Gays & straights together

...I don't know anyone who has a comer on that desirable condition, and I think it important to say that the homosexual W.H...

...It seems to me that all the church can say about this one of many human mysteries is that the church does not accept the idea that people have a right to sex outside of marriage...

...And Archbishop Romero, who went to visit Arrupe at the University of Central America in San Salvador...

...but his years as superior general were years he of two Salvadoran believers and martyrs, Ignacio Ellacuria and lived for them...

...and as important and necessary as the sexual expression of love between married people is, when it is separated from the possibility of a new life beginning a limitation has been introduced into some- thing essentially holy...

...On the other hand, to illus- trate the awkward thing I want to get at, I want to look at the boring, but maybe parallel, issue of contraception...

...The idea that homosex- uality is a moral issue that is somehow rad- ically different from these others seems faulty to me...

...We act as if we could make our choices freely, acting with a clarity which may not, in fact, be present in us or in our world...

...When some prominently placed church people say that homosexuality is "an objective dis- order" they certainly go beyond their com- petence...

...It is only one conse-quence of what Christianity means...

...If a lot of people find this teaching difficult to accept, the difficulty should be approached the way the church approaches the situation of married people with ill spouses, or invol- untarily single people, or anyone else wh~b faces the difficulty of a celibacy imposed by circumstance...

...They saw in him the presence of God among his God...

...Almost everything else having to do with sex is in this strange, more than moral category...

...This is not to say 186: Commonweal...

...It is interesting that the root of the word lies in the Latin word for "custom," rather than in any word having to do with truth or goodness...

...In Romero's new disappear little by little...

...There is no doubt in my mind that the kind of lovemaking that leads to a new life is, in some objective way, powerfully won- derful, more wonderful than the kind that rules it out...

...or, as Christians, we ignore the fullness of what is meant by humanity's fall...

...One is the fact that while homosexuality may not be "an objective disorder," it may also not be the most wonderful way to be a sex- ual human being...

...But other things are involved here...

...Recent articles about homosexuality by Richard Rodriguez, in Harper's (October 1990), and Andrew Sullivan, in the New Republic (December 17, 1990), made me think of the lives of gay friends...

...This is important, because otherwise good and bad forms of behavior begin to loom larger than forgiveness, or the relationship with God that forgiveness reveals, or the life revealed in Jesus' Transfiguration and Resurrection...

...Still, sisters and priests, Christians, and men and women of good faith like Micah, he kept going forward, always humbly and with all over the world...

...It is also important to see that morality, as important as it is to our being together, is not to be equated with Christianity...

...By morality, I should make it clear, I mean the way people are called on to behave...

...Arrupe saw clearly what he had to do: Practice justice and love you can see how the spirit of God enlightens him...

...tenderly in the midst of a changing history, even if it meant, as Today, Arrupe is in the hearts of many people: the martyrs, it did in his last years, that it be done in personal obscurity...

...and we sense at the same time that everything we say falls so far short of the fullness and strangeness of what we are aiming at, what we try to comprehend, that we are often quite uncomfortable with our generaliza- tions...

...Ellacuria said that Arrupe was "the John XXIII ye~s he lived both for them and like them: in silence, and in of the religious life," that he opened the windows of a stagnant impotence...

...To the extent that choice has no more to do with someone's being homo- sexual than with someone's being hetero- sexual or, for that matter, with someone's having red hair, it isn't really a moral issue at all...

...He was looking for consolation and encour- unknown, it was even harder to accept the pain of seeing the agement during his own difficulties with the Vatican...

...JON SOBRINO religious congregation and let in light, fresh air, and the breath Jon Sobrino, S.J., is professor of philosophy and theology of the Spirit...

...Like the prophet Micah, however, diary we find these words: "Father Arrupe is a very holy man...

...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey GAYS & STRAIGHTS TOGETHER IN ADAM'S FALL, WE SINNED ALL here are a number of issues that believers seem to engage in a vacuum, or address as if they were only morally problematic, with- out seeing that they exist in a larger land- scape than a merely moral one...

...How do they know...

...I want to take an almost blind stab in a direction I haven't seen addressed yet, and say that we don't deal with some of these things very well because we lack, as a cul- ture, a sense of the tragic...

...Auden or Gerard Manley Hopkins was in most senses a healthier (and less "objectively disor-dered") person than is the heterosexual Donald Trump...

...And his last ten years, after his stroke, were Oscar Romero...

...We know them to lack something essential...

...The poor in our countries, the crucified peoples, may not I want to end with words far better than my own, the words know his name...

...No one, not even a eunuch, is objective here...

...I think we do something oddly contra- dictory where moral matters are concerned: we talk a lot about them, making all sorts of distinctions, or too few...

...The whole idea of a "right" here is, from a Christian point of view, misplaced...