A CATECHISM OF THE HEART

A gay former seminarian finds that the open church of Jesus is not the closed church of the present.

“For just about 10 years,” writes Brenkert, “I was a gay, mostly celibate Jesuit Scholastic, a member of the Society of Jesus in good standing.” He left when the Jesuits embarked on a housecleaning mission meant to root out LGBTQ+ workers and volunteers. That policy, undertaken even as Pope Francis has made tentative nods to the acceptance of same-sex marriage (nods that turn to sideways shakes of the head once filtered through the Catholic bureaucracy), is, Brenkert argues, immoral and fundamentally un-Christian: “[I]t treats people as means when they are ends in themselves.” The author’s argument, repeated many times without much variation, is that he should be allowed to serve as an openly gay Jesuit priest in a church that could use bridge-building to the LGBTQ+ community worldwide. Some of the antecedent memories are affecting—e.g., when he relates trying to come out as a teenager only to be assured that he would burn for it; and attempts to sort out his emerging desires in the face of “Catholic conditioning: that one’s being gay is intrinsically disordered, to have gay sex is sinful.” Brenkert makes a convincing case for those like him, true believers, to be accepted into the community of the church—as indeed he has been in the Anglican Communion even as he remains hopeful that one day he will be ordained in the Jesuit order, “if God desires it for me in this lifetime.”

A well-argued plea for inclusiveness, though perhaps unlikely to sway the authorities.