Michael Bernard Kelly, Seduced by Grace: Contemporary spirituality, Gay experience and Christian faith.
Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan Publishing, 2007, website.
The essays assembled in this book are passionate and prophetic. Kelly must be a man of courage. He undergoes the personal struggle to reconcile his own deep faith with being proudly gay; he then commits to the struggle of achieving a right to an accepted presence for gay people in the church.
Kelly came to prominence within the Catholic Church in Australia, most noticeably, for his part in organising the Rainbow Sash movement, and its contentious attempts to receive communion from bishops in cathedrals. From 1998 he has been the movement's writer, spokesperson and co-convenor.
These essays are both strongly personal narratives, and the proclamation of a manifesto.
In some sense he is not alone. 'Liberal' Catholics have an habitual deep frustration with the managers of the church tradition to which they have a powerful sense of belonging. Women, in particular, have felt marginalised and patronised by the clericalised Church. Kelly experiences this, but not only does he find incomprehension for his point of origin inside the church, he also finds incomprehension from many outside the church in the mainstream gay movement. 'Why would you bother?' is their challenge to him.
This guy is not going to win, you think. You wouldn't volunteer for this role, this multi-focal isolation, unless you were both sincere, generous and prepared for loss. It makes you think of prophets like Jeremiah who knew they were on a hiding to nothing, and begged God for leave to resign from the cause to which God had conscripted them.
Kelly says, 'There are few precedents in Church history for what we are trying to do. This is a radical experiment. It is not surprising that the Churches are unnerved by it — we are as well.'
For establishment Catholics, with maybe a neurotically narrow conception of orthodoxy, with a sense that the tradition is so wise and timeless that nothing new could come along, Kelly's position and advocacy are a frightening challenge. It is a challenge that has emerged and is viable only because of the spread of toleration through modern secular societies.
Kelly has placed first in the book those essays which are more directly spiritual. If we are going to be persuaded by the more declamatory pieces, and those which focus on the minutiae of male