GAY IS NOT LIBERATION
Novak, Michael
GAY IS NOT LIBERATION MICHAEL NOVAK No special unfamiliarity impels Catholics to hold that homosexuality is sinful and wrong. In the era of the Church's birth, homosexuality was very widely...
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...What was heretofore done by tradition, by habit, by unconscious common consent ought now, perhaps, to be chosen consciously and freely...
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...lovely, but wrong...
...One might even hypothesize that some percentage of those drawn to the celibate life are latent homosexuals...
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...The witness of millions of celibate and chaste persons----celibate by choice or by the accidents of life-provides a bond of moral support...
...If at times you get impatient with his subject or his representation, his praise of the East, his pairs of tugging doubles, you should remember, rephrasing what Hugh Kenner said of G. K. Chesterton, that Paz is not a great writer because he is important...
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...So homosexuals do have dignity in the Church...
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...They may, indeed, he psychically satisfying to participants...
...It is one more false god, one more false prophecy, against which it is our vocation to offer the dignity of resistance...
...In the second section, "The Poetic Revelation," Paz links the poetic with the sacred by means of wonder which inspires man: "he poetizes, loves, divinizes" under its spell...
...Modern progress, they hold, has dissolved older views of what is natural...
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...Nevertheless, there has from the beginning been something about overt homosexual behavior repellent to the Catholic conscience and to the Catholic sensibility...
...If he has made the inner chamber of his office a soundproof bunker where he must retreat from bad news and criticism, the willing prisoner of his Junker guards, we might question more than his judgment...
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...Thomas Aquinas was the finest book that had ever been written on Thomas Aquinas...
...But to go further than that--to treat as good what is less than good, or as equal what is less than equal, or as symbolically right what is symbolically flawed--is to be careless with morality itself, and with the symbolic texture of society...
...The proper exercise of the Presidency, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, is moral leadership...
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...To others, sexuality is a marital symbol, expressing in opposite bodies the unity of man and woman, in the context of permanent commitment and family life...
...The Catholic tradition prefers to confine sexual demonstrativeness more narrowly than that, out of an instinct of respect for the union of man and woman, and an instinct of respect for the children at times born of such union...
...Note--For an opposing view, see editorial May 24 issue...
...In "The Poem," Paz concentrates on elements of poetry, culminating with imagery containing "many opposite or disparate meanings," which it embraces or reconciles without suppressing, thus providing "the key to the human condition"--just as Paz does...
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...Neither of these steps ought, I think, to be taken by Catholics or the Catholic tradition...
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...The titles that we have reissued ate doing very well indeed and from the viewpoint of one individual engag~l in the practical business of publishing books that have an appeal I would say that GKC is very healthy indeed and that his day is far from past...
...The sinner is at the heart of Christianity": we, in our manifold corruptions...
...To free homosexuals from the bonds of silence, fear, self-rejection, fear of blackmail and the rest is surely an important social gain...
...population maintains quite traditional patterns of chastity...
...They do not represent the unity of bodily opposites...
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...Each human psyche--at this point for you, at that point for me--is morally deficient...
...Not the fully liberated person...
...What kind of symbol is sexuality...
...Sinfulness arises in the overt action and in the internal will, not in the involuntary tendency of the psyche...
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...Paz is a very good poet but by the measure of his own prose he is not a great one...
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...The first step is to approve of overt homosexual behavior---of homosexual relations characterized by homosexual acts...
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...Sexuality ought not to be wholly...
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...Children are not born from each act of marital love: all the more reason for keeping the overarching symbolism firm...
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...Confiteor Deo omnipotenti . . . "The sinner is at the heart of Christianity," Leon Bloy used to say...
...Similarly, we see that Paz's own work fully lives up to his definition of the image in "The Poem" so that his own critique is also his best example...
...To call a proposal "progressive" or "radical" does not save it from being regressive...
...Moreover, societies must necessarily make choices among the symbols (Continued on page 318) II I 31 May 1974:304 respond to the phases of that implication...
...Indeed, on a great many old-time holy cards, Jesus himself looks like a homosexual...
...It figures in the dialogues of Plato...
...The symbols of sexual exchange, in the Catholic view, ought always to radiate these two forms of respect...
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...There is nothing sinful about the simple fact of finding oneself a homosexual, of course, any more than there is anything sinful about the simple fact of finding oneself a kleptomaniac or an egotist or an arrogant s.o.b...
...O'Brien's feeling that GKC's day is past, I thought perhaps your readers might wish to know that we have had in the Image series GKC'E St...
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...Our age, Mary McCarthy once said, is an age for doing as much as we can to one another's genitals...
...The second is to grant equal legal status in housing and in jobs to those who practice homosexual acts...
...The moral quality of a society depends less upon the choices of individual human wills than upon the social structures, forms and symbols that govern daily life and unconscious practices...
...Octavio Paz is a great writer because he is right...
...In an age centered upon genital expressiveness, homosexuality is an especially poignant burden...
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...The recent public frankness about homosexuality is, in that sense, a social advance...
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...Not the ideal person of liberal thought and radical rhetoric...
...To drive homosexuals from the Church would be to lose some of the greatest talents--and some persons of highest holiness--who now are in her ranks...
...To be homosexual by the accident of personal development does not carry with it the right to claim that overt homosexual acts are morally good or that persons who practice them should be given the same symbolic equality before the law as persons who do not...
...31-74 31 May 1974:318 turns us to his originating notion of the image as synthesizing without suppressing...
...It was, in the ancient world, a frank and often public way of life...
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...But if the body is so insignificant, why can't two persons treat each other with mutuality and gentleness without overt sexual acts...
...Thomas he succeed in presenting the life and the age of the Angelic Doctor with the simple and sure ma~er strokes that have been the despair of professional students of St...
...That lucidity which again is both Paz's subject and his mode provides for "neon jewels" but never says "what time says in hard sentences of stone, in vast gestures of sea covering worlds...
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...If he knew what was going on--and we believe he did he either directed or connived in the most far-reaching attempt to undermine the democratic process in our history . . . . -----Commonweal, May 25, 1973 Send ]or a Trial Subscription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Issues for $3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS ONLY COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...In the third, "Poetry and History," Paz argues that "man's true history is the history of his images: mythology" and explains surrealism as the poetic attempt to ground society on a poetic, imagistic and, thus, a liberated basis correspondent to a world view...
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...I say that not forgetting Paz's many poems, because "The Middle of the Night" describes what I see in all his verse: "Thought shines, goes out, returns,/ identical with itself it consumes itself and begets, recurs,/ neither alive nor dead,/ turning forever around the cold eye thinking it...
...But "gay liberation" wants us to go two further steps...
...They belong there, with the irate and the lascivious, with the machiavellian and the pompous, with the hypocrites and those on whose souls lies the ash of tedium...
...according even to the latest statistics, as many as a third of the U.S...
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...Most evils do present themselves in the guise of moral goodness...
...The homosexual person who is a Catholic carries a heavy spiritual burden, equivalent in the moral order to the burden carried by millions who are born lame, or blind, or retarded, or otherwise la~,,mg in human fullness...
...If the present trend of disclosures and indictments continues, the President's claim to moral respectability will be so destroyed and his capacity to lead so crippled that his very presence in the White House will be a national embarrassment . . . . If he knew nothing of the sabotage, espionage, perjury and fraud that has emanated from his own offices for years, he is an incompetent --a bungler whom any private corporation (like 1TT) would bounce in a minute...
...We are studying further Chesterton works with a view to reissuing them in the future...
...Genital activity is an end-initself, and in another respect a means of manifesting affection, mutual cornIIm |1 fort, and community...
...In the era of the Church's birth, homosexuality was very widely practiced...
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...Either way--as well as both--Paz is a great writer who has determined a great subject--relation: the universal,, existential--and a perfectly adjusted means for expressing that subject-conjunctive units of imagery and grammatical parallelism...
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...that does not prevent Catholics in tune with their tradition from holding that, indeed, overt homosexual acts are immoral, even though homosexuality as a trait of personality is rather frequent, unwilled, and potentially of the highest beauty...
...Pete Hamill has recently argued that to oppose homosexual acts is to grant too much importance to the human body...
...but in writing his St...
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...If cardinals in all their regalia can be made to fit in the Church of the humble Christ, why not homosexuals...
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...To break the symbolic connection between sexuality and family--between male and female and the family they mutually nourish--may to some seem a trifling matter...
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...When I view the coolness in his "dialogues of transparencies" as disassociation toward sensibility, then I see Paz's verse as the negative charge to his positive prose, his essays as the poetry of prose...
...that is an empirical question...
...In a time of confused sexual roles, when both the role of women and the role of men have undergone profound symbolic changes, there might well be a special social value in insistin$ more strongly than ever upon unequal status as between homosexuals and heterosexuals...
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...In this backward glance, Paz reImpeachment 9 . . IT IS TIME to speak seriously about removing President Nixon from office...
...In this view, premarital and extra-marital sexual relations are expected to be frequent but not universal...
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...And when the artist says in ten pages what the historian or the scholar, says laboriously in a volume, what comment is possible...
...Sexual relations outside marriage are not "dirty" but attractive...
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...Yet that judgment in itself is a disjunction...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 000 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued /tom page 299) Aquinas than Etienne Gilson told me many years ago that Chesterton's St...
...0,0 0 0 9 9 9 9 9 Michael Novak (Cont...
...Surrealism, he recognizes, failed and in a section of his epilogue, Paz looks back to the Aztecs whose works of art were literally their religion---"living manifestations of the sacred"--and that religion literally their state...
...What (he asks) does gender matter, so long as two persons love each other in mutuality and gentleness...
...Twelve words m.nlmum...
...Gay liberation" is not a form of genuine liberation, not a form of human progress...
...Overt homosexual acts, even in the context of permanent commitment and perfect mutuality, do not symbolize this Catholic sense of earthiness and harmony...
...Regarding the opposite sex surely some draw a blank, or are deeply afraid, or are repelled...
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...They represent, at best, the overflow of friendship--the expression of friendship through sexual demonstrativeness...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 13
