Catholic Schools Week: The Arc Is Indeed Long
My own experience with Catholic high schools – an arc of more than forty years – confirms that the direction is indeed towards justice, but that we need to keep working to make the arc bend that way.
Michaelangelo Allocca (he/him/his) is a member of St. Francis Xavier parish, Manhattan, New York, and a religion teacher at St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City, New Jersey. He holds degrees in religion from Columbia University and the University of Chicago, and he has wide experience teaching religious studies, humanities, and Latin at the high school and university levels, and also as a catechist and retreat leader.
My own experience with Catholic high schools – an arc of more than forty years – confirms that the direction is indeed towards justice, but that we need to keep working to make the arc bend that way.
REJOICE! … Really? With all the bad news, how can we rejoice?
This issue has been a tangled mess for us in the queer segment of the population. Difficulties arise from both the “wall of separation” and from the “inherently intertwined” points of view.
Although intended to hide the sex organs of Adam and Eve, those fig-leaf Fruit-of-the-Looms managed to focus attention on them. The only thing they covered up was the real meaning of the story.
As a gay man in the Church, I am constantly torn between the “glass half-empty” and “glass half-full” views – or more in keeping with the imagery at hand, the question of “Is that light the coming Day of Wrath, blazing like an oven – or is it the Sun of Justice, with its healing rays?”
Could Jesus mean his “Depart from me!” precisely for those who would try to exclude others?
“What are you, a masochist?” We in the Catholic LGBTQ community sometimes hear this question from well-meaning, non-Catholic friends, who wonder how we can remain in a Church that seems, in many ways, not to want us.
These readings display the root of the Church’s traditional rejection of our LGBTQ community: it “knows about” us in a catechism sort of way…But it is only beginning to know us.”
I propose that the Solemnity of Christ the King be made the official sacred holiday of the Catholic LGBTQ community. Before I am tied to the stake and a fire lit beneath my feet, please allow me a minute to explain.
I am frankly uncomfortable with some of the ways that the Church chooses to honor Mary. Maybe more disturbing, the Church seems to proceed from the same type of theological thinking that leads to homophobia and transphobia.
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