Doublespeak, doubletalk, newspeak are rapidly ousting straight talk from official discourse.
Connotation trumps denotation, subtext overpowers text, semiotics ride roughshod over semantics.
As a result we increasingly listen not so much to the officials’ words as to their inflexion. Rather than getting their meaning we try to second-guess it. More and more we learn the art of what Soviet citizens called ‘reading between the lines.’
This has become so commonplace that we no longer expect any politician to come out and say exactly what he means.
When he talks about ‘helping the less fortunate’, does he actually mean it or is he hinting at a plan to rob the more fortunate?
When he talks about reducing the deficit, does he mean sweeping reductions eventually leading to the state paying its own way or merely a token sop to fiscal conservatives?
When he talks about his commitment to equality, is he really so stupid as to believe he can catch this Chimera by the tail or is he merely talking about an imminent tax increase?
We have to figure it all out for ourselves, without much help from the speaker.
In a way this is to be expected. A politician, especially a modern one, isn’t going to commit himself explicitly to something he knows he won’t deliver. Unless, of course, he feels he has to in order to win the next election, which is, as we know, the only goal of modern statesmanship.
But one would expect more straightforward statements from prelates of the Church. They are, after all, answerable to the kind of authority that can see through any dissembling or equivocation.
Neither does church doctrine encourage vagueness and ambiguity in the same way as politics does. After all, it’s supposed to come down from God, either directly, through Scripture, or through the ecclesiastical intermediaries he inspires.
Alas, we are all supposed to be politicians now, and prelates are no exception. Instead of speaking in a loud and clear voice, they increasingly leave us scratching our heads and wondering what this or that pronouncement actually means.
The current example is the Vatican’s statement on homosexuality, which the papers are describing as “a dramatic shift in the Catholic Church’s traditionally negative view [of it]”.
Actually, this isn’t the only way to read the statement issued yesterday. If one so chose, one could just as easily say that the Church is stubbornly clinging to its discriminatory homophobia (I hope I get the PC lingo right).
After all, the statement does say that there is no “denying the moral problems connected to homosexual unions.”
And there’s more: “The Church furthermore affirms that unions between people of the same sex cannot be considered on the same footing as matrimony between man and woman. Nor is it acceptable that pressure be brought to bear on pastors or that international bodies make financial aid dependent on the introduction of regulations inspired by gender ideology.”
Now if that’s not homophobia, I don’t know what is. We no longer acknowledge any moral problems with any form of sexual activity, other than feeling a girl up without permission. In fact, sex has been taken out of the moral sphere altogether.
“If it feels good, it’s moral,” pronounced Hemingway, and if you disagree with this indisputable statement you are not fit to live in modern society.
And what’s that about homomarriage being any different from the old kind? Write something like this in a modern paper, and you’ll get a deluge of indignant effluvia faster than you can say Press Complaints Commission (spoken from personal experience).
So where does the ‘dramatic shift’ come from?
The first sentence in the statement says that “homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community”. No doubt. But where’s the novelty appeal?
The best-known chapel in the world is covered with frescos produced by a 16th-century homosexual, whose Pieta sculpture also adorns St Peter’s in Rome. Both the chapel and the sculpture are in the Vatican, under the immediate jurisdiction of popes throughout the centuries.
In fact it would be tedious to enumerate all the great works of religious art commissioned and gratefully received by the Church from many homosexuals, whose proclivities were common knowledge.
If Renaissance popes acknowledged the gifts of homosexuals at a time when their chosen method of consummating passion constituted a criminal offence, how does the Synod’s statement represent a dramatic shift?
The statement goes on to say “Often [homosexuals] wish to encounter a Church that offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?”
Things are beginning to look dicey – but still falling way short of a dramatic shift.
The traditional Church position is hate the sin, love the sinner, which, in spirit if not letter, is an accurate rendering of Augustine’s “Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum”.
Applied to the issue at hand, a homosexual has (or should have) always been accepted by the Church, provided he repented his sin and accepted the imposed penance.
So yes, communities are capable of providing a welcoming home to homosexuals. But no, they can’t be expected to accept, or especially to value, their sexual orientation, for the simple reason that there is nothing valuable about it.
No sexual activity is valued or indeed countenanced by the Church unless procreation within wedlock is its aim. ‘Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony’ is unequivocal on this, and any divergent interpretation would indeed spell compromising it.
Then there is the issue of repentance and penance. For a homosexual to accept such traditional practices as the price of admission to communion, he has to acknowledge his ‘sexual orientation’ is a sin and promise to desist.
The Synod’s statement implicitly affirms this aspect of it, although an explicit statement would have been welcome.
That august body then gets further into hot water, without quite drowning:
“It has to be noted that there are cases in which mutual aid to the point of sacrifice constitutes a precious support in the life of the partners. Furthermore, the Church pays special attention to the children who live with couples of the same sex, emphasising that the needs and rights of the little ones must always be given priority.”
The first sentence is true but irrelevant, not to mention poorly phrased. The same logic could be applied to marriage between siblings or parents and children. Hence ‘mutual aid to the point of sacrifice’, laudable as it is, isn’t ipso facto redemptive. Why mention it at all then?
As to ‘the children who live with couples of the same sex’, is one to understand that the Church condones such living arrangements? And what does giving priority the ‘rights of the little ones’ actually mean?
One could argue that such rights have already been violated by the very fact that the child is denied the chance of growing up in a normal family, whether natural or adoptive. Does the Church not think so? Again, one would appreciate a less ambiguous statement.
Such quibbles apart, semantics alone don’t quite justify the talk of seismic or even dramatic shifts. Neither, as a matter of fact, do they justify the opposite view.
In other words, the statement is more political than ecclesiastical, and as such it displays all the foibles of modern politics. It’s as if the Synod had a ruling party that wished to preserve its majority by being all things to all men/women/other.
If that’s indeed what the Church has become, then one could indeed talk about a dramatic shift. For the institution whose brief is to guard tradition is giving signs of surrendering to a world that sees tradition in its bombing sights.
These aren’t good signs – and they can’t happily co-exist with the sign of the cross.
My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752