The problem(s) with “LGBTQ Catholic”

The late Father Richard John Neuhaus had a love/hate relationship with the New York Times.

Richard was a passionate partisan of New York City, which he sometimes described as a preview of the New Jerusalem, but the Grey Lady’s parochialism nonetheless led him to occasionally dismiss New York’s most prestigious daily as a “parish newsletter.” He regularly castigated the Times’ editorials for their air of smug infallibility. And then there was RJN’s annoyance (and more) with the Times’ knee-jerk liberalism, which, by its embrace of every imaginable left-of-center cause, accelerated the decay of liberal politics into the promotion of lifestyle libertinism. Richard was thus years ahead of Joseph Ratzinger in issuing warnings about a dictatorship of relativism, the unavoidable political outcome of the Times’ cultural lurch leftward.

On the other hand, Richard Neuhaus could no more imagine skipping the New York Times in the morning than he could imagine beginning the day without numerous cups of coffee, a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, and a smoke.

That love/hate relationship was crystallized in an incident during Richard’s days as a Lutheran pastor in the then-impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, when the Times declined to refer to a local black pastor (from Christendom’s entrepreneurial Protestant subdivision) as “Bishop” so-and-so. In high dudgeon, RJN wrote A.M. Rosenthal, then the Times’ managing editor, and asked what was going on. The man referred to himself as “Bishop.” His people called him “Bishop.” The sign on the front of his ecclesiastical establishment identified him as “Bishop.” Who did the Times think it was, and what did the Times think it was doing, denying this man the title he and his people used?

Abe Rosenthal eventually wrote Richard a harrumphing letter, stating that, after the painstaking deliberation appropriate to the nation’s newspaper of record, the Times would henceforth refer to the gentleman in question as “Bishop” so-and-so. The letter then concluded with a sentence that would cause Richard Neuhaus to laugh uproariously for decades: “And so, Pastor Neuhaus, you may take some satisfaction from knowing that, in drawing this matter to our attention, you have made a small contribution to the history of our times.”

Or words to that effect, if I may be pardoned for quoting the loathsome Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons.

Over thirty-plus years of friendship and collaboration, I must have heard Richard tell that story a dozen times, but I don’t think I’d thought of it more than once or twice since his death in 2009. Then, recently, I read an article indicating that a churchman I admire, who indicated some sympathy with the charge that the Catholic Church in the West is “obsessed” with questions of sexual morality, nonetheless himself used the term “LGBTQ Catholic.”

Now, as a matter of good manners, I agree with the substance of Richard’s complaint to Abe Rosenthal: people should usually be identified the way they identify themselves, and in any event, it was not up to the New York Times to decide who is and who isn’t a bishop. But a churchman using the term “LGBTQ Catholic” of any member of the Catholic Church seems to me a different matter.

First, it strikes me as incoherent to give at least a nod of credibility to the charge that certain sectors of the world Church are obsessed with sexual morality and then use the hypersexualized term “LGBTQ Catholic” — which, whatever its provenance, reduces an individual to their sexual desires, confusions, or both.

Second, as was pointed out at several synods beginning with Synod 2018, this usage has no warrant in Catholic history, for the Church has never identified its members by libido. Which means it’s just as untoward to speak of “Heterosexual Catholics” as it is of “LGBTQ Catholics.” Why? Because “you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28) and subdividing Catholics this way fractures the unity of the Church.

Finally, in this political and cultural moment, the term “LGBTQ Catholic” is both the carrier of a theological program — the transformation of settled Catholic understandings of the human person and the moral life — and an emblem of various political causes: causes not untinged by the threat of Ratzinger’s “dictatorship of relativism.” The term “LGBTQ Catholic” is not neutrally descriptive; it is, rather, quite loaded, theologically and politically.

We are all sinners in constant need of the redeeming grace of Christ, as Pope Leo XIV forcefully reminds us. When we remember that, we will perhaps be less inclined to countenance delineating each other (and ourselves) by sexual desire, orientation, or practice.

(George Weigel’s column ‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.)