Just hours after Pope Benedict XVI announced his unexpected resignation, a bolt of lightning struck St. Peter’s Basilica.
Many say it’s a sign from God. If so, I’m hoping it’s an Amen moment signaling the end of an oppressive era of LGBTQ-bashing as the church now moves forward.
“The church has an opportunity to turn away from [Benedict’s] oppressive policies toward LGBT Catholics, and their families and friends, and develop a new understanding of the ways in which God is at work in the lives of faithful and loving people, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” said LGBT Catholic group Equally Blessed in a statement.
This pope has used his papal authority to hold back the tides against modernity. And the early signs were there long before Benedict became pope. The reaction by many religious progressives to the election of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in April 2005 as Pope Benedict XVI had been tempered by either their faith to keep hope alive or by an apologetic acceptance in deference to Pope John Paul II.
If the Church was looking for a leader who embraces the world, as it is today, Pope Benedict XVI was not the man.
Benedict used his authoritarian persona of church doctrine to maintain an ecclesiastical lockdown on the church’s progressives. Last year. he publicly bashed a group of U.S. “dissident” nuns for “focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping ‘silent’ on abortion and same-sex marriage. He pushed back against the tide of progressive theologies by upholding a rigid orthodoxy of millennium-old church doctrines and creeds. Benedict suppressed the growth of Liberation Theologies in Third-World countries, the emerging face of the Catholic Church, for their supposedly Marxist leanings that exposed classism. And his venomous attacks on LGBTQ people have been unrelenting.
In December, the Pontiff’s Christmas sermon denounced same-sex marriage, advocating it would destroy the “essence of the human creature.” In previous anti-LGBTQ diatribes, Benedict stated that marriage equality is a “manipulation of nature,” and a threat to world peace.
The Pontiff didn’t equivocate his stance on us with the theological qualifier to “love the sinner but hate the sin.” He went to a new level that invited LGBTQ-bashing justified in the name of God.
On the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith web site, directed by then Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote: “Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil.”
Benedict believes that evil is born into a person and that it is part of his or her ontological makeup. Evil exists in its various machinations because of systems, regimes, presidencies and, yes, the Vatican, which allow it to give birth unchecked. As a system whose wheels churn on the absence of goodness, evil reduces people to objects of sin and targets of hatred, thus denying them their basic human needs. And its strength to maintain human suffering is proportionate not only to its political and capital clout, but also to the strength of its religious ideological underpinning.
The problem with evil is not only how it diminishes human life, but also how it denies the suffering it causes.