Catholic and evangelical comfort and bull.

April 25, 2009 by Dan Hooper.

I’ve had some more private e-talk with my friend Sarah. She is/is not a rarity: a faithful Catholic lesbian.

(How does anyone know that all the lesbians and gay men are fleeing the church? Just because we meet a lot who have fled? There might be tens of thousands more who have not fled. there’s no way to take a census, after all.)

A couple of weeks ago Sarah responded to my thoughts in Evangelical Catholic? Here is more of what she wrote: 

I’m Catholic. Roman Catholic. To the core, beyond anything I can deny - tried to get away from it for awhile, and that didn’t work out too well. And yes - it is because of the nuns - the ones who taught me about civil disobedience in 2nd grade, the ones who I called several years ago when I returned to the Church, telling them about the horrors that had shoved me away from any faith in God, being condemned to hell for being who I am, and who said “Honey, you should’ve just called us right away. We’d have told you that what that man said was bullshit.”

First lesson: the Church is not monolithic, and many LGBT people find room within it where they don’t feel crushed. My local friend and ordained deacon Roberta says as much. Make space for yourself where the hypocrisy or authoritarianism of the hierarchy isn’t so oppressive. Shrug them off. Press on with your own sense of calling and ministry and service to Christ.

Sarah is raising a son, who is in Catholic school, and will remain in one. Yet she walks closely with a dear gay friend (partnered, married), a Catholic priest who is in the process of exploring the Lutheran ministry, and now worships in a Lutheran church.

[It] is overwhelmingly filled with people who are part of the “Catholic diaspora” - and it sounds like Hollywood Lutheran is as well. There’s one guy there who sat down over coffee with me . . . saying he finally felt at home there, because he finally felt there was someone with proper Petrine succession. He thinks the Holy Mother Church is idiotic for refusing to ordain women and married people (regardless of the gender of the one to whom they’re married) - but is Roman to the core otherwise.

When I wrote about Roberta’s ordination a year ago, I ventured to remind myself that the Lutheran church is the original “Old Catholic” movement. Or as I quoted a few weeks ago (from Wikipedia of all places), “[the Lutheran reformers] saw the continuity of Catholicism in Lutheranism, which they understood not as a re-formation of the Church, but rather a renewal movement within and for the Catholic Church, from which they had been involuntarily and only temporarily separated.

Top Lutheran meets top Catholic.  More on this later.

Ironically, I don’t think that either the Roman Catholic Church or the Lutheran Church acknowledges the fact of this diaspora. When I search the ELCA’s official publications or its web site, I find absolutely nothing helpful about what Lutherans say to Catholics in the diaspora, or what we should be teaching about grace, scripture, the sacraments, church order, Blessed Mary or the saints.

Sarah says that while she attends her priest friend’s new Lutheran eucharists, “I simply can’t imagine ever being Lutheran. 

I can sit with that liminality just fine. It’s something that you’re encountering from a different perspective, and I’m really enjoying reading about how you work with it, hearing how the Catholics [in Lutheran parishes] handle it, how Chuck reconciles it all… it’s not easy for any of us. I’m so happy that places like [these] exist to welcome my Roman brothers and sisters. I’m still pondering what it takes to make that “home away from Rome” a place that will speak to and soothe our souls in ways that will heal the wounds caused by the HMC’s own sins.

That’s Holy Mother Church for those of us who didn’t grow up with a Catholic “abbreviary” in our school book bag. (I was once shocked when visiting a beautiful little Catholic church in the mountains of Arizona to find the bronze plaque affixed on the outside which read “Church of the B.V.M.” I know they saved a lot of money by not having to pay to spell out “Blessed Virgin Mary”, but I couldn’t help wondering how reverent that really is when it makes outsiders think of an underpants company.) (Sorry, Sarah!)

My friend Roberta just doesn’t use the word “Roman” when she speaks of herself as Catholic and reminds me that I am Catholic. In conversations like these, I realize there is a lot of fluidity within the larger “small c” catholic church, and that all of us are trying to live out our discipleship appropriately.  This is the current reality 500 years after the “Reformation.”  There is some convergence of what we as the people of God understand about our Christian faith, regardless of what the hierarchies of church institutions may publicly state.

But, we (LGBT Christians and our straight allies) also have to struggle with an ongoing divergence: that these institutional churches are taking far different courses in dealing with this other reality: the faithful presence of lesbian/gay, bisexual and transgender people who are seeking to find their place and live out their discipleship without condemnation, without the bullshit.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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