I am still bound for hell. Nothing the bishops discussed in Rome over the past few weeks will save me and my kind from damnation. They considered some soft rhetoric but never questioned that sex between men must remain a grave sin.
Commentators around the world, straight and gay, have shied away from this. So delighted were they by talk of the church “welcoming” gay people and recognising their “gifts and qualities” that they spoke of a sea change in Rome.
Those optimistic voices are falling silent now as they realise how wrong they were. The issue is sin and the sin remains. And bishops of the far right and Africa combined to strip any fine words about “men and women of homosexual tendencies” from the final report of the synod. The most the meeting in Rome offered them in the end was “respect and sensitivity”.
That’s the most sinners can expect.
It’s a miracle of the modern church that reformers are not utterly downhearted by this latest reverse. They cling to their hopes. They find wisdom in the pope’s strategy. They talk of a triumph of open debate and see a day coming – perhaps not in their lifetime – when Rome may yet change its mind.
The west already has. Rome’s teaching on homosexuality is in big trouble in Britain, Australia and North America. According to the excellent Pew Research Center, most Catholics in the US don’t even see homosexuality as a sin. Barely half thought it was in 2003 and a decade later that’s dropped to a third.
Reformers ask us to soft-pedal the question of sin, find signs of hope even in this latest catastrophe and overlook its inevitable consequences. Another generation of young men discovering they are homosexual will face the official teaching of the church that they are disordered, their condition is a source of shame and having sex will see them damned.
So many beautiful commentaries have been written and so much optimism has been invested in Francis since he was elected pope. But nothing he says on this subject matters much until he goes to the window and declares – if indeed this is what he believes – that homosexuality is a commonplace of the human condition.
“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” said Francis shortly after his election and the liberal commentariat was overjoyed. But he wasn’t offering to change the rules. Nor did he ask his bishops to do so when he called them to Rome.
Only the wrapping was under discussion. Not the package. And in the end, even the ribbons and the pretty paper were thrown away. Gay people were to be reminded they were sinners and “no grounds whatsoever exist for assimilating or drawing analogies, however remote, between homosexual unions and God’s design for matrimony and the family”.
Cardinal George Pell, a leading Vatican conservative and keeper of the church’s finances, applauded the result: “We’re not giving in to the secular agenda; we’re not collapsing in a heap. We’ve got no intention of following those radical elements in all the Christian churches, according to the Catholic churches in one or two countries, and going out of business.”
The business is shame and damnation. Precisely what awaits us on the other side remains, of course, an open question: endless torment but by what or by whom? Dante gives us the most detailed prediction: in the second zone of the third ring of the seventh circle sodomites will walk continuously on hot sand under a rain of fire.
Think of the bishops we will meet there …
