JHD: Dignity and the Rat Master | 1986

 Orsetti detail which would be used for dead/queer/proud cover. Firetrap Press, 2002.

31YOU GOT KICKED OUT OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH? AND YOU WANT TO GET BACK IN? 

HELLO? THEY SHOULD WANT YOU.

The Vatican’s letter “On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” will not stop people from being gay or Catholic. But it will make life more tense when you try to he both gay and Catholic at the same time. Cardinal Ratzinger, writing for the Company of Men, asserts that gay groups (though he never calls us by name) such as Dignity, have no right to meet and hold services on church property. 

In an ironically gay use of words, the Rat wants us to obey his dignitas, which in Latin meant “office, rank and authority,” and was often used by the Emperor to refer to himself. The Society of Homos still have visions of extending the Holy Roman Empire to America. And they become very upset when ordinary Americans question their authority.

As the Rat states: “The use of church buildings by these (gay groups)... and permission to use church property may seem only just and charitable, but in reality it is contradictory to the purpose for which these institutions were founded: it is misleading and often scandalous.”

Should any “homosexual persons” come together on church property they must first abjure and renounce themselves: “No authentic pastoral program will include organizations in which homosexual persons associate with each other without clearly stating that homosexual activity is immoral.”

Lesbian and gay people are not welcome on church property. Harsh lines are drawn: it would seem that the only gay priest would be an ex priest, the only lesbian nun would be an ex nun and the only gay Catholic would be an exCatholic.

What do you do? Do you fight or quit? Stay on or drop out of the church? Do you attend services wearing a red letter “G” on your forehead and cause a scandal? Or, as one rebel suggested, do you chain yourself to your pew and force them to throw you out? It seems like the Holy Father is saying: “This is my church, love it or leave it!”

Fortunately, life is not a series of pseudo dramatic often neurotic either/or choices. As theologian Rosalle Muschal Remnhardt says, “you can be both/and and more/than.” When you are gay or lesbian there is no reason you have to cut yourself off from your church, family, or country. It is your choice how you place yourself. Inside or outside, or both in and out and more. Stay where it is comfortable for you. Adopt a style that is comfortable for you. Be confrontational, or moderational, as you feel free to be. Go along, or make trouble, do what you feel most expresses your love for your church and country.

Once you overcome the negativity of this Vatican letter and get yourself back in place a lot of issues will start to clarify. I can suggest a few and I’m sure you can think of others: 

1. If you want to get their attention fast start a movement to tax their Company. This is still America, where the idea of individual freedom prevails. Each person is free to act on her own authority according to the promptings of her own conscience. The founders of this country ran away from Kings, Queens (of either gender) and Emperors, to make this land the home of freedom. We are not now going to allow some Company of Foreign Men extend their vision of the Holy Roman Empire to our shores. We don’t accept the teaching of foreign potentates here, be they Ayatollahs, Bhagwans, or Popes. If the Company of Men in Rome want to assert their corporate rights of private property, let them begin to pay corporate taxes in America–and property taxes. Let the pseudo masters in Rome know: there will be no magisterium without taxation.

2.  The Society of Homos can't look you in the eye and won't have you in their "house". Ask yourself why.  Nowhere in the Rat's letter is the word gay or lesbian mentioned. They treat us as though we do not exist. They do not know our mores, our morals, our ways and means of existence. Their lack of respect and willed ignorance of us reveals much about themselves. They don’t understand that people who fight homosexuality are always fighting their own homosexuality. Since most of us have done the work it takes to come out, this is something we know that the Pope's gang doesn't. It's a Company loss, but they make us pay.

3. The Company of Men has "a long tradition" says the Rat. He's right. It's called lying and the Society of Homos have a special name for it: jesuitical "Crafty, intriguing, or equivocating person.” Though they say we "deceive" they are the real masters of deceitful Sophistry (here their magisterium fits). They've been "sodomites" for centuries: They ripped the "sin" of Sodom (inhospitality) out of its biblical roots, made up something new and have been killing people for this truly original sin ever since. The Rat takes the art to a new extreme: he blames us for the AIDS plague. Their letter on "pastoral care" (one more touch of sophistry) is a plague of words. It falls back on the Church of Rome. 

What are these liars hiding? They are on the run, terrified of the "gay" plague. They tell the world, that plague is AIDS. The thing that scares them, the dis-ease which freaks out these old homos, is a very young idea: two gays or two lesbians, together, publicly. Honest gays and lesbians threaten the entire Homo Order! Now we understand what the Rat means about "the lives and well-being of a large number of people."  He's out to save his Company of Men. 

If any of them are smart rats, they'd better start practicing 'pastoral care' at Homo Heights, first,  and leave morality to those who can handle it. I've been a witness to such strength: every breath taken by a person with AIDS is a moral act. Without serious homo (mental) health-care at the Vatican–and lessons about how to treat guests–the Company of Men has no healthy future. It will die of its own terminal theology. (Rome has fallen before.)

For the recovering Catholics out there, Ratzinger's letter is just one more piece of junk mail. Send it back: addressee unknown. Or trash it.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press. Originally appeared in Damski's JHD column, November 27, 1986 and republished in Damski's dead/queer/proud as Schizo-file#31 (Firetrap Press 2002).

Homokind

Frank J. Tipler, in his enlightening book, The Physics of Immortality, reports (pg 370):

At the Council of Florence 1442, the Catholic Church laid it out forcefully: ‘The Holy Roman Church, firmly believes, professes and proclaims that none of those outside the Church (Extra Ecclesium nulla salus), not Jews, not heretics, can participate in eternal life, but will go into eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, unless they are brought back into the Catholic Church before the end of life."

This doctrine clearly makes the Roman Catholic Church the most extreme fundamentalist church of them all.

Today Jews and heretics have been replaced by gays and lesbians. We go to the fire, unless we go (back) into the Church before our life ends. No option for eternal life for us.

In the 15th century the Church sold the notion that heaven is only for the select few. Kept its priests at the door of the big Disco in the sky. Tempted all queens who wanted a VIP pass to the stairway to heaven. Admit One Selected Soul-a lucky person to get in.

Even at the time, this doctrine of selectivity was challenged. If the Church happened to be wrong, then it meant the Church falsified itself and stood between a loving God and Jesus, who admitted everyone and humankind. It meant the Church shut off the electrifying flow of love between God and her people. God left heaven’s gate open to all.

For our tribe, I like the word HOMOKIND. HOMO from Latin refers to the universal generic man, who like gays and lesbians, “are everywhere.” Tiny in numerical size, but universal in application. That’s why a church which calls itself “universal and whole” should be the first to include us all as equal members, equal to the body of Christ.

Pope comes from the word pontifex, which means “bridge builder.” Hardly. Instead Popes use their bully pulpit to brand us “molokai,” softies, sissies, the no accounts. Tragically, because of our soft, kind and gentle nature (the KIND in HOMOKIND) we seem to stir up and provoke their brutal atoms. So they harass and keep us outside the Church and try to keep us away from eternal life. This harsh punishment hits gay sons and lesbian daughters hard, puts fear instead of the love of God in our older members.

For 27 centuries the Church has been wacky and out of balance. In the beginning all it talks about is HOMOGENITALITY. As Rick Garcia has remarked: they keep sticking their noses into our genitals. They are one rigid kind of unkind church that concentrates all its fire in condemning one kind of homo/sex. They particularly refuse to acknowledge over the years how we have evolved a loving kind of domestic partners.

The Church has a deliberate stand against domestic partners at City Hall and in Oak Park, as recently signaled by Archbishop George. Chicago aldermen have and make better sense than the pack of bishops.

It took them half a millennium to seek forgiveness for standing between God and Galileo, between God and the Jews. Will it take them another 500 for the church to reach the apology and realization stage with us? YES. Meanwhile they themselves, because they deal in an ethic that is dark, closed and closeted, suffer a horrendous perception problem. Many if not most who stand outside the Church believe these men in fine silks and dress are gay.

Believe that homo priests and pedophile clergy run the shop.

If in the next millennium they want to live up to their name “universal,” they will have to incorporate outsider gays and lesbians with the folks inside the Church, decent folk who do not like their mind trapped in such deception. Ironically the Church’s salvation hinges on their outreach, love and acceptance of gays and lesbians, not our obedience to a cabal of secretive repressed homos, men who exhibit too much genital expression in their talk about us, and not enough kindness in actually dealing with us.

[Publisher’s Note(s): Along with “The Field of God,” this makes up the last essays Damski wrote and edited in 1997. It was reprinted as Schizo-File No. 32, under the title “By the time you read this I’ll be a dead queer, but I was always homokind to you.” in dead/queer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2002)--John Vore]