THE END OF THE AFFAIR: Okay, so: There’s this document, see? And it’s about what you gotta be to be a priest. (For example, apparently you can’t be a lesbian. Who knew?) And there are these articles that people write, because the only certainties in life are death, taxes, and journalism. And in one of these articles, somebody says that homosexuality has no “social value.”

Which prompts Andrew Sullivan to post a deeply moving photograph of Fr. Mychal Judge, who (as far as I can recall) publicly said he was gay, holding a victim of the World Trade Center attacks. [*EDITED, SEE BELOW] And then this:

That’s the new pope’s verdict on the life and work of gay priest Mychal Judge, and the thousands of others who have served God so faithfully and so well since the beginning of the Church. Nothing this pope can do or say will ever take away from their service or their dignity as people and servants of God.

And I just… this isn’t even about gay stuff, yet. (I will try to post something about gay stuff in a bit.) It’s just about logic. Because Sullivan’s logic would mean a lot of things I doubt he really wants to mean:

Lechery has social value.

The use of working-class prostitutes has social value. (He called it “feasting with panthers,” and talked about how the boys’ “dirtiness” was part of the attraction. Look, Wilde is something of a personal hero of mine, but he did some things and liked some things that are cruel and disgusting.)

Adultery and the use of prostitutes have social value.

In other words: People do amazing things and terrible things. There aren’t good people and bad people. So listing off someone’s heroic actions does nothing to indicate that everything he did or believed was right, and it’s naive and destructive to pretend otherwise.

More crucially, one of the most beautiful and hopeful doctrines of the Catholic Church is the distinction between behavior and worth. You aren’t valuable because you have never screwed up, or because everything you do and believe is right. You’re valuable because you were created by a God Who loves you, Who cherishes you and longs for you. If you take every chastisement based on behavior as an attack on your personal worth, you are a) a Pelagian (believing people get saved because they’re so cool and special) and/or b) rejecting the possibility that God sees past your behavior, sees down to the core of you, wants you, loves you, but doesn’t ever agree that everything you do is right. God is not an idolater. God’s constant lament to His beloved is, “Baby, don’t be that way!”

A political and (more importantly) cultural movement has sprung up to convince those of us with strong (I guess the word this season is “deep-seated”; it’s the new black!) homosexual attractions that God couldn’t possibly want us not to act on those attractions. Because it hurts too much to give it up? Because it seems so necessary or central to our identities? If those are the reasons people resist, I guess I just want to remind them that people every single day embrace varying kinds of sacrifice–slow or fast, honored or humiliating–and if you want anything resembling a functioning culture (let alone a Catholic one) you need people who can say that “It hurts” isn’t an argument. Every functioning culture relies on a core of people who can accept that life, or God, or whatever they believe in, will ask them to do things they would never have believed possible; and they do them. Every day. Policemen and policemen’s wives; soldiers and soldiers’ husbands; saints and martyrs; pregnant women in desperate circumstances; everyone who suffers and whose suffering would be eased by just a little wrong action, just a small palliative sin.

You can be as big as your culture by only making the sacrifices your culture honors. You can be as big as your own self by only making the sacrifices you honor and completely understand; if you’re a cosmopolitan, that will mostly mean making the sacrifices your personality and chosen subculture honor. You can be as big as the Church by making all the sacrifices God requires. I’m pretty sure most of us are in between–but we can move from one pole to the other.

Be bigger.

*EDITED: Uh, actually, Fr. Judge is the victim being held in the photograph. Moreover, there’s controversy over whether or not he ever publicly claimed to be gay. I read up on this a while ago but cannot now remember the details, so I guess, just keep in mind that I am talking about Andrew Sullivan’s take on Fr. Judge’s life and ministry. I apologize for the sloppiness on both counts….