AIDS, Gays, and the American Catholic Church.

Richard L. Smith The Pilgrim Press, $14.95, 161 pp.

Richard Smith has written a timely and well-intentioned book on the American Catholic response to AIDS, a topic which figures prominently in the current "culture wars." While some religious leaders have called the AIDS epidemic God's just punishment on promiscuously immoral homosexuals, America's Catholic bishops have repeatedly called for compassion and expanded treatment for people with AIDS. At the same time, the church's leaders have reaffirmed the traditional teaching that all homosexual acts are intrinsically evil, and remain opposed to the popular policy of promoting condoms and "safe sex" to limit the spread of the disease. This position has been greeted with contempt by AIDS activists such as the leaders of Act-Up.

Smith is critical of the (official) Catholic position, but he also emphasizes that American Catholicism has valuable moral resources to help us make sense of the illness. The church's "understanding of human community, its strong tradition of social justice, and its rich repertoire of myths, rituals, and symbols" can give meaning to human suffering and death, Smith writes. What is inadequate about the official church response is the bishops' reassertion of the "narrow metaphors of the Catholic sexual program and their unwillingness to dialogue with and respect other voices in the larger American culture, particularly the gay community."

Smith has the wit to recognize the church's understanding of AIDS is not exhausted by official episcopal pronouncements: he devotes a chapter to an examination of ordinary church people engaged in AIDS ministry. In what might be called a "postmodern" fashion, Smith admits that he did not attempt to be "objective" or "scientific" in either the selection of his sample, or in the conduct of the interviews. Using this methodology, he was pleased to discover that not a single person engaged in this pastoral work agreed with the bishops on the immorality of homosexual activity, and he expresses here the hope that one day the bishops will listen to these good Catholics.

Smith's stated intention is to find common ground between the gay community and the Catholic church on the AIDS question. He repeatedly praises the bishops for their compassion, and the church for its spiritual and material ministry. Yet as I read the book it seemed that beneath the appeal for reasoned dialogue and mutual understanding a tendentiousness was often at work. Smith's non-negotiable demand is that the church abandon its teaching on the immorality of homosexual activity. Dissent on this point is a kind of pluralism Smith does not approve.

Sociologist Robert N. Bellah writes in the foreword, "a principled rejection of gay sexuality, whether put forward by the church or any other sector of society, is morally indefensible." This appears to be, for Smith, an a priori exceptionless moral norm, an unquestioned presupposition. But since it is precisely this point which separates the two cultures, it is here I would have thought dialogue ought to begin. It is true that the church's traditional arguments for the absolute immorality of all gay sexuality are increasingly unconvincing to many people, but does it follow that it is now "morally indefensible" even to try to make the case? This sounds like the pope ruling out discussion of the ordination of women!

I suspect most people are as uncertain about the official church's condemnation of all homosexual acts as they are of the claim that being actively gay is of no more moral significance than being left-handed. Surely there is much to talk about here, but so long as either side demands total agreement with its position at the outset, we will never get the conversation under way.

Smith longs for dialogue, but only, it appears, on his own terms. The hierarchical church is repeatedly criticized for its failure to question its moral position, its rigidity and rejection of pluralism; but the gay culture is not subject to the same standards. In fact, there is virtually no critique of the gay community nor any recognition that pluralism in sexual ethics exists there as well.

For example, while there are many loving and committed homosexual couples, there are also those in the pluralistic gay community who reject the "we are just like you" brand of liberalism; they oppose the value of sexual fidelity as the unjust imposition of alien heterosexual norms. Nowhere in this book is the connection between sexual promiscuity, the gay lifestyle, and the spread of AIDS even discussed. Smith follows the modem practice of accepting tout court a technological solution (condoms) to what is, at least partially, a moral problem.

In the final chapter, "Battleground or Common Ground," Smith recalls the incident when Act-Up desecrated consecrated hosts at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, and claims to have discovered common ground between the desecrators and the faithful. He is critical of Act-Up's behavior, but he sees it as equivalent to the church's desecration of what gays find sacred, that is, their sexual activity. One wonders how many Catholics will recognize as "common ground" a position which sees equal sacredness in the body of Christ and gay sex.

The ambiguity of Smith's call for dialogue is echoed in the inconsistent way he uses "facts"--sometimes enclosing them in "postmodern" quotation marks, sometimes not. The author believes there is no such thing as objective, value-free scientific truth. Thus, the manner in which the Catholic church has construed homosexuality and AIDS reflects the way cultural biases appropriate scientific "facts" to support a position. Smith here makes the very astute (postmodern) point that the issue is not whether cultural bias should shape the use of "facts" about AIDS, since any construction of AIDS will be affected by such bias. The real question is the validity of the bishops' sexual-cultural norms. This is certainly the right question to ask, although by now the reader has no doubt about what the answer will be.

How to determine the validity of the Catholic sexual ethic? By facing facts, of course, only this time without the ironic quotation marks, because postmodern irony stops when it comes to making one's own case. Smith argues that a respect for the validity of the other's point of view is an essential precondition for dialogue. This sounds exactly right. But for all his stated desire to find common ground, the author actually ends up demonstrating the futility of dialogue between the official church and the gay sexual ethic. Far from bridging the cultural divide between the two groups, this book is rather an illustration of how difficult genuine dialogue has become.