Mortal Remains
Rigidity
by S. M. Hutchens
While the book was crafted and released in the manner of a bombshell, the message of Frédéric Martel’s Sodom (English title, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy) is not a shocking exposé to those who have kept up on Vatican affairs and read the publications of authors like Michael Rose, Leon Podles, Ross Douthat, Philip Lawler, Sandro Magister, and Henry Sire. Rather, it offers detail and exterior perspective to what is already known. By “exterior” I do not refer to Martel’s distance from his subject, but to a viewpoint radically different from that of the other authors named, all of whom are traditional Christians with the best interests of the Catholic Church at heart. Martel’s approach, which he freely admits is that of a secular homosexual, entails deep detachment from the sexual precepts of Torah and Church, for it is “modern.”
The book is in fact written with that cold and refined hatred of orthodox Christianity not uncommon among sophisticated homosexuals who understand it to be permanently and intractably against them, an enemy to be opposed and defeated. Sodom is a product of, and its judgments are thoroughly colored by, the homosexual mind. Its presentation of fact is embedded in that matrix, so that the book uses credible research as material for artful contempt not only for the Catholic Church but for Christianity itself as fundamentally inhumane and detached from an evolved moral reality—for that is how they must be portrayed to justify homosexual identity. When, for example, Martel describes Benedict XVI’s “coronation” of Archbishop Gänswein as a kind of homosexual carnival in the light of which rumors of that pope’s gayness can hardly be denied, the odd color of Martel’s narrative dye, the peculiar smell of its incense, the nature of his mind’s permeation, looms large on the frontiers of perceptibility and the book’s corrosive raison d’être.
Its message is that the Catholic Church has been deeply penetrated by homosexuality (there is none of that diversionary nonsense about “pedophilia” here), whose international power connections terminate at a Vatican dominated by a network of homosexuals who are, with other progressives, advanced and protected by Pope Francis; and that the Church has changed in the post-Vatican II era, with the mostly unwitting cooperation of all its popes, into a gay-dominated correlate of liberal Protestantism. In my view the significance of the book is that it has successfully placed the burden of denying its thesis on those who believe the substance of the Catholic Church can be radically other than the accidents described here—without, I may add, resorting to the “Protestant” notion of an “Invisible Church”—a daunting assignment indeed.
The Christian versus the Homosexualist Consciousness
Of particular interest is concentration on the “hypocrisy” of the Vatican authorities who are known for being the strongest opponents of homosexuality. This charge is energized by Pope Francis’s pronouncement, directed against the conservatives he identifies as his enemies and enemies of the faith, that, “behind rigidity there is always something hidden, in many cases a double life.” By this the pope means what is taken by Martel as virtually incontestable: that the deepest perversity in the Vatican is to be found not in its homosexuals, but in those who want them purged, which leads to the point of this brief essay:
The self-identified and impenitent homosexual does not by his own principles understand or acknowledge the evangelical and apostolic doctrine of Baptism into Christ, the New Birth that effects a radical transformation in those who receive it, establishing their lives on a new -basis, that of being in Christ himself, placing the Old Man and his sins at the infinite distance where God remembers them no more. Of this the Touchstone editors wrote by my hand in the July/August 2013 issue:
In 1 Corinthians 6, St. Paul gives vital clarification on a subject where there is much foggy thinking among those who ask questions like, “What should the Church’s approach to homosexual Christians be?” The apostolic answer [and on this there must not be the slightest equivocation] is that there is no such thing as a homosexual Christian. There are brethren who struggle with various temptations, to be sure, and may on occasion fall to them before rising again. But believers who resist homosexual lust are not “homosexuals”—not Sodomites but just Christians, as are the rest of us with our own besetting sins.
“Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? [Then comes a list of sinners, including “sexual perverts.”] And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”
Such were some of you. The Apostle is writing to the baptized saints in the church of Corinth who are no longer these things. He does not say they are no longer susceptible to old sins, nor that these mustn’t be dealt with in an ongoing process of purgation: addressing the problems old sins create is a large part of the epistle’s burden. Given this apostolic definition, however, we cannot—we dare not—say there is any such thing as a “gay (or lesbian, etc.) Christian,” for the Christian by definition has been cleansed of his homosexuality.
He has a new identity that wholly excludes that of “homosexual.” Thus there is a place in the Christian consciousness, but not in that of the homosexualist, for the person who renounces and struggles with homosexual attraction as inimical to his being in Christ, regarding it as hateful and, if he is in pastoral office, as among his -duties to oppose and defeat in himself and his flock. In this place the adamant homosexual, who will acknowledge only the permanency of the condition and views its extinction as a lie, can see only a hypocrite, a self-hating, once-born gay person who pretends to be the saint that he is not and cannot be, and who can therefore only live a double life.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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