Griffiths on Rodriguez

Paul J. Griffiths is the Warren Chair of Catholic Theology at Duke University.  Richard Rodriguez is ... well, if you don't already know but follow the link below, you will know.

In First Things, Griffiths has a wonderful review, here, of Rodriguez's new book, Darling:  A Spiritual Autobiography.  An excerpt from Griffith's review:

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Among the impurities the Church might want to cleanse herself of is people like Rodriguez, he thinks, because he prefers to share his love and his bed and his life with a man rather than a woman.  He takes the Church to be wrong doctrinally about homosexual acts, and often wrong, too, in what it teaches about women.  He would like the Church to take instruction on these matters, as Jesus also did, from Mary, another darling in these pages.  And he thinks that if it did, the Church’s self-shrouding fear might grow less and its loving embrace of pain might show itself more clearly.

I don’t agree with every position taken in Darling, or with every argument offered.  On Islam, I suspect that what’s needed at the moment isn’t emphasis on the similarities among the three so-called Abrahamic religions as desert faiths, real though these are, but rather on difference and complementarity.  The recent work of Rémi Brague on this, especially On the God of the Christians (and on one or two others), is especially instructive.  On homosexuality and homosexual acts, by contrast, I think Rodriguez much closer to being right than not.  Insofar as such acts are motivated by and evoke love, they are good and to be loved; insofar as they do not, not. In this, they are no ­different from ­heterosexual acts.

There are other interesting differences between the two kinds of act.  But if you think, as Rodriguez seems to, and I do, and all Catholics should, that we live in a devastated world in which no sexual acts are undamaged, free from the taint of sin and death and the concomitant need for lament, then the fact that ­homosexual acts have their own characteristic disorder is no ground for blindness to the goods they enshrine.  Gay men should, of course, darling one ­another; those of us whose darlings are of the opposite sex should be glad that they do, and glad of instruction in love by the ways in which they do.  Love is hard enough to come by in a devastated world without encouraging blindness to its presence.

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Again, the entire review, in First Things, is here.