Brother McNaught, Brother O'Rourke
Novak, Michael
BROTHER McNAUGHT, BROTHER O'ROURKE MICHAEL NOYAK In an earlier column (May 31), I opposed the politicalization of homosexuality and the ideology of "Gay Liberation." Yet as many as ten percent...
...An essay on Joe O'Rourke's Boston baptism in New Times, for example, fulfilled my worst fears about what the event might come to symbolize...
...Under the slogans of an open church, liberation, aggiornamento, liberal Catholicism, radical Catholicism --all of them excellent slogans---a highly problematic middle-class morality is being too uncritically baptized as Catholic...
...If we didn't have any, we certainly wouldn't be manifesting the signs of grace we ought to...
...Surely, a high percentage of Catholics are fornicators, or adulterers, or tax evaders, or criminals, or petty tyrants, or gossips, or the like, for our church prides itself on being a "church of sinners...
...It is a corrosive, self-aggrandizing, ambiguous morality...
...But many other kinds of behavior, also wrong, are manifested by Catholics every day...
...The Church needs homosexual columnists...
...the new morality is also suspect...
...as though the people did not also include clouds of witnesses from generation to generation, hundreds of millions who shaped unto themselves institutions that might, quite fallibly, develop a dictionary of signs, a record of right usage, and a system of sanctions...
...Thus, if Brian McNaught is confessing publicly to a failing of his, who shall toss the first stone...
...I continue to believe that homosexual acts, like adulterous acts, are both attractive to some and contrary to the Catholic ideal...
...The Michigan Catholic might even run a little notice under McNaught's column: "Catholic faith teaches that overt homosexual acts are dangerous to the state of grace...
...The self --in this morality--is law and symbols belong to those who invent them or employ them...
...There is good reason to believe that a considerable number of highly placed Catholics-prelates, clergy, some nuns, and laity --are also homosexuals...
...Homosexuality is not the worst of sins and, in any case, "the sinner is at the heart of Christianity...
...A sound Catholic tradition teaches both respect for intractable facts and adaptation to human fallibility...
...Indeed, each columnist in the Catholic press might accept an appropriately similar disclaimer...
...and that among artists, writers, actors, politicians and other Catholics in specialized public careers, perhaps ten percent are homosexuals...
...Yet as many as ten percent of our population may be homosexual...
...In a related matter, my friend Father Joseph O'Rourke, S.J., has also raised good questions even while, it seems, he errs...
...The sins of bishops could be written underneath their names upon the last page of their pastoral letters...
...One must estimate competing evils, in deciding which of two to oppose...
...One must weigh the consequences of symbolic actions...
...The inadequacies of the self are semantically transformed into virtues like "independence," "liberation," "openness...
...that some saints have been homosexuals...
...On the other side, middle-class morality is spreading like the Boswash smog: anti-institutional, self-congratulatory, petulant, antinomian...
...otherwise, it would be better to wait until the infant is of an age to declare her faith herself...
...What clearer way would there be to state the present understanding of the Catholic people than to let it emerge under open controversy...
...Perhaps McNaught is under fire because he publicly announced his failing...
...I am grateful that he has been continued as a staff member...
...surely, there are adulterers in Boston, and members of the Mullins gang, and others, who are allowed to baptize their children, and scandal does not result...
...What would be a more powerful witness to authentic teaching than to allow him and others to debate the issue in the paper...
...We have had, for our instruction, occasional homosexual popes, military popes...
...Present political tensions over abortion laws too much inflamed the atmosphere...
...All the more reason to appeal strongly to the editors of The Michigan Catholic to reinstate Brian MeNaught, 27, who held a column in that paper until he publicly admitted that he was a homosexual...
...Contemporary middle class morality, particularly among the highly educated, tears apart resistant institutions to make them subservient to its ends...
...Or perhaps becaues he wants to argue that overt homosexual acts are not sinful...
...Are the editors of The Michigan Catholic and the prelates, clergy and leading laymen of Michigan willing to make similar public confessions of their own serious failings...
...On the one side, it seems that the pastor of the child and the archdiocesan office were implicated in one evil...
...I wish Joe O'Rourke (Continued on page 70) 18 October 1974:56...
...The baptism of infants is intended as a public, social act and is predicated on the good faith and good will of parents and guardians...
...And, after the fact, authorities acted clumsily in bringing disciplinary action against Father O'Rourke--both too harshly and without open procedures...
...The church is not lhe only culprit...
...and such a percentage, subject to cycles and modifications, may be typical for most historical eras...
...Such warnings could purify the church, even empty it...
...The sacraments, wrote the author, belong to the people--as though the people were constituted by any 200 who gather now, today...
Vol. 101 • October 1974 • No. 3
