UNITED STATES
Houston Voice
Friday, September 30, 2005
Richard J. Rosendall
THE VATICAN’S RECENT decision to purge Catholic seminaries of gay men makes me think of Groucho Marx’s line, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” In truth, the church’s authoritarianism drove me away years before I was ready to deal with my sexuality.
Leaving the church, however, can be easier than making it leave you. Family tradition, rituals instilled early, the music and images and stories — they can exert a lasting emotional pull long after you have rejected the core beliefs.
This personal awareness tempers my irreverence when I wonder with exasperation what it would take for diehard gay Catholics to get the message that they are not welcome. Belonging to a family or a church that doesn’t want you may be painful, but that doesn’t make it any easier to turn your back.
It is supremely ironic that a key hallmark of the life of Jesus of Nazareth was his affinity for and kindness toward outcasts: the tax collectors, the adulterous woman, the Good Samaritan. He admonished against judging others, decried as hypocrisy public displays of prayer, and declared that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.