BBC: 'Thought For The Day' by Giles Fraser | Kiwianglo's Blog

Thought For The Day by Giles Fraser

BBC Radio 4 Monday 4 March

This morning the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland is waking up to one of the biggest crises in its modern history. A few weeks ago, Cardinal Keith O?Brien was expecting to be in Rome electing the next Pope. Now he?s in disgrace, vowing that he?ll never again take part in public life .

We still don?t know the details of what he did, simply that he?s admitted to sexual misconduct amongst his fellow priests. Charges of hypocrisy have been swift to follow. This month last year, the Cardinal was on this very programme attacking gay marriage as evidence for the ?degeneration of society into immorality?. Indeed, he insisted: ?if the UK does go in for same sex marriage it is indeed shaming our country.?

So why is it that all the churches ? and not just the Roman Catholic church ? seem to attract so many gay men who are themselves so virulently hostile to homosexuality? Perhaps it has to do with a misplaced sense of shame about being gay, a sense of shame that they go on to reinforce by being vocal supporters of the very theology that they themselves have been the victims of. As the novelist Roz Kaveney tweeted yesterday: ?I feel sorry for?O?Brien. I hope one day he realizes that the sense of sexual sinfulness the Church forced on him was an abuse.? And that ?O?Brien needs to distinguish between his sexual desires and his bad behavior and not see all of it as sin.? I totally agree.

The election of a new Pope provides an opportunity for real change. The culture of secrecy that fearfully hides this bad behavior ? and not least the clerical abuse of children ? needs dismantling from its very foundations. Inappropriate sexual relationships, relationships that trade on unequal power and enforced silence, are the product of an unwillingness to speak honestly, openly and compassionately about sex in general and homosexuality in particular. The importance of marriage as being available to both gay and straight people ? and indeed to priests ? is that it allows sexual desire to be rightly located in loving and stable relationships. I know there are people who see things differently, but I?m sorry: the churches condemnation of homosexuality has forced gay sex into the shadows, thus again reinforcing a sense of shame that, for me, is the real source of abuse.

Things may now be changing. It is encouraging that four priests have had the courage to speak out against a Cardinal ? though one of them has expressed the fear that the Catholic church would ?crush him? if they could. This is precisely the climate of fear that does so much to create the conditions of clerical abuse.

?It seems to me that there is nowhere to hide now,? said Diarmaid MacCulloch, the professor of the history of the church at Oxford University in a recent interview. He goes on: ?We have had two Popes in succession that have denied that the church needed to change at all. The Roman church has to face realities that it has steadily avoided facing for the last thirty years.? And I might add, not just the Roman church, but my own church too.

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The sad prospect of a Roman Catholic Cardinal, who formerly proclaimed his own rhetoric against the prospect of ?Gay Marriage? in Scotland, being openly accused of inappropriate homosexual advances toward some of his own clergy, can only raise the obvious question:

What is it about the whole subject of human sexuality that so bugs the Churches that they have to be seen to militate against any expression of it outside of the marriage bond ? and yet refuse Same-Sex couples the right to even commit themselves to a similar relationship?

Now that the prospect of actual marriage is being sought to help homosexual and lesbian couples to harness their sexuality into a loving, life-long, committed monogamous relationship ?with a particular Same-Sex person whom they love; the Churches are getting their metaphorical knickers in a twist, tripping over themselves to now justify the concept of Civil Unions for Gays, a legal process which once they did their best to shoot down at the first post. This, seemingly in order to avoid what they discern as being the degradation of the concept of the tradition of marriage as we now know it. ?

What has not been considered is that, though human marriage has been referred to in Scripture as a typological equivalent of the ?Marriage of The Lamb? ? ?betwixt Christ and His Church? ? this is so obviously not an exact equivalence; which would have required no sexual activity in order for earthly marriage to match the heavenly model. This surely renders any attempt to rule out Same-Sex Marriage ? on the grounds that it does not equate with the relationship between Christ and His Church ? while yet allowing that heterosexual marriage does. What is involved in each instance of human marriage, is a level of faithful commitment to one another that is based on trust and fidelity, which can be Christ-like. Even the Church of England recognises that not every act of sexual congress, within marriage, has to be undertaken with the explicit intention of begetting a child/children ? thus honouring the concept of sexuality as an agency of human comfort and support between partners who have committed their lives to each other.?

Fr. Giles Fraser is a well-known advocate for the respect of Women & LGBT people in the Church. His advocacy of these constituent parts of the Church may never gain him a bishopric, but it certainly enunciates the feelings of many clergy and laity in the Church of England, and elsewhere in the Anglican Communion.

Father Ron Smith, Christchurch, New Zealand

Source: http://kiwianglo.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/bbc-thought-for-the-day-by-giles-fraser/

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