Il mio cammino per essere. Il celibato per un gay cattolico non è l’unica opzione

Testimonianza di Patrick Gothman* pubblicata sul sito “Reaching Out – storie di fede LGBTQ persa e trovata” (USA) il 22 novembre 2017, libera traduzione di Innocenzo

One evening i cooked a flan for my brothers, when a policeman visiting our house interrupted the silence of the dinner to praise me for how i had cooked. i whispered A thank you, as i looked at my hands on my knees. "Don't get many compliments, right?". He said to me disconcerted from my mutual answer. It was not true. I was used to taking them all the time. But I understood then that I had substantially decided that, as a Catholic gay, the best hope of surviving the celibacy was to find a corner of the world in which to make disappear and kill all my dreams and my desires. Which does not mean that my experience in a religious order had destroyed my personality, I was only wary of all that I had become of me.

When I left the monastery to return to my house in Texas I felt relieved. But after the joy I initially tried to review my family and friends, what she remained to me was a kind of anger and frustration, which had long been hidden to boil under the surface, which I now could no longer deny. I had done everything to be a good Catholic or to be a passable believer. A Catholic that was irrevocably gay, but desperate because he could not avoid hell.

I tried to become a priest. I tried to live as celibate and single, I tried to join a religious order. Each step has removed me from my reality and gave me a version, increasingly distorted and masked, unreal than myself.

Back home, I struggled to find a Christian community and a routine that would help me make sense of this new reality in which I was. I tried to write on a blog. But when I took a position, criticizing the way many Catholics treated gays on Facebook, during the fire storm triggered by the ongoing discussion of the United States Supreme Court on the rights of LGBT people, the reaction in my hometown was rapid and strong. Some agreed with me, but many affirmed that LGBT people had crossed a line and that they were attacking them only to defend the teaching of the Church.

I suppose there was a kind of line for me too. If I could not suggest treating Catholics gays with a little mercy, without risking being attacked, then I could no longer pretend that the reality I lived in was a healthy place for me. I needed to leave, as far as possible.

I left my country again, but this time, instead of running away from myself, I retired in the literal sense to learn to be myself. My refuge was in the capital with the highest number of murders in the world, in Honduras.

The Church that I was so deeply part - and that it was deeply part of me - believed that being homosexual was not the only way I could be. Still, it didn't matter where I would go, I would always be wrong for her. But I was convinced that to understand I, who I was really, I had to return to the foundations of the Gospel: love, humility, service.

I felt far from God and the Church, but perhaps if I had been a companion for some orphans, far from all those who wanted to tell me how much I was not a real Catholic perhaps I would have found a new journey. So, for two years, I volunteered in a children's house on the northern coast of Honduras.

I went to the south with a Floor. i allowed myself a year to adapt to the life of the tropics and i worked in a catholic house for abused And abandoned children. but once a good knowledge of the spanish language was obtained, i also found a kind of balance, among my new community, in which all my voluntary companions knew i was gay, and the boys who had started to trust me.
The time had come to remove from the shelf the box I had locked up when I was sixteen. I was finally ready to immerse myself in what the Catholic Church really teaches homosexuality without being afraid of what I would find.

What most terrified me was not the fact that I could agree with the logic of the Church, but that I would find it very lacking. That the biggest part of my life was just a defect. Where would I end up then? I had passed a decade trying to position myself so that the Church would approve me. I finally decided to find out where the church was with me.

I spent several weeks to pour all the relevant writing passages, the quotes of the catechism, the reflections of the Catholic intellectuals on homosexuality. After my days with the children in the children's house, I spent my nights with Ratzinger, Weigel and Wojtyla, so I woke up very early with Neuhaus, George and Congar. I analyzed and synthesized the best topics against gay marriage that they had invented, writing until late at night.

Then I read the reflections of those who, precisely because of their faith, did not agree on those statements. I read texts by Catholics and Protestants, of anyone who was willing to discuss their arguments on the merits.

So i discovered that the catholic analysis of homosexuality is more nuanced than you Think. probably because there are so many negative reactions from religious sources, so much so that the gay person is Considered bad. in Reality, the catholic church does not teach that all homosexuals are bad or have chosen their attraction for the same sex.

Rather, the language of the magisterium speaks of people "intrinsically disordered ". A distinction is made between the desires that we experience and the actions that could be taken to satisfy them. A bit like feeling attracted by your neighbor's wife and really really bed with her. [...]

But the part of the thought of the Catholic Church that had emotionally paralyzed me for many years, pushing me to think that I was better without my friends and my family, it was the belief that I was not able to love. I was often told that they are more than my sexuality. Catholic priests must be celibate, why shouldn't I be?
It is true that there is much more in a person than his sexual desires but this is exactly the point. The falling in love, building a life together. Walking with each other - and if you are believers - approach each other to God. To grow children safe and affection, knowing that you will try to be there for the other through all the difficulties, it doesn't matter. These are not small things.

Those instincts, emotions and desires were present in meintense as in anyone else, but I had been told that I was unable to live them. If I felt them towards a man, then I am intrinsically disordered. Even if to do what comes naturally to others, it would have been an unnatural and abominable thing for me. In reality my gay love was a threat to the love of all the others and the Church had to defend the entire society against it because it was self -destructive and narcissistic. That would have left me from God, not approached to him. So it was better if I hadn't even tried. But how should those words have made me a better Christian? The comparison with a celibate priest is then irrelevant, since the priest offers these things to God. I, on the other hand, apparently I had nothing to offer.

So I gave my life an honest look, because it was the only step I had hesitated to take for so long. I know it was instinctive for most people, but I had always hesitated to use my experiences as evidence. They all seemed so subjective. Better to remain abstract. But in the end I realized that abstractions have no roots in reality and if everything works, then they are useless.

Keep it going…

* Patrick Gothman vive negli Stati Uniti, dove si occupa di giustizia sociale. E’ uno scrittore abbastanza gay ed è editor del sito Reaching Out.

Original text: I Thought Gay Celibacy Was My Only Option — I Was Wrong