This essay is drawn from the introduction to Mark D. Jordan's new book, The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism, available from University of Chicago Press.

Imagine this. Overnight, God changes the hearts of the majority of officials in the Vatican. They awake in the morning convinced that the Roman Catholic Church's condemnations of "homosexual acts" are both untrue and unjust. They resolve to revoke them. What would they have to revise in church doctrine or practice in order to correct the teachings about gays and lesbians? 1

To give this question any force, we have to picture the Holy Spirit bestowing courage as well as insight. Imagine, for example, that particular morning-after at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican's principal bureau for doctrinal surveillance. Each ecclesiastical bureaucrat is aware of a profound change of heart in himself (the masculine pronoun is appropriate). Who will be first to broach such a topic? Who will take the risk? Imagine that it is a morning toward the end of May, say the Monday after Pentecost, the commemoration of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the first Christian Community. Outside, the signs of early summer: the sky is "almost black with its excess of blue, and the new grass already deep, but still vivid, and the white roses tumble…" Inside, dry mouths and palpitations over coffee.

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So we must imagine a divine infusion of courage — not to say of independence, that rarest of virtues in any bureaucracy. Let us suppose that God has worked a change in the pope himself (here the masculine pronoun is obligatory). It would take at least a thorough conversion in the pope to make the doctrinal change possible, and it would take a pope not enchained by his handlers to make it plausible. So let us imagine that the pope's heart has been converted and then comforted with courage. He has decided to right a wrong done to homosexuals over the centuries. His advisers have persuaded him to at least go slowly — to "study" the problem before acting on it. Rumor rushes down the clerical layers: The moral teachings about homosexuality are to be corrected by papal command in obedience to God's will, in faithfulness to the message of Christ. The Holy Father asks, What is required for the thorough correction of the teachings?

No serious answer to the question can be simple. In fact, to change Catholic teaching about homosexual acts would require changes under many other headings of Catholic theology. "Conservatives" are right to suspect this, though they are wrong to think that this is a reason for not correcting the teachings. The moral teachings on this topic are just the most visible sign of a larger failure. If the church could be so violently wrong about this for so many centuries, there must be some deep deformity in church governance. Any correction of teachings about homosexuality will have to begin by considering topics as different as the structures of church power and the styles of moral theology, the hypocrisies of the confessional practice and the screening of seminary candidates. The correction would end… but that is a question.

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What is required for a thorough correction of the teachings? No one knows. Homosexuality has been silenced so successfully in the Catholic Church that we do not have the kinds of evidence required for a convincing answer. A subject that Catholic theologians cannot discuss during centuries except with thunder, derision, or disgust is not a subject on which Catholic theology can speak.

Some theologians have indeed begun to speak about it more freely in the last thirty years, and they have made some helpful and even bold beginnings. We now have notable first essays in lesbian and gay theology, not least because we have lesbian and gay appropriations of liberation theology, feminist theory, the writing of church history, and so on. But three decades cannot undo two millennia. Catholic theologians will have to be able to speak freely about homosexuality for many years before they can write serious moral assessments of it.

In order for them to "speak freely," many changes will be required. It is not enough for the CDF to promise that it will no longer prosecute moral theologians who dissent from its diagnosis of homosexual orientation (though just that now seems utopian fantasy). The church, in some broader sense, will have to encourage homosexual Catholics to live openly and proudly. Serious moral theology cannot be principally the framing and manipulation of quasi-legal propositions. It must begin and end in the discovery of particular lives under grace. Lesbian and gay lives will have to become audible to the church, readable within it, before their graces can be discerned and described.

Indeed, the church will need to recognize homosexual saints in order to learn God's will in same-sex love, since it is typically and properly saints that instruct Catholic communities about how to live. By "homosexual saints" I do not mean lesbians or gays who felt obligated to martyr themselves in celibacy. I mean saints with lovers. The icons that show "Harvey Milk of San Francisco" are not just jokes, in good taste or bad. They are reminders that Catholic theology needs to watch how saints live a way of life before it can say much about it.

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Correcting Catholic teachings on homosexuality is not only or mainly a matter of proposing amendments to specific documents. The official doctrine is more deeply embedded than that. It is more intimately connected to old arrangements of institutional power. Changing the language without reforming institutional arrangements would be useless, even if it were possible. The most important relations between Catholicism and homosexuality are not embodied in official propositions about homosexuality, nor even in official regulations for homosexual behavior. The forces at work here are only the forces of words.

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Imagine morning again. The Holy Spirit has indeed worked overnight in the Vatican, but microscopically. Conceive a middle-aged staff "theologian" who has spent an entire career being cautious. He awakes to find that his convictions have changed about — about this, of all things — living as homosexual. Disturbed and yet compelled, he might try to broach the topic with colleagues in a round about way. Perhaps he would raise it directly to a particular confidant. Or perhaps he would simply delay, hoping that his peculiar mood would pass.

On this May morning, his behavior would resemble that of many closeted gay men in the Catholic clergy. They feel compelled to play a sad game of concealed solicitation, of saying and not saying, of showing what they want only to those who surely want the same thing. Our staff theologian will be just like someone cruising from inside the closet. He may well have had that guilty experience too.

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Behind the fixed rhetoric of the Vatican's bureaucratic speech are comprehensive structures for creating and enforcing clerical "discipline." For centuries now, these structures have been much preoccupied with controlling the appearance and the reality of clerical sexuality, especially homosexuality. The official words about homosexual activity are anchored in an apparatus for disciplining the facts of homosexual activity in the clergy. 2 Whatever the original causal relations between official teachings and clerical discipline might have been, it is now certainly true that clerical discipline keeps many clergymen from speaking candidly about the possibility of changing the official teachings. It keeps some of them from even thinking about that possibility.

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Clerical discipline shows itself well in the very bureaucratic style of the modern Catholic Church's moral "teachings," which is to say, its moral regulation. Whenever the Vatican does change moral teachings on a controversial point, as it did 150 years ago in the case of slavery, it insists all the more loudly that nothing has changed. Bureaucratic speech strives to maintain the illusion of unchanging control. So Vatican pronouncements work hard to convince us that nothing important ever changes in church teachings — or could change.