#8: another possibly-anonyreader?:

I read this piece (and your blogpost), and the comments with interest but also a good deal of confusion.

When I began to read the blogpost, I thought at first that you were recommending “vowed friendship” simply as a way of binding friends together. But as I read further, and read the piece at Inside Catholic, it seemed clearer that you were talking about a substitute for marriage, of a kind that would, I think, appeal mainly to SSA people, no matter what the original purpose of such vows might have been.

You seem to recognise this risk, and ask whether it matters, on the grounds that that chaste gay Catholics need an affirmation of their loves and family lives. I can see why this would be important to gay people, but I suspect that instituting or re-instituting such ceremonies would cause bewilderment among Catholics of whatever sexual orientation.

Straight people (esp. men, I suspect) would fear to try it with members of their own sex on the grounds that it might make them seem gay. Straight women might like the idea but not understand why such “best friendship” had to be exclusive. Straight men and women friends would fear it might be threatening to their spouses or potential spouses. Gay people would, I think, be sorely tempted to treat it as a marriage in every sense, including the physical. This temptation would be particularly powerful for the young and inexperienced, who might also reasonably ask “we’re allowed every other expression of our love, why not the physical as well?”

You mention people like David Morrison and his partner, who live a chaste life together, but such couples are in a special position. Mr Morrison and his partner were once lovers. They have already found some form of sexual fulfillment together, in so far as homosexual sex can provide this type of fulfillment (and I suspect the Church would say that it cannot do so, or only in a limited sense). Two young SSA persons who exchanged best-friend vows would not have such a history behind them and find it very difficult to refrain from seeking sexual intimacy, esp. if they lived together, as you suggest such couples should.

I think the best hope for an SSA person who wishes to share his/her life in chaste friendship with someone of similar tendencies (or not of such tendencies? you aren’t quite clear about this) would be some form of “domestic partnership” arrangement. This would not, of course, provide the public and vowed commitment you long for, but it would help to solve the loneliness problem and give some legal structure to chaste gay friendships.

I suspect that the Church simply is not going to yield on its view that homosexual love (if not chaste in both body and heart) is “objectively disordered”, and thus not a thing to be celebrated by public vows of friendship, however chaste in intention. Sigh. I remember that when I was younger I used to search history, scripture, and anywhere else I could think of for some legitimate way out of the Church’s restrictions on both pre and post-marital heterosexual activity. I couldn’t find any. I realise that you aren’t trying to do anything of the sort regarding SSA love, but I suspect you won’t be any luckier than I was, just the same. Marriage is a sufficiently grave matter that the Church is unlikely to compromise regarding anything that looks like marriage, or could be mistaken for marriage, for fear of “scandalizing” the faithful.

Eve says: Yeah, I think this email hits on real issues, esp. cultural barriers (if a practice is taken up by gay people, will it become unattractive and/or embarrassing for heterosexual same-sex friends to do it?) and the potential for scandal. I think my upcoming post will make it clear that this is not “gay marriage lite,” but in the end, really these questions of how can only be answered by individual people taking up this practice, renewing and reshaping it. If they want to, then the tradition will grapple with its accompanying problems; if they don’t, we’ll move on to other possibilities and other questions.

Super-quick clarification: While living together was one traditional part of English friendship vows, I wouldn’t say vowed friends “should” live together; I think that’s a matter for discernment, and often it just won’t work for any number of reasons both practical and spiritual. Again, I don’t think a renewed tradition would look the same as the earlier forms of that tradition….