reader #2:

My initial response to the suggestion that we revive vowed friendship is, “Yes, obviously.” It’s madness that marriage is the only meaningful public mode of intimacy that our society allows. It just leaves so much of the psychological landscape… nameless.

As the very last person to be actually interested in undertaking a vowed friendship (I’m a married white male who considers his wife his best friend and who has no significant male friendships to speak of), I nonetheless had much the same reaction to the idea of vowed friendship that you did. The world of vowed friendships is the one that really resonates with me. And this for many reasons, including, but not limited to…

1. The world of vowed friendship almost automatically has a saner view of marriage. After all, in practice, there’s a lot of overlap between eros and philia. The marital relationship has a lot to do with being friends and co-workers, but with those aspects of the relationship consumed in public discourse on the one hand by silence and on the other by the equation of worthwhile work with money-making, marriage is left only with its distinctives — sex and childbearing. Oh… except not those either since the Birth Control Revolution. A robust theology of friendship accompanied by a meaningful liturgical corollary would go a long way towards giving us a way to think sanely about marriage.

2. The Catholic Church says that homosexuality is wrong only insofar as sodomy is wrong. That means that the Church ought to decry the condemnation of homosexuality as a culture/genre/predisposition (and especially the condemnation of chaste same-sex love) as error. The Church has not done this in an open way (though, I would argue, it has done so in an implicit way), and I would really like to see that happen. It would appeal to my sense of justice, and it would seem to me that the Church was striking a really startling blow against modern heresies — both pro- and anti-homosexual.

and

3. I’m down with pretty much anything folks did in the Middle Ages so long as it doesn’t involve gruesome death.

However… but… and also… I still see merit in some of the arguments you speak against.

You are correct to say that the potential for misuse is no reason to avoid doing something that is inherently good to do. However, the potential for misuse may mean that we have to do that inherently good thing in an extremely cautious manner. Thus, the Tridentine mass is good, and Benedict XVI has always spoken out in favor of it, but he nonetheless has been cautious in his efforts to bring it back into common usage because of its mistreatment by the St. Pius X Society and others (as well as the unfavorable reputation it has with a certain generation of bishops).

Just so, I think that much groundwork must be laid both theologically and politically before the vowed-friendship rite may be meaningfully restored. Were it simply released to the many winds within the Church, it would be tossed about and treated ill. It would be taken by the press and the public at large as a concession by the Church to the gay marriage movement rather than as a ressourcement coming out of Catholic tradition. And many Catholic faithful (though men and women of great faith) would be unsophisticated and uninformed enough to suffer great scandal. More to the point, though, I think the vowed-friendship in its true form (and not as a surrogate for gay marriage) would be short-lived and little used.

I would suggest that what the Church needs is a point man in the form of a (conservative) bishop who truly and deeply understands the need for a theological understanding of friendship to let his own flock be a liturgical laboratory. After a few years of sermons and letters (maybe a nationally-distributed book) on the subject, perhaps he could hand-pick a few well-respected pairs of friends to help resurrect the rite on a very small scale. And so on and so on… little by little.

Basically, as with all rites, the community comes first. The soil must be ready for the seed.

But again, I agree with your basic point. The vowed friendship and a theology of friendship underlying it is something the Church (and the society in general) need… I would go so far as to say “desperately need.” My only concern is cultural and political logistics.

Thanks for getting people talking about this issue. Here’s hoping the conversation is… preparing the soil (?)