Abstract
In 2016, James Martin received the Building a Bridge Award from New Ways Ministry, which advocates for equality and respect for LGBT Catholics, as well as for reconciliation within the Catholic Church and wider society. In 1993, the US Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter, Always Our Children, reassured parents of gay and lesbian children that the “must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity” (quoting the 1993 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2358). Yet in the wake of the 2016 bombing of the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, only a handful of the bishops who decried yet another act of senseless violence named this as a bombing expressly targeting gay people.
This episcopal omission—whether rooted in fear, hypocrisy or homophobia—inspired M. to write Building a Bridge, an expanded version of his New Ways Ministry acceptance speech. He offers “a meditation for the church at large” as it strives to replace divisions with “respect, compassion and sensitivity” (8). M. envisions traffic moving across the bridge in two directions. He exhorts LGBT Catholics to remember that seemingly unsympathetic or hostile clergy may not be personally familiar with gay men and lesbians who are open about their sexuality, or may even have chosen their vocation as a refuge from personal same-sex attraction (59–61).
Several bishops and cardinals support M., including those who wrote jacket endorsements (Kevin Farrell, Joseph Tobin, Robert McElroy). Yet to many “John Paul II” bishops, the fact that two-thirds of US Catholics now support same-sex marriage (Pew Research Center 2017) is undoubtedly destabilizing, frightening, even horrifying. These bishops too deserve sensitivity and understanding. Still, the heart of M.’s book is a cry for compassion for those LGBT people who remain faithful to a church that de facto rejects them (terming their sexual identities “intrinsically disordered,” and in theory barring same-sex partners from communion). As M. remarks, “the rash of suicides among LGBT youths cannot fail to move the Christian heart” (143). “The church has a special call to proclaim God’s love for a people who are often made to feel . . . as though they were damaged goods, unworthy of ministry, and even subhuman” (27).
M. is right that prophetic denunciations of exclusionary or hateful behavior are unlikely to convert the powerful to more sympathetic attitudes. Uniting all in imitation of Christ would seem a better strategy. To that end he includes several biblical passages for reflection by travelers from both of the bridge’s entry points. M. Finds the declaration of Psalm 139, that God has knit us in our mothers’ wombs so that we are “wonderfully made,” to be most powerful for gay persons. For travelers from the other direction, he cites stories such as the Good Samaritan, and Zaccheus, tax collector and “chief sinner, who climbed a tree to see Jesus, received a personal visit, then gave half his wealth to the poor. The moral is to reach out to sinners even before they convert. Gay people and their allies may be taken aback by the comparison; of course, as interpreters, they are free to place others in the sinner role. The point, however, is that quick judgment should be replaced with outreach. The result might be a surprising event of hospitality in which everyone is fed.
M.’s gentle, gracious, and attractive book neither breaches nor defends any magisterial norms of Catholic social ethics, though he justly complains that they are applied with extreme selectivity. In fact, this is a book not about sexual ethics, but about ecclesiology and pastoral theology. The church is a pilgrim church, and its embrace should be inclusive. Those in pastoral roles should adopt Pope Francis’s style of “encounter” and listening. Yet Building a Bridge has been roundly attacked from the dogmatic and barricading “right” (notably a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Guinean Cardinal Robert Sara, head of the Congregation for Divine Worship; and an online campaign by Church Militant); and indignantly disparaged from the fed-up and activist “left” (Jamie Manson in the National Catholic Reporter).
The reason may lie in the book’s subtext: encounter will change moral perceptions. This message is dangerous, progressive, or not revolutionary enough, depending on viewpoint. There is a precedent. Pope Francis encounters and accompanies more than he judges and declares. Amoris Laetitia recommends pastoral discernment of “irregular” situations of sex and marriage, and leaves solutions to the local church. Many Catholics (and former Catholics) are no longer waiting. But others either worry or hope that bridges of compassion might lead to innovative moral and sacramental practices, and eventually to changes in teaching. Building a Bridge certainly scores in the progressive and hopeful column of the ledger. M. signs off for the US Catholic majority: LGBT Catholics’ experiences of “God at work in their lives” reveal “what it means to be ‘wonderfully made’” (150).