EPISODE 441: GOODTIME JESUS
Catholic Twitter Has a Gay Panic; James Corden to Blame.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
This week’s Pop is a li’l bit Catholic. I do promise entertainment on this flight, but if Church stuff is not your jam, feel free to pop down to the links at the bottom.
(Before we jump in, bride and groom above, I love your insistence on making choices, but that photo does not mean what you think it means.)
About two weeks ago Catholic Twitter lost its mind. The reason: this tweet.
The priest on the left, Jim Martin, is a Jesuit and a Catholic writer. The guy on the right has some job in Rome. Also, I’m guessing, a pretty massive laundry bill.
(I’m pretty much at that stage of life where not only can I not wear white, I really shouldn’t wear colors. Black is not a style, people, it’s crisis management.)
There’s actually plenty of reasons these two guys could have gotten together. Jim serves on a Vatican commission. He’s also one of the biggest names in Catholic spiritual writing.
But the reason that this was a big deal was that for the last two years Jim has been giving talks about how queer Catholics are loved by God and have a place in the Catholic Church. And that is apparently a big deal.
No, I’m not writing you from the Middle Ages. We didn’t have internet speeds that could break the timespace barrier back then. It really is 2019, where there are tens of thousands of children that the United States has stolen from their parents and Australia is opening a new massive coal mine and those nifty looking freezer bags Whole Foods/ Amazon is using for food delivery are completely non-recyclable, etc. etc. etc. But you know, gay Catholics: Grr. Argh.
Just for context, Catholic Twitter is also losing its mind over an ongoing conference on the Church in the Amazon that is proposing that maybe since there are so few priests that some parishes only have Mass once every two years and the indigenous communities that are actively trying to save the jungles that we all need to survive are being murdered we should have a conversation about stuff.
You know, or not.
Catholic Twitter is just Twitter where you get to pick up Jesus’ cross and whack people with it.
Or put another way:
So the Pope meeting with Jim was understood – as Jim writes – as expressing support for the work he’s been doing. Work that many have supported, while others have sent him death threats, implied he’s a pedophile. All the good stuff you’ve come to expect from your wacky happy-time basement-dwelling friends in the virtual universe.
It’s been all the buzz everywhere, those photos. Like, serious progress, y’all. Yo, I hear Francis promised to march at Pride.
*suddenly imagines Francis waving from a Mardi Gras float in Rio*
I love the photo, even if it does look a little like Jim is in an incredibly realistic Madame Tussaud exhibit where he has not positioned his chair quite right to match their eyes. The Vatican under Francis has been far from perfect on queer issues, but Francis himself has done a tremendous amount of good. In fact, he made his famous “Who am I to judge?” statement about the reality of gay clergy within months of becoming Pope. And he said it at the very age that grandparents start announcing at Thanksgiving I don’t care any more if my comments are racist or homophobic, that’s just how I feel.
But at the same time, I just finished In the Closet of the Vatican, a major book by journalist Frédéric Martel about homosexual activity in the Vatican itself. Martel spent four years on the book, interviewed hundreds of priests, bishops and others – most of them on the record – and the result is a pretty strong Lower your reading glasses and ask your mom to get me a glass of water, would you?
We’re not just talking the occasional clergyperson falling in love and/or losing track of their vows here; we’re talking a generalized culture of sex, secrecy, blackmail and abuse. Martel interviews the prostitutes outside the Roman train station El Termini (many of them refugees) who see Curial priests and bishops as clients; he checks in on Grindr, where you can see the men who are using the app within Vatican City. (Whoops.) And he interviews many many people within the Church and outside about sexual activity, including oftentimes the hierarchs he’s actually reporting on.
Honestly, I went in ready to be appalled, because the pattern you would expect really does hold true: the bishops and Vatican clergy acting out in some of the most outrageous ways are the same ones condemning homosexuality in the most scary and brutal of ways. (And often also covering up or committing abuse. A real hat trick of horrors.)
But as Martel starts to work through the logic of that – which ends up being a lot more nuanced than the typical “we hate the things we are”, and also ties well into why these same bishops and cardinals hate Pope Francis--he also describes many encounters with these bishops who in private seem so desperate to make it clear to Martel that they are also friends of Dorothy and maybe also some handsome wizards.
And I found myself starting to pity some of them and also this institution, which has itself so wrapped up in knots about what is when you step back and take a look not at all the big deal we make it out to be – definitely not the kind of issue you would expect followers of Jesus to be worried about like, at all. Even on a snow day.
In the end it’s shocking to read the extent to which the Vatican Curia is an absolute mess on all of this, but it also changes the way I take the things coming out of there. Honestly, it was pretty liberating to read. Highly recommend it.
Reading List:
In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy by Frédéric Martel.
One other a-ha moment from Closet: Pope Francis has made a competitive sport of attacking the hypocrisy of the Curia, usually at this talk he gives them at Christmastime. (So much coal in those stockings, my friends.)
Martel’s take is that in large part Francis’ words here are actually about sexual activity. Francis knows what’s going on around him, he knows it’s completely forked up and so he calls them out on it.
That take is a little reductive, I’d say, plenty of hypocrisy to go around with the cranberries and the dressing at Vatican Christmas; but it’s a point of view I’ve never heard on those talks, which really are like world wrestling level smackdowns, and it makes a lot of sense.
If we could get Pope Francis in a fur coat and a porkpie hat shouting at the Curia with a mike in hand I would lose my mind.
Far from Rome, in a little town in New Mexico that is probably surrounded by cacti, baby gila monsters and sunsets painted by Georgia O’Keefe, Franciscan priest Father Richard Rohr runs a center on spirituality that’s all about learning how to be open. So much of our struggle in life, he writes, is about us reacting too fast, judging versus allowing ourselves to see and experience what’s right in front of us. A lot of us say we like a good surprise, but in practice, he argues, most of the time we respond to surprises defensively. It’s that new Cardi B single everybody’s listening to, Categorize, Control, Condemn!
In his newsletter, Rohr has just started a week of thinking about gender and sexuality. Which really is such rich terrain for that invitation to openness that he’s talking about. There’s no end to the surprises of being sexual; the people you are attracted to or fall in love with, their needs and ideas, yours – which themselves change and evolve both over time and just as we get more comfortable with ourselves. If you want to be a good partner, you really have to learn how to be open, to step away from judgment to see what’s going on in your partner and in you.
It’s also rich terrain for thinking about because for so many of us doing that is really hard. We all come to our sexuality and relationships with beliefs, hang ups and fears that get in the way of being in the open, of seeing and hearing and feeling what is within us and in front of us.
That’s one of the things I love about Rohr in general -- he sees our resistance as part of the opportunity, the gift. To see ourselves freaking out is to actually get a glimpse of ourselves, to see what’s really going on with us. And to the extent we can observe ourselves, even as we’re externally shrieking and throwing things and eating our rage (tastes so good with peanut butter), we can learn a lot about what’s going on with us. It’s like discovering there’s a glitchy subroutine hidden in our operating system; once you see it, you can start to see what it’s doing and how to work with it.
Catholics still get taught more often than not I think that sex is at best, um, okay, maybe, but not in conversation, and still generally the terrain of sin, so watch out, please and thank you. And that helps absolutely no one.
What would it be like if we swung the other way, to use a baseball/cricket analogy, and leaned into those questions, let them take us by the hand and lead us (lovingly) into the dark?
Pretty sure the takeaway from this episode is going to be “Priest tells people to be sexual adventurers.” So yeah, for those playing along at home, this was the episode where I got thrown out of the church. It was nice to know you all. Do me a favor and take care of my dog.
THREE TWEETS
On a totally different topic, I know this is not a popular opinion but I often feel this way:
I didn’t even know I could love sleeping even more than I already do but then I saw this:
And speaking of dreaming:
READ
As someone who grew up with the sound of modems, this piece about what was going on there is all that I love.
Reading it also made me aware of just how backwards the modem sounds were. At just the moment where you’ve finally established a connection your computer literally starts shrieking oh God maybe it was warning us all along.
CLICK
Does the art of Mark Rothko make you feel things? You need this website.
WATCH…?
HBO’s new TV series-that-is-based-on-a-comic-book-whose-creator-refuses-to-be-acknowledged Watchmen debuts tonight. I’m conflicted, not only because creator Alan Moore wants absolutely nothing to do with the project but because there’s very little about the trailers that actually seem like Watchmen. This is a comic about a super genius who manipulates a blue naked super being into create a fake invasion of Cthulhu-like aliens to try and save the world from nuclear war. The trailer is about…white supremacy, maybe?
But it is from Damon Lindelof, who seems like he is trying to create a spiritual sibling to The Leftovers, and that would make me happy. So I don’t know. I’m going to give it a shot.
(Worth mentioning: HBO is owned by Warner Brothers, who also own DC Comics, who own the rights to Watchmen for reasons that are kinda insane. In other words, Hollwyood Hollywooding hard here.)
Also, there’s supposedly a final Rise of Skywalker trailer tomorrow and we are at T-minus 60 people, T-Minus 60, all systems go for Episode IX. Please prepare yourself.
COMING SOON
The first episode of Interviews with Interesting People did so well we’re going to do another. It’s still October, so I’m sticking with the horror theme, although it’s a very different kind of horror: The Price of College.
Coming next Friday, an interview with Lawrence University Vice President for Enrollment & Communications/Dean of Admissions Ken Anselment. If you want an early taste, check out this piece from Ken in Medium: Higher Ed and the Zombie Apocalypse.
(When I say horror, I am leading you true.)
October is flying by. Hope you can take a little time to enjoy it.
See you next week.