Widely reported today, Good Friday among Christians, is the sermon delivered before Pope Benedict XVI (formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger) by Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, who holds the office of preacher of the papal household. Friar Cantalamessa likened recent criticism of the Pope’s inaction in a priest-pedophile abuse case (when Ratzinger was Archbishop of Munich, Germany) to the invective heaped upon Jews during two-millennia of anti-Semitism (some of it fomented by the Church).

The timing of this sermon was unusual in that for centuries the Catholic Good Friday liturgy blamed the “perfidious Jews” for the death of Christ.

Medical observers, however, expressed alarm, noting that the friar’s sermon and recent Vatican pronouncements indicate a serious, even life threatening pathophysiology requiring a surgical procedure.

The surgical procedure is a cranial-rectalectomy, the surgical removal of one’s head from one’s own or another’s rectum. Delay, according to medical authorities, only worsens the condition, which can become permanent, dimming the prognosis.

In 2008 I left the Commonwealth of Virginia (my ancestral home, where I had lived and worked for most of my adult life) to move to Connecticut. News from the Old Dominion (reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education) confirms my decision to leave:

Virginia’s attorney general says public colleges and universities in the state with policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation should revoke such policies because they lack the legal authority to name gay state employees as a protected class, The Washington Post reported. The attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, a Republican who took office in January, wrote in a letter to the colleges that only the state’s General Assembly can give legal protections to gay state employees. The legislature has repeatedly declined to take that step.

Connecticut, in contrast, recognizes same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex parents, prevents discrimination because of sexual orientation, and provides benefits for same-sex spouses. Since Griswold v Connecticut in 1965 (the Supreme Court decision, ruling on a law restricting access to birth control, that established a right to privacy), the “Land of Steady Habits” has moved steadily into modernity.

The Virginia AG office has historically been the springboard for those with gubernatorial ambitions, like Bob McDonnell, the recently elected governor whose campaign was successful in part because he was a Right Wing transvestite performing in Centrist drag, and whose 1989 Public Polic master’s degree and Law JD thesis from Pat Robertson’s Regent University (entitled “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family”) includes this gem: “. . . every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators. The cost of sin should fall on the sinner not the taxpayer”  (p. 65).

I am the product of 20 years of Catholic education (grade school, prep school, college, seminary), of which I am proud and for which I am grateful. During the 1980s I was a Roman Catholic priest. Over 20 years ago, I left the priesthood and the Church. In the words of the Jewish Passover Seder hymn, Dayenu . . . “it would have been enough.”

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the bishops’ collusion in shielding sexual abuser priests and preventing the victims from receiving their rightful pastoral care.

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the bishops’ intractable denial of a rightful place for women in ministry and in positions of leadership, more recently evidenced in the Vatican’s New Inquisition of orders of women religious.

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the Church’s single-minded campaign against the social equality of gay and lesbian people.

Today’s news includes salt on that wound. After the Washington, DC, government decided to recognize same-sex unions as marriages (with all the rights, privileges and duties pertaining thereunto), which included the provision of health benefits for spouses, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, led by Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl (”Oh, her!” I could tell you stories that I’d heard about that girlfriend years ago), has decided that henceforth they will not offer spousal benefits to any new heterosexual employees or to any new spouses of current heterosexual employees, in order not to give even the appearance of condoning same-sex marriages.

The former chief operating officer of the archiocesan Catholic Charities, Tim Sawina, has called upon the archdiocese to change its position. According to a report in the Washington Post:

“Some, including the archbishop, have argued that by providing health care to a gay or lesbian spouse we are somehow legitimizing gay marriage,” said Sawina, a former priest. “Providing health care to a gay or lesbian partner — a basic human right, according to Church teaching — is an end in itself and no more legitimizes that marriage than giving communion to a divorced person legitimizes divorce, or giving food or shelter to an alcoholic legitimizes alcoholism.”

The sound you hear is my shaking the dust off my sandals . . . again.

Telehypocrite Pat Robertson has announced today that the Haitian earthquake was God’s punishment for Haitians’ making a pact with Satan 200 years ago when they struggled for liberation from the French. (I’m not making this up.) The following prayer is offered for the relief of Haitians and all humanity from this pestilent beast.

(To be prayed for nine days in a row)

Almighty and All Just God, who smites the proud and who protects the weak, hear us as we beseech Thee to deliver us from the pestilence of Pat Robertson. Raise Thy mighty arm and remove this affliction from our midst. May Thou bring him swiftly into Eternity where Thou shalt mete out justice and mercy. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, the soon-coming Just Judge of the quick and the dead. Amen.

(Disclosure: I conducted some research for my book AIDS and American Apocalypticism in the library of Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and was once threatened with arrest on the campus during direct action civil disobedience there to protest Robertson’s anti-gay on-air slanders.)

The Times recently reminded us of one of the timeless films from the 1070s, Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of 10, a representation of the macrocosm and microcosm. The film begins with a camera hovering over a couple’s picnic on the Chicago lakeside, a frame 1 meter wide (10 to the power of 0 meters), then zooming out incrementally by one power of 10, until the view finally reaches 100 million light years (10 to the power of 24 meters). The scene then zooms back until we see the couple, when the camera zooms in on the man’s hand then the microscopic level and, eventually, subatomic view until we are brought into the protons of the carbon nucleus of the man’s tissue cell, 0.000001 angstroms or 10 to the power of minus 16).

It does put things in perspective.

Thank God the US Conference of Catholic Bishops are on watch looking out for your physical and spiritual health. Its Committee on Doctrine, chaired by William Lori, bishop of Bridgeport, CT, has published “Guidelines for Evaluating for Evaluating Reiki as an Alternative Therapy.”

Reiki (an alternative touch therapy used in many hospitals as a complement to Western medicine) is anathema.

The bishops’ conclusion:

“Since Reiki therapy is not compatible with either Christian teaching or scientific evidence, it would be inappropriate for Catholic institutions, such as Catholic health care facilities and retreat centers, or persons representing the Church, such as Catholic chaplains, to promote or to provide support for Reiki therapy.”

In one particularly spooky footnote, redolent of sulphur and read with “Tubular Bells” playing in the background while you imagine Max Von Sydow dressed in clericals:

“Some forms of Reiki teach of a need to appeal for the assistance of angelic beings or ‘Reiki spirit guides.’ This introduces the further danger of exposure to malevolent forces or powers.”

 Ooooh!!! Be afraid, be very afraid!

I’m more worried about the malevolent forces among Catholic clergy (like pedophile priests) and bishops (protectors of pedophile priests or the new Vatican Inquistion against Catholic nuns).

(In the interest of full disclosure, readers should know that I am the proud product of 20 years of Catholic education, including four years in seminary, in preparation for spending most of the 1980s as a Roman Catholic priest. I am grateful for the education and for the years in ministry.)

Now on the faculty at the University of Connecticut, I recently noticed an article about one of our medical researchers, Gloria Gronowicz, who is conducting laboratory studies of touch therapy:

“A study by a Health Center researcher takes a scientific look at a therapy that is often considered unscientific – hands-on healing. Gloria Gronowicz, professor of surgery, found that Therapeutic Touch performed by trained energy healers significantly stimulated the growth of bone, tendon, and skin cells in lab dishes. Her findings are published in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research and The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.”

There are more things in heaven and earth, dear bishops, than are dreamt of in your theology.

In the late 1970s, Sheldon Kopp’s If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! influenced my own work of cultivation.  Kopp, a psychotherapist who died in 1999, ended that book with an “Eschatological Laundry List”:

1. This is it!

2. There are no hidden meanings.

3. You can’t get there from here, and besides there’s no place else to go.

4. We are all already dying, and we will be dead for a long time.

5. Nothing lasts.

6. There is no way of getting all you want.

7. You can’t have anything unless you let go of it.

8. You only get to keep what you give away.

9. There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things.

10. The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there is no compensation for misfortune.

11. You have a responsibility to do your best nonetheless.

12. It is a random universe to which we bring meaning.

13. You don’t really control anything.

14. You can’t make anyone love you.

15. No one is any stronger or any weaker than anyone else.

16. Everyone is, in his own way, vulnerable.

17. There are no great men.

18. If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.

19. Everyone lies, cheats, pretends (yes, you too, and most certainly I myself).

20. All evil is potential vitality in need of transformation.

21. All of you is worth something, if you will only own it.

22. Progress is an illusion.

23. Evil can be displaced but never eradicated, as all solutions breed new problems.

24. Yet it is necessary to keep on struggling toward solution.

25. Childhood is a nightmare.

26. But it is so very hard to be an on-your-own, take-care-of -yourself -cause-there-is-no-one-else-to-do-it-for-you grown-up.

27. Each of us is ultimately alone.

28. The most important things, each man must do for himself.

29. Love is not enough, but it sure helps.

30. We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that’s all there is.

31. How strange, that so often, it all seems worth it.

32. We must live within the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge.

33. All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data.

34. Yet we are responsible for everything we do.

35. No excuses will be accepted.

36. You can run, but you can’t hide.

37. It is most important to run out of scapegoats.

38. We must learn the power of living with our helplessness.

39. The only victory lies in surrender to oneself.

40. All of the significant battles are waged within the self.

41. You are free to do whatever you like. You need only to face the consequences.

42. What do you know . . . for sure . . . anyway?

43. Learn to forgive yourself, again and again and again and again. . . .

According to a report in today’s Hartford (Connecticut) Courant (where the Connecticut Supreme Court has recently ruled in favor of same-sex marriages so the General Assembly is putting together the legal framework):

Church: Florists Should Be Allowed To Say No To Gay Weddings
By DANIELA ALTIMARI | The Hartford Courant
March 7, 2009
Concerned that the state’s new same-sex marriage law would infringe on religious liberties, the Connecticut Catholic Conference today proposed some broad exemptions which it believes are necessary to protect those rights.

The law does not require Catholic priests — or any other clergy member — to preside over same-sex weddings.

However, the church is seeking additional exemptions. For instance, it wants to ensure that a florist opposed to gay marriage on religious grounds not be forced to sell flowers to a same-sex couple.

“Same-sex couples have their liberties protected fully. Religious people are wondering ‘how is this going to effect me?”‘ David Reynolds, lobbyist for the Catholic Church, told members of the legislature’s judiciary committee.

Mary Agnes, as a former Roman Catholic priest, I’m only going to explain this to you one time: 1) The term “heterosexual florist” is as oxymoronic as the phrase “heterosexual priest”; 2) Some girls are religious about their floral arrangements, but I don’t think it constitutes a legally recognized religion.

You can share your special thoughts on the subject at: ccc@ctcatholic.org 

With the arrival of the solstice, winter is here.

Some pics I took at my home this weekend, reminded my friend and fellow vocalist Bill Hunter (of Schola Cantorum) of Christina Rossetti’s poem, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which begins:

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.

A video follows with Gloucester Cathedral Choir singing Gustav Holst’s musical setting.

I’m thinking about sex.

(I know; you’re shocked.)

But it’s not what you think.

I’m often amused (and often more than a little bemused) about sex. About how sex is usually not about sex. And about how sex is often configured in some communities in seemingly contradictory (or to be more polite, “paradoxical”) ways.

Margaret Talbot’s article “Red Sex, Blue Sex: Why Do Evangelical Teenagers Become Pregnant?” in the November 3, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, observes that social science research conducted by Mark Regnerus (U Texas Austin) has found:

• Religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical
• The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents-seventy-four per cent-say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage.
• Among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them.
• Evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews.
• On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début” shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.
• Evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception.
• Abstinence-only sex education delays sexual initiation by 18 months and in communities with high rates of adolescents’ taking public abstinence pledges have high STD rates.

The “grups” and ” ‘rents” aren’t much different. Talbot notes the research of two family-law scholars, Naomi Cahn, of George Washington University, and June Carbone, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who contrast marriage and sexuality in Republican-voting “Red States” and Democratic-voting “Blue States”:

In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). “The ‘blue states’ of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage,” Cahn and Carbone observe.

In a book review in the October 31, 2008, Times Literary Supplement (TLS), historian of gender and sexuality Thomas Laqueur discusses Dagmar Herzog’s new book, Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics (Basic Books). Herzog is a Christian from the American South, the daughter and granddaughter of pastors who recalls growing up in a Christian South in which sexuality was treated with greater privacy than now and with greater forgiveness and tolerance of human frailty than now among some evangelical Christians.

How and for what purposes Fundamentalist Christian leaders turned sex into a political phenomenon is the subject of Herzog’s book. Laqueur notes:

For the Evangelical Right, premarital intercourse and adultery and even homosexuality have become not so much wrong as injurious to mind, body and society. Even the Right’s arguments about abortion are often now less about whether it is an act of murder than about whether social science finds it harmful. . . . In other words, the religious Right created late twentieth-century sexual politics on the coat tails of the secular Enlightenment’s ways of arguing. Even if the state could not be asked to legislate morality . . . it did have a clear role in furthering the psychological and physical well-being of its citizens and, indeed, of people all over the world. It is by secularizing sex that the religious Right made it so central to politics.

Putting this struggle in historical perspective, Laqueur notes the vehemence of the debates about contraception in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when sex began to be understood in the West as a private, personal matter and when sex and procreativity began to be disconnected. An abhorrence of homosexuality and a defense of premarital sexual abstinence have been the Right’s causes in this postmodern struggle.

In an on-line venue, sex-positive Live Girl Review (Audacia Ray) reviews Herzog’s book, new high-tech erotic technologies, print porn, a how-to sex sex feature for women (the first one-third of the vagina is more sensitive so short thrusts are better than deep thrusts–who knew!?!), and duo performers Wet Spot.