A most unusual story is now developing in England. It concerns the famous nineteenth century churchman, John Henry Newman, one of England’s greatest prose stylists (he wrote “Lead, Kindly :Light” and “The Dream of Gerontius)”. Newman was first an Anglican priest, then a Catholic cardinal.
What has caused an uproar in England in the gay community and among many Catholics is the Vatican’s decision to exhume Cardinal Newman’s body and move it to Birmingham as a step towards his beatification this fall. A shrine in Birmingham would be more suitable in view of the large number of pilgrims who might be drawn to the site of his mortal remains after this fall’s beatification.
So what is the problem?
The problem is that Newman explicitly ordered in his will that he wanted to be buried in the same grave as his long-time friend, Father Ambrose St John, and so he has been for more than a century. A new Church Times poll shows that 80 per cent of the responders are opposed to the Vatican’s decision to move Newman’s body.
Most outraged of all is the gay community in England. The gay rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell, says: “The Vatican’s decision to move Cardinal Newman’s body from its resting place is an act of grave robbbery and religious desecration. It violates Newman’s repeated wish to be buried for eternity with his life-long partner, Ambrose St John.
“They have been together for more than 100 years and the Vatican wants to disturb that peace to cover up the fact that Newman loved a man. It’s a shameful, dishonourable betrayal of Newman by the gay-hating Catholic Church.”
However, a respected Catholic spokesman, Austen Ivereigh, takes a very different view: “I don’t think anyone disputes thatCardinal Newman deeply loved Ambrose St John. He did say after St John died that the grief is comparable to a husband losing a wife or a wife losing a husband, but he did not mean that the relationship with Ambrose St John was a marriage like a gay relationship. It is simply wrong to read back from today’s categories into the Victorian periods when these very intense, passionale, but totally celibate relationships in Oxford and among the Anglocatholic community were very common [Italics mine].”
Lurking just below the surface here is the question whether John Henry Newman was gay and what, in fact, does that mean in the predominately male context in which he spent most of his life. There is considerable evidence that Newman was gay; there is not a scintilla of evidence that he lived out his homosexuality in a sexual way.
The Catholic haters and the sceptics will say this is impossible. But is it? Should we deny the possibility of deep and tender love between males without any hint of a sexual connotation. We are all familiar with profound relationships of non-eroticised love between males and females, such as between fathers and daughters or mothers and sons. An even better example is the relationship between a happily married man and a close woman friend who is not his wife. (I have certainly experienced that myself).
One of Newman’s modern successors, the late Cardinal Basil Hume, once wrote” “To love another, whether of the same sex or of a different sex, is to have entered the area of the richest human experience.”
Amen to that.
Meanwhile the battle of words about the Newman affair in England, gets more vitriolic. And the Catholic Church is under growing pressure to abandon the “homophobic” exhumation and reburial of the body of one of its most famous cardinals, in defiance of his wish to lie for eternity next to the man he loved.
Do you think the Vatican should move Newman’s body?
Do you think its possible for two gay people (male or female) to have a passionate emotional relationship without expressing it sexually?
“Do you think the Vatican should move Newman’s body?”
No. It doesn’t matter WHAT his sexual orientation was – his request should be honoured. I think it’s beyond sick that the vatican would dig him up and move him when he left SPECIFIC intructions to the contrary!
What the hell is the matter with ‘the vatican’?? Do they really want to show the world what a disgusting bunch of low lifes they really are!
Amazing.
“Do you think its possible for two gay people (male or female) to have a passionate emotional relationship without expressing it sexually?”
Yes, of course.
I don’t see it’s relevance to THIS case though…
The guy wanted to be buried in a particular place and everything should be done to grant him this wish! Geez!
Neil writes: “Should we deny the possibility of deep and tender love between males without any hint of a sexual connotation.” He then goes on to provide examples of that love.
I would add another. In eastern traditions, such as in Hinduism, there is a profound male-male relationship between guru (teacher) and disciple (student). It is one characterized by total surrender which is supposed to lead to enlightenment on the part of the student, reaching the exalted state that the teacher is already in.
The importance of this relationship is underlined by the following saying from India: One should love one’s father unconditionally; however, one should love one’s mother a hundred times more than one loves his father. The guru? He should be loved a thousand times more than one loves his mother.
I think we can assume that similar male-male relationships of a non-sexual nature, can occur also in the west.
I totally agree with Joe and Tony. I’ll bet quite a few already canonized monks and nuns were gay or lesbians and not involved in sexual relationships.
Why is the Vatican so afraid of homosexuality? Not to be confounded with paedophilia mind you. Most paedophiles I came across with were heterosexuals, often married and good fathers to boot.
“Do you think the Vatican should move Newman’s body?”
The Vatican doesn’t pay any attention to the wishes of those who are still living, so why would they give credence to the wishes of the dead? What we think matters not at all. They will do what they will do, and they will continue to do so until someone stops them.
“Do you think its possible for two gay people (male or female) to have a passionate emotional relationship without expressing it sexually?”
Gays are not different from anyone else in sexual desire, so simply restate the question:
“Do you think its possible for two people (of any gender) to have a passionate emotional relationship without expressing it sexually?”
Yes, of course. But my return question is: Why would they want to?
My notes:-
The chief knob gobbler in the UK states (as excerpted) “gay-hating Catholic Church”. Doesn’t that statement belie the fact that the church is honouring Newman by canonizing him.
A person who is gay can be celibate.
A non-gay can love another person of the same sex.
Who owns the body? What are the chances that both bodies will be moved to Birmingham, ouch.
No one can change a will without a court order. The court will not overrule the will as 80% of the population are ag’in it.
It could seem as a contradiction unless the Church following the pre-beatification inquest has decided that Newman was not homosexual. Not altoghether impossible eh?
Chimera:
Why would people want to live celibate? Only, in my view, for spiritual reasons. Celibacy is the closing off of the possibility of intimacy with one person in order to open the possibility of intimacy with many persons, so as to transform the personality of the celibate and transcend whatever sexual preferences might otherwise have been present. I expect you would agree with me (that despite failures) thousands of nuns and monks have lived fruitful celibate lives. Also lay people.
Jim:
I want to quote your killer line exactly:
“Whatever happens to Cardinal Newman and his friend, you can be damn sure the Vatican won’t move both of them.”
Right on.
“I expect you would agree with me (that despite failures) thousands of nuns and monks have lived fruitful celibate lives.”
Provisionally, yes, I agree. But would they have remained celibate if celibacy had not been required of them as a condition of their serving their god in formally regimented settings? In cases like this, I’m more inclined to think that celibacy was a price they agreed to pay, rather than as any real free choice without strings.
And I’m grinning at your phrase, “fruitful celibate lives,” especially considering that most peoples’ definition of “fruitful” in this context means “having many offspring.”
“Also lay people.”
Ah, yes. Those who are celibate and chaste without its being conditional of anything. And not for spiritual reasons. Just because they are simply not interested. This phenomenon has recently been getting some discussion in blogs, and from what I’m reading about asexuality, it’s more common than most people think.
Good morrow, all!
The original question presented was “Can gays be celibate?” I am reminded of a courtroom exchange between Jodie Dallas (as played by Billy Crystal) and a lawyer in the TV series “Soap”:
Lawyer: Isn’t it true, Mr. Dallas, that you are a practicing homosexual?
Jodie: I don’t have to practice, I’m very good at it.
Any time you do not engage in sexual relations with another person, you are being celibate, n’est-ce pas? Whether it’s for one day, one week, one month, one year, any number of years, for whatever reason, doing without is doing without. Ar one time or another, for whatever reason, for whatever length of time, we are all celibate.
Wasn’t Simon the fisherman, who became Peter I, the first Pope, married, when Jesus called upon him to follow Jesus, and become a fisher of men? (Oh, and by the way, no nookie for you!) Before the sexually repressed Saul of Tarsus co-opted the whole shebang, what made you think Simon, and Andrew, and James and John, all abandoned their wives and families, to hang out with the other boys? (Imagine the repercussions of THAT little decision, in a society where rabbis HAD to get married, to make sure they were contributing to the continuance of the rabbinical tradition)
Of course gays can be celibate. What makes celibacy necessary? Not possible, or desirable, but NECESSARY. (And under which cabbage patch were all those Borgia popes and cardinals found, hmmm?)
The bottom line is not, never has been, and never will be, how one keeps warm at night. What matters most (and I’m sure what St. Peter probably has in bold 24-point Times New Roman in his big book at trhe Gates) is how we treat one another. To quote The Son of Man: Love ye one another, as I have loved you. All else is commentary.
But, I digress…CTZen