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Let me first and briefly register my dissent from the CDF's notification regarding Jeannine Gramick and Bob Nugent before going on, at much greater length, to show my gratitude. The dissent is simple: I do not accept that what the CDF claims to be the "clear and constant teaching of the Catholic Church in this area" (a series of paragraphs from ecclesiastical documents ranging from 1976 to the present day) is in fact consistent with the revelation of God made available to us in Jesus Christ. I consider that the CDF's teaching in the area of homosexual persons makes God inappropriately complicit in the traditions of men.
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My purpose here is to point out how much better, and how much more bracing an ecclesial document, the CDF's notification is than most responses would indicate.
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I may be wrong, and I certainly couldn't be right without running the risk of being wrong. However it is not my purpose here to enter into the debate about how to make the expression of the Church's teaching in this area more adequate to the Word of God. The issue of truth is a proper discussion (the only really worthwhile discussion in this area) but to be conducted in other arenas. My purpose here is to point out how much better, and how much more bracing an ecclesial document, the CDF's notification is than most responses would indicate. A careful reading suggests that those who rejoiced at the censoring of Jeannine and Bob have won a much hollower victory than they may have imagined. In fact, the notification shifts the ecclesial discussion and the resulting ecclesiastical ambience in very interesting directions.
I would like to highlight three of these directions with gratitude. The first (and most startling because best hidden) is that of the recognition of the delicacy and yet of the relative unimportance of the issue; the second is the recognition of the ecclesially deleterious nature of deliberately fostered ambiguity; and the third is the insistence on interior assent to accompany teaching.
The first point becomes evident at the end of the notification, with the pronouncement of punishment. The notification sets out a lengthy apologia for itself, indicating how long the process has been grinding on (over fifteen years), the various commissions which have pored over all the literature involved, and so on. Manifestly the CDF was acting as a shock-absorber to filter out the endless rubbish spewed out against gay people or those in the Church brave enough to take their side in the eighties and nineties, before the turning of the tide. So, there has been a certain delicacy here, and a desire to avoid easy accusations and condemnations. What is more remarkable is that this delicacy is accompanied by a recognition that, for all the time and energy spent on the case, the matter is not, objectively speaking, a very important one.
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