The Revolution of Mercy and a New Ecumenism

Abstract

The Revolution of Mercy and a New Ecumenism Tomáš Halík Some time ago, sensational and striking news from the Vatican appeared on the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers. Apart from the form, the core of the message lay in Pope Francis shocking the world by speaking – in the documentary film Francesco (a 2020 documentary film directed by Evgeny Afineevsky) – about homosexuals and their entitlement to love in a very humane manner, as a normal twenty-first-century person who is both tender-hearted and has a good head on their shoulders. He spoke as if there had not been long centuries of fear, prejudice and hatred towards nonheterosexual people – the prejudice that has caused many human tragedies and driven many people to suicide. Not so long ago, a number of such tragedies happened in the Czech countryside, caused by fear of a conservative Catholic family’s reaction to a teenager’s ‘coming-out’. In this instance, the pope did not content himself with merely referring to the pseudo-progressive but, in fact, inconsistent position of existing church documents that say LGBT people must be treated ‘sympathetically’, while, nevertheless, offering homosexual believers life-long sexual abstinence as the only acceptable solution. People are losing patience when they read church documents that are reminiscent of the fairy tale about a clever girl who was invited to come to the castle ‘neither naked nor dressed’. I will never forget how a certain gay Catholic intellectual looked at me when I said that we could perhaps accept his union as a ‘lesser evil’ – the words that I then in good faith regarded as most generous and progressive on my part as a confessor. The person responded with a quiet question: ‘Father, why should I see the life-long relationship of love, fidelity, and mutual support with my partner as evil?’ In the subsequent decades I have experienced major surprises as I realised that the perception of a high percentage of gays among the Catholic clergy are not merely malicious gossip spread by the enemies of the church. I have come to know a whole variety of them: from those who lived a life of complete chastity, projecting a kind of delicate and Studies • volume 110 • number 437 27 The Revolution of Mercy and a New Ecumenism understanding motherliness into their pastoral approach to people, to those who were in a complete denial of their sexual orientation, living a double life and compensating for their inner conflicts as a result of this situation by exercising ultraconservative aggressiveness toward homosexuals. Behind almost all cases of the most zealous campaigners against the ‘tsunami of homosexualism’, I detected, thanks to my experience with psychotherapeutic practice, a priest who was trying to ‘shout down’ his personal issue. Reactions to the pope’s statement The pope’s comments in Francesco were not decisive. His support for ‘civil unions’ (not ‘marriage’) of LGBT people and a humane approach to them is longstanding and well-known from many of his earlier statements. I have been waiting for a reaction from conservative enemies of Pope Francis to these most recent words. Will there again be new ‘filial corrections’ by a group of conservative theologians and dubia (doubts, objections) by some cardinals? This is what happened previously, when Pope Francis sensitively mentioned in his encyclical Amoris laetitia that divorced and remarried persons do not have to be harshly denied the Eucharist and forced to observe sexual abstinence in their second marriage under all circumstances and for good; every case needs to be addressed wisely and kindly, with conscience also taken into consideration. What these opponents demand from the pope is rigid adherence to the letter of the Law. That is exactly the attitude that Jesus opposed during his whole life in his encounters with some of the religious elites of his time, warning his disciples to beware of the ‘yeast of the Pharisees’. I think that the present-day Pharisees are still deliberating about their action. Some bishops were heard to say that the flippant pope simply had a slip of the tongue in front of the camera and that his words have no dogmatic authority. ‘Calm down, friends! The...