Melbourne Conversations at the Town Hall 30th January 2004 “To be Gay/Lesbian and Christian..and that’s a fact” Michael Kelly’s speech -Melbourne Lower Town hall

Firstly it’s a great pleasure and in a certain sense it’s a surprise to be here. In some ways this is an historic night, or at least from my perspective. I’m a Melbourne boy and probably like many people older than me and some perhaps a little bit younger, I grew up with my father buying The Truth newspaper. To read the form guide of course. And I would occasionally see stories of men caught in public toilets doing dastardly things and having their lives destroyed and dragged before courts, having their crimes displayed in the bastion of decency, The Truth, having their families fall apart.

This was the kind of image of what it meant to be gay in this city, in this country until ’78-80. As a Catholic I also grew up having to repress my sexuality, not just as a gay, young gay man, young gay boy, because I wouldn’t have been able to name it then. But as Catholic, as someone who wanted to become a priest. Sexuality had to be repressed and hidden, and certainly as I began to discover myself as gay, it had to be even more repressed, even more hidden.

And here tonight the Melbourne City Council welcomes in openly gay and lesbian people and says speak to us of the truth of your lives. And welcomes in this openly gay Catholic and says speak to us of the truth of your faith, which is more than the Catholic Church has ever done. I have never been invited to speak on church property in Melbourne since I came out, in Catholic Church property. But here the City of Melbourne invites me to come and speak. And so in many ways this is a great pleasure and a privilege and an historic night.

I also speak as a member or representative of the Rainbow Sash movement, and perhaps we can say a bit more about that during the question time. But a group of people within the church in this country who have chosen to stand up within the church very publicly and symbolically and quietly but very resolutely claim our place and our dignity and expose what goes on behind closed doors.

Dorothy and I have been invited to address the same questions, so some of our comments will overlap. But I very specifically want to speak I guess from a Catholic perspective, so you will hear that in some of the things that I’ll say. I want to approach it under four headings, length and breadth and depth and height.

Being a gay Catholic or being a Catholic who wants to address openly and creatively the gay issue or the gay and lesbian issue or the queer issue, however we want to use those terms, really means firstly holding yourself open to the length of the history of the church, and it’s an enormous and immense and complex history. Certainly it means going back, right back to those early centuries. Now I take some exception to what Dorothy said. I think it was already happening before Augustine.

In the early centuries one of the crucial debates was the issue of sexual abstinence, virginity, sexual renunciation as the mark of the Christian. And there was an enormous tussle and struggle, both in the city and in the desert for several centuries as to how the reality of marriage and procreation and sex and the obvious human drive could co-exist with this very very strong ethos around sexual renunciation and perpetual virginity, which was being held up as the sign of the new life in Christ. It’s a very complex story.

What’s important to note is that by the end of the Patristic Period, sort of 4th, 5th century it’s kind of like a deal had sort of been struck. And the deal is that it’s always and everywhere preferable to be abstinent, totally sexually abstinent, and that means also from thought. No one’s supposed to think about it. And if you do you mustn’t enjoy the thought. Seriously, grave sin. That’s always to be preferred. And that is seen particularly in the desert monasteries and the growing groups of young women who take on virginity in the cities. It’s increasingly imposed on the clergy over the next few centuries, because of course they should be Holy, and that’s the way of life to be preferred, the abstinent way of life.

And on the other side, well you can get married and you can have sex for the sake of procreation. It’s always a second class way of life and you should enjoy it as little as possible, and that was really what was said. But you can do it, you can have sex within marriage for procreation and your laying of concupiscence as they put it. Lest you get so horny you go and visit a prostitute. That was the kind of logic. Okay well if you’re going to get that horny, perhaps you can have some sex in marriage.

So that was the kind of deal that was struck. Now that deal, abstinence, virginity, celibacy, perpetual clergy, monasteries, convents, that deal there and the marriage thing here, that has lasted until the 20th century – within the Catholic Church certainly – and it’s had immense implications for the whole of the Christian body.

Now just think about the teachings, the spirituality, the counseling the education, the theology, the mythology, the practices, the spiritual wisdom that has grown up to embody and reinforce and teach and impose that deal. How do we deal with new life in Christ which was seen as something that should take you away from just the ordinariness of physicality and the reality of marriage and sex.

Now the 20th century, the first time in the Catholic Church the deal really began to break down. It wasn’t noticed at first, but began to break down when the church began to teach that within marriage you could actually have sex for the sake of the unity of love of the couple. But that was actually a good in itself. And then that you could actually in certain circumstances have sex within marriage and enjoy it, and to give or be content not to have a child natural family planning, at least for some parts of your marriage. The idea that you could ever have sex even within a marriage and enjoy it with the express intention of that particular sexual act not producing a child would have horrified most of the thinkers for most of Christian history. It breaks down that original deal.

So we start to see some change beginning. So as a gay Catholic standing at the start of the 21st century I needed to be aware of the length of that history, but also the fact that it can change and gradually develop, and be aware that people have a length ahead of me as well, and will continue to change and develop. And I and many people here are part of that change and development.

So when stuff is put to us as if this has fallen from God, you know, in Genesis or something, not true. We have to look at the history and be aware of it, where it’s coming from. But also be aware that it’s not surprising that this issue is terrifying the church institutions.

If you just look at what I’ve talked about, if this fundamental kind of nexus around how to deal with sex is being broken down as we speak, and it’s been in place since the early centuries, and all the church culture around that sort of issue has been, you know, saturated with that deal, it’s going to scare the hell out of people at every level in the church when the deal starts to break down. And it is breaking down.

So that’s part of, very potted version, of why it’s such a huge issue for the church. It’s never had to deal with sick sex like this since the early centuries. Okay. But the deal has been maintained till now.

It’s also critical to be aware that the issue is so important in the churches because it’s iconic. The jury is still out I think on whether the church is capable of truly engaging with the modern world. I think the jury really is out. At the beginning of the 19th century the church was still saying that democracy was a pernicious evil and questioning the whole idea of human rights for example, and defending slavery. The church has groaned and creaked, try and engage with the modern world. And with people quite frankly like Jensen, like Pell it’s not quite clear that the church is going to make it into the modern world. It’s really not, you know. And I’m not just talking about sex. I’m talking about the church, you know, dealing with modern pluralist western democracies with educated autonomous adults who can think for themselves.

With modern science, with modern biology a lot of the churches sexual teachings is based on flawed ideas of human biology. Can the church deal with that? Modern cosmology, the modern press. The church doesn’t like dealing with the modern press. Evolution, diversity, individual human rights. The primacy of individual conscience. The increasingly openly articulated reality of individual and communal human experience where people are claiming the right to speak for themselves. There are kind of new phenomenon, phenomena in many ways, and the church is really struggling to deal with them.

That’s why you often get the church saying, oh things are going really well in Africa. There’s lots of people joining the seminaries in Africa. And by god parts of Latin America are booming, and there are sections of Asia and eastern Europe. It’s like yeah right, and, the modern, educated, healthy, free west? Oh the church is in deep shit. Well, could that be because the church has a problem, it’s not just the modern world.

Now when the gay issue, all of those various sort of disciplines and issues that I talked about really are kind of coalesce in many ways. Throw in the issue of the Bible, watch the nature Biblical authority, watch the nature of Church tradition. The tradition I just described, watch the level of authority that should hold. What if the Pope says “X” and the modern world seems to be saying “Y” which is what’s happening now. Both Y the letter and why.

They all come together around the gay issue, okay. It’s an iconic issue. Including also something what Dorothy said about that deep human cultural sexual taboos and things in earlier cultures, but I just want to keep it to the catholic thing at the moment.

It’s also a huge thing for the Catholic Church of course – and I’m not going to go into this tonight – because seminaries, the clergy, monasteries, convents have traditionally been havens for same sex attracted people. Very dangerous kind of havens that could turn on you in a moment. The homophobic cultures they kind of were, and not needed any more in that way. And many of the people in there are still acting as if they’re in this terribly threatened place, and the threat is acting coming from the church not the society around them.

So gay people coming out openly threatens to undo the kind of covert nature of the arrangement within the Catholic clergy and religious life which in some ways was a haven at times. I have to tell you a joke and don’t have much time, but Wilcox, one of the cartoonists who is very popular. One of the height of one of the rainbow sash arguments – it might have been the Uniting Church thing going on as well, had two little vignettes. One was: the minister or priest standing up in the pulpit saying there is no way the church is going to deal with overt homosexuality in the clergy. The next vignette: It goes against the venerable and long-standing trading tradition of covert homosexuality.

So for all those reasons the issue is hot in the church at the moment.

Breadth. And in this I’m also talking about why people stay. The Catholic Church is this enormously vast juggernaut. Just over a billion members. 25% of citizens in the greatest super power the world has ever known call themselves Catholics. 20% plus of people in secular Modern Australia call themselves Catholics. It’s the largest employer in Australia. It is exempt from most anti discrimination legislation, especially the gay and lesbian people which regards itself as being. It educates between a quarter and a third of all Australian youth, with government money for the most part. 27% plus of all aid services in the world are administered by the Catholic Church.

In the words of David Marr, the church in this country is the best funded, the most active, the most powerful and the least scrutinized lobby group. From the seat of the UN to phone calls between Popes and Presidents to what a teacher in a school in Richmond can say on Monday morning to what a parent will tell a child about masturbation in Poland. The Catholic Church is an enormously complex and huge reality.

It’s crucial that such an organization be engaged in the way it treats gay and lesbian people. Crucial, you can’t ignore it. Sometimes I wish we could, but we can’t. Whether it’s the parliament in Columbia ditching the whole idea of rights for same sex couples, following lobbying by the local hierarchy because of the Vatican document on gay unions in August, or whether it’s a teacher at Sienna College writing an article in The Age in which she claims, I have sympathy that religious education is not indoctrination. But she knows as well as I do that she can’t get up on Monday morning and say there was nothing wrong with a gay couple forming a stable, loving union. She’ll lose her job.

It’s enormously powerful. It must be engaged with. And one of the ways of engaging with it is to stand within it as a gay Catholic and say, I know this tradition as well as you do, I articulated(?) too, it’s in my body and my life as much as yours, and I challenge you on the basis of the gospel and on the basis of the core of the Christian heritage that we share. It’s frustrating to stay within it, but it’s crucial that some people do that.

Another dimension of the breadth which also I think enables gay people to stay, some of us anyway, is that under that top echelon of people in hats and robes it’s an enormously complex community of people, enormously complex. Enormously rich and diverse whether it be injustice making or in prayer or in scholarship, in education, in art, in culture, in music, in youth work. It’s an enormously rich and diverse community of people.

So for example I would feel in communion as a person who works for justice with Dominican nuns who are sitting in jail in America because they challenged the US government at Fort Benning where the assassins are trained for Latin America. I would feel in solidarity with nuns who are working in impoverished prisons in Tanzania. I would feel in solidarity with an 86 year old monk friend of mine who lives in Colorado who is gay. It’s an enormously complex body of people who are doing astonishing work for justice and for deepening the human spirit.

And so as a gay Catholic I stand in solidarity with them and I will not simply walk away. At the same time I wish those very people were less intimidated by the documents coming from the Vatican about gay issues and would speak up for us as powerfully as they speak up for justice for other people.

The impact on one’s own spirituality is enormous and obviously would take all night to talk about, but depth. Depth. It makes you go to the roots of your Christian heritage. What does it really mean to believe? What does it really mean to be a follower of Jesus? What does it mean to be a person of spirit and heart and integrity? What does it mean to follow the law of love rather than the law of law? What does it mean to have my own human experience, including my experience as a sexually active man, interact with and engage with the Gospel and the Christian tradition. What wisdom can I bring to that tradition, to transform it for the future, not just what can I learn from it for myself.

Ultimately if one can hang in there and discern and be guided from within it calls one’s spirituality to become more personal, more embodied, more adult, more daring, more open-hearted, more questioning, more critical of the status quo, very Christian. More honest, more humble, more passionate. More in solidarity with all those who are marginalized and excluded in the name of religious righteousness. A spirituality that is more tenacious, more erotic, more forgiving, more radically hopeful, even when there seems to be no hope. More experimental and playful, more truly human. It’s an invitation to be honestly, openly who one is, painful, astonishing, frustrating, but to walk a path into true and vulnerable humans. Through all the messiness of discovering a path to sexual wholeness that has never been walked or talked about before. It’s the radical cutting edge of discovering what that means. But no one’s done it before. If they have they haven’t talked about it.

So it’s a gift and a grace to be with spirituality that’s sexual as a gay and lesbian person in the church. It’s a gift and grace for the church.

Now I’ll close here. There’s a need for a sense of vision, for a sense of hope for the future. A need to remember that the church does not exist for itself, but for human kind. And the price gain to bring us life in its fullness, not religion. It’s to be able to see the world and society evangelizing the church, and teaching the church through justice, through human rights, through equities, through what’s happening tonight. What the real implications are of the law of freedom and liberation and love that Christ to proclaim. It’s to see that that energy that came from that one life, that one tradition, has long ago burst the bounds of the institution of church and is transforming society.

And that’s a cause for great joy. And so many ways it’s to call then for the church to wake up and engage with a society which in some ways is already moving beyond it in the spirit of freedom.

In many ways is to stand in the water and watch the ripples. The message of Christ is like a pebble dropped into the water of human kind. And the ripples spread outwards. And in every age the ripples meet the next frontier of the so-called sacred, the so-called righteous, the so-called clean and orthodox. And there’s a battle for the sacred, and the ripples win. And that version of the sacred collapses and the ripples move outward, and the next stage there’s another frontier in the water of what’s called sacred, and that collapses. And in our age the ripples are reaching this level of gay and lesbian issue area. This edge has been called unclean, ungodly and unrighteous. And I am standing in the water watching the ripples reach this edge and saying to the church, the time has come. One of the great disappointments of my experience over the last six years has been the total, utter, complete refusal of the church hierarchy to engage in any kind of structured dialogue around these issues.

Thank you.

http://www.abc.net.au/compass/s1192915.htm

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