EVIDENCE ANYONE?

The Silence of Sodom
Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism
Mark D. Jordan
University of Chicago, $25, 322 pp.

The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836) by Maria Monk offered a sensational revelation of lascivious goings-on between Catholic priests and nuns behind those monastic walls. The book was the best-seller of its day, to be outstripped only by the later publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. As it turned out, Monk's revelations were a total fraud--the unhappy ravings of a seriously disturbed young woman. Mark D. Jordan's The Silence of Sodom purports to open the closet on the homosexual goings-on of priests in rectory, seminary, and on up to the papal court. These are the angry accusations of an avowedly gay Catholic scholar. (Major difference: enthusiasts of Awful Disclosures disapproved of priestly heterosexuality; obviously Jordan does not necessarily disapprove of priestly homosexuality.) Whether Jordan's claim for widespread homosexuality (morally good or bad) is more accurate than Monk's fabrications is a genuine puzzle.

What evidence does Jordan offer for the view that male homoeroticism is endemic in the Catholic church? (Jordan says virtually nothing about lesbianism.) Surveys are few and faulty. In 1991, Tim Unsworth interviewed some fifty priests and, although he found only one admitted gay priest, he endorsed the figure of 30 percent while noting that other researchers suggested a range from 10 percent to 75 percent. That wide a range does not inspire great confidence in surveys. Unsworth's own evidence is discounted by Jordan because he, Unsworth, is "straight" and made no effort to get inside the "lavender rectories," which his gay informant assured him existed. Jordan cites stories by individuals, criminal prosecutions of pedophiles, and stray anecdotes. (A new reach of scholarship is achieved when a well-known high prelate's sexual behavior is reported to Jordan by friends of said cleric's retired chauffeur.) On such evidence one would have to agree with Jordan's explicit conclusion: "No one can know the extent of homosexual acts or desires within the Catholic clergy."

Normal empirical evidence is not, it turns out, all that important. For Jordan, the real proof of widespread homosexual life is "the silence of sodom." The fact that church officials will not admit that homosexuality is pervasive, and that the mere suggestion of gay life in the rectory evokes "hysterical" reaction, indicates that a vast cover-up is in place. Silence is complemented by severe church condemnations of homosexuality. Silence and censure are precisely the behavior one gets from repressed or covert "in-the-closet" homosexuals--the Roy Cohn syndrome.

If silence does not persuade, Jordan offers the palpable evidence of how priests express themselves in the worship life of Catholicism. Cardinals swish in shot silk and lace. Catholic ceremonials are high camp fussed at by liturgy queens--Jordan attaches the latter designation to himself. In the eucharistic service, the priest confects the bread as Christ's body. Since the priest represents Christ, the wafer is then the priest's body. Having created the perfect body (Christ's/his own) the priest hands it around to be eaten. And so on.

Whatever should one make of this picture of through-and-through homoeroticism among the Catholic clergy? I am afraid that there is nothing that one can make of it positive or negative. To be critical will immediately label one as a homophobe interested in maintaining the cover-up. To agree with Jordan stretches the normal warrants that one applies for deciding truth and falsity.

Jordan's argument would work as well for pervasive homosexuality in the National Football League. (I am sure someone has already made the case.) Those guys do suit up in some pretty gaudy costumes, spend a fair amount of time huddling, patting each other on the butt, and falling all over one another. The coaches, players, and commissioners don't talk a lot about gay life in the locker room. If accusations were made, I am certain hyperhysteria would be displayed.

At the conclusion of the book, Jordan turns with approval to the thought of Michael Foucault who is, of course, the grand theorist of modern homosexual thought. Foucault's views would be a "justification" of Jordan's overall effort if there is any sense to the notion of "justification." Foucault straight out denies the notion of truth. "Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by multiple forms of constraint....Each society has its own regime of truth, its general politics of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true...." Truth, in other words, is a rhetoric of power, what you can get away with in some social contestation. Applied to the issue at hand, there can be no truth about clerical homosexuality. What does exist is repression of homosexual activity by those in power (church authorities in this case). The gay movement seeks a counter rhetoric to defuse this power, to establish whatever might be construed as "homosexual" culture.

Put most baldly, from a Foucaultian perspective it is quite unfair of me to raise the issue of whether widespread homoeroticism exists de facto in the clerical closet, or de symbolico in ecclesiastical camp. The book is not about truth, it is about rhetoric. Jordan lives on the wrong side of Roman Catholic rhetoric about homosexuality and he is mounting a rhetorical counterattack. Truth about numbers or the inner meaning of church symbolism is not and cannot be an issue--because in political rhetoric there is no truth, only a struggle for power. Truth is the first casualty of war, and Foucaultian society is a war of all against all.

Not the least of the problems with Foucault's theory is what happens to "homosexuality" itself. Unlike the prevailing argument that homosexuality is some inherent characteristic, Foucault regards it as a "historically conditioned role, character, personage, even a form of celebrity" (quoting Jordan's characterization of Foucault). There is no "truth" even about homosexuality. Foucault "wanted to deny that homosexuality is a secret about oneself, a hidden identity discovered and then displayed." Using Foucault's analysis, how would one decide that Neo-Gothic chasubles are homosexual while Latin chasubles are not? (This was a big issue, evidently, with "liturgy queens.") It would depend not on some "real" homosexual trait, but on how homosexuality happens to be culturally constructed. Those stolid Roman senators who traipsed in togas (the ancestors of chasubles) may have been constructing a macho heterosexual style.

It is quite plausible on general psychological grounds to suppose that there is homosexuality in the Catholic clergy. Given the all-male nature of priestly society, it would be reasonable to conjecture that homosexuality is higher in that group than in the population at large--a proportion which is itself hard to ascertain. But Jordan's book is not about facts, it is about words: the initial and most valuable section is titled "Church Words." Jordan is onto something when it comes to the issue of official church language (rhetoric) about sexuality. "Cardiac infarction" and "heart attack" have the same descriptive referent but are uttered in very different tones of voice and have extraordinarily different rhetorical effects. "Conjugal act" and "having sex" describe the same thing--as does the dialogue of R-rated films--but the rhetorical meanings are wildly different. "Heart attack" and "sex" are words with affect and effect. How can the church guide sexuality with the bureaucratized, sanitized language of the moral manuals? In that sense, there is not only a silence about "sodomy," there is general silence about sex. Church language seems never to reach the subject. But, then, what is the subject of sexuality? Body position or romantic poesy; facts or words? Foucault is not wholly wrong in regarding sexuality as a "cultural construct." In an earlier book on the moral philosophy of sodomy in medieval theology, Jordan noted that Thomas Aquinas regarded "sodomy" as a subcategory of the vice of luxuria. What is the cultural construct of sexuality (any of the fifty-seven varieties) in a culture of consumerism and luxuria?

Dennis O'Brien, a regular contributor, is president emeritus of the University of Rochester.