Colm Toibin on Benedict and Georg

Colm Toibin is one of my most admired gay Catholic authors, though he describes himself as very much a lapsed Catholic. His collection of short stories, The Empty Family, won Lambda's  Best Gay Fiction Award for 2011. His most recent novella, The Testament of Mary, a deconstruction of the Virgin Mary myth of Roman Catholicism, looks at the origins of Christianity through the eyes of a disillusioned mother of Jesus, aghast at the foolishness of some of her son's followers, who in seeking to consolidate their own power, are busy about mythologizing both her and her son. It is very much a radical critique, that challenges - perhaps unfairly and with insufficient appreciation - some of the most cherished assumptions of  Catholic culture. However, it offers a refreshing iconoclastic viewpoint that seems healthy in its intent, even if we can fault it for a certain insensitivity to the mystical currents of the faith. In April of this year the great British actress (actor) Fionna Shaw will bring Toibin's book to life in a one woman Broadway show that should be one of the events of the season. The mere fact it has landed a Broadway booking is an event in itself. 

Maureen Dowd both reviews the book and interviews Colm Toibin in a March 3rd article in the New York Times, entitled " How Mary  Feels About Being a Virgin." 

The review is well worth reading (with the usual assortment of irate comments from staunch and loyal Catholic tribalists side by side with angry anti-Catholic zealots, interspersed with a few measured and balanced observations). However, what most interested me were Colm Toibin's observations about Benedict's recent retirement, his relationship with his secretary, George, and on Vatican Gay Culture (in  capital letters) in general.

And so I quote:

I wonder what he thinks of the pageantry in Rome. He is dubious about the showy helicopter exit of Benedict to nearby Castel Gandolfo: “There’s absolutely no reason why he couldn’t have gone by car. The roads in Italy are really good.” But he expresses admiration for the easy affection between the 85-year-old former Holy Father and his 56-year-old private secretary, Msgr. (Archbishop) Georg Gänswein, whom Toibin has described as “remarkably handsome, a cross between George Clooney and Hugh Grant, but in a way more beautiful than either.” 

Benedict may have given up his flashy red loafers, downgrading to brown ones made for him in Mexico, but he is taking “Gorgeous Georg,” as the younger German is known, to live in his new home, a monastery in the Vatican. Some cardinals are worried about the arrangement of having Gänswein serve two pontiffs, by day as prefect of the new pope’s household and at night as secretary to the emeritus pope.

“An 85-year-old man having such a beautiful companion with him morning and night to talk to and walk with,” Toibin said. “It’s like the end of a novel. It’s what all of us want for ourselves, straight or gay. It’s better than sex.”

They need to think very carefully about not recognizing that gay people, like all other people, are made in God’s image. It’s just possible that they have more gay priests than they know. I think most gay priests are very good people in the priesthood for very good reasons, and actually faithful to the vows of celibacy. On the issue of gays, Benedict made things even worse.”

As Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict called homosexuality a “more or less strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil.” As pope, he reiterated the church view that homosexuals were “objectively disordered” and that men who had such tendencies could not be allowed into seminaries. He called gay marriage a threat to “the future of humanity itself.”

Toibin says that the church must have tolerance, and that its leaders have lost any sense of how their sanctimonious denunciations clash with their scandals and imagery, causing nothing but pain.

“I remember being at the Vatican at Easter 1994,” he recalled, “and watching all the cardinals and bishops, wonderfully powerful old men with great chins, sitting nobly with a long row of extraordinarily beautiful young seminarians standing behind, shading them with different colored sun umbrellas, some of which were pink.

“It was remarkable that none of them seemed to know what it looked like, and I watched it thinking, somebody must tell them.”

I share in Toibin's  admiration for the bond between Benedict and Georg. The relationship appears to be a gentle and tender one of mutual devotion, and I don't begrudge the retiring pope this companionship in his declining years. And of course it couldn't be anything but chaste. The added job of Head of the Papal Household recently assigned Ganswein is another matter entirely. However, speculation about Benedict's sexual orientation in light of this relationship seems to me to be entirely in order, because of the question of hypocrisy it raises, whether such hypocrisy is unintentional, unconscious, or simply repressed. I will not go into the 'reasons' for the suggestions made in the past that Benedict might be (most likely is) gay, but will refer the reader to  Richard Sipes excellent article on the subject here. Father Sipes, of course, is a leading expert on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, and possibly the world's leading expert on the clergy and their sexuality. 

IS THE POPE GAY

In the article, Sipes makes these pointed remarks:

The time has passed when popes are immune from observation of their humanity even their human sexuality. (I agree wholeheartedly.)

The fact that Benedict XVI has spoken out so vigorously and clearly about homosexually oriented men even those who practice celibacy makes him a prime target for investigation and speculation. If they are not suitable candidates for ordination to the priesthood (and their ordination is of questionable validity) what does that say of him and scores and scores of other prelates who are without doubt homosexually oriented?I have asked a number of Roman clerics and members of the Roman press corps if they think the pope is gay. None, of course, wish to be named for obvious reasons, but every one was convinced that Pope Benedict XVI is gay. (Italics mine)

And for an excellent response to Richard Sipes article, here is Colleen Colkoch of Enlightened Catholicism:

For Me a Christmas Gift from Richard Sipe:

I was just saddened again this Christmas to hear the Pope once again castigate gays for most of the ills of the world.  Even though I've written a previous post about one of Benedict's droppings, it has left a bad taste in my mouth.  It's not like this is the first time he has chosen the Christmas season to throw lumps of coal at gays.  I happen to find this obsession of his pathological and hugely polluting for the spiritual energy of the Church.  I have never found it edifying to work for any leadership that can't admit to their own pathology because that pathology always plays out in the collective work force. It becomes the unstated underlying motivation for too many dysfunctional decisions.  In the case of Roman Catholicism, I firmly believe this is why so much time and energy is focused on dehumanizing gays and attempting to control women's reproduction through legislative means.  Call it the politics of pathology.  It's hardly surprising Catholicism leads the way in these endeavors since it's entire leadership core is carefully enculturated to both reflect and blindly accept the dysfunction coming from up the food chain, especially the dysfunction about human sexuality.....

So all of this angst propelled me to check in with Richard Sipe's blog because if anyone could explain this bizarre need of Pope Benedict's to bash gays at Christmas it would be the world's expert on clergy and their sexuality.  He has a new post up in which he gives answers to the most frequently asked questions he receives on lecture circuits and in interviews.  I found the answers to the following questions balm for my soul.  I guess one could say, this was not a Richard Rohr Christmas for me, it was a Richard Sipe Christmas.

Colleen quotes Sipes' remarks in reference to his previous article, Is the Pope Gay. These comments struck me with particular force, including Colleen's editorial comments in blue:

When I posed the question about the pope's sexual orientation it was only to raise these areas for calm and rational discussion. Many informed people in Rome believe that Pope Benedict XVI has a homosexual orientation. This is neither an accusation of fault nor any implication of wrongdoing. But the official teaching of the church proscribes that men of homosexual orientation should be allowed to train for the priesthood or be ordained (Cf.1961 Directive). 

The patent hypocrisy of church teaching and practice is a travesty. Many saints had a homosexual orientation and many good priests are gay and celibate. (Pope Benedict might be reaching new heightsin hypocrisy in his castigation and persecution of gays. He is apparently oblivious to the fact many of his flock think he is exactly that state of being which he condemns.)

Homosexual orientation is neither an illness nor a perversion. To oversimplify: It is an inborn attraction and disposition to love persons of the same sex, even sexually - parallel to persons of heterosexual orientation and disposition. Homosexual persons can behave perversely and be ill just as heterosexually persons can. 

Hypocrisy is the greatest religious sin. Although homosexuality among the clergy and in the general population involves difficult and complicated social and moral questions to confront it is one area of necessary discussion for serious Christians.

I couldn't agree more and when dealing with the apparent or supposed hypocrisy of Benedict on such a grand scale, then scrutiny of his personal relationships is more than called for, it becomes an imperative of the Christian conscience, for the sake of so many young gay persons out there in the real world. Such a level of hypocrisy needs to be confronted, aired and 'outed' in the strongest terms. 

It goes without saying that if Karol Wojtyla were retiring to a monastery in the company of a handsome, charismatic personal secretary, no one would think to make an issue of the relationship. And if there were evident signs of mutual devotion between the two men, no one would raise an eyebrow. With Benedict, however, it is a whole different ballgame. Where there is so much pink smoke, there is bound to be fire. 

One final comment from Colleen in the comments section of her posting bears repeating here:

I don't think he will retire either, but you never know. There is precedent. If such a thing should happen, it would only be because he knew beforehand who his successor would be.

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TWILIGHT OF LOVE: Loss of Love, Loss of Faith and the Religious Quest

Still reflecting on 'lapsed Catholic' Colm Toibin's journeys through Catholic Europe, which he chronicled in his travel book, The Sign of the Cross. I was particularly moved by his encounter with Scotland's "only Catholic novelist," Thomas Healy, author of Fathers and Personality. Healy replied to Toibin's description of him by saying the thought had never occurred to him, but that, yes he supposed he was Scotland's "only Catholic novelist," though, like Toibin, he was of the lapsed variety. The two men then went on to discuss the importance of there being 'Catholic novelists," particularly of the lapsed variety, to chronicle both the experience of having grown up Catholic and the pain of loss experienced when one leaves the womb of mother church. Once again, we see writers chronicling that sense of nostalgia for a long ago time when the sacred seemed near and comforting within the Catholic institution, coupled with the bittersweet sense of loss and regret when the institution seems to fail to sustain them in their faith (though the issue is more complex than this simple summation).  This tragedy is now being compounded many times over, as thousands in Europe flee the Roman institution in light of the sex abuse scandals and the institution's failures to protect it's own children. How can one believe in a benevolent spiritual Power at work within the institution and which the believer presumably can access through the aid of the institution, when this Power seems impotent to prevent the most horrific forms of corruption within the power structure of the Church, a corruption that leads to the debasement of children. "Get behind me, Satan," would seem to be a very sensible reaction to such a religion (though one which I don't personally share, since there is evidence of a spiritual power at work throughout the larger church independent of a corrupt hierarchy). The loss of faith for millions as a result of this crisis is going to be devastating and the moral responsibility for this loss falls like the  blade of the guillotine upon the necks of those responsible.

Reading Toibin's books led me by a circuitous route to Australian novelist Robert Dessaix's lovely travel memoir, Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev. Dessaix's thesis is that Turgenev was the first great modern Russian writer to exemplify the prophecy of Dostoevsky that once God and religious faith are banished from the world, the human person loses its soul, and 'love' in the full human sense becomes impossible. All that is left is lust and sentiment, affection and friendship, dalliance and flirtation, but the depth of love has been lost with the loss of all faith in God and the Sacred. The human person becomes flat and one dimensional.

This reminds me of Graham Greene's criticisms of modernist writers, Virgina Wolf and E.M. Forster:

for having lost the religious sense, which, he argued, resulted in dull, superficial characters, who "wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin". Only in recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama of the struggle in the soul carrying the infinite consequences of salvation and damnation, and of the ultimate metaphysical realities of good and evil, sin and divine grace, could the novel recover its dramatic power.  

Of course, Greene himself strongly objected to being called a Catholic novelist, rather than a novelist who was Catholic, and in his later works, his religious themes were replaced by humanist ones. 

Dessaix also maintains that Turgenev was the first great modern Russian author to simply lament the state of emptiness of the modern world, without the frenzied religious agenda of a Dostoevsky or a Tolstoy. Paradoxically, Turgenev chronicled this loss while himself living out a passionate and quite extraordinary love affair of  over forty years with the opera singer, Pauline Viadot, herself a married women. As far as we can tell, their relationship was never consummated sexually and was accepted by Louis Viadot, the husband, even when Turgenev moved to Paris and bought a home near the Viadot's, frequently dining with them and playing with their children. It is one of the most unusual love stories in history, a menagie a trois without the sex, but there I go trivializing it in the modernist sense, when in fact the quality of Turgenev's devotion and fideilty was something quite profound. Nonetheless, Dessaix insists that the tragic sorrow of Turgenev's life was his deep conviction that without religious faith, human love in all it's depth and profundity had simply become impossible. 

Here I must pause to say a word of thanks to my dear friends Bill and Steve (you know who you are) who so graciously led me to Stamford's Travel Bookstore (on Floral Street, off of Long Acre Street in London). Among the many riches  I found on Stamford's shelves were the works of Colm Toibin and Robert Dessaix's sensitive and insightful study of Turgenev, Twilight of Love. How mysterious are the ways of Providence, leading us -through the interventions of friends - to those books we seem to need right at the moment, which turns out to be a moment of grace and synchronicity

Speaking of Turgenev's desolation of soul, Dessaix remarks:

Given his spiritual desolation, his joylessness (unrelated, as I see it, to unhappiness) and given his comfortable circumstances, I find it odd that Turgenev did not drift into mysticism of some kind. Inner emptiness and a full stomach, after all, make a good start. He did dabble in the supernatural, but that is not the same thing at all. Some trigger was missing in his psyche, something failed to fire.  He made an effort from time to time to put his spirit in order, as one does at a certain age, but putting your spirit in order best follows some sort of insight, surely. No transforming insights were granted him." (pg. 67)

That concluding sentence reminds me of Colm Toibin's "Why?", referred to in the previous posting. Why is no supernatural insight granted, when the seeker is so sincere? What is the source of the mystery of religious faith and it's absence?

Later in the book (pg.169), Dessaix refers to Virginia Woolf's own judgment about Turgenev, a judgement I find highly ironic in light of Graham Greene's own criticism of Woolf.

I believe that Virginia Woolf was essentially right about Turgenev. What the seer tries to understand in Virgin Soil, I said, thinking aloud, is not the historical details of the failed attempts of high-minded radicals to foment revolution amongst the peasants in the late 1860's, but how it is impossible to believe in anything - even a cause as just as revolution - or to sacrifice yourself to that cause, when you don't believe in yourself (don't love yourself), when you see yourself as nothing but a pinprick of mould on a grain of sand, about to be dead forever, just a biochemical reaction in a brain, as we might say nowadays. Commentators can argue endlessly over whether or not the radicals in Virgin Soil are Bakuninists or Blanquists or unhistorical fabrications, but such cogitations are beside the point: they are just the scenery for a play about the complete breakdown of any rational for acting (or loving) in an utterly senseless world.  

As Dessaix explains, religion as a solution to his inner emptiness left Turgenev cold:

Religion (and in particular Orthodoxy and Catholicism) seems simply to have failed to hold his attention. I feel much the same way about astrophysics and sport, for example, although I know that for millions of human beings the cosmos revolves around these things. 'God', or at least the Orthodox Christian god, was not the answer to any question Turgenev was interested in putting.

He was aware, however, ...that 'whoever has (religious) faith has all there is and can lose nothing, while whoever has no faith has nothing'. In need of consolation (as we all are), he kept a close watch all his life for something to have faith in, some sign that he might not after all lose everything in dying...

Born at a time when most people still believed in some sort of three-tiered universe -there was the supernatural world, the natural and, at some remove, there were human beings - he had lived on into an era when there was only indifferent nature left, which is more or less where we find ourselves stranded today. Everything else... was just words. Outside the natural universe, there was nothing.

 

Ironically enough, one of Turgenev's most affecting characters, the young girl Liza in Nest of the Gentry, is possessed of a burning religious faith:

Liza (had) in a sense already been ravished by God, just as Pauline had been by music. At an early age 'the image...of God squeezed with a kind of sweet force into her soul,' Turgenev tells us with unusual directness,'filling her with awe and reverence...and Christ became something close and familiar to her, almost kindred.' After an episode like this, any 'possession'  Lavretsky (her suitor) had planned had little chance of fulfillment. (pg. 230).

This was, however, a ravishment of soul that remained foreign to the great Russian writer,  Turgenev himself, just as Colm Toibin looks on from afar at the burning faith of Polish Catholics walking on their knees around the sacred icon of the Black Virgin of Czestochowa.  Turgenev was not contemptuous of the power of religious faith, far from it, he seemed to harbor a deep seated respect coupled with a lilting sadness at his own incapacity for such devotion.

'The naturalness of death is far more frightening than its suddenness or unusual form,' he wrote to ' Countess Lambert, for whom, like Liza, the solution was simple: religious faith. Turgenev was not about to argue with her ('Only religion can conquer this fear,' he agreed), but 'religion itself must become a natural need in man,' he wrote, and in him it wasn't. If a man doesn't have a natural religious bent, he went on ruefully, 'all he can do is avert his eyes frivolously or stoically (and in essence it doesn't matter which).'

In the absence of any viable, living religious faith, love, then becomes impossible, the love, that is, that ruptures time and reveals to us a hidden, transcendent dimension. Love-sickness is still possible, as are desire, affection, infatuation, lust, sentimental attachment, adoration, married bliss, enduring fondness, passionate but passing infatuations.  But not the love that breaks through the barrier of time and reveals to us Eternity.

The love that saves us from time... or at least opens up a crack in it, allowing us...'to think we have glimpsed the other side', is of a different order. It is this kind of love which seemed hardly possible any more to the mature Turgenev. If it proved impossible, that would mean that what we see is all there is. And that would mean that ultimately everything is futile. ...(pg. 249)

Only religion, as Turgenev noted ruefully, has made any serious attempt to call time's bluff and remove our fears of the executioner. Yet, for all it's huffing and puffing, what a huge disappointment Western Religion has turned out to be. We were expecting so much more. The music, paintings and cathedrals don't make up for it. Jesus mentioned something about the kingdom of God being revealed to us -and quickly, too - and what might that be if not a rent in the fabric of time? However, as Mark Twain remarked, what we got instead, with lighting speed, was the Church. (pg. 250).

As I stumble my way towards a conclusion to these spontaneous reflections, it will certainly not be the judgment that the present sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is responsible alone for the loss of religious faith in Western culture at this present moment, since this malaise has been a long time coming.  But it has certainly contributed to the decline! It is more like the final nail in the coffin for many struggling Catholic souls who were already hanging on by their fingernails to a religious practice that seemed to leave them atrophied and an institutional authority they found abusive. Just how abusive is now being made graphically clear day by day in what amounts to one of the greatest trials of faith the Catholic community has ever had to face. (This just in from Bridget Mary's blog:

"Following a long and painful investigation of the sexual abuse of children in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, a Grand Jury has issued a final report stating that they have no doubt that Cardinal Bevilacqua’s “knowing and deliberate actions during his tenure as Archbishop also endangered thousands of children in the Philadelphia Archdiocese.“ This endangerment included vulnerable and poor immigrant children from the Hmong community.

"Cardinal Bevilacqua is one of America’s best known Roman Catholic Cardinals. He is also considered to be one of the most notorious protectors of dangerous sexual predators, in the history of the Catholic Church in America.")


In the light of such revelations, many are simply leaving in disgust and who can blame them? To quote from an Irish reader's comment left on my previous posting, (who is not referring explicitly to the sex abuse scandal):


Irish rural poverty seemed to be a terrible thing, especially for the women. But my mother was brought up in Irish rural prosperity (amid numerous tragedies), independence in thought on morality and religion, revolutionary activity and government retaliation, cultural richness, teenage adventure and misadventure, and strong local Catholicism. Yet she left in disgust at the meanness of the culture, and for personal reasons.

Most of my relatives in the US and Ireland and other countries are no longer Catholic. And like me, few or none miss it at all on a personal level but are saddened to see the disappearance of kind and pastoral priests in favor of rigid "churchmen."

Heartbreaking as such experiences of mass exodus are to contemplate, beyond them all is the unfathomable mystery of the religious quest itself, which does not always end in fulfillment  even for the most sincere of spiritual seekers. Lapsed Catholics like Colm Toibin and Thomas Healy look back on the Church with a kind of nostalgic sadness, willing with part of their being to accept the sign of a healing light within the walls of mother church, but for all their goodwill unable to find it. Who is to say why or why not? Some do  maintain or discover an open door into the sacred within the traditional religions (and I continue to be passionately 'Catholic' in my own devotion), others through meditation on their own, or through an unaffiliated spiritual master like Eckhart Tolle,  others through nature, and others simply seem to have discovered a "little white bird,' within their souls which sustains them in times of the most horrific terror without the mediation of any faith or explicit spiritual practice. 

I'm thinking here (among others) of Heda Kovaly, wife of Rudolph Margolius, who was condemned to death during the infamous 1952 Slansky trial in Prague. Spurned by all of her friends, spied on by her apartment building neighbors, Heda contracted a mysterious illness that left her completely paralyzed on her bed, while her ten year old son Ivan remained powerless to help her, the two of them facing starvation. Yet during this ordeal, Heda maintains a 'little white bird' visited her interior being, assuring her that all would be well, as indeed it was some days later (of complete paralysis), when an old friend found her and broke through the door. 

But Robert Dessaix himself, in The Twilight of Love,  offers another example of this inexplicable faith in the  worth of life, a faith that seems to find its sustenance completely outside the realms of organized religion:

Riding in the funicular later that afternoon through the firs and pines to the top of the Merkurberg, I took pleasure once more, as I always do in (Ilse's) company, in her effortless ability to make life good and revel in it. How does she do it? I can never quite work it out. Certainly not through resignation - Ilse is not resigned to anything. Yet she by no means closes her eyes to the things that chilled Turgenev's soul - she grew up in Berlin during the war, after all; until recently she worked in an old people's home, listening to the 'crackling sound of death' on a daily basis; she has seen what nature and humanity are capable of, from Phnom Penh to the football stadium in Santiago. She, too, I think, although much loved, has failed to win what Turgenev thought of as 'the main prize in life's lottery' (a mere spouse does not qualify). And she has no religious faith at all, as far as I can see, or even much sense of its absence. Yet she is joyful. I almost turned to ask her how she did it in the funicular car, but didn't. And once we got to the top, as happens on the top of mountains, it didn't seem important any more to find the words. (pg. 67)

This reminds me so much of a passage from a 'secular saint', that I've always found so inspiring. AS a fitting close to these reflections, here is Albert Camus' glorious paean of praise to the light of his childhood on the beach at Tipasa, Algiers,  which sustained him through a lifetime of witnessing and resisting humanity's cruel injustices:

At noon, on the half-sandy slopes, strewn with heliotropes as if by a foam which the furious waves of the last few days had left behind them in their retreat, I gazed at the sea, then gently rising and falling as if exhausted, and quenched the two thirsts that cannot long be neglected if all our being is not to dry up, the thirst to love and the thirst to admire. For there is only misfortune in not being loved; there is misery in not loving. We all, today, are dying of this misery. This is because blood and hatred lay bare the heart itself: the long demand for justice exhausts the love which nevertheless gave it birth. In the clamour in which we live love is impossible and justice not enough. This is why Europe hates the daylight and can do nothing but confront one injustice with another. But I rediscovered at Tipasa that, in order to prevent justice from shriveling up, from becoming a magnificent orange containing only a dry and bitter pulp, we had to keep a freshness and a source of joy intact within ourselves, loving the daylight which injustice leaves unscathed, and returning to the fray with this reconquered light. Here once more I found ancient beauty, a young sky, and measured my good fortune as I realized at last that in the worst years of our madness the memory of this sky had saved me from despair. I had always known that the ruins of Tipasa were younger than our new buildings or our crumbling towns. There, the world was born again each morning in a light that was always new. O Light! This is the cry of all the characters who, in classical tragedy, come face to face with their destiny. Their final refuge was also ours, and I now knew that this was so. In the depths of the winter, I finally learned that there lay in me an unconquerable summer.

 

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