It works for her! And this is good news...and not only for her! Her position as chaste-lesbian is puzzling, fascinating, paradoxical and very challenging. She is living sexual chastity as an observant Catholic and inviting other gay Catholics to the same. This is marvelous! She loves being Catholic, being gay, and being chaste! But is this coherent?
My answer: It works for a small niche and therefore is praiseworthy. But it is eccentric: neither practicable nor coherent as a broad cultural program.
Favorite Eccentrics
Eve reminds me of Dorothy Day. Brilliant, passionate, holy, and eccentric or off-center. In a beautiful way! Dorothy is on the path for canonization and may become our first post-abortive, anarchist, pacifist saint. Maybe Eve will one day be our first openly lesbian saint. That would be a good thing.
But the Catholic Worker and the Gay-Chaste-Catholic community are off-beat, anti-bourgeois, radical-bohemian communities. Outliers. Not part of mainstream Catholic life. Gay-orientation, anarchism and pacifism are all out-of-sync with normal Catholicism; but not impediments in themselves to Catholic practice as they are prudential judgements which can combine with other elements into holiness of life.
We Catholics cherish a rich legacy of such eccentric, brilliant, fascinating, holy, inspiring women: Elizabeth Anscombe, Adrienne von Speyr, Caryl Houselander, Catherine de Hueck Dougherty, Heather King, Sigrid Undset, Flannery O'Connor, Mother Angelica, Mother Theresa, Raissa Maritain, Edith Stein, (unbaptized) Simone Weil and many others. In brilliant, peculiar, sanctified passion they grasp their Catholic faith in a way that challenges mainstream bourgeois mediocrity and banality.
Ordinary Catholic life, as in a typical parish with normal priests, is mundane, prosaic, often boring. But the Catholic universe has all kinds of bizarre, extraordinary phenomena: mystics, hermits, anchorites, stigmatics, bi-locators, incorrupt corpses, mendicants, pilgrims, martyrs, consecrated virgins. Additionally, we have eccentric communities: Catholic Worker, Eve's network of chaste gays, Opus Dei, the Neocatechumenal Way, The Latin Mass sector, charismatic covenant communities, Hebrew-Catholic Alliance, and a vast variety of religious orders.
All of the above combine in complex, marvelous manners some degree of disorder with God's mysterious grace. All of them are NOT "the way" for everyone. They are special missions, special calls. Extraordinary and yet needing to be integrated into the broader Body of Christ. When blessed with prudent leadership within and a discriminating welcome from hierarchy without they enrich our Church.
Redefinition of "Gay"?
Eve is challenging in that she is redefining "gay" in a Catholic-friendly manner and redefining Catholic chastity in a gay-friendly manner. This is good news. It promises to work, on a small scale; not as part of a broader Catholic culture. It does open us conservatives to a more positive view of "gay." She opens a window, however small, of dialogue between gay and Catholic.
"Gay" in ordinary usage entails three elements: First, homosexual longings. Second, these are so intense and deep that they come to define in an essential manner one's identity. Thirdly, the moral judgement that sexuality is not essentially connected to procreation so that same-sex activity is ethically good.
The third moral decision, the detachment of sexuality from fruitfulness, is the contradiction between Catholic and gay. The issue is chastity. Eve accepts Catholic chastity even as she upholds the value of "gay identity" and thereby reconciles gay and Catholic.
She agrees with the gay movement that sexuality is so powerful and interior to the human person that it needs to be recognized, accepted, communicated openly and not repressed and hidden. We can here identify gay liberation as part of the profound pivot in Western culture, radically in the 1960s, from an ethos of restrain, reserve, self-control to one of authenticity, transparency, openness, and acceptance: the famous Triumph of the Therapeutic! So is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Conservative Catholicism stands against the now-hegemonic Cultural-Freudian-Marxism that heralds the liberation of sexuality from the bondage of repression-family-fidelity-procreation. But Tushnet is suggesting that this may not be an absolute black/white binary. There may be some good in this recognition of the power and importance of sexuality and the liberating value of acceptance and disclosure.
A very close priest friend of mine came into his gay identity by way of the 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. That dynamic encourages the move out of shame by sharing of secrets. Additionally, Father Mark joined closed gay meetings and there came into his new identity. He clearly experienced a release from shame and oppression. He embraced his new identity as a gay Catholic priest. Unlike Eve, he was in tension with Catholic teaching on chastity and I am uncertain as to his fidelity to his vow. The trajectory of his life (he died some years ago) was, for me, a sad one. He fulfilled what another gay friend said to me over 50 years ago: the gay life is a sad one.
But I can imagine him under the influence of Eve and her group: embracing at once his gay personality and his call to chastity. He could have lived and died as an integrated, happy priest.
The gay life and community (from what I can see) is not just about sex: it is a sensibility, a set of values, a taste for irony and humor, for art and even prayer. It is, in part, a life of compassion, of kindness, of delight in the beautiful, including same-sex loveliness and even in a chaste mode.
The Catholic intuition is to accept and affirm everything that is good, true and beautiful. In this new Tushnet model there is much to admire. We can welcome a cultural shift in which homosexuality in itself, as attraction and longing, is no longer stigmatized and shamed. And therefore, in theory at least, we can distinguish gay identity (element 2 above) as a sensibility-identity-culture from the anti-Catholic detachment of procreation from sexuality (element 3). Clearly, there is a positive dimension to gay liberation which a genuinely catholic Catholic wisdom will welcome. This is the challenge of Eve Tushnet.
Challenges
But there are challenges and limits to that reconciliation. Eve is sensitive to the positive dimensions of gay identity but may underestimate the negatives.
First, I suspect this reconciliation is easier for a female homosexual. Womanly sexuality is generally less explosive, compulsive, aggressive and imperial than that of the man. In her the emotional, psychological and romantic has relative more influence. I doubt there are many males who could so serenely reconcile gay with Catholic-chaste.
Secondly, she understandably despises the "conversion therapy," strong in fundamentalist and evangelical communities, which ambitions to change one into heterosexual. She doesn't seem (to my knowledge which is limited) clearly distinguish this from the more gentle, scientific and Catholic-friendly "reparative therapy" of Joseph Nicolosi and others. This last does not ambition a change of "orientation." Rather, it seeks to address any underlying wounds to the psyche that can be connected especially to the compulsivity and obsessiveness of same-sex cravings. These include: misconnection with father or mother, negative body image, abuse, poor attachment to same-sex peers, low gender-self-esteem and other. The intent here is not to erase same-sex attraction but, as in all good therapy, to reduce compulsivity/obsession rooted in anxiety, resentment, insecurity, isolation and enlarge the domain of psychological freedom. Understood in this way, reparative therapy is as valuable for the heterosexual who suffers similar wounds and the associated compulsivity and bondage.
Thirdly, the "pearls" that Eve wants to harvest from gay liberation are embedded in a highly dysfunctional culture. True child of the sexual revolution, this culture (although surely not everyone who participates) is saturated with: self-indulgence, histrionics, narcissism, entitlement, indignation over victimization (from a position of affluence, prestige and power), self-righteousness and moralistic rage against the traditional conjunction of sex with new life. Something like what St. Thomas did for Aristotle needs to be done in our day for the gay movement. This is a subtle, delicate task: to embrace the good but renounce the bad. Eve Tushnet is a big step in the right direction.
Fourthly, it would be imprudent to expand her model very broadly. For example, we don't want to encourage a gay culture in the priesthood and seminaries. This especially in light of the priest sex scandal wherein teen boys were overwhelmingly targeted. Under the Francis' papacy we see the unveiling of the strength and power of the "McCarrick Network." We need to seek and esteem in our priests/bishops a wholesome virility, chastity, paternity and fidelity.
Fifthly, even less do we want to encourage our young to precociously embrace a gay identity, particularly through LGBTQ support clubs in Catholic schools. Raised in a loving, secular, liberal environment, Eve came out as gay at the age of 13. We see that in the long run this served her well as she is imbued with a sterling moral compass. But this is not the norm. We want to discourage such sexual-romantic precociousness and protect the innocence of our young. We do well to maintain, in general, traditions of discretion and reverence in things sexual and allow the slow, steady, healthy blooming into feminine and masculine maturities.
Sixthly, the witness of Tushnet raises the broader philosophical question of desire: including the passion and depth of sexual-romantic longing. She would assert that even these homosexual longings, incapable of full satisfaction, are nevertheless in themselves good insofar as they can be directed to the genuinely good-true-beautiful. In other words, we need to disciple, direct and correct them; even as wee need to accept them with their hidden longing for God. In this she echoes, I believe, the invaluable legacy of Monsignor Luigi Giussanni who spoke so elegantly of the noble yearnings of the human heart as moving always toward the Good.
Lastly, the language of "disorder" in the Catechism which is so offensive to gay liberation. This is the heart of the antagonism between gay and Catholic. The Catholic position is clear: it is not the person, nor the attraction nor the condition that is "disordered" but rather that the inclination is towards what is itself disordered, sterile-non-unitive sex whether homo or hetero. The Church can never back away from this view of sex. But we can understand how the word "disorder" is entangled with stigma and shame. The word is troubled also as it suggest a psychological or emotional dysfunction. This is an issue that can hardly be discussed in the current field of psychology which is ideologically committed to one side of the issue. I prefer a stronger Catholic emphasis upon "concupiscence" as our shared legacy of sexual disorder from original sin. We know that many saints were tormented by disordered, lustful cravings. Many of the dessert fathers/mothers fought these for years in the wilderness. It is part of the ordinary itinerary to holiness of life. In this, homos and heteros are on even terrain. What is worse: voyeurism, pornography and masturbation by homosexuals or heterosexuals? Contracepted co-habitation by the straight or sterile sex of the gay? Morally, to my mind, they are equivalent. They both contravene our Catholic code. So we do well to uphold the code, renounce the specific shame of homosexuality, and move from the language of disorder to that of concupiscence.
To Conclude
This remarkable, refreshing young woman has a distinctive message for our culture: an inspired movement to revive chastity even as we welcome what is best in gay liberation: a release from shame, stigma, and isolation. In her company, we can relax in our culture war vigilance: agree in the beauty of purity of heart and mind; breath free of anxiety and resentment; and embrace our gay brothers and sisters in the very fragility, woundedness, reverence and tenderness they share with us.
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