Building a Bridge, Fr James Martin

Fr James Martin’s book, Building a Bridge. How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion and Sensitivity does not follow all the strands within the LGBT+ acronym. Nor does Fr Martin offer any thoughts on the ethics and implications of gay parenting, transgender parenting, or the emerging lexicon of political correctness that erases words and terms like “mother”, “father” and “pregnant woman” and seeks to enforce a new order of pronouns.

Most readers of Fr Martin’s book will ask themselves at what point he gets off in the light of the more and more bizarre manifestations and consequences of our latent sexual complexity, unleashed by a culture of licence and legitimized by slogans of diversity and equality.

Extremes of sexual self-expression and accompanying experimentation with procreation have found acceptance or at least acquiescence across wide swathes of Western society despite a court having to adjudicate whether a child’s biological mother can, as a trans-gender man, be registered as the child’s “father” and the dismissal of a teacher for refusing to supervise a boys’ locker room when a trans-gender, biological female joined the group,

For the Catholic Church, the natural order is foundational to the moral order. Fr Martin does not agree. For Fr Martin, both science and lived experience offer better insights into how we best flourish as human beings and as human society.

The problem with science is that it discounts the insights of faith. Secular anthropology studies man’s nature within the world and culture in which he lives. It takes no account of man’s origin and destiny as a creature made in the image of a loving creator and placed within creation primarily “to know, love and serve Him”. It takes no account of how fallen, disordered nature is strengthened and transformed through the grace of the Risen Christ. It takes least account of all of the call to daily sacrifice and submission which opens for us the way that leads to “life, life to the full” (John 10:10).

Christian anthropology understands incarnation in terms of ensouled body or embodied soul. The type of secular gnosticism that sees body as something we have, rather than something we are, something separate from an essential self that lies somewhere within our being, like a captain in a control cabin, free to reshape and rename the external self that envelops it, underpins modern gender science. This is not a Catholic view.

Our lived, personal experience is even less reliable than science. Humankind’s wants and desires, however intensely felt do not necessarily serve our best interests. Taking God at his word often means struggling against compelling emotional convictions. 

Not surprisingly, Fr Martin, looks to Scripture to find a reading of man’s nature that affirms diversity of sexual identity and expression. He quotes Psalm 139 in which the psalmist gives thanks for the wonder of his being. “I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made”. That does indeed include us all, however we are made and however our sexuality is orientated. But we are called to use all the gifts of life according to their proper use. God’s instructions to Adam and Eve connect their relationship to its sexual, procreative dimension. There is no other relationship in Scripture so connected.          

The spousal relationship is powerfully used in Scripture to show that the real enemy of freedom is not bondage and enslavement but chaos and disorder. The story of Noah’s Ark is an emphatic statement of the centrality of the sexual moral order in God’s providence. Coming after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, it upholds in vivid imagery the simply ordered, beautifully diverse and interdependent creation based on the union of male and female. Male and female, the mutual magnetism of complementary elements, is at the very heart of matter itself. Ironically, the other icon of the Flood narrative, the rainbow, has been co-opted by LGBT+.

Fr Martin’s selection of Scripture texts to make a case for LGBT inclusion do not, not surprisingly, include any that treat of marriage. Instead he cites Jesus’s encounters with marginalised people, his acceptance of them. Yet, it is clear that while Christ goes to the margins, or receives those from the margins who approach him, without judgment, it is equally clear that he is inviting them to a closer encounter. Jesus invites himself to the home of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10) but the result of that visit is that Zacchaeus repents of his wrongdoing and vows to repay fourfold those he has wronged. Jesus’s reaching out to Zacchaeus expressed a shepherd’s care for a straying sheep. It did not infer approval of in his way of life as some of the onlookers and self-appointed custodians of righteousness feared. Fr Martin is coming down on the side of the Scribes and Pharisees on this point.

Fr Martin also sees the story of the healing of the centurion’s servant as offering a template for how the Church should respond to those of faith within the LGBT community. The centurion is praised for his faith through which his request is answered. Jesus does not refer in any way to his way of life. Faith is all. But faith is a recognition of truth, the truth of Jesus and his teaching. There is reason to believe the centurion is very aware and respectful of all that Jesus represents and stands for. In Luke, the story carries the added information that this particular centurion, “loves our nation and has built our synagogue” (Luke7:1-10). We don’t know if he was the same centurion who declared at the foot of the cross in all the synoptic gospels, “truly this was the Son of God”. A pagan Roman outwardly, familiar with the God of the Jews and, unlike most of them, open to accepting Jesus as the promised Messiah. Even if it was a different centurion at the foot of the cross, it shows no easy assumptions can be made about the faith understanding of the man who approached Jesus.

The story of Christ’s encounter with another Samaritan, the woman at the well, is the most surprising of all Fr Martin’s choices. Yes, it is again framed as a story of outreach and accompaniment. But at its heart lies a firm affirmation of monogamous, faithful marriage. The directness of Jesus’s words, “Go, call your husband”, carries a rare punch because of its peremptoriness and because it comes as a complete non-sequitur in their conversation. It goes to the heart of the woman’s unspoken story, to the heart of her troubled, needy life. Would it be possible to remove the word “husband” and replace it with another word like partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife? Everything that came from the lips of Jesus about marriage, was a defence of the primal order, of how “it was from the beginning, that a man would leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife, and the two would become one flesh” (Mark 10:8).

 We have to re-assert the basic truth that moral struggle is not unique to any group. Nor is it confined to the sphere of sexual morality. It is for God alone to judge our actions because only he knows the obstacles that snag our paths. The Church respects and supports all its members equally because there is none of us without sin, none without the need of God’s healing and mercy.  

The Church’s ministry of mercy is not at variance with her duty to faithfully impart the truths entrusted to her. It is the very antithesis of mercy to deny truth. It is for its defence of truth that the Church has been persecuted in every age. 

Perhaps the greatest test faced by the Church today is presented by the persistent challenge to join the campaign of what Christ calls “the World” for the normalisation of sexual and gender diversity. And full normalisation, mainstreaming and equality is the uncompromising goal of the LGBT+ movement. This means far more than the “sensitivity, compassion and respect” of which the Catechism and Fr Martin speaks. It means the right to marry and found a family, to change one’s body surgically and chemically. It means recognition for all that technology makes possible for human reproduction. It means all the physical, psychological and spiritual pathologies that accompany this coming of age of the sexual revolution. Yet this moral and social disintegration is met largely with polite silence, acquiescence or worse by our Church.