It will be better for all concerned’.
I did not grow up in the Roman Catholic tradition of Christianity. Some things in this book appear alien to my understandings. The holy water. The Marian prayers. The seeming fear of the Vatican. The close attention to Papal encyclicals. The ‘sacred gift’ of celibacy these last 1700 years. For me, the Church of my childhood was the Church of England, now called Anglican. It is, as the author describes it, a church that daily ‘has our fights for us’. There were always flags near the altar of my church. God, King and country were intimately associated in those boyhood days of the British Empire. Yet it seemed a pretty tolerant space. Inclusive even. There always had to be room for the catholics and protestants in the post-Reformation English Church.
I watched with expectation the outreach of my denomination in the ordination of women priests and the consecration of women bishops. I saw its growth in Africa and other lands of people formerly oppressed. Yet, lately, those who were oppressed seem to have turned their new-found power on the sexual minorities within Anglicanism. Like some of the leaders of the Roman tradition, described in this book, a few Anglican leaders have attempted to snuff out the ever-so-tentative moves to welcome and accept gay people to an equal place at the Table of the Lord.
In Australian Anglicanism, there are Church leaders who oppress and trouble my spirit, just as the author’s spirit is troubled. They deny the pulpit to voices they see as discordant. They refuse engagement with new ideas. They turn their backs on the rational tradition of the Christian Reformation. Little wonder that Bishop John Shelby Spong calls for a new Reformation in Christianity. One that will reach out to the alienated and restore the true universality of the Christian Communion.
Michael Bernard Kelly is a powerful writer. Notice how, in many of the short and painful essays in this collection, he uses the rhetorical device of repetition. Words and phrases are repeated, like the chants of the monks of old and the beautiful collects of Cranmer’s Common Prayer. I understand and share his pain, without necessarily agreeing with all of his tactics. I am not, of course, competent to assess the response of his Church. Doubtless it would have its own viewpoints. However, I am thankful that great churchmen of our age, like Bishop Desmond Tutu, are now lifting their voices to demand an end to the oppression of sexual minorities. In Nairobi, in January 2007, the South African Nobel Laureate Tutu told a conference:
I am deeply disturbed that in the face of some of the most horrendous problems facing Africa, we concentrate on ‘what do I do in bed with whom’. For one to penalise someone for their sexual orientation is the same as penalising someone for something they can do nothing about, like ethnicity or race. I cannot imagine persecuting a minority group which is also being persecuted.
Sad that it took apartheid to teach a Christian Bishop that lesson. Happy that he learned the lesson and now teaches it to millions.
The answer that Michael Bernard Kelly and I give to Johan is a simple one. We love and accept the universal message of Jesus. We refuse to let it go. We deny anyone the right to take it from us. We do not for a moment accept that we are beyond the pale. We know that, in the end, the universality of love and belief will be restored. Nothing else would be rational or just. Nothing else would be true to the central message of our Faith that so many good people accept and live by. Everything else is peripheral. In the words of the Talmudic scholar, although we may not see our conviction fulfilled, neither are we free of the moral obligation to tell its message.
1 October 2007
Michael Kirby
Contents
Foreword – The Honourable Michael Kirby AC CMG
Contents
Introduction – Michael Bernard Kelly
On the Peninsula, alone with God
Christmas, sex, longing and God
Selective blessings that sully the faith
The road from Emmaus: the challenge of the future
Open letter to Pope John Paul II
The radical ministry of Jesus
Rainbow warriors
James: who’s to blame?
Ash Wednesday and the tears of things
Over the rainbow
Light in our darkness: the gift of the winter solstice
What is it about the Catholic church and homosexuality?
Out of great evil, grace
Gay and Christian: why bother?
Francis of Assisi: a saint for troubled times
Kathy’s story: why the Catholic church is in crisis
How a sorry church still destroys so many lives
Jesus gloried in a woman’s touch
End this evil teaching
Christmas letter to Archbishop Pell
Could Jesus have been gay?
Father, I am troubled: the hidden lives of gay priests
Fire, stone and living faith: the mystery of transformation
Silence, shame and shadows: the ugly truth about gay bashing
September 11: facing the sacred centre of violence
Loaves and fishes in the dust of Nicaragua
Live without illusions, love without reasons
Coming to the Christmas crib with new eyes
Ash Wednesday
Flawed saint or wounded hero: the legacy of Fr Mychal Judge
In Christ’s name: the marriage of Brendan and Tom
Sex with soul, body and spirit
Can a gay man be a saint?
Sing a rainbow: the challenge of being gay and Catholic
Ass. Arse. Butt. Bum. Backside
Tasting the wine: the nun, the filmmaker and the risk of freedom
Catholic and gay: the wounded blessing
The Feast of Purification
After Garrison
Appendix – The Rainbow Sash Movement Author’s Acknowledgments
Introduction
Michael Bernard Kelly
This collection of essays, articles and talks, written over a ten-year period, represents the public expression of one man’s inner journey of struggle and contemplation, as he faced the challenge of becoming vulnerable to the seduction of grace.
This seduction is not simply a matter of an inner, ‘spiritual’ journey; it is also woven into an actual
