What Do Straight Catholics DU'ers Think Of The Church's Institutionalized Homophobia?

My mother is Roman Catholic, left the church because she couldn't tolerate the message it conveyed about women and gay people.

For those of you who have chosen to stay, how do you justify the Church's official bigotry which causes such demonstrable harm to gays and lesbians and their families worldwide?

my daughter and I were discussing abortion the other day, and her friend said, "well, I'm Catholic so I don't have to ever make that choice."

responose, "Well of course, as a Catholic, you will be a virgin until you're married, right?"

"Um, lets change the subject."

You see - you take the parts that work for your life.

there seems to be real cognitive dissonance on this issue.

And since we hear on daily basis how hypocritical gay Republicans are (and they are), I'm wondering aren't socially liberal Catholics in somewhat the same boat?

And these supposedly celibate men should just stay out of all that stuff. They don't know anything about it.

that makes sure millions of women don't have the luxury of picking and choosing. I find it disturbing how easily many Catholics just brush off the *official* abusive policies of their church.

... or an Agnostic Catholic.


Growing up as an active participant in the Catholic church I don't recall any hatred or vilification of Gay people at the parish level. (Yes, I understand that as an institution the RC church is homophobic and that the hierarchy of the church spews hatred and venom toward gays).

Oddly, the people that I have been close to that are gay have all been practicing Catholics and the two Gay men that I have been the closest to were monastic brothers. They were far more worried about by my lapsed Catholicism (as it relates to my eternal soul) than the Catholic Church's official view of homosexuality. I don't "get it", but guess I don't need to (?)

has had real problems with it, including questioning the purpose of the church and the existence of God. She is also very upset over a series of what she calls "lunatic priests" that have been assigned to their parish, saying members started dropping "IOU's" into the offering plate as a form of protest when the bishop wouldn't listen to their concerns about the priests' attitude (not sexuality or abuse).

It is very liberating. I am a better person now because I am in charge of my life. I am a good person because I want to be and not fearful of offending god as the church wants me to be. Fear is dreadful.

I'm still a spiritual person but I don't need religion for that. The politics of the church were annoying me too much, along with the robotic congregation that generally appeared even more uninterested at mass than I was. The birth control stance is the craziest part I think. There was no homophobia that I saw in our parish, but they did have the anti-abortion rhetoric and speakers from time to time that made me angry. We had one priest that would deliver a sermon railing against material things and then later in the same mass he would beg us for money so that he could buy a new sound system for the church.

a believer. However, I thought that often only lip service was paid to demonizing gays. I say this because it was often open knowledge that many of the religious order members and clergy were gay. The difference was that an emphasis was paid to celibacy and vows of chastity in religious orders so that sexual orientation didn't matter that much as long as you didn't have sex.

In early Christianity that placed an emphasis on monogamous marriage, thanks to St. Paul, the religious life became a refuge for gays. Among the Pagans marriage was expected but no one blinked an eye at lovers of either sex on the side. Christianity changed that.

Anyway, although we got a lot of strange and mixed signals on sexuality when I was growing up, the message that I got was that sex was bad unless in marriage and for pro-creation. Anything else was a mortal sin that would send you to Hell. Who you wanted to have sex with didn't seem important as long as you didn't act on those sinful impluses outside of a heterosexual marriage for pro-creation.

There is a great book, "When God was a Woman.." that traces the rise in patriarchal religions and their intentional actions to CONTROL.... In this case, control the populace, control women, control anyone who differs from the conformity, which of course would include homosexuals...

Most Catholics that I know practice a far more liberal form of Catholicism... i.e., taking the good from it, and leaving the "bad."

to correct those deviations from the teachings of Jesus.

It was in that century that the Church was taken over by powermongering men, who (just like Bushites) purged the great variety of thought within the Christian movement, created a narrow set of "Church dogmas," wedded these dogmas to state power to be enforced by the sword, instituted "baptism by the sword," created a narrow group of gospels (stories of Jesus) that were to be the synoptic (official) gospels, burned all the others, began in earnest to persecute all other Christians, as well as Pagans and Jews, raised men above women as special envoys of God (bishops began to call themselves "patriarchs," women told to veil themselves in church, and not to speak), and began to build the monolithic organization that imprisoned the human soul in Europe and the Mediterranean region for a thousand years. The Alexandria Library (center of all learning in the ancient world) was burned, early in the century, and its last great teacher--a woman named Hypatia--was skinned alive by a mob of 'christian' monks at the behest of the "Patriarch of Alexandria," Bishop Cyril, now known as "Saint Cyril" in the current Church list of "saints," i.e, people who were so holy their souls went straight to God. Skinning alive was believed, at the time, to prevent the soul from going to Heaven, which is possibly the reason they chose this method of death for Hypatia, by all accounts a brilliant and saintly woman, devoted to learning, teacher of some of the good bishops, and, as a Pagan (neoplatonist), a bridge between the true Christians--the Gnostics--and the Pagans, especially the learned Pagans, of the Roman Empire.

As with Bushites, education was the enemy. Literacy was near universal in the Roman republic and later empire, which provided schooling for all. But with the rise of the monolithic Church, literacy quickly died out among the general population, and was confined to a narrow group of male churchmen. As an example of this night and day change in the matter of education, Hypatia is described by writers of that era as standing on the street in the marketplace and arguing a point of mathematics with an ordinary shopkeeper. It may sound unusual to us--she was upper class/Roman citizen--but it was not so remarkable then, especially in Alexandria. When a ship came into harbor in Alexandria, the import authorities first of all scoured it for any learned manuscripts--before any other goods were unloaded--sent the mss. to the Library to be copied, then returned them to their owners. The Alexandrians were obsessed with learning. But with the rise of Cyril, "Patriarch" of Alexandria, all of this--the work of the ages, the accumulation of thousands of years of learning and reverence for education--was swiftly destroyed. And it's interesting that one Cyril's first actions, in destroying all this, was a pogrom against the Jews, who had a safe haven in Alexandria (city of tolerance, city of light). Hypatia and the Library were next, and, after that, the purge of the Gnostic Christians (whose gospels were buried in sealed jars in the Nag Hammadi desert near Alexandria, to be found 1,500 years later, in our era).

The Roman Catholic Church, after these dreadful developments of the 5th century, was thereafter constructed on a foundation of ignorance, repression, male dominance, violence, and hatred of women and free thought. Any Christian movement that adhered to the original teachings of Jesus ('love they neighbor')--such as the gentle, tolerant Pelagians in the British Isles--was stamped out.

All evidence points to Jesus living in an egalitarian community, where all were welcome and all were equal. The earliest Christians lived communally, and drew straws to choose who would preside at Mass. Women, and even children, could act as priest. The oldest gospel in existence, called the Gospel of Mary--found among the recently discovered Gnostic gospels--depicts Mary Magdalen as the leader of the apostles, as the closest to Jesus, and most knowledgeable about his teachings, whom the male apostles turn to for guidance, after his death. The "synoptic" gospels--narrowly chosen and EDITED by "patriarchs" like Cyril--contain the uncharacteristic (of Jesus) line, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." Jesus never said anything like this anywhere else. He was very anti-institutional. I'm not a language or Bible scholar, but I have little doubt that that line was invented in the 5th century. It is the supposed statement of Jesus upon which all the horror of the next 10 centuries was justified--the "authority" of Rome (deriving from St. Peter), and all of its witchburnings, pogroms, inquisitions, murderous crusades against both dissenting Christians and Pagans, enforced ignorance (which, among other things, led to the spread of disease), and enormous suffering.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I'm sure Jesus would agree with Lord Acton. What we see today, in the institutional Church, are the vestiges of that great crime committed by the "Church Fathers" so long ago. The crime of absolute power. The crime of claiming to speak for God. The crime of monolithic organization. The crime of arrogance. The crime of self-worship. The REAL Christian movement still exists underneath and outside of this absurdly anti-christian hierarchy. In a REAL Christian community, NO ONE is excluded, and NO ONE is "high" and NO ONE is "low" and NO ONE is a "heretic" and NO ONE has a monopoly on God. No one!

The history of the Church is all so hauntingly similar to the rightwing Bushites--who have sought to build a monolith out of the U.S. government, with an absolute monarch at the top, using enforcement of their religious doctrine, and hostility to education, as tools of oppression--as to make one shudder.

But, as W.B. Yeats believed, history is a gyre. Things do indeed come back round in cycles, but never exactly in the same way. And each turn of the gyre is an opportunity to re-learn certain important lessons and to improve upon the human race and further our progress toward wisdom and understanding.

That's where we stand today--both those who are still members of the Catholic Church and fighting the good fight within it--and all others, who are outside of its structure, on various paths toward enlightenment. It's important to know what has gone before, in order to fathom what you are seeing today--in the current Church hierarchy, in Bushism, in Corporatism, and in all the ways of oppression and militarism.

I will conclude with my favorite fact: The foundation of the oppressive modern Church was laid at the Council of Chalcedon in 550 AD, where free thought was anathematized, and where religion and state power were cemented together. One of the two electronic voting corporations that are now "counting" all our votes in the U.S., with TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, was initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation, which, among other things, touts the death penalty for homosexuals. I have no idea if the Chalcedon foundation was deliberately named after that Church Council, but think of it this way: Saint Cyril has been "counting" your votes behind a veil of corporate secrecy. Strange turn of the gyre, no?

Even more after this election cycle after watching all the crap that went down in Wisconsin, epically from the Madison bishop.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=186x17500

Our Bishops in MN are doing this too (New Ulm one is worst in the state for this). I am all for gay rights and allowing marriage, even inside the church. I know it is a couple centuries away at least for the Church but for now if they can stay away from civil marriage I would be fine with it.

I write semi-regular letters to Bishops over this. The hierarchy, epically here in the US (from EWTN, (ir)Relevant Radio, etc...) is way out of touch with the members in the pews. Supporting the broadly based amendments even goes against accepted teachings (and not just regular homophobia).

I would be content with a neutral position right now but that is not going to happen.