The
Silence of Sodom : Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism by
Mark D. Jordan
Sexual scandals in the Roman Catholic Church
have been highly public in recent years, and increasingly shrill
directives from the Vatican about homosexuality have become
commonplace. The visibility of these issues begs the basic
question of how the Catholic Church can be at once so homophobic
and so homoerotic. Mark D. Jordan, the author of the award-winning
The
Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, takes up
this fundamental question in a deeply learned yet entirely
readable study of the relationship between male homosexuality and
Catholicism.
The Silence of Sodom is devoted, first,
to teasing out the Church's complex bureaucratic language about
sexual morality. Rather than trying to point out that official
Catholic documents are simply wrong in their discussions and
directives regarding homosexuality, Jordan examines the rhetorical
devices used by the Church throughout its history to actively
produce silence around the topic of male homoeroticism. Arguing
that we cannot find the Church's knowledge of homosexuality in its
documents, Jordan looks to the unspoken but widely known features
of clerical culture to illuminate the striking analogies between
clerical institutions and contemporary gay culture, particularly
in the mechanisms of discipline, the training of seminarians, and
the ambiguities of liturgical celebration.
The Catholic Church's long experiment with
masculine desire cannot be discovered through sensationalist
trials of priest-pedophiles or surveys of gay clergy. The
Silence of Sodom looks deeply into the intertwining, in words
and deeds, of Catholicism with homoeroticism; it is a profound
reflection on both "being gay" and "being
Catholic."
