The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism

by Mark D. Jordan

Book Overview

The past decade has seen homosexual scandals in the Catholic Church becoming ever more visible, and the Vatican's directives on homosexuality becoming ever more forceful, begging the question Mark Jordan tries to answer here: how can the Catholic Church be at once so homophobic and so homoerotic? His analysis is a keen and readable study of the tangled relationship between male homosexuality and modern Catholicism.

" Jordan] has offered glimpses,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226410412
• ISBN13: 9780226410418
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 342 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Interesting

A bit blabby, but overall quite interesting. If you read history, which some of the previous reviewers evidently have not, the church has always been a haven for those interested in alternative lifestyles. This is a problem when it focuses on children, of course. After all, the Marquis de Sade claimed that he learned his various perversions from the Jesuit priests who tutored him as a child.

AMAZING!

This book is truly a scholastic masterpiece. The author tackles numerous contraversial topics tactfully. The writing style coupled with the author's wit and intellect made this book fantastic. I think that every American Catholic should read this! A necessary piece of literary genius that should be in every LBGT Catholic's library!

A challenge to gay Catholics

Mark Jordon's book does an adequate job of discussing the systematic Catholic language that does now allow for disagreement or dissent. Beyond that Jordan reveals how homerotic the liturgy and the beauracracy of the Church is. Jordan then challenges to begin a new Catholic community. Not a community such as Dignity, but one in which a new language and a new way of saying homosexual can become the foundation of a new teaching.For some Gay Catholics, who wish to stay within the church, this may seem like whistling past the cemetery. But it may be the only way one can move the Catholic Church, albeit probably through another milennium, into not only the recognition that its basis is homoerotic, but to embrace it as well.One wonders, though, how this community begins. Where are the writers, the liturgists, the theologians? The only other answer for gay Catholics is to find another denomination or marginal quasi Christian group.Jordon's idea may be quite exciting.

Why the Vatican prefers to ordain Gay priests

Mark Jordan's book well illustrates Garry Wills's claim in "Papal Sin" that the unwitting legacy of JPII's papacy is a homosexual priesthood. However, Jordan's book goes far deeper in exposing the extent to which the Catholic Church has cynically used priests with homosexual tendencies for a thousand years. Once ordained, these hapless young men could then be used to wage war against innocent and open forms of sexual expression. Anyone who deviates from the 'party line' would have his own homosexuality exposed! This has created a situation where blackmail and hypocrisy run rampant in the inner circles of Roman Catholicism... Further, the young priest's anguished knowledge of his own hypocrisy would make it far harder for him to intervene and denounce any other occasion of injustice and exploitation. For example, it is possible to see how Paul VI's alleged homosexual tendencies could have been used by the Roman Curia to block any change in the Vatican's position towards birth control. It is tragic that a largely and secretly homosexual priesthood should have ultimate authority over the sexual practices of married catholics.

Why Homosexuality Dominates Catholic Discussion

This book offers an answer to the question of why homosexuality is such a repeated theme on Catholic internet discussion lists on the net. Jordan's book is *not* another example of the efforts to discuss the fallacies of "natural law" arguments used in recent Catholic documents (although, in passing, Jordan -- a specialist in the thought of Aquinas -- does quite spectacularly explode current uses of such language); nor does he discuss the by now absurd use of "proof texts" by the Catholic bureaucracy.Rather Jordan addresses the huge number of official Catholic documents about homosexuality since 1975 (not just from the Vatican, but from bishop after bishop, and so forth). He also considers the rhetorical strategies of such documents, and especially the extreme violence of the language used.He sees the rhetoric and the strategies of the Catholic bureaucracy (which arrogates to itself the meaningless term "Magisterium") as an effort to impose a standard of silence, above all about the intricate interconnection of homosexuality and Catholicism, a truth which must not be stated, and if it is stated, must be opposed "by all means possible. & quotI am not always in agreement with Jordan's arguments (I positively dissent from his dismissal of the possibility of history), and I do not like his adoption of an aphoristic style, but this is a new approach to this subject. More than that, it is an essentially more profound work than Helminiak's _What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality_ or John McNeill's _The Church and the Homosexual._ Other authors have tried to argue with the church bureaucracy: Jordan shows why such argument does not work. Not because the arguments are wrong, but because those who are presented the arguments are not allowed to think.