessness. So it was that Jesus, whom they had still not recognised, with friendly authority, invited them to look elsewhere: “Cast the net to the right side of the boat and you will find some fish.” They obeyed without the least resistance, even though, as experienced fishermen, it would have made perfect sense to challenge this man’s intervention. After all, what he did he know and how could he tell where the fish were from his position on the shore?

The need – and the desire – to break out of potentially destructive and pointless behaviour patterns has the potential to launch our lives on to a different trajectory. An acknowledgement that some of the paths we choose, and all of the addictions which grip us, are essentially unfulfilling and barren is the first step enabling us to look elsewhere for true fulfilment. For the seven, striking out in a different direction resulted in a great and miraculous catch beyond any measure. In the light of this experience of abundance and joy, John recognised the voice of the stranger and told the others: “It is the Lord!” Feeling the proximity of the Lord, Simon Peter understood his unworthiness and shame – he was naked – and immediately threw on his clothes, dove into the water and swam towards the shore and Jesus. The others followed in the boat, hauling in the net full of fish.

“Come and have breakfast” (21:12)

The next scene is warm, friendly and tender: a charcoal fire had been prepared, bread and fish were to hand, no one dared to ask him anything; they were speechless, as, indeed, we are apt to be when overcome by love and tenderness and our needs are being met. Tender intimacy, acceptance, love and warmth: is this not what we crave? Jesus comes among these aimless men, failures all of them, deserters, and he invites them to: “Come and eat.” Then he took the bread and gave it to them. It is a simple scene, but one that is profound. Jesus puts a question to Peter. It is not a question about his past or his disappointments, it is not a reproach for his betrayal a few days before, nor is it about his fears. He is simply asked: “Do you love me more than these others do?” “Yes, Lord;” he replies, “you know that I love you.” Love covers many sins. Peter did not merit anything, and yet he is told by Jesus: “Feed my sheep.” How was this man, so vacillating, the very one who had revealed himself as being quite incapable of loyalty, how was he supposed to be responsible for others? The question is asked a second and a third time and, with each question, Peter demonstrates that he welcomes the love that Jesus is giving, and in love we become capable of speaking, giving witness, taking care of others.

“Follow me” (21:19)

Here at the end of John’s Gospel we are brought back to the beginning. “Follow me” were the words Jesus spoke to Philip in chapter 1 (v43) and now they resonate again in Peter’s hearing. As the proverb runs: “Rivers need a spring”; in the case of the Christian life, the grace received in the baptismal spring is restored when we sincerely repent of our past mistakes, betrayals and sins and so are revitalised in witnessing to the freeing and healing power of Christ.

Where is life taking us? If our love for Christ has become shaky in the course of our difficult journey with him, he readily calls us back to him to renew our love. Make no mistake about it, trials will come when we are urged to smile the risen power of Christ into our secular society, bringing his values to play in our daily lives, among our families, friends and associates. As with Peter, so with us: it is our relationship with the Lord that provides the key to our happiness and our human fulfilment and he calls us to a relationship of love. The interchange between Peter and Jesus underlines the need for divine mercy in order to heal spiritual wounds, the wounds of sin. Jesus puts the question to us: “Do you love me?” Do we wish to serve him through the gift of our whole lives? Do we long to bring others to know and love him? If the answer is: “Yes, Lord; you know I love you”, then we ought to recognise that it is in him that we find nourishment for the hungers of our hearts and souls; it will not be found in a cruising ground.

This article has been originally published in the Quest Bulletin, Spring 2011

When Mark Dowd began a teenage fling, a daring lie kept the true nature of his relationship secret. But when his former boyfriend died, he suddenly found himself in an excruciatingly sticky situation.

My flatmate greeted me with an unusually severe expression. It was 10pm after another long day at work and I slumped in the armchair. “You’d better check the answermachine,” he said. I walked over and pressed the red button. A message from a relative in Manchester. My 65-year-old father was dead.

Several gulps of whisky later, I plucked up the courage to ring home. A familiar voice said: “Are you all right? You don’t half sound queer.” It was my father – still very much in this world. What was going on? Sensing an almighty mess brewing, I quickly finished the call and replayed the message. It was from a man calling himself “uncle” whose first name I didn’t recognise. He had left a number and when the blunt Mancunian tone answered “Ronnie Craddock”, the surname sent my mind spinning back to 1979.

Full text on the Guardian newspaper website

Mark Dowd – a former Quest chair.

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.

I’ve been living in Madrid now for more than five months, enabling me to look beyond the headlines, all the legal changes and get under the skin of what is really happening in the Iberian peninsula. First stop, the Dumbarton Bar on Calle Zorilla just five minutes walk from the Gran Vía. This is Spain’s “Old Quebec” or “el cementerio de las elefantes” for those of you that know the infamous London bar off Marble Arch. I get talking with a man in his early fifties, Pablo. As the conversation progresses, it turns out that he’s a primary school teacher. “Where do you live in Madrid?” I ask him. “Oh no, I am not from around here, I am from Cordoba.” Cordoba! That’s in Andalucia, some 300 miles away. The more I talk to Pablo, the more I feel the optimism of that 2005 TV report fading. Pablo lives with his mother and has not come out to a soul in his home town. He comes up on the AVE, the high speed train, and books into a hotel at great expense once a month. He tells me he feels “free” for 48 hours, before going back to the socially conservative south and his classroom of eight year olds

The power and influence of mothers over their gay sons has become a recurring theme here in these last few months. I am attempting to pass a fiendishly difficult diploma exam in Spanish this May and one of my loyal assistants is a guy called Raúl who’s something of an Anglophile – so we meet up, we talk, we compare idioms and pose maddeningly difficult questions about the imperfect subjunctive to one another (sobre gustos no hay nada escrito  - “there’s no accounting for tastes.”) We have become very good mates, we even went to the premiere last night of the new movie of Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escrivá and his role in the Spanish Civil War. But there´s something rather odd that happens if we are out together late at night – the mobile always seems to go off between 11.30 and midnight. It’s never a jealous lover. I can always tell by Raúl’s face exactly who it is. He creeps away out of sight but I can pick up a few fragments. He assures his mother that he is in no danger (little does she know!) and that, yes, before too long, he will be home. This guy is forty two years old. What is going on here?

Those who have been following the evolution of post-Franco Spain here and in particular the development of a new confident gay identity speak of the difference between the attitudes of men under and over thirty five. The younger ones seem to have taken coming out more in their stride, see in the new legislation an affirmation of their own growing self-esteem, but for the post forties – well, coming out after twenty odd years in the closet with mother, (and that is one hell of a tight space!) involves quite a departure and one that the passing of a new law on marriage can do little to bring about.

If there’s a lesbian scene and society here, I have yet to find it. Certainly not in CRISMHOM, the nearest thing there is to Quest and LGCM in Madrid. Founded in 2006, my attention was first brought to the group by a BBC Radio Four documentary on modern Spain which aired in the UK last November prior to Pope Benedict´s visit to Santiago de Compostela and Barcelona. CRISMHOM meet every Thursday and Saturday for prayer, liturgy, fellowship and occasional “charlas” – that´s a Spanish noun coming from the verb to chat. We’ve had priests on the teaching of the Magisterium, film nights with animated discussions (do see the Peruvian film Contracorriente if you can…a Latino “Brokeback Mountain” with fishermen instead of cowboys),  and one very memorable session with a couple who met here three years ago and who spoke openly about a very challenging dilemma. They are both engineers and have pledged their next few years to the church on a huge community project in rural Brazil. If it becomes clear they are a living as a “couple” they may face difficulties. It’s the classic “don’t ask, don’t tell” bind, that lesbian and gay Catholics find themselves in all the world over. But it was great to see these two guys speaking openly of their need for one another, but also their need to place their relationship in a wider context of gift to the community beyond their own front door.

CRISMHOM is very lucky. It has a fixed meeting place in Chueca, Madrid’s Soho, gifted to them by a well off female patron who admired the group’s goals and placed the duplex premises at their disposal for nothing. It attracts mainly men of all ages, yet it differs from Quest, LGCM and other gay Christian groups in one respect – it really is a full time commitment for a small core of the dedicated activists. Eight meetings a month, speakers, liturgy, websites and all the rest of it. Some of the meetings attract in excess of seventy, eighty plus people. Best of all was the pre-Christmas liturgy, followed by a bring your own buffet supper with litres of rough red wine and a medley of villancicos (carols) until three in the morning.

Scenes that like would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. This is a heavily polarised country. I recall hosting my (straight) Madrid friend Martin Sanchez Chamon at my London flat some three years ago. I had not even come out to him as really there had been no point at which to naturally raise the subject. In our first few meetings it just never arose as a topic for discussion. He had me down as a kindly, liberal, left-ish BBC guy, so when I told him I was hosting a house mass for the feast of Los Difuntos (All Souls), he was more than a little perplexed. To such a man, Catholicism meant siding with the forces of reaction and was a distinctly bourgeois phenomenon. In the end, I didn’t need to come out to Martin. He took his seat at our Quest house mass and his gaydar kicked in. Catholic and Gay? We had a long talk afterwards and I explained that to be RC in the UK is to be part of another anti-establishment minority. Then is all made sense to him. Here in Spain, it is so different. And so much harder. For far too long the Church and the State have been like figures of eight intertwined, co-dependent on one another and both the worse off as a result of it. Render unto Caesar and all that…

This is the legacy that the women and men of the new Spain are seeking to overcome and a good number of them have come a long way in a short time. But this is all about deeply held cultural values, about prejudices and about long memories. And such things lie deep, often located way way down in the subconscious, well beyond the grasp of well intentioned, but often quite limited changes to the legal landscape.

So I toast the new gay marriage laws and the four thousand plus newly wedded couples. But I am under no illusion. In the eternal debate over which comes first: legal change or society’s values, it seems to me that the latter will always drive the former. Here, more than anywhere.

This article has been originally published in the Quest Bulletin, Spring 2011