The Silence of Sodom
Jordan, Mark D.
EVIDENCE ANYONE? ...
...Both Acodenic Year and Summer Study http://www.hc.edurrepm.html It is quite plausible on general psychological grounds to suppose that there Commonweal 34 September 8, 2000 is homosexuality in the Catholic clergy...
...Jordan lives on the wrong side of Roman Catholic rhetoric for Ministry Since 1971 about homosexuality and he is mountGraduate Degree Programs ing a rhetorical counterattack...
...What does exist is repression of hothe butt, and falling all over one anoth- tification...
...Car- sodomy in medieval theology, Jordan he becomes involved in an artificial-indiac infarction" and "heart attack" have noted that Thomas Aquinas regarded telligence program, and in the past as a the same descriptive referent but are ut- "sodomy" as a subcategory of the vice crucial love affair unravels...
...ISBN 1-880913.45-3 $13.95 PB monastic walls...
...How can the church guide Rochester...
...In tual reality works and to what uses it search, and juggles the big questions captivity, struggling to stay alive and is being put...
...Foucault domestic story of a woman dying of valuable section is titled "Church is not wholly wrong in regarding sexu- cancer with a very theoretical "Story of Words...
...Using • Advanced Certificate in Formative Spirituality Boston College Foucault's analysis, how would one decide that Neo-Gothic chasubles are ho Weekend Courses Far information, ranlad: mosexual while Latin chasubles are not...
...then listing twenty others...
...Those stolid Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3931 • Generous Financial Aid Roman senators who traipsed in togas 800-487-1167 or 617-552-8440 (the ancestors of chasubles) may have Graduate Student Housing Fox: 617-552-0811 been constructing a macho heterosexu• Enriching liturgical and Social Opportunities e-mob: irepm@bc.edu al style...
...Having created the pergenuine puzzle...
...A new reach of scholarship Director, Pew Partnership for Civil Change is achieved when a well-known high prelate's sexual behavior is reported to Introducing four female archetypes from the Dennis O'Brien Jordan by friends of said cleric's retired Bible whose stories empower women to claim chauffeur...
...he create their own realities, it moves its cannot name one music composer or characters through real time and real medicine or political problem without space, leaving them profoundly changed...
...JorMark D. Jordan dan cites stories by individuals, criminal 'A major breakthrough in our University of Chicago, $25,322 pp...
...Major difference: enthusiasts Roy Cohn syndrome...
...Foucault's views would be a Applied to the issue at hand, there can gaudy costumes, spend a fair amount "justification" of Jordan's overall effort be no truth about clerical homosexualiof time huddling, patting each other on if there is any sense to the notion of "jus- ty...
...Suzanne W. Morse, Ph.D., Executive anecdotes...
...If accusations were tiple forms of constraint...
...There is no "truth" even about homosexuality...
...Since the priest repreality (morally good or bad) is more sents Christ, the wafer is then the accurate than Monk's fabrications is a priest's body...
...Galatea 2.2 folit comes to the issue of official church lier book on the moral philosophy of lows its protagonist in the present, as language (rhetoric) about sexuality...
...ly as the novel opens...
...LEADING LADIES Unsworth's own evidence is discounted Transformative Biblical Images by Jordan because he, Unsworth, is far Women's Leadership The Silence of Sodom "straight" and made no effort to get inBY JEANNE PORTER, PHA Homosexuality in Modem side the "lavender rectories," which his Catholicism gay informant assured him existed...
...and the offered a sensational reve- Catholic clergy...
...The by the later publication of Uncle Tom's fact that church officials will not admit Available from your local bookseller or from Innlsfree Press Cabin...
...Mark D. Jordan's The Silence of indicates that a vast cover-up is in place...
...Dr...
...The gay sioners don't talk a lot about gay life in this world: it is produced only by mul- movement seeks a counter rhetoric to the locker room...
...Nursing inherent characteristic, Foucault regards it as a "historically conditioned role, charYouth Ministry acter, personage, even a form of celebrity" (quoting Jordan's characterization of Continuing Education Foucault...
...Deportment R on how homosexuality happens to be culturally constructed...
...That wide a range does applies for deciding truth and falsity...
...For Jordan, and discussion...
...But, then, what is the kind of two-part construction: his last tain...
...sexuality with the bureaucratized, sani- Wall as its backdrops, the novel spreads Given the all-male nature of priestly so- tized language of the moral manuals...
...fect body (Christ's/his own) the priest What evidence does Jordan offer for hands it around to be eaten...
...What is the cultural construct the Dark the two stories are separated have extraordinarily different rhetorical of sexuality (any of the fifty-seven vari- stylistically by a device I found strangeeffects...
...In the eucharistic priestly homosexuality...
...In 1991, Tim am afraid that there is nothing that one Unsworth interviewed some fifty priests can make of it positive or negative...
...facts or words...
...To agree with Jordan searchers suggested a range from 10 per- stretches the normal warrants that one cent to 75 percent...
...To and, although he found only one admit- be critical will immediately label one as ted gay priest, he endorsed the figure of a homophobe interested in maintaining 30 percent while noting that other re- the cover-up...
...in Pastoral Ministry • M.Ed...
...technological tools and toys...
...The coaches, players, and commis- the notion of truth...
...an issue-because in political rhetoric Spirituality there is no truth, only a struggle for • Ph.D...
...A transforming book for group or individual study, with questions for reflection Catholic priests and nuns behind those turns out, all that important...
...With Tianan- reality in (nearly) all its dimensions...
...As it turned out, Monk's revela- that homosexuality is pervasive, and 1-800-367-5872 tions were a total fraud-the unhappy that the mere suggestion of gay life in ravings of a seriously disturbed young the rectory evokes "hysterical" reaction, www.InnisfrePPresc.rnm woman...
...not inspire great confidence in surveys...
...Truth, in other words, is National Football League...
...Whether Jor- service, the priest confects the bread as dan's claim for widespread homosexu- Christ's body...
...Cardinals swish scholar...
...One of its Plowing the Dark has a surfeit of intelliplots (there are two distinct stories, pre- gence, empathy, playful theory, seriValerie Sayers sented in alternating sections) concerns ous philosophy, loving literary alluthe artist Adie Kiarpol, who is recruit- sions and wit...
...Unlike the prevailChurch Leadership Psychology ing argument that homosexuality is some Liturgy and Worship M.A./M.S...
...Heart Dennis O'Brien, a regular contributor, is on narrative distance that makes strucattack" and "sex" are words with affect president emeritus of the University of tural sense but feels forced, particularand effect...
...reality that is at the heart of its con- and mess, but his enthusiasms and encerns...
...Computer sci- favorite here is the man describing his R a maximalist who inter- entists there are creating fantastic 3-D middle-aged sexual self: "the loin in weaves seemingly dis- spaces, simulations borrowed from real winter...
...Besides, there are the ichard Powers is a novelist ed by an old college friend to work in a puns, which are gloriously awful: my of the more-is-more school, Seattle virtual-reality lab...
...Catholic ceremoof Awful Disclosures disapproved of nials are high camp fussed at by liturgy priestly heterosexuality...
...Learning to live inside a PowRichard Powers And it is that physical depiction of ers novel is learning to live with excess Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, 415 pp...
...Church language seems never Powers has made a specialty of this proportion which is itself hard to ascer- to reach the subject...
...in Counseling mosexuality" itself...
...politics of truth: that is, the type of dis- culture...
...I Surveys are few and faulty...
...In the second story, Powers's use of a technological illitjags, allows his characters to philoso- Taimur Martin, an Iranian-American, erate, Adie, allows him to explain, clearphize and to pontificate, puns shame- is kidnapped in Beirut, where he has ly and without condescension, how virlessly, displays the minutiae of his re- recently arrived to teach English...
...In Plowing tered in very different tones of voice and of luxuria...
...Truth is the first casualty of war, Pastoral Counseling and Foucaultian society is a war of all Social Justice • Joint Degrees: against all...
...The novel opens in 1990, as the ergies are more than worth the strewn world comes to terms with its emerging clothes and the crumbs on the counter...
...he can be a It also glories in depicting the mundane, pedantic name-dropper on subjects like Plowing the Dark the quotidian, the physical...
...in Religion and Education power...
...Truth about numbers or the inner meaning of • M.A...
...It would depend not and Pastoral Ministry on some "real" homosexual trait, but In Addition...
...But Jordan's book is not about facts, subject of sexuality...
...Those guys do suit up in some pretty thought...
...Conjugal act" and "having sex" eties) in a culture of consumerism and ly artificial for a novel about artifice: describe the same thing-as does the di- luxuria...
...parate story lines, indulges in language life (and real art...
...At the conclusion of the book, Jordan course which it accepts and makes func- Put most baldly, from a Foucaultian perspective it is quite unfair of me to raise the issue of whether widespread BOSTON COLLEGE INSTITUTE OF RELIGIOUS homoeroticism exists de facto in the clerEDUCATION AND PASTORAL MINISTRY ical closet, or de symbolico in ecclesiastical camp...
...She novelistic: as it ponders how humans men Square, Tehran, and the Berlin has already abandoned her painting...
...Truth is a thing of (church authorities in this case...
...great art...
...Silence and censure are precisely the offers the palpable evidence of how papal court...
...eroticism among the Catholic clergy...
...I\TERCESSOR, who advocates on behalf lation of lascivious goings-on between Normal empirical evidence is not, it of others...
...Foucault straight out denies mosexual activity by those in power er...
...Not the least of the problems with Foucault's theory is what happens to "hoReligious Education M.A./M.A...
...Body position or ro- novel, Gain, for instance, alternates the it is about words: the initial and most mantic poesy...
...church symbolism is not and cannot be with concentrations In: C.A.E.S...
...the CHOREOGRAPHER, who treal (1836) by Maria Monk homosexual acts or desires within the brings people together for celebration...
...His seventh novel, Plowing the must deal with the horror of his own cal and moral implications of a techDark, often appears to be aiming for a reality as he labors to fill his hours by nology that is capable of representing theory of everything, but it is also fully making sense of his past...
...obviously Jor- queens Jordan attaches the latter desdan does not necessarily disapprove of ignation to himself...
...If I sound cranky, that may be because Powers's fictional worlds are so complex, so complete, that a reader begins to inhabit them, A VIRTUAL MASTERPIECE perhaps even to feel a little proprietary about them...
...Jordan is onto something when ality as a "cultural construct...
...the view that male homoeroticism is en- Whatever should one make of this demic in the Catholic church...
...Adie functions as the out(suffering, reality, the meaning of exis- sane while chained to a radiator, he sider and innocent learning the polititence...
...Jordan picture of through-and-through homosays virtually nothing about lesbianism...
...I am sure Michael Foucault who is, of course, the a rhetoric of power, what you can get someone has already made the case...
...The book was the best- the real proof of widespread homosexseller of its day, to be outstripped only ual life is "the silence of sodom...
...Each society defuse this power, to establish whatevmade, I am certain hyperhysteria would has its own regime of truth, its general er might be construed as "homosexual" be displayed...
...group than in the population at large-a about sex...
...I• nternet Distance Education Mary Mogennis (This was a big issue, evidently, with • Workshops Institute of Religious Education "liturgy queens...
...he Awful Disclosures of the the MIDWIFE, who helps birth ideas and Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Mon- clusion: "No one can know the extent of dreams...
...in shot silk and lace...
...Jordan's argument would work as Commonweal 3 3 September 8, 2000 well for pervasive homosexuality in the turns with approval to the thought of tion as true...
...Foucault "wanted to • Certificate in Ecdesial Ministry deny that homosexuality is a secret Collaborative Leadership Concentration about oneself, a hidden identity disLiturgy Concentration covered and then displayed...
...prosecutions of pedophiles, and stray understanding of women as leaders...
...On such evidence one would their full leadership potential: the WEAVER, have to agree with Jordan's explicit con- who braids together her vision for the future...
...grand theorist of modern homosexual away with in some social contestation...
...Hispanic Ministry M.A./M.S.W...
...Commonweal 3 5 September 8, 2000...
...Powers has plenty of annoying stylistic quirks: his characters speak in relentlessly arch dialogue...
...These are the angry accu- behavior one gets from repressed or priests express themselves in the worsations of an avowedly gay Catholic covert "in-the-closet" homosexuals-the ship life of Catholicism...
...In an ear- American Commerce...
...In itself across the globe, as if to emphaciety, it would be reasonable to conjec- that sense, there is not only a silence size its universality and the interdeture that homosexuality is higher in that about "sodomy," there is general silence pendence of humans everywhere...
...The book is not about truth, it Continuing a Tradition of Excellence in Educating is about rhetoric...
...And so on...
...Sodom purports to open the closet on Silence is complemented by severe the homosexual goings-on of priests in church condemnations of homosexuali- If silence does not persuade, Jordan rectory, seminary, and on up to the ty...
...O the hostage's story is addressed to himalogue of R-rated films-but the rhetori- self in the second person, an insistence cal meanings are wildly different...
Vol. 127 • September 2000 • No. 15
