The Gay-Bashing Pope
Flash! This just in: All the while that Afghanistan's ruling Taliban has been protecting Osama bin Laden, Italy has been harboring another omnipotent religious zealot, one who equally condemns us Western sinners and incites violence with his incendiary rhetoric. Yes, right there on the European mainland! n Meet John Paul II, Christian fundamentalist extraordinaire and a man who inspires thugs across the globe who commit hate crimes against homosexuals, a form of terrorism if ever there was one. "Homosexual acts are against nature's laws," John Paul said last summer to cheering crowds from his balcony overlooking St. Peter's Square. "The church cannot silence the truth, because this would not help discern what is good from what is evil."
The Pope claims to be adamantly opposed to violence, and he does call an awful lot of things "evil"?from the death penalty to divorce?but when one uses the word "evil" against a minority group that is often under physical attack it becomes a clarion call to bashers. Evil, after all?and certainly from listening to George W. Bush these days?is often considered something that must be hunted down and destroyed. John Paul launches his broadsides against people who are subject to brutal, sometimes fatal assaults, simply because of their perceived difference. The violent acts are often committed in the name of the very religious decrees the Pope and his Vatican "thinkers" put forth: If not for a consistently promoted religious belief that homosexuality is abhorrent, against nature and an affront to God, why would there ever be any Matthew Shepards found bloodied, beaten and left to die on fences?
So it's perhaps a bit ironic, perhaps a bit outlandish, that Pope John Paul last week accepted the helmet of deceased New York City Fire Dept. Chaplain Mychal Judge at a ceremony in St. Peter's Basilica in which the pontiff honored visiting New York City firefighters. Maybe the Pope doesn't read New York magazine, or LGNY or a variety of other publications that rushed out posthumous outing stories on the chaplain. Judge died when he was hit by falling debris during the attack on the World Trade Center, having gone to the site to administer last rites to fallen firefighters. And within days of his death it was reported that Judge, loved throughout the FDNY and New York's Catholic archdiocese, was gay and wasn't so secretive about it. He was out to those he knew would be okay with it?such as the many gay activists he worked with, as well as the more accepting members of the Fire Dept., including Commissioner Thomas Von Essen?and was more circumspect to those he knew wouldn't approve, such as church officials.
At the Rome event, it was a visiting New York firefighter who presented John Paul with Judge's helmet after the Pope gave a speech honoring the firefighters. It's possible that the 81-year-old Pope didn't have a clue about who owned the helmet. Or maybe the Pope knew it was the deceased chaplain's helmet, but perhaps no one in the New York archdiocese bothered to brief the Pope's people on the scuttlebutt about Judge. Whether John Paul knew about Judge or not, however, the symbolism of the event was rife with hypocrisy and irony, as the Pope ultimately honored one of those people he's labeled "intrinsically disordered." Having railed against the forces of "evil," the Pope was now cradling that evil in his bosom.
Perhaps the Pope, if he did know about Judge, felt there was nothing inconsistent about that as long as he didn't mention Judge's homosexuality, and thus didn't promote Judge's "disorder" as something acceptable. Some church purists indeed might say that there was nothing hypocritical about the Pope's honoring Judge. The church has a "love the sinner, hate the sin" policy, after all. Those who are homosexually oriented are not evil simply by nature of their inclinations?they are evil only if they act on those inclinations. In the sin department, those who engage in homosexual acts are technically on a par with those who engage in premarital heterosexual sex, even though the former is railed against as a threat to Western civilization while the latter is treated with a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge. And when it comes to nuns and priests, well, they're to remain celibate no matter what the object of their fantasies is. As long as they don't do the nasty in any way?including with their own hands?they could be into men, women, rubber hoses, even sheep.
I don't know if Judge was sexually active or not. Even if he was celibate, however, according to the Pope's own standards Judge still can be seen as promoting evil, and that's got to be as bad in the Pope's mind as getting down and dirty oneself. According to the New York magazine article, Judge helped gay men come out of the closet and accept their homosexuality, the complete opposite of the Vatican's decrees that one must lead a heterosexual life regardless of one's inclinations. The Catholic church even quietly runs its own version of an "ex-gay" ministry, called Courage and headquartered in the Bronx with chapters around the globe, that will help one to lead a straight life.
"Mike taught me how to come out as a young man," one gay man told New York. "And how to see sexuality as an important part of who I am... He took away the shame." Judge had even marched in the alternative St. Patrick's Day Parade?the pro-gay one held in Queens by Irish gay activists who've been excluded from the annual St. Patrick's Day parade in part because of pressures from the Catholic archdiocese.
It would be interesting to know just what the Pope knew about Judge when he accepted that helmet; having not acknowledged Judge's being gay, the Pope can always feign ignorance. Perhaps it's too much for anyone to hope that an 81-year-old church leader who's locked himself away in a basilica all these years will ever change. But if priests like Father Judge are any indication, the revolution that's happening in the Catholic Church may be far too widespread for the Pope's successor to ignore.
Michelangelo Signorile can be reached at [www.signorile.com.](http://www.signorile.com)