Heresy and moral foolishness in France. Time of choosing for the Church on moral issues

Heresy and moral foolishness at the Centre Sèvres

Paix liturgique reports on the lecture given by openly LGBT and defrocked English cleric James Alison - before Pope Francis restored his ability to confess and absolve. It took place at the Centre Sèvres, at the home of the Jesuits, Pope Francis' congregation.

Are we to deduce from this that the comments made below are supported in high places and constitute the new magisterium, the ideological counterpart of the new liturgy of nothingness expounded by Mgr Viola at Saint Honoré d'Eylau?

In a somewhat tense atmosphere, on 30 May the Centre Sèvres organised a conference by the English homosexual theologian James Alison, a former Dominican who was expelled from his order and dismissed from the clerical state, entitled "Catholics and homosexuals, a special way of living the Creed".

Why the tension? Because the centre's owners feared that the 'Tradis' would disrupt the conference, "because it was announced on Riposte Catholique on 9 May". So much so that they kept the gate separating the Sèvres centre from the street closed and forced the key keeper to stand permanently outside the room, which was occupied by 70 people for 250 places, including a good twenty students from the Sèvres centre, LGBT activists and a lot of white hairs... and nothing happened. In any case, it would have been a great pity to disrupt such a heterodox talk, but one that provides a better understanding of certain processes and heresies shared in such high places.

Riposte Catholique pointed out that James Alison had been reduced to a layman and expelled from the Dominican order, but that Pope Francis had restored to him the power to confess and absolve, before publishing a right of reply by Frédéric Martel, an authority on the subject, in which he said what we reproduce: "The Church no longer reduces anyone to a layman. From time to time it dismisses clerics from the clerical state. Father Alison's case is even more irregular [...] since the Holy Father confirmed his ministry in July 2017 [...] It would be more accurate if you said, "priest with the endorsement of Pope Francis invited to speak by the Centre Sèvres".

THE CONFERENCE STEP BY STEP

The elderly priest who introduced him said straight away: "We met in Mexico, where we shared pious and crazy adventures, he as a charismatic Dominican, I, authorised by the dignity of the Jesuit superiors".

Having said that, he went on to talk about "his work on Rémi Girard, to which James Alison has added two accents. Thanks to his Dominican training, he has a great sensitivity for the text of the New Testament, and the second is his integration with the experience of a young gay man in a Church and a culture that are perfectly respectable, but which only know how to persecute people who don't fit into the standards [...] He has a very creative way of reading the Gospel as the sign of a God who absolutely refuses to be the projection of the aggressive dynamisms of society. It's a new way of thinking about theology and even the Creed, with several sources for rebuilding our faith".

Liturgical peace: in other words, what follows clearly no longer belongs to the domain of the Catholic Faith - but to a belief, something quite different.

James Alison then took the floor to thank us for this "remarkable" presentation. The love of the New Testament is the basis of the Christian faith. It is the nexus mysterium of the Christian faith". Before attempting, in hesitant French, a captatio benevolentiae: "since today is the feast of Saint Joan of Arc, I am the little Englishman who offers himself to be burnt at the stake for you Frenchmen".

THE NEGATION OF CHRIST'S SACRIFICE

"The gay question, as we say in English, is a discussion by proxy on the sacrifice of Christ and an expression of concern - if we are liberal on the gay question, will we become liberal on the sacrifice of Christ? Now, depending on how we understand the question of the Sacrifice [of Christ], we may or may not move on the gay question.

There is Adam's sin [original sin], after which everything must be forgiven. Jesus said to God, I become man and I can make a human sacrifice to appease your rage, he convinced him and paid the price for original sin. God then said to him, all those who believe in you can be saved, all those who are outside will always suffer. In that world, the Mass would be the repetition of the Sacrifice, the priest offering a victim to God. The menu, the payment for original sin, is in the Hebrew literature [the list of sins in the Old Testament], the sacrifice serves to create the group of good people, who are not like the bad people, and the menu must never be changed.

If you question the list of sins [including sodomy, which he never names] you are accused of questioning Jesus' sacrifice; this is emotional blackmail, classic in Lenten preaching, "I suffered so much for you, and you continue to sin?" This notion of sacrifice closes the question of goodness and makes sin "unquestionable". It is impossible to learn anything new from the Bible and the magisterium of the Church.

If we suggest that there is something to learn from homosexuals, we deduce that Jesus' price was not well paid and that the list of sins was not the right one. René Girard taught us how sacrifice worked in the ancient world and that Christ's sacrifice is a subversion of it. God's presence was entering a place where people were being sacrificed, in the midst of our violence, in a death that gives the impression of being a sacrifice, but which is only a murder by the crowd (turba) in a confusion of the religious and the civic. God enters into the place of the condemned man, experiences the misery, the death sentence, dies and shows that he loves.

It's a love that doesn't come from the top down - I sacrifice myself for you, even though I don't love you - but side by side - I love you well. From the moment God said "listen to my son", the fatherly way became brotherly. In this situation, things can be discovered - not in the Aztec version, if you'll pardon the expression, where sacrifice is a payment to an enraged God. Love is the opening up of reasoning.

"The invention of heterosexuality and the witch-hunt."

The fact that we already have a victim who forgives us, when we get together every time to repeat the sacrificial mechanism, we get together by contrast with someone, Jesus tells us "you've already done that". Is there a way to do something different and stop forming unanimous circles against others? When we stop uniting against the witch, we open ourselves up to learning about reality. The moment we stop believing that witches cause hail, we open ourselves up to the possibility of learning about the scientific, meteorological causes of hail.

It's the same for the modern Christian faith: we can combine openness with knowledge of the faith. A relational way, not just a proportional one. Obviously, when it came to the homosexual question, we followed the same path as for witches. For us, the issue arose with the invention of heterosexuality, I hope that's obvious to you. From the seventeenth century onwards, boys and men were brought up together, girls and women together, there was the development of marriage and companionship in the north of France, arranged marriages with the vigilance of all those close to them, it became the norm - and we began to detect people who did not fit into this world, and who in a homosocial world would have remained invisible.

Homosexuality gave rise to medical, criminal and psychological questions, questions about its pathological nature - in any case, something damaged. Then there were the two world wars, with a mass of people of this type serving side by side in the armed forces, then their demobilisation - it takes major social movements to get things moving. In the United States after the Second World War, it was the first time that homosexuals stopped being seen as a problem, that the witch-hunt stopped and that we could talk about social causes.

One element of the question that is absolutely central - if you're gay or lesbian you're all going through this - is whether it's just a hedonism that gives you a very rich sex life, but that's a way of deceiving yourself, or whether you are in fact homosexual. It's an important question to know whether, as the Roman congregations tell us almost literally, you are just intrinsically heterosexual people with a serious disorder...

Or whether you carry a minority, non-pathological variant of the human condition that was once considered a serious disorder. Being left-handed is no worse or better than being right-handed. In the life of faith, these questions come with conscience - conscience is patient, it doesn't skip steps, it wants the truth.

So, if we follow the little Ratzinger, agere sequitur esse, we act according to what we are. The question is, will I go to Heaven as I am, or, if we follow the sacrificial version, in spite of a part of what I am?

("Liturgical peace: the Church's teaching on marriage and procreation in the dustbin?)

The second question of conscience, especially among young people who don't know much about Catholic morality, but who just know that the Church says bad things about gays - once you've found what you are, it's about self-fulfilment. But the very fact that you don't want children [in a sexual relationship or couple] is seen by the Church as disordered.

The only way the Church talks about us LGBT people is by drawing a negative inference from the marital act - none of the Scripture sources count, they have nothing to do with it, and the Rite congregation ended up concluding that there was no point in summoning up all those texts that are usually used to condemn homosexuality. This is possible if we are damaged heterosexuals, not if our deepest identity is homosexuality - because there is an innate tendency to the glory of God.

So the Church has no strict teaching on the LGBT question; its only sources are passages of Scripture that it itself acknowledges to be irrelevant to the question of whether someone who is the carrier of a non-pathological minority variant should be accepted as they are or criticised by straight people?

This is where we come close to the question of synodality - should we be able to talk about it or should we be denied a voice by people who call us madmen who think they're Napoleon? The question of synodality is to talk about all this between brothers, to accept that there is no paternal or magisterial way above or below us, the magisterium is between us, and this is what Pope Francis develops in Amoris Laetitia. God's only way is fraternal - there is no paternal way in the Church.

The same goes for LGBT people. Gustave Martelet said to Paul VI at the time of Humanae Vitae, if he dropped the link between sexual relations or love and procreation, the Church would no longer have any logical reason to condemn homosexuality. If the Christian world persists, there is a good Credo to share with the world".

At the end of her talk, a lady from the Sèvres centre regretfully recalled that "in this house there are courses in moral theology and students come from backgrounds where the superiors' positions on these ecclesiastical questions are very rigid. Synodality is about the importance of the parousia, speaking in truth and openly".

Paix liturgique:Is synodality about piling up heresies while claiming that it's about science, truth, deep identity and the Creed to be shared with the world? You have four hours...

James Alison returns to the subject with a question: "There's a wonderful document signed by Ratzinger in 1983 that explains how to avoid fundamentalism and above all how not to update texts that go against charity. Fundamentalist translations are a betrayal.

Last year the document Che cosa e l'Uomo in Italian [in 2019 in fact] reminded us that the texts often used in the Bible to condemn homosexuality had nothing to do with it - the term homosexuality was invented in 1869 by a German psychiatrist who was trying to describe types of people in ancient times; there were other ways of understanding and designating this type of relationship.

Today, thank God, we are beginning to see bishops who recognise that we no longer know what to say on the issue of homosexuality, like Mgr Bonny of Antwerp, who said very clearly that the Vatican should change its teaching.

Mgr Hollerich, Cardinal Archbishop of Luxembourg [and rapporteur for the Synod on Synodality] spoke very wisely on these issues, saying in particular that the Church's biological knowledge dated back to the second century AD and was light years ahead of today's knowledge - at the time, they thought that the sex of unborn children depended on the direction of the wind.

Incidentally, that's one of the main reasons why young people leave the Church - they're noble, and they have LGBT friends with whom they talk freely".

Liturgical peace: James Alison didn't go to Chartres either...

Among the few questions, a lady with white hair said: "You insist on the anomaly. I'm a mother of a certain age, I've looked after young people in difficulty, and in all the confidences I've received from young gay and lesbian people, they've told me that they've been hijacked by adults and that's led them to fall into the anomaly". A question that elicits murmurs from the audience.

Not enough to derail James Alison, who is very quick to criticise "those who live in a world of lies and don't want to see", and who shortly before quoted ICASE - but without specifying that according to the statistics in the Sauvé report, the vast majority of recorded rapes of minors are homosexual, and that the extreme majority of predators questioned by the commission claim to have acted for reasons of same-sex attraction, but who clearly has no desire to answer:

"Many straight people were abused as children and did not become LGBT. I believe that sexual orientation, according to scientists, can be changed". Returning to her question, the woman asked again: "It comes down to education and the importance of parental vigilance". Alison continued to answer in the opposite direction: "No, not at all. For Catholic morality, the causes, the aetiology, is not as important as the future, knowing where you're going".

Meanwhile Alison - who clearly hasn't read the CIASE report - asserts: "There's no pathological issue or additional sexual disorder in gay or straight people - we're all affected in the same way. And a good education won't change anything about sexual orientation".

The woman rolled her eyes. She has just realised that synodality and openness are all the better for not being questioned, while preaching dialogue.

REFLECTIONS BY PAIX LITURGIQUE

1- This concrete and recent example clearly shows that there exist today within the Church, and with the support of a significant part of the Catholic hierarchy, people and institutions, some of them "prestigious", who defend ideas that are completely new but alien to the Church's two-thousand-year-old thinking.

2 - It is not up to us, simple lay people, to judge, and even less to condemn or exclude; that is up to the hierarchy of the Church. We recognise that it has sometimes been able to do so, notably in the case of James Alison, who was both excluded from the Order of Saint Dominic and reduced to the lay state, but he was also somehow reinstated by the highest authority of the Church to which we belong.

3 - This situation will seem completely incomprehensible to ordinary believers, i.e. to most of us who, despite our experience and secular studies, remain simple lay people (as seems to be the case of the lady who attended the conference). But it does allow us to ask a question: Why the double standards?

Why are we persecuted for our attachment to a faith and a liturgical tradition that goes back thousands of years, on the grounds that we are endangering the unity of the Church, while others, who have already gone who knows where, seem to benefit from a paternal concern?

4 - Well, we don't accept this situation and we never will, and to those who want to spread war, hatred and exclusion we say loud and clear that we won't give up the Faith of our Fathers.

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