rope trick

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Oct 08, 2010

The Heights, the student newspaper at Jesuit-run Boston College, denounces the Catholic Church for “intolerance” toward GLBTQ people. (That’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer people, in case you’re not current on the preferred terminology.) The Heights editors want to know:

Must all Catholic GLBTQ persons be prescribed lives of celibacy and renunciation, never fully allowed to be a full participant in society?

That may not be the most diplomatic way to word the question, when it’s ultimately addressed to Church leaders who are celibate, and yet believe that they are full participants in society. But the student journalists aren’t finished.

There are persons on this campus who choose to continue to practice the Roman Catholic faith despite the Church's unwillingness to address the condition of their sexuality.

Sorry; now I’m confused. What’s the problem here: that the Church doesn’t address the question of aberrant sexuality, or that the Church does address the question, and the Heights doesn’t like what the Church is saying? In any case, the editors have a solution: more of the sort of outstanding education that they have encountered on the Boston College campus:

BC needs to become a place where the tangled knot of Catholic moral theology on GLBTQ issues can be unraveled and debated by intelligent, thinking believers.

So somehow the Church has created a “tangled knot” of teaching on this issue, without even addressing it. Nice trick.

But actually the Heights is making a useful suggestion. Students on the BC campus should be exposed to an intelligent debate on Church teaching. Just one problem: in order for that to happen, they’ll have to find someone on the BC campus who is willing to explain and defend what the Church teaches.