On Sunday Cardinal Theodore McCarrick presided at a Eucharist in St. William’s Chapel, at which 21 students?some, though not all, lesbian and gay?remained standing throughout the liturgy. Their silent presence drew attention, a handout said, to Georgetown’s failure to address “the needs of its students without regard to age, sex, religion, race, sexual orientation, handicap, color, national or ethnic origin.”
Some will argue that the gesture was inappropriate since it mixed politics and worship. Worship, according to this line of thought, is a private moment that must remain sacrosanct and untouched by political activism. This reasoning is ingenuous, however, since the liturgy, and the Cardinal’s presence at it, was itself demonstrably anti-abortion?arguably a political action. Are the Cardinal’s politics appropriate? Of course. Vatican II underscored in numerous places that the Eucharist is the major public work of the Church. In this way Vatican II dismantled a longstanding quietism in which Mass was thought to be private, engaged in for one’s personal salvation. Not so, insist counciliar documents; the liturgy must register the character of the world, however fallen, in which it operates.
Other persons argue differently, saying that the metaphysical reach of the Eucharist removes it beyond earthly concerns. St. Paul anticipates this argument?indeed, Paul anticipates Vatican II’s corrective measure. In 1 Corinthians 11:3-13, Paul writes that women should keep their heads covered in church because such a posture manifests outwardly the inward state of the woman, who remains covered and subservient to the natural line of authority.
Paul’s remarks concerning the women of Corinth must surely be read in terms of that particular historical era. Nowadays, in most Western public places, including churches, women need not appear covered. Nonetheless, little progress has been made otherwise on the equality of women in liturgical participation. For this reason Christian indignation at the treatment of women in other cultures and religions seem na?ve, since in many Christian communities women still are not full participants at the Lord’s Supper. The Islamic burka thus has an honesty about it that casts the doubleness of Christian practice into high relief.
Women, of course, are not alone in facing spiritual curtailment. Homosexual persons, male and female, confront numerous obstacles in their pursuit of a soul. Some of these constraints might be “merely” symbolic, invisible to those unaffected by them. Others, however, are directly material and affect how and under what conditions gay persons are permitted entry into communal religious life. For example, apologists for the Vatican position on homosexuality will say that the 1986 “Letter to the Catholic Bishops Regarding the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” only forbids the open meeting of Dignity, a group for gay Catholics, on church property. Indeed, the document forbids much more than that, even as it presumes to monitor personal relations of the homosexual person. To read the document as only about Dignity is willfully na?ve, ignoring the many ways in which homosexual persons suffer numerous slight but nonetheless consequential abridgements of their spiritual lives. Keeping with the image from St. Paul, one might argue that homosexuals must don a bag over their heads as they enter the church. Like the hidden although politically visible covering still worn by Catholic women, the metaphorical burka worn by homosexual persons has practical consequences.
Take Sunday’s protest, in which persons removed the bag and opened their mouths, acknowledging by their visible presence the voices they are otherwise denied. St. Paul deemed it appropriate that public worship should represent the social and political realities by which it was organized. He praised the Corinthians for thus visibly “holding fast to the traditions.” St. Paul’s example thus gives warrant to the silent witness at an anti-abortion sponsored liturgy; it is clearly appropriate that gay-identified persons and those who support justice for them should, in such a venue, show upon their bodies the spiritual bondage in which, perforce, they must negotiate their spiritual lives.
Within the practice of everyday church life, women still remain covered. So, too, gay men and women remain mute?for all practical purposes, uninvited to the Eucharistic Table. To the contrary, one might argue, homosexual persons are invited to the Lord’s Supper. Yet the invitation is duplicitous, since it is offered only so long as they keep their mouths shut?as witness the Georgetown gay student denied communion by a Georgetown priest on Georgetown’s campus. The priest’s refusal of communion?surely as scandalous as any behavior to which he might object?makes the point very clear: If one cannot open one’s mouth to speak, one can hardly hope to receive nourishment. Gay-identified persons, spiritually mute, also starve.
Finally, one wonders why gay-friendly parishes work so hard to convince gay persons that they are welcome, even though canonically and in terms of social prejudice clear curtailments exist upon their liturgical participation? Furthermore, why do gay persons talk away or ignore the obvious disparities that exist between the spiritual limits placed upon them and the freedoms that others have as their birthright? For example, what straight person ever fears the humiliation of being refused the host at communion, or even ever thinks about this as a threat? There are doubtless compassionate reasons why parishes try to find ways around administrative church obduracy and accommodate homosexual presence. On the other hand, gay persons find they must bend to such accommodation, lest they starve completely. Nonetheless, the uneasy alliance between the two frequently resembles the exercise of colonial power. The inequities between overlord and subjected person, will, in the end, corrupt both. Indeed, the very need to indicate “gay friendly” signals the depth of “gay antagonism” that goes without saying, because it is everywhere. Try out a comparable expression?”African-American friendly” or “Irish-friendly” or “adultery-friendly.” It was against just such liberal and finely poisonous rhetoric that Martin Luther King expended his life. In a week when we celebrate his vision, his dream?truly “pro-life” in its widest, Christian sense?should, and must, become ours, whatever our various faiths.
