The proliferation of news articles about the Catholic Church's continued abhorrence to homosexuality gives one pause as to whether they have become permanently stuck in the mire of the Dark Ages, stubbornly refusing to come into modernity on this and other issues related to gender and sexuality in general.
Certainly their inability to "clean house" in the spate of relatively recent predatory attacks by their clergy on the young and innocent smacks of a diabolical hypocrisy.
Federico Garcia Lorca, some say, was murdered because he was gay, and in machismo Spain at the time this was an affront to the established norms of a rigid Catholicism. In fact, there are reports of one of his executioners coming into a bar in Granada on the day he was shot bragging that he had filled the poet's bowels with lead, satisfied that he had rid the world of one more "pouf".
It was his homosexuality that tortured him the most and it was only at the end of his life that he decided to live openly and authentically as a gay man. All this time, it must be noted, he was reverently Catholic, and his friends in Madrid would laugh at him when he left their company early on a Saturday evening so that he could attend mass the next day.
Some reports of his death say that the Archbishop of Granada, who knew the Lorca family well (Federico's brother-in-law was the mayor of Granada at the time and was executed within days of the poet, perhaps on the same day), did not intervene when he was arrested. His power within the city would certainly have saved Lorca's life had he chosen to do so.
But the larger question here, and the one that I've addressed in both my books is this: why is Catholicism so afraid of any matters related to sexuality, especially when their history has been overtly marked by deviancy in this area (and others, of course)? In the time of the Cathars, for instance, the church was so rife with debauchery and licentiousness that the "Pure Ones" won the hearts and the minds of the people easily. They left the church in droves to follow them. The ensuing crusade against them by the Pope and the French king was in large part a response to this "loss of income" (along with a not-so-hidden lust for the riches of the Languedoc, not yet part of France), and it finally took a Dominican monk of humble means to win the people back into the arms of "mother church" again.
Of course, Dominic de Guzman, as this monk was called, was also responsible for the creation of the Inquisition, and its methods of torture and cruelty, later enthusiastically emulated by regimes like the Nazis, were first used against the Cathars, before its perfected focus was turned on the Moors and Jews of Spain.
But that's another story.
Certainly their inability to "clean house" in the spate of relatively recent predatory attacks by their clergy on the young and innocent smacks of a diabolical hypocrisy.
Federico Garcia Lorca, some say, was murdered because he was gay, and in machismo Spain at the time this was an affront to the established norms of a rigid Catholicism. In fact, there are reports of one of his executioners coming into a bar in Granada on the day he was shot bragging that he had filled the poet's bowels with lead, satisfied that he had rid the world of one more "pouf".
It was his homosexuality that tortured him the most and it was only at the end of his life that he decided to live openly and authentically as a gay man. All this time, it must be noted, he was reverently Catholic, and his friends in Madrid would laugh at him when he left their company early on a Saturday evening so that he could attend mass the next day.
Some reports of his death say that the Archbishop of Granada, who knew the Lorca family well (Federico's brother-in-law was the mayor of Granada at the time and was executed within days of the poet, perhaps on the same day), did not intervene when he was arrested. His power within the city would certainly have saved Lorca's life had he chosen to do so.
But the larger question here, and the one that I've addressed in both my books is this: why is Catholicism so afraid of any matters related to sexuality, especially when their history has been overtly marked by deviancy in this area (and others, of course)? In the time of the Cathars, for instance, the church was so rife with debauchery and licentiousness that the "Pure Ones" won the hearts and the minds of the people easily. They left the church in droves to follow them. The ensuing crusade against them by the Pope and the French king was in large part a response to this "loss of income" (along with a not-so-hidden lust for the riches of the Languedoc, not yet part of France), and it finally took a Dominican monk of humble means to win the people back into the arms of "mother church" again.
Of course, Dominic de Guzman, as this monk was called, was also responsible for the creation of the Inquisition, and its methods of torture and cruelty, later enthusiastically emulated by regimes like the Nazis, were first used against the Cathars, before its perfected focus was turned on the Moors and Jews of Spain.
But that's another story.