On Being a Protestant

On Sunday, I had a visit with a man that I got to know during my time with the Dominicans.  He was enormously supportive of me during that time; in fact, he was the most supportive member of the Dominicans, all told.  I will always be very grateful to him for his kindness and support in my early 20s.  He was a couple of years ahead of me in formation, but he entered the Order older (after a complex and convoluted process), so he is a good 15 or so years older than I am.  He is, at his heart, a good man who cares deeply for the people around him.  He is also someone who takes great joy in being a priest, and he truly puts his whole self into that role.

And yet, every time I see him, I come away very sad, and this time was no exception.  While he loves being a priest, he has not found the support among his fellow Dominicans that he hoped for, a fact that he admitted to me on Sunday.  This is to some degree a function of the fact that (as he also acknowledged in our conversation) he is not the most tactful or politically astute person, and has a strong tendency to speak his mind when being silent would be more prudent.  This alienates people; it has alienated me at points over the course of the time I have known him.  That's a part of the story.

But that's not the main issue.  The main issue is that he is, by any objective measure, a gay man.  I say "by any objective measure" because his own position is that "gay" is an identity that one can assume, and that he thinks one can, and should, simply not assume that identity in favor of an identity in Christ.  So, he would reject the framing I have given him at the beginning of the paragraph.  Now, you hear this sort of rhetoric from conservatives in the Roman Catholic world all the time.  The difference with my friend is that, contra the overwhelming majority of Roman Catholic clergy who say these sorts of things, he really does believe it.  Or, more accurately, he desperately wants it to be true.  He may be deluded, and I think he is, but he is 100% sincere.

But, and this is where the problem lies, he is also 100% aware that the overwhelming majority of his brother priests who say similar things to what he is saying are full of shit--that this rhetoric about avoiding a "gay identity" is a smokescreen to allow them to live their accustomed secret gay life and engage in various political machinations between and among the various gay networks that populate the Roman Catholic priesthood.  And, because as I mentioned he is not particularly tactful, they know he knows they are full of shit.  As a result, he is persona non grata in any of those circles.

Plus, on the flip side, he is not willing to perform the medieval inquisitor LARP that is de rigeur for the Angry Young Men of the Roman Catholic clergy in the 21st Century.  This is in part because he is too smart for that, but more fundamentally it is because he cares too much about people, both clergy and lay, to take out his frustrations and psychodrama on other people.  So, to the Blob that runs the show in Roman Catholic church circles, he can't be trusted; to the Young Turks, he is a dirty Lib.  He's stuck on his own, alone.

That loneliness is palpable with my friend, and it is the thing that makes me sad when I see him.  It's particularly hard because I know that he has decided that this loneliness is the price he must pay to be able to be a priest.  He told me on Sunday that he thinks the trade-off is worth it, and I think at a minimum he is, once again, speaking sincerely.  He did live a life prior to coming into the Dominicans; he is not someone with nothing to compare his current life to.  I must take him at his word.

And yet, I cannot get over the feeling that his suffering is stupid and purposeless.  He should not have to make this trade-off.  The fact that he believes it to be necessary makes even more tragic, even harder to accept.  The thing that the Roman Catholic Church has demanded of him is fundamentally unfair; the fact that everyone else is cheating makes it more, not less, unfair for the truly faithful like my friend.  He, far more than I ever did, and far more than the overwhelming majority of the Roman Catholic clergy, really believes in the Church.  So much so that he has followed it off the cliff into this place of personal pain.

Episcopalians, and Anglicans in general, like very much to say that they are either neither Catholic nor Protestant, or both Catholic and Protestant.  The great Twitter personality MB made the argument the other day that Anglicanism, especially the Anglo-Catholic variety, is actually the most Protestant of all denominations.  While I think that was mostly (as is MB's way) a provocation, I nevertheless think there is a deep truth there.  At its heart, the Anglo-Catholic project says "we can sift through the enormous attic of stuff that is the Christian tradition and stitch together a cohesive synthesis that we then voluntarily associate ourselves with and implement in practice."  What makes it Protestant, I think, is the self-awareness of the nature of the project.  Roman Catholics and Orthodox and evangelicals are doing a synthesis as well, but they don't admit it, instead asserting that they are simply implementing the unchanging truths embodied in the consistent traditions of the Church inherited from the apostles (or the Reformers, or whatever).  Anglicanism's best trait, but also its most alienating trait, is its bracing honesty about itself and what it is doing--we are all figuring this out as best we can as we go along, trying to take what is good from our past while being responsive to the world as we find it.  Admitting that there is no net to catch you is scary, no matter how true it may be.

I bring this up because my friend and I had an extensive conversation about my current Anglo-Catholic parish, followed by a somewhat lengthy diatribe that it is Pope Francis's fault that someone like me would leave the Roman Catholic Church.  I found this juxtaposition initially strange, but on reflection it makes sense.  For my friend, and I think for many folks, the Anglo-Catholic position I sketched out above represents a kind of ecclesiological nihilism.  Once you admit that we are piecing this together as best we can, based on principles that are ultimately self-selected, then the concept of "the Church" as some sort of a priori provider of answers dissipates.  And the church as a priori provider of answers is the whole point of the exercise, at least for many.  Thus, Pope Francis poking around at the edges of the tradition must have caused me to lose faith in the church qua church, according to the thinking of my friend.

There is a sense in which he is right about Pope Francis being the catalyst for me, but not for the reasons he says.  In fact, it is basically the opposite of how my friend frames it.  Pope Francis didn't undermine my belief in the a priori correctness of the church;  Pope Francis undermined my belief that the Roman Catholic church cares about getting things right on the merits.  It's one thing to see someone like Pope John Paul II, who definitely believed in what he was saying, take positions that I disagree with.  It's another thing to watch someone like Pope Francis, who seems like he knows what the Roman Church is saying is wrong on a certain disputed issue, to shy away from making moves out of a fear of undermining the ability of the Roman Church to support its own internal consistency.

As much as my friend dislikes Pope Francis, he is very much like Francis in that they agree that maintaining the internal coherence of the Roman Catholic Church is more important than doing right by my friend in his individual situation.  Pope Francis does what he does to protect the thing that my friend holds the most dear about the faith, or at least Francis is trying to.  My friend must hold to the idea that being gay is a created identity and not an objective reality because that's what the Roman Catholic Church says, and the Roman Catholic Church must be right in order for his faith to be meaningful and coherent.  To the extent change is considered, it is not evaluated on the basis of "does this change reflect the concrete realities of the world?" but "can this change be structured in a way that doesn't bring into question my underlying belief in the Roman Catholic Church?"  That what my friend meant when we dismissed any possibility of change with "what is the theology?"---"what is the argument that I can accept this and still maintain that we are not just doing what we think is right?"    

And, at the end of the day, I don't really care about any of that. Trying to get it right is the core value, at least for me.  Doing right by my friend and his life is more important than maintaining some consistency with the positions taken in the past.  That's why all of this seems so senseless to me, and thus sad, even though I understand intellectually why it matters to him and why he has made the choices he made.  Yes, we pick and choose what we are going to carry with us and what we are going to leave behind.  So what?

In this, I am at my heart a Protestant, and on some level I always have been.