The Genesis of the Idea of God as Human Destiny

John McNeill Spiritual Transformation

In my three areas of expertise; spirituality, psychotherapy and theology, I am aware of a desperate need for spiritual transformation in the culture, the nation, and the Church. I will do my best to make a contribution to that need from my perspective as an older man with many years of involved experience.

Introduction
This Christmas eve i wont to post this blog because I feel it iis the one most revelant to a theological understanding of the importance of the Incarnation for all humanity.

Blondel believed that he could discover all the a priori aspirations implicit in the human will by means of his dialectic. Most fundamental is the drive out of isolation and alienation into unity with ourselves, the world, our fellow man and God. This is the central message of Christian revelation concerning human destiny: “May they be one, Father, even as you and I are one.” Accepting this word not merely as revealed but as revealing, Blondel traces the stages in the dialectical process by which man searches for that oneness.
The appearance of human self-consciousness in the evolutionary process marks man and woman's awareness of moral consciousness as a thrust toward unity: humans are morally obliged from within to act as if humanity were one. Unlike Kant who was tempted to see moral truth as an end-in-itself and the other person as a means to that end. Blondel maintains that, like all truth, moral truth does not exist for its own sake. It is only by acting in accordance with the principles and values of moral truth that humans can achieve the unity of humanity in a human community.
Beyond the felt unity with other humans in the concept of humanity and the moral unity in the order of intention, the will strives for a unity with all humanity on the level of existence itself. The will as willing cannot be one with the will as willed until this existential unity is a reality. For Blondel, the ideal of existential unity among all humankind is the primary example of the category of human commitments that remain simultaneously necessary and impossible. In so far as these commitments are necessary, they represent a possible immanent dimension of the human’s existential reality: in so far as they are impossible for humans to achieve by their unaided freedom, they indicate the presence within humans of a power that transcends them. This is the key experience that leads humans to form an idea of God as the immanent transcendent. Having its genetic origin in the experience of the necessary and the impossible, it is a “projecting out of the unused and unusable potentialities of the human will” In order to find the perfect identity of themselves with themselves in their voluntary action, humans must look within theimselves until they reache the point where that which is of themselves ceases, yet something remains.
What humans can know of God is precisely “that surplus of interior life which demands its employment.” Blondel is well aware that the possibility of existential unity among humankind, to which all humans necessarily aspires, would remain forever an abstraction unless humans could realize an existential unity with God, A human’s knowledge of God consists fundamentally in an immanent awareness that “at the root of his or her ego there is an ego which is no longer his or hers.” Yet it is only in the act of freely consenting to such an intimate presence that the actual consciousness of it as an immanent dimension of human’s existential reality is achieved: Only by free consent does that presence pass from abstract possibility into experienced actuality. According to Blondel, this transformation is the ultimate meaning of human freedom and the ultimate dimension of our moral life; it is grounded in the power to make God exist or not exist in our lives by reason of our own freely chosen existence.
Although the idea of union with God is a necessary idea, it is seldom brought to the degree of clarity and precision that it achieves at the end of a dialectical presentation. No matter under what form it is presented in consciousness, the thought of God as absolute is produced in us by a determinism which imposes that idea from within as a necessary result of the dynamism of our interior life. In turn, it produces a necessary influence on the organization of our conduct.
What emerges necessarily in consciousness and is inevitably efficacious in practice is not the concept of a speculative truth to be defined, but the perhaps vague yet certain. and imperious conviction of a destiny and ulterior end to be attained. The vital source of this sense of destiny is the presence within us of the absolute person. No matter under what form this presence reveals itself to consciousness, be it clear or confused, accepted or hidden, admitted or unnamed, the living truth of that presence has an inevitable efficacy. For this reason Blondel calls human action a sort of théergie: We cannot posit a free human action without cooperating with the absolute subject within us thereby causing him to cooperate with us. To inset the character of transcendence into our lives it is not necessary to perceive its presence or directly recognize the action of the absolute in us and on us. Indeed, even our denial of its presence and action displaces only the object of affirmation; the reality of human action is not affected by this superficial play of words.

Since the idea of the absolute is necessarily projected as our destiny, it is equally necessary to sense the need actually to achieve it through the combined forces of our thought and action. Human action has the inevitable ambition to realize in itself the idea of perfection: “We cannot know God without willing in some way to become God." Just as the idea of God represents a paradoxical reality, at once immanent in us and yet transcendent, so too the choice and the action which necessarily follow upon this idea exhibit their paradoxical nature. Our ground for affirming God as absolute subject is the fact that He is conceived as that which we can neither be by ourselves nor accomplish solely by the force of our free action. Yet we have neither being, will nor action except on condition of freely willing and somehow becoming one with the divine who is the source and being of our own will and action. Hence, the only way to become one with ourselves is to admit another being within us by substituting another will for our own: “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

It is impossible to enter really into contact with another being, in fact, it is impossible to enter into contact with oneself without passing through the Uniquely Necessary who must become our unique will.

Rejection of the absolute by a human is nothing more than an attempt at avaricious self-possession which isolates us in a false subjectivity and inferiority. This results in a world of solitude and hostility, of rejection and discontinuity, without meeting or true presence, namely the modern world. Release from the prison of selfhood comes by communicating with the transcendent who as immanent in oneself is bridge to the other. “One cannot be for oneself or for another without being for Him first of all.” One cannot communicate with anyone unless it be with and by God.
Blondel sees in the act whereby humans achieves living communication with God an active dialectical resolution of the metaphysical problem of the one and many. It is love’s death to self and sacrifice of self that resolves this problem existentially: “Sacrifice is the solution to the metaphysical problem by an experimental method.” The act by which humans chooses to supplant their will by the Will of God is a negation both of ego and of the false appearances of being in it: “... it is the destruction of that self-will that holds me in isolation from all the rest.” Implicit in this “death” to self, which is the most perfect act of sacrifice, is the most perfect revelation of being, for one no longer sets the absolute source of being from without, but begins to possess it within oneself.

At the very root of being, in the common practice of life in the secret logic of consciousness, without God there is no fellow man for man. In order to be one, in order to exist, it is necessary that I do not rest alone; I have need of all the others. What is necessary, then, is to capture within myself the source of all unity (the divine will) and transmit the truth of its intimate action.

It is important to understand that a metaphysical priority of communion with absolute being does not imply a temporal or psychological priority of divine love over human love. Blondel repeatedly insists that the true nature of the option need not be explicit, but is necessarily implicit in the living reality of every free human action. Hence, to live “metaphysically” is not contingent upon the prior conceptual resolution of any metaphysical problem. To resolve the problem of unity by love in any one of its three possible aspects: love of God, of self, or of neighbor, involves a vital solution of that problem for all three.
Yet, the problem and its resolution are ordinarily posed within the context of love of neighbor. “Without that love which is active within the members of humanity there is no God for man; he who does not love his neighbor has no life in him.” Therefore, in any human encounter where a genuine interpersonal bond of mutual love is factually established, there is necessarily an implicit resolution of the option in favor of the divine will: “If any man loves he knows God, because God is love.” Without an implicit commitment to God there is merely a semblance of true love, which will prove to be ultimately unfounded and deceiving. A true act of love involves death to self, which in fact is a positive opening of the spirit to the action of the absolute. It thus goes well beyond an attitude of strict justice, which considers only the impersonal character of the other in his abstract dignity as a member of human society. An act of love, in order to be truly such, must be directed to the other as unique and as end in him or herself. “Charity is always universal and always attached to what is unique.”

Conclusion

In Blondel’s dialectic of life, existence and truth continually draw closer together without ever becoming entirely the same. The dialectic in life of the singular existence and universal truth is thus posited as a constant movement towards realizing in the human the immanent and necessary connection between essence and existence, nature and liberty, constructive project and transcendent end. Yet throughout the course of their dialectical development, existence always remains to some extent inward and solitary, while truth remains to some extent abstract and exterior.

In the Hegelian dialectic the mediation of singular existence and universal truth could take place only in the abstract dimension of absolute spirit. It occurs independently of the existential freedom and moral commitment of man as a person. The individual is merely a means that reason uses to obtain its objectives. In contrast, it is Blondel’s conviction that such a mediation of existence with truth can be only the result of man’s free moral commitment and that its ultimate condition of possibility may depend on union with one man, Christ, who is “the way, the truth and the life.”

jjmcneill@aol.com

The Genesis of the idea of God understood as our Human Destiny

John McNeill Spiritual Transformation
In my three areas of expertise; spirituality, psychotherapy and theology, I am aware of a desperate need for spiritual transformation in the culture, the nation, and the Church. I will do my best to make a contribution to that need from my perspective as an older man with many years of involved experience.
I though it appropriate to repeat this blog which I feel is most appropriate to our understand of the Mystery of the Incarnation on Christmas day.

The Genesis of the Idea of God as Human Destiny
Blondel believed that he could discover all the a priori aspirations implicit in the human will by means of his dialectic. Most fundamental is the drive out of isolation and alienation into unity with ourselves, the world, our fellow man and God. This is the central message of Christian revelation concerning human destiny: “May they be one, Father, even as you and I are one.” Accepting this word not merely as revealed but as revealing, Blondel traces the stages in the dialectical process by which man searches for that oneness.
The appearance of human self-consciousness in the evolutionary process marks man and woman's awareness of moral consciousness as a thrust toward unity: humans are morally obliged from within to act as if humanity were one. Unlike Kant who was tempted to see moral truth as an end-in-itself and the other person as a means to that end. Blondel maintains that, like all truth, moral truth does not exist for its own sake. It is only by acting in accordance with the principles and values of moral truth that humans can achieve the unity of humanity in a human community.
Beyond the felt unity with other humans in the concept of humanity and the moral unity in the order of intention, the will strives for a unity with all humanity on the level of existence itself. The will as willing cannot be one with the will as willed until this existential unity is a reality. For Blondel, the ideal of existential unity among all humankind is the primary example of the category of human commitments that remain simultaneously necessary and impossible. In so far as these commitments are necessary, they represent a possible immanent dimension of the human’s existential reality: in so far as they are impossible for humans to achieve by their unaided freedom, they indicate the presence within humans of a power that transcends them. This is the key experience that leads humans to form an idea of God as the immanent transcendent. Having its genetic origin in the experience of the necessary and the impossible, it is a “projecting out of the unused and unusable potentialities of the human will” In order to find the perfect identity of themselves with themselves in their voluntary action, humans must look within theimselves until they reache the point where that which is of themselves ceases, yet something remains.
What humans can know of God is precisely “that surplus of interior life which demands its employment.” Blondel is well aware that the possibility of existential unity among humankind, to which all humans necessarily aspires, would remain forever an abstraction unless humans could realize an existential unity with God, A human’s knowledge of God consists fundamentally in an immanent awareness that “at the root of his or her ego there is an ego which is no longer his or hers.” Yet it is only in the act of freely consenting to such an intimate presence that the actual consciousness of it as an immanent dimension of human’s existential reality is achieved: Only by free consent does that presence pass from abstract possibility into experienced actuality. According to Blondel, this transformation is the ultimate meaning of human freedom and the ultimate dimension of our moral life; it is grounded in the power to make God exist or not exist in our lives by reason of our own freely chosen existence.
Although the idea of union with God is a necessary idea, it is seldom brought to the degree of clarity and precision that it achieves at the end of a dialectical presentation. No matter under what form it is presented in consciousness, the thought of God as absolute is produced in us by a determinism which imposes that idea from within as a necessary result of the dynamism of our interior life. In turn, it produces a necessary influence on the organization of our conduct.
What emerges necessarily in consciousness and is inevitably efficacious in practice is not the concept of a speculative truth to be defined, but the perhaps vague yet certain. and imperious conviction of a destiny and ulterior end to be attained. The vital source of this sense of destiny is the presence within us of the absolute person. No matter under what form this presence reveals itself to consciousness, he it clear or confused, accepted or hidden, admitted or unnamed, the living truth of that presence has an inevitable efficacy. For this reason Blondel calls human action a sort of théergie: We cannot posit a free human action without cooperating with the absolute subject within us thereby causing him to cooperate with us. To inset the character of transcendence into our lives it is not necessary to perceive its
presence or directly recognize the action of the absolute in us and on us. Indeed, even our denial of its presence and action displaces only the object of affirmation; the reality of human action is not affected by this superficial play of words.
Since the idea of the absolute is necessarily projected as our destiny, it is equally necessary to sense the need actually to achieve it through the combined forces of our thought and action. Human action has the inevitable ambition to realize in itself the idea of perfection: “We cannot know God without willing in some way to become God." Just as the idea of God represents a paradoxical reality, at once immanent in us and yet transcendent, so too the choice and the action which necessarily follow upon this idea exhibit their paradoxical nature. Our ground for affirming God as absolute subject is the fact that He is conceived as that which we can neither be by ourselves nor accomplish solely by the force of our free action. Yet we have neither being, will nor action except on condition of freely willing and somehow becoming one with the divine who is the source and being of our own will and action. Hence, the only way to become one with ourselves is to admit another being within us by substituting another will for our own: “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

It is impossible to enter really into contact with another being, in fact, it is impossible to enter into contact with oneself without passing through the Uniquely Necessary who must become our unique will.

Rejection of the absolute by a human is nothing more than an attempt at avaricious self-possession which isolates us in a false subjectivity and inferiority. This results in a world of solitude and hostility, of rejection and discontinuity, without meeting or true presence, namely the modern world. Release from the prison of selfhood comes by communicating with the transcendent who as immanent in oneself is bridge to the other. “One cannot be for oneself or for another without being for Him first of all.” One cannot communicate with anyone unless it be with and by God.
Blondel sees in the act whereby humans achieves living communication with God an active dialectical resolution of the metaphysical problem of the one and many. It is love’s death to self and sacrifice of self that resolves this problem existentially: “Sacrifice is the solution to the metaphysical problem by an experimental method.” The act by which humans chooses to supplant their will by the Will of God is a negation both of ego and of the false appearances of being in it: “... it is the destruction of that self-will that holds me in isolation from all the rest.” Implicit in this “death” to self, which is the most perfect act of sacrifice, is the most perfect revelation of being, for one no longer sets the absolute source of being from without, but begins to possess it within oneself.

At the very root of being, in the common practice of life in the secret logic of consciousness, without God there is no fellow man for man. In order to be one, in order to exist, it is necessary that I do not rest alone; I have need of all the others. What is necessary, then, is to capture within myself the source of all unity (the divine will) and transmit the truth of its intimate action.

It is important to understand that a metaphysical priority of communion with absolute being does not imply a temporal or psychological priority of divine love over human love. Blondel repeatedly insists that the true nature of the option need not be explicit, but is necessarily implicit in the living reality of every free human action. Hence, to live “metaphysically” is not contingent upon the prior conceptual resolution of any metaphysical problem. To resolve the problem of unity by love in any one of its three possible aspects: love of God, of self, or of neighbor, involves a vital solution of that problem for all three.
Yet, the problem and its resolution are ordinarily posed within the context of love of neighbor. “Without that love which is active within the members of humanity there is no God for man; he who does not love his neighbor has no life in him.” Therefore, in any human encounter where a genuine interpersonal bond of mutual love is factually established, there is necessarily an implicit resolution of the option in favor of the divine will: “If any man loves he knows God, because God is love.” Without an implicit commitment to God there is merely a semblance of true love, which will prove to be ultimately unfounded and deceiving. A true act of love involves death to self, which in fact is a positive opening of the spirit to the action of the absolute. It thus goes well beyond an attitude of strict justice, which considers only the impersonal character of the other in his abstract dignity as a member of human society. An act of love, in order to be truly such, must be directed to the other as unique and as end in him or herself. “Charity is always universal and always attached to what is unique.”

Conclusion

In Blondel’s dialectic of life, existence and truth continually draw closer together without ever becoming entirely the same. The dialectic in life of the singular existence and universal truth is thus posited as a constant movement towards realizing in man the immanent and necessary connection between essence and existence, nature and liberty, constructive project and transcendent end. Yet throughout the course of their dialectical development, existence always remains to some extent inward and solitary, while truth remains to some extent abstract and exterior.
In the Hegelian dialectic the mediation of singular existence and universal truth could take place only in the abstract dimension of absolute spirit. It occurs independently of the existential freedom and moral commitment of man as a person. The individual is merely a means that reason uses to obtain its objectives. In contrast, it is Blondel’s conviction that such a mediation of existence with truth can be only the result of man’s free moral commitment and that its ultimate condition of possibility may depend on union with one man, Christ, who is “the way, the truth and the life


John J McNeill
jjmcneill@aol.com

Mature Spirituality

An Understanding of Adult Spiritual Growth Based on the Insights of Maurice Blondel

Introduction

I will never forget the joy and excitement I felt the first time I read the philosophical thought of Maurice Blondel, the brilliant French existentialist philosopher who wrote at the turn of the 20ieth century. His most famous work was called L’Action, his doctorate thesis at the Sorbonne presented in 1893 and subtitled; Essai d’une Critique de la Vie d’une Science de la Pratique. I was a student of theology at Woodstock College, the Jesuit school of theology in Maryland. I hungered for a philosophical framework which I could use to integrate my religious faith with the deep insights into the human person coming from the human sciences, especially psychology. At the same time, I was deeply aware of the inadequacies of traditional Thomistic philosophy and the scholastic school of objective realism to provide that framework and convey the truth of Christian revelation to today’s believers. I found in Blondel a kindred spirit whose philosophical thought remains an original and profound response to the problems and the needs of Christian believers in our times.

A devoutly religious man, Blondel sought out in prayer what God’s will was for him. He considered entering the priesthood, but his religious counselor advised him to remain a lay person because only as a lay person would he have the freedom to rethink the philosophical basis of Christian belief. This advice proved prophetic.

Blondel defined philosophy as “life itself insofar it attempts to achieve a clear reflexive consciousness of itself and gives direction to its action”. I appreciate the holistic tone of that definition; philosophy has as its object the whole of human life and not just language or thought in abstraction from life. Blondel discovered the central insight of his philosophy while reflecting on this line in scripture: “He or she who does the truth comes into the light! “.

Blondel saw human life as a continual dialectic between thought and action. He liked to compare the human intellect to the headlights of a car moving down the highway. Those headlights can illuminate our way only as far as the next curve in the road. The car must move forward to that curve before the headlights can illuminate what lies around that curve. In a similar way, each of us must act according to our present understanding in order to arrive at the fullness of light or wisdom. There is a kind of subjective experiential knowing that comes from human choice and action and cannot be achieved in any other way.

There is a dynamic in the human spirit, Blondel believed, a striving for fulfillment. That fulfillment can be achieved not by thought alone but also by action. Ultimate truth is not just a question of the conformity of our intellect with what lies outside ourselves. Ultimate truth involves the conformity of our actions with the full potential inside us. That potential is for an identity of our human will with the divine will. We are made in the image and likeness of God. Humans are created capax Dei. As long as we have not achieved that identity there is a felt privation. a longing, a hunger and thirst, to become one with God. ‘Our God”, Blondel wrote, “dwells within us and the only way to become one with that God is to become one with our authentic self”.

This insight lies at the heart of every effort at human liberation. For example, women derive a unique kind of knowledge of themselves from their subjective experience of themselves in action as women. Lesbians and gays have a subjective source of knowledge of what it means to be gay or lesbian that comes from their immediate experience of themselves in their lives and actions and which is not attainable in any other way. The only way we who do not share that subjective experience can obtain that knowledge is to listen carefully and respectfully to those who o have that subjective experience and can articulate its meaning. That is why dialogue is at the heart of all true growth in knowledge.

The central question Blondel posed in L’Action is: What is the ultimate meaning of human life. Blondel makes the observation that humans cannot choose to cease being; we are here, like it or not, for eternity.

Yes or no, has life a meaning and do humans have a destiny….This appearance of being that is at work in me, these actions fleeting as a shadow, I understand that they carry within them the weight of an eternal responsibility, and even at the cost of blood I cannot purchase nothingness; because for me it can no longer be. I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity. Why and by what right, since I have neither known nor willed it?

Having posed the question of human destiny, Blondel makes the point that freedom is the very essence of the human subject and the essential condition for the possibility of existence. Here can be no human destiny, unless that destiny can be achieved through human freedom. Blondel makes the passionate assertion that each of us must be able to choose life, choose death, choose eternity, otherwise the very existence of the human is an illusion. “There is no being where there is only constraint. If I am not that which I will to be, I am not. At the very core of my being there is a will and a love of being, or there is nothing. If human freedom is real, it is necessary that one have at present or at least in the future a knowledge and a will sufficient never to suffer any tyranny whatsoever,”

Blonel’s understanding of human freedom differs radically from the classical understanding of objective realism. The scholastics believed that humans were substantially determined by their essence and only free on the superficial level of actions. Blondel believed that for a human to be is to act, and in acting, to freely mold his or her reality. Humans are not totally or authentically human unless in the depths of their being and action they seize themselves as free source, action itself, a constant self positing.

Human freedom is understood as a radical self-positing of our own reality. We must exist at every moment as a consequence of our freedom. If in the depths of our own subjective being we meet with any determinism whatsoever --- biological, psychological, social, or even a determinism springing from the divine will, a determinism which lies radically outside the sphere of our free ability to determine ourselves --then we would be forced to accept the conclusion that the existence of the individual human person as such is an illusion.

This insight into the radical nature of human freedom led Blondel to accept the principle of immanence as the fundamental methodological principle governing his philosophy of action. He formulated that principle in these words: “Nothing can impose itself on a human; nothing can demand the assent of her or his intellect or the consent of her or his will which does not find its source from within ourselves.”

jjmcneill@aol.com

Trailer to my documentary: Taking a Chance on God

At last the website for the trailer to my documentary: Taking a Chance on God is now available at:
http://www.takingachanceongod.com/
Please copy this URL and paste it into your browser.

Gratitude for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit

I believe a new form of adult, mature spirituality is rapidly repl;acing the immature dependence in spiritual life on external authority. Jesus predicted that maturing process at the last supper when he told the apostles 'it is necessary that I go away for the Spirit to come to you"! So too our dependence on external authoity must give way to a dependence on the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts.

In this advent season of gratitude I want to share my personal gratitude to the role the Holy Spirit has played in my ministry to LBGT people by posting the talk I gave at the New Ways Ministry award to me of the Building Bridges award.

Acceptance Speech for Building Bridges Award

I want to express my gratitude to Jeannine Gramick, SL., Frank DeBernardo
and the Board and Staff of New Ways Ministry for honoring me with the Bridge Builder Award.
Let us pause for a moment of silent prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to be with us here in this room and touch our hearts with God’s love!

Meister Eckhardt once wrote: If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was one heartfelt “thank you, God,” that would suffice for salvation!

And Ignatius Loyola in the preamble to his spiritual exercises wrote: “All the good things in this world belong to us, but the glory belongs to God.” The way we make sure that the glory goes to God, Ignatius pointed out, was by a continuous spirit of gratitude.

I am aware that the Holy Spirit has been with me always over the past 84 years. I would like to reflect with you on some dramatic moments in my life and ministry when the action of the Holy Spirit was palpable and express my debt of gratitude and hope that you will search for parallel moments in your life.

One of those special gifts of the Holy Spirit over the past few weeks was reading the memoirs of Archbishop Weakland: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, an extraordinary book by a gay member of the hierarchy which throws incredible hope-filled light on the future of the church. I emailed Archbishop Weakland and asked him if he had a message for this audience. Rembert wrote to me that his message would be simple. “Be not afraid. Cast out into the deep!”

My text for these remarks today is the words ascribed to Jesus in Mark 12 quoting Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”

The first moment I want to recall goes back 65 years. Having enlisted in the army when I was 17, I went into combat with General Patton’s third army on the border of Germany. My infantry unit managed to cross the border. The German army counterattacked. My unit found itself surrounded by German tanks. I remember taking off my T-shirt to signal my surrender. A German soldier was assigned to march me back to a prisoner collection point. I was certain that the guard intended to shoot me. As we walked down a country lane we came upon a roadside shrine with a crucifix. I signaled the guard that I wanted to say a prayer. As he leaned on his rifle and smoked one of my camel cigarettes, I knelt to pray. I remember making an act of contrition. And then saying:” Lord I am only 18; I am too young to die!”

Well, here I am at 84 still in decent health, so that prayer was certainly answered.

The next event occurred while I was a kriegsgefangenen (prisoner of war). The Germans starved the American prisoners. I went down to 90 lbs and looked like a skeleton. One day we were sent out to a farm to chop wood where the SS were raising mink. A slave laborer from eastern Europe was mixing a mash of vegetables for the animals. I could not take my eyes off the food. While the guard’s back was turned the slave laborer took a potato from the mash and threw it to me. The guard would have killed him if he saw him feed a prisoner. I made a gesture of thanks and the slave laborer’s response was to make the sign of the cross. That action was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. I date my vocation to religious life to that moment. Here was a man who had the courage to risk his life to feed a total stranger. And he found that courage in his faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I wanted to be able to imitate that man. My prayer from that moment to this is: Lord, grant me the grace to know what your will for me is and grant me the courage to be able to do it.

The next memorable moment was my discovery of the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel while studying theology at Woodstock seminary. Fr. Sponga, the rector, gave a seminar on Blondel. A whole new world of philosophical and theological thinking opened up to me and filled me with joy and hope. I was set on fire by Blondel’s opening words in his book, Philosophy of Action: “I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity, Unless I can choose life, choose death, choose eternity , I am not.” God created us free and will always respect that freedom! I will never forget reading this line in Blondel’s philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God, is by becoming one with our authentic self!” (One of my deepest regrets is not having done more to make Blondel’s thought available to an American audience. My nephew Tim McNeill the publisher of Dalai Lama’s Wisdom Press is in the process of putting my doctorate thesis, from Louvain University published under the title, The Blondelian Synthesis, on the computer.)

One of the next striking manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life occurred at one of the darkest moments in my life. I was in France doing graduate studies. In my loneliness, I began to compulsively act out sexually. I was so filled with shame, guilt and self-loathing that I began to contemplate suicide. Right at that moment I felt I heard the Spirit assuring me that I should continue to trust God; that somehow he would make use of this moment in my future ministry. I felt peace flood back into my heart. I did not fully understand what happened until years later when I first read Henri Nouwen”s great book, Wounded Healers, with its message that the greatest gift a spiritual healer brings to his ministry is his own experience of having been healed in his woundedness.

he next occurrence was during a trip to Toronto from Le Moyne college in Syracuse, NY, during the Vietnam war, on New Years Eve of 1965. I had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. So much so that the Democratic party asked me to enter the Democratic primary as a peace candidate for congress against the hawk candidate, James Hanley. When I asked permission to do this from my Jesuit provincial he advised against it pointing out that Fr. Drinan was running for congress that same year in Boston. He felt that if there were two Jesuits running for congress that would be interpreted as a Jesuit conspiracy to take over America.

I had gone to Toronto to try to bolster the moral of my students who fled to Canada because their status as conscientious objectors to the war had been denied. While there I visited a gay bar called the St. Charles bar and met Charles Chiarelli who has been my life partner since then for the past 43 years. I could never have carried out my ministry if I had not had a deep personal experience with Charlie of the goodness and holiness of gay love.

Another debt of gratitude I owe the Holy Spirit is the support I have received from my sister, Sister Sheila. Sis was a Franciscan nun in the convent of St. Mary of the Angels in Williamsville, NY. Sister had a progressive bone disease for many years and lived in the infirmary of her mother house. When she heard that I was involved in a ministry to gay and lesbians, she prayed to the Spirit for a sign to confirm that my ministry was from God. A fellow nun returned from the missions in Africa asked my sister if the John McNeill who wrote The Church and the Homosexual was her brother. When Sis said yes the nun asked her to thank me. Nearly all her personnel at the hospital she directed were gay men. She did not know how to deal with them until she read my book. That book put her at ease in dealing with the gay orderlies. Sis took that as her sign. She told me whenever I gave a retreat or talk to a gay or lesbian audience let her know exactly when. She would gather twenty to thirty elderly nuns in the infirmary and they would pray in front of the blessed sacrament that God would use me to bring the message of God’s love to my audience. I was always consciously aware of the spiritual power of those prayers. As symbol of that spiritual alliance, Sis had this beautiful rainbow stole made for me. We continued that ministerial alliance until Sis’s death from bone cancer in 1995. I am sure Sis is still with us with her prayers today.

Several events occurred during the writing of my first book that I ascribed to the Holy Spirit working overtime. After several years of research I wrote a long article titled, The Christian Male Homosexual and mailed it off to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a conservative priests’ journal. The editor wrote back that my article arrived just in time. He had made the decision to resign as editor and enter the Trappist order. So he decided to publish the article over three issues in 1972. The response was so positive that my Jesuit colleagues at Woodstock seminary asked me to major the articles into a book.

While doing research on my book the librarian at Union Theological gave me a copy of an anonymous research article on scripture and homosexuality which I found out several years later was the first draft of John Boswell’s brilliant book: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.

Once the manuscript of the book was completed, I began the process of undergoing censorship within the Jesuit order to receive an imprimi potest. First, on a request from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, I sent it to seven Jesuit moral theologians in the United States. All seven found it a serious theological contribution and approved its publication. General Pedro Arrupé hesitated and requested that I mail the manuscript to Rome where it would be censored by several Roman Jesuit moralists. They also approved publication.

Just as my manuscript arrived on Father Arrupé’s desk, a world famous sculptress named Jacqueline Ziegler arrived from the United States to sculpt the head of Father Arrupé. Jacqueline, several years before, had come to Syracuse, New York after many years with the peace corps in Africa and joined the faculty of Le Moyne college as the professor of fine arts. We became close friends. Jacqueline made the decision to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and asked me to be her spiritual director. On the feast of St. Ignatius in July 1974, I baptized her in the student chapel at Le Moyne. (Jacqueline did a larger than life sculpture of my head which is now with my archives at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.)

Just as Pedro Arrupé began to read my manuscript, Jacqueline began to sculpt his head and tell him about this wonderful Jesuit, who baptized her, named John McNeill at Le Moyne college. I don’t know what effect this had on Father Arrupé’s decision to grant me his imprimi potest. But I am sure it did not hurt.

Archbishop Weakland in his memoirs has this to say about Arrupé: “If from all the people I have known in my life in the Church, I had to select only one for sainthood, it would be Pedro Arrupé”.

The next event was the actual publication of the book, The Church and the Homosexual in 1976. I had prayed to God to act as my public relations agent and God certainly delivered. A major article by the religion editor Kenneth Briggs was on the front page of the New York Times. Special articles appeared in Time magazine and Newsweek. I made three appearances on the Phil Donohue show and several on the Larry King Live show.

The day of its publication I was invited to appear on the Today show. It was Tom Brokaw’s first day as host. He did not feel confident to handle such a hot potato as a theological work on homosexuality, so he invited Russell Barber, the religion editor, to sit in with him for the interview. Russell told me later that he was furious at having to take my book with him for his weekend on Fire Island, but ended up delighted when he read the book and invited me to appear on his Review of Religion show, The First Estate, a few days later.

There were innumerable manifestations of the grace of the Holy Spirit over the years. But the one that stands out as most remarkable occurred during a trip to Europe in 1988 after the publication of my second major work, Taking a Chance on God: Liberation Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, and Friends. Charlie and I had been invited to do a series of conferences at various universities in Holland. We decided to take a trip to Paris for a few days. On arriving in Paris, I called Jacques Perotti, the assistant to Père André and the founder of David and Jonathan, a gay group for French speaking Catholics. Jacques told me that there was an international meeting of David and Jonathan groups in a monastery outside of Paris and invited me to address the group. I warned him that my French was almost non-existent and I would need a translator. When I arrived I gave a one hour talk in the best French I ever used. I believe that God gave me the gift of tongues that day. As a result David and Jonathon translated my book into French and made it their official manual.

Once again I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit when I faced the choice of giving up all ministries to LGBT people or being dismissed from the Jesuits after 40 years. I went to Gethsemane Abbey to seek God’s help in making that decision. While there, a Trappist monk came to my room and gave me a copy of the Buddist boddisatva vow of universal compassion. As I read that vow it became clear to me what God wanted of me…to continue the ministry and pay the price. I sought the spiritual help of Fr. Matthew Kelty, the guest master at the monastery. I remember him saying to me: “John, God has put you in touch with the suffering of the gay and lesbian community in a special way. Now it is your duty to do whatever you can do to relieve that suffering!”

Shortly after my dismissal from the Society of Jesus, Walter Wink, the biblical theologian and my colleague on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, wrote me a letter in which he said: “John, when the Vatican imprudently slammed the door on you, it blew open a thousand other doors.” That was a prophetic statement. Bishop Paul Moore, of the New York Episcopal diocese wrote to me inviting me to join his church and carry on my ministry there. When William Sloane Coffin retired as minister at Riverside Church, the Maranatha gay group at Riverside submitted my name as a candidate to replace him as pastor. (I always hoped Cardinal O’Connor got wind of that!) Robert Raines, the Methodist director of Kirkridge Retreat Center organized a letter of protest to Rome signed by several famous protestant pastors and theologians, among them, Paul Moore, Harvey Cox and Sloan Coffin. In the letter, they asked the Vatican to restore me because my ministry to LGBT people was as important to their churches as it was to the Roman church. Scores of gay clergy from all denominations began to flock to my retreats for gay Christians at Kirkridge; among them Gene Robinson, the future gay bishop.

I would be remiss today if I failed to pay tribute to Rev. Joseph Doucé. Joseph was a Baptist minister. He was born in Belgium and became a minister in the church in Holland. He opened a specialized ministry in Paris called Christ, the Liberator, to all sexual outcasts, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and transsexuals. He had a special ministry to pedophiles and the victims of pedophiles

When Rev. Doucé heard of my work, he came to New York to meet with me. On several occasions I attended and spoke at his Sunday services in Paris. Joseph was responsible for the publication and distribution of my books in French. In 1990, Rev. Doucé invited Charlie and me to come to Strasburg for me to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of all the Christian gay and lesbian groups in Europe. After the conference he and his lover returned together with us to Paris. The next day we flew back to New York. A few days later we received a tearful phone call from his lover. He told us that men disguised as Parisian police came to the center and arrested Joseph. When his lover went to the police station they denied any knowledge of the arrest. We eventually found out that he was kidnapped by secret police who brought him to a secret prison in Paris where they tortured him for several weeks and finally murdered him and dumped his body in a woods outside of Paris. They were acting on a rumor that Rev Doucé had a list of high government officials who were pederasts and they wanted that information at any cost. Later we heard that the murderers of Rev. Doucé were openly bragging about their murder of the pedophile Doucé. To my knowledge they were never brought to justice. Rev. Joseph Doucé is a true martyr in the cause of gay liberation.

To bring this reflection to a close, I believe that we are witnessing an extraordinary transformation of the Church from a patriarchal, authoritative institution into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a democratic Church that recognizes the Holy Spirit dwelling within all its members and sees authority as coming from the ground up.

At his discourse at the last supper Jesus is reported in the gospel of John: “It is necessary that I should go away before the Spirit can come to you. If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit will dwell in your hearts and lead you into all truth.” What was that necessity? Why could the Holy Spirit not come as long as Jesus was alive?

I believe that Jesus was expressing a basic law governing human growth into spiritual maturity. As humans, we must grow from dependence on external authority to dependence on an authority that dwells within us. To achieve that growth we need fallible authorities. If our parents had been infallible we could never develop into mature adults making our own decisions and taking responsibility for them.

Thank God that Church authorities have proved so fallible. The result has been a maturing of the people of God. This began when the Vatican fumbled the issue of birth control, forcing millions of Catholic to exercise their freedom of conscience, make their own decisions and take responsibility for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what the present Pope is against when he decries moral relativism. Speaking of our last Pope, Archbishop Weakland had this to say:

He (John Paul II) did not read the signs of the time, namely, the opening of Vatican II toward more participatory government on all levels of church life…Discerning the action of the Spirit in the whole Church was not on his agenda. This failure was probably the most important lost opportunity of the post-conciliar period (pp.407-408).

One of the greatest beneficiaries of the fallibility of church authorities has been the LGBT Catholic community. We came to realize early on that we could not accept and obey Church teaching on homosexuality without destroying ourselves physically, psychologically and spirituality. Consequently, as a matter of survival we had to take distance from Church teaching, develop our freedom of conscience and learn to hear what the Spirit of God is saying to us through our experience. The result has been that the LGBT community is leading the way to transform the Catholic Church into a Church of the Holy Spirit.

“The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone! This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” THANK YOU!! New Ways Ministry for your many decades of heroic service to the Church and to the Catholic LGBT community Thank you, God, for all the special maturing graces you are pouring out on the people of God. Thank you especially for the special role you are calling the LGBT community to play in establishing the kingdom of God.

Veni creator spiritus. Mentes tuorum visita; Imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora. A special heartfelt thank you, Holy Spirit!

jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com

Gratitude for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit


I believe a new form of adult, mature spirituality is rapidly repl;acing the immature dependence in spiritual life on external authority. Jesus prdicted that maturing process at the last supper when he told the apostles 'it is necessary that I go away for the Spirit to come to you"! So too our dependence on external authoity must give way to a dependence on the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts

In this advent season of gratitude I want to share my personal gratitude to the role the Holy Spirit has played in my ministry to LBGT people by posting the talk I gave at the New Ways Ministry award to me of the Building Bridges award.



Acceptance Speech for Building Bridges Award



I want to express my gratitude to Jeannine Gramick, SL., Frank DeBernardo

and the Board and Staff of New Ways Ministry for honoring me with the Bridge Builder Award.



Let us pause for a moment of silent prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to be with us here in this room and touch our heats with God’s love!



Meister Eckhardt once wrote: If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was one heartfelt “thank you, God,” that would suffice for salvation!



And Ignatius Loyola in the preamble to his spiritual exercises wrote: “All the good things in this world belong to us, but the glory belongs to God.” The way we make sure that the glory goes to God, Ignatius pointed out, was by a continuous spirit of gratitude.



I am aware that the Holy Spirit has been with me always over the past 84 years. I would like to reflect with you on some dramatic moments in my life and ministry when the action of the Holy Spirit was palpable and express my debt of gratitude and hope that you will search for parallel moments in your life.



One of those special gifts of the Holy Spirit over the past few weeks was reading the memoirs of Archbishop Weakland: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, an extraordinary book by a gay member of the hierarchy which throws incredible hope-filled light on the future of the church. I emailed Archbishop Weakland and asked him if he had a message for this audience. Rembert wrote to me that his message would be simple. “Be not afraid. Cast out into the deep!”



My text for these remarks today is the words ascribed to Jesus in Mark 12 quoting Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”



The first moment I want to recall goes back 65 years. Having enlisted in the army when I was 17, I went into combat with General Patton’s third army on the border of Germany. My infantry unit managed to cross the border. The German army counterattacked. My unit found itself surrounded by German tanks. I remember taking off my T-shirt to signal my surrender. A German soldier was assigned to march me back to a prisoner collection point. I was certain that the guard intended to shoot me. As we walked down a country lane we came upon a roadside shrine with a crucifix. I signaled the guard that I wanted to say a prayer. As he leaned on his rifle and smoked one of my camel cigarettes, I knelt to pray. I remember making an act of contrition. And then saying:” Lord I am only 18; I am too young to die!”

Well, here I am at 84 still in decent health, so that prayer was certainly answered.



The next event occurred while I was a kriegsgefangenen (prisoner of war). The Germans starved the American prisoners. I went down to 90 lbs and looked like a skeleton. One day we were sent out to a farm to chop wood where the SS were raising mink. A slave laborer from eastern Europe was mixing a mash of vegetables for the animals. I could not take my eyes off the food. While the guard’s back was turned the slave laborer took a potato from the mash and threw it to me. The guard would have killed him if he saw him feed a prisoner. I made a gesture of thanks and the slave laborer’s response was to make the sign of the cross. That action was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. I date my vocation to religious life to that moment. Here was a man who had the courage to risk his life to feed a total stranger. And he found that courage in his faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I wanted to be able to imitate that man. My prayer from that moment to this is: Lord, grant me the grace to know what your will for me is and grant me the courage to be able to do it.



The next memorable moment was my discovery of the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel while studying theology at Woodstock seminary. Fr. Sponga, the rector, gave a seminar on Blondel. A whole new world of philosophical and theological thinking opened up to me and filled me with joy and hope. I was set on fire by Blondel’s opening words in his book, Philosophy of Action: “I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity, Unless I can choose life, choose death, choose eternity , I am not.” God created us free and will always respect that freedom! I will never forget reading this line in Blondel’s philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God, is by becoming one with our authentic self!” (One of my deepest regrets is not having done more to make Blondel’s thought available to an American audience. My nephew Tim McNeill the publisher of Dalai Lama’s Wisdom Press is in the process of putting my doctorate thesis, from Louvain University published under the title, The Blondelian Synthesis, on the computer.)



One of the next striking manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life occurred at one of the darkest moments in my life. I was in France doing graduate studies. In my loneliness, I began to compulsively act out sexually. I was so filled with shame, guilt and self-loathing that I began to contemplate suicide. Right at that moment I felt I heard the Spirit assuring me that I should continue to trust God; that somehow he would make use of this moment in my future ministry. I felt peace flood back into my heart. I did not fully understand what happened until years later when I first read Henri Nouwen”s great book, Wounded Healers, with its message that the greatest gift a spiritual healer brings to his ministry is his own experience of having been healed in his woundedness.



The next occurrence was during a trip to Toronto from Le Moyne college in Syracuse, NY, during the Vietnam war, on New Years Eve of 1965. I had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. So much so that the Democratic party asked me to enter the Democratic primary as a peace candidate for congress against the hawk candidate, James Hanley. When I asked permission to do this from my Jesuit provincial he advised against it pointing out that Fr. Drinan was running for congress that same year in Boston. He felt that if there were two Jesuits running for congress that would be interpreted as a Jesuit conspiracy to take over America.



I had gone to Toronto to try to bolster the moral of my students who fled to Canada because their status as conscientious objectors to the war had been denied. While there I visited a gay bar called the St. Charles bar and met Charles Chiarelli who has been my life partner since then for the past 43 years. I could never have carried out my ministry if I had not had a deep personal experience with Charlie of the goodness and holiness of gay love.



Another debt of gratitude I owe the Holy Spirit is the support I have received from my sister, Sister Sheila. Sis was a Franciscan nun in the convent of St. Mary of the Angels in Williamsville, NY. Sister had a progressive bone disease for many years and lived in the infirmary of her mother house. When she heard that I was involved in a ministry to gay and lesbians, she prayed to the Spirit for a sign to confirm that my ministry was from God. A fellow nun returned from the missions in Africa asked my sister if the John McNeill who wrote The Church and the Homosexual was her brother. When Sis said yes the nun asked her to thank me. Nearly all her personnel at the hospital she directed were gay men. She did not know how to deal with them until she read my book. That book put her at ease in dealing with the gay orderlies. Sis took that as her sign. She told me whenever I gave a retreat or talk to a gay or lesbian audience let her know exactly when. She would gather twenty to thirty elderly nuns in the infirmary and they would pray in front of the blessed sacrament that God would use me to bring the message of God’s love to my audience. I was always consciously aware of the spiritual power of those prayers. As symbol of that spiritual alliance, Sis had this beautiful rainbow stole made for me. We continued that ministerial alliance until Sis’s death from bone cancer in 1995. I am sure Sis is still with us with her prayers today.



Several events occurred during the writing of my first book that I ascribed to the Holy Spirit working overtime. After several years of research I wrote a long article titled, The Christian Male Homosexual and mailed it off to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a conservative priests’ journal. The editor wrote back that my article arrived just in time. He had made the decision to resign as editor and enter the Trappist order. So he decided to publish the article over three issues in 1972. The response was so positive that my Jesuit colleagues at Woodstock seminary asked me to major the articles into a book.

While doing research on my book the librarian at Union Theological gave me a copy of an anonymous research article on scripture and homosexuality which I found out several years later was the first draft of John Boswell’s brilliant book: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.



Once the manuscript of the book was completed, I began the process of undergoing censorship within the Jesuit order to receive an imprimi potest. First, on a request from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, I sent it to seven Jesuit moral theologians in the United States. All seven found it a serious theological contribution and approved its publication. General Pedro Arrupé hesitated and requested that I mail the manuscript to Rome where it would be censored by several Roman Jesuit moralists. They also approved publication.



Just as my manuscript arrived on Father Arrupé’s desk, a world famous sculptress named Jacqueline Ziegler arrived from the United States to sculpt the head of Father Arrupé. Jacqueline, several years before, had come to Syracuse, New York after many years with the peace corps in Africa and joined the faculty of Le Moyne college as the professor of fine arts. We became close friends. Jacqueline made the decision to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and asked me to be her spiritual director. On the feast of St. Ignatius in July 1974, I baptized her in the student chapel at Le Moyne. (Jacqueline did a larger than life sculpture of my head which is now with my archives at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.)



Just as Pedro Arrupé began to read my manuscript, Jacqueline began to sculpt his head and tell him about this wonderful Jesuit, who baptized her, named John McNeill at Le Moyne college. I don’t know what effect this had on Father Arrupé’s decision to grant me his imprimi potest. But I am sure it did not hurt.



Archbishop Weakland in his memoirs has this to say about Arrupé: “If from all the people I have known in my life in the Church, I had to select only one for sainthood, it would be Pedro Arrupé”.

.



The next event was the actual publication of the book, The Church and the Homosexual in 1976. I had prayed to God to act as my public relations agent and God certainly delivered. A major article by the religion editor Kenneth Briggs was on the front page of the New York Times. Special articles appeared in Time magazine and Newsweek. I made three appearances on the Phil Donohue show and several on the Larry King Live show.



The day of its publication I was invited to appear on the Today show. It was Tom Brokaw’s first day as host. He did not feel confident to handle such a hot potato as a theological work on homosexuality, so he invited Russell Barber, the religion editor, to sit in with him for the interview. Russell told me later that he was furious at having to take my book with him for his weekend on Fire Island, but ended up delighted when he read the book and invited me to appear on his Review of Religion show a few days later.



There were innumerable manifestations of the grace of the Holy Spirit over the years. But the one that stands out as most remarkable occurred during a trip to Europe in 1988 after the publication of my second major work, Taking a Chance on God: Liberation Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, and Friends. Charlie and I had been invited to do a series of conferences at various universities in Holland. We decided to take a trip to Paris for a few days. On arriving in Paris, I called Jacques Perotti, the assistant to Père André and the founder of David and Jonathan, a gay group for French speaking Catholics. Jacques told me that there was an international meeting of David and Jonathan groups in a monastery outside of Paris and invited me to address the group. I warned him that my French was almost non-existent and I would need a translator. When I arrived I gave a one hour talk in the best French I ever used. I believe that God gave me the gift of tongues that day. As a result David and Jonathon translated my book into French and made it their official manual.



Once again I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit when I faced the choice of giving up all ministries to LGBT people or being dismissed from the Jesuits after 40 years. I went to Gethsemane Abbey to seek God’s help in making that decision. While there, a Trappist monk came to my room and gave me a copy of the Buddist boddisatva vow of universal compassion. As I read that vow it became clear to me what God wanted of me…to continue the ministry and pay the price. I sought the spiritual help of Fr. Matthew Kelty, the guest master at the monastery. I remember him saying to me: “John, God has put you in touch with the suffering of the gay and lesbian community in a special way. Now it is your duty to do whatever you can do to relieve that suffering!”



Shortly after my dismissal from the Society of Jesus, Walter Wink, the biblical theologian and my colleague on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, wrote me a letter in which he said: “John, when the Vatican imprudently slammed the door on you, it blew open a thousand other doors.” That was a prophetic statement. Bishop Paul Moore, of the New York Episcopal diocese wrote to me inviting me to join his church and carry on my ministry there. When William Sloane Coffin retired as minister at Riverside Church, the Maranatha gay group at Riverside submitted my name as a candidate to replace him as pastor. (I always hoped Cardinal O’Connor got wind of that!) Robert Raines, the Methodist director of Kirkridge Retreat Center organized a letter of protest to Rome signed by several famous protestant pastors and theologians, among them, Paul Moore, Harvey Cox and Sloan Coffin. In the letter, they asked the Vatican to restore me because my ministry to LGBT people was as important to their churches as it was to the Roman church. Scores of gay clergy from all denominations began to flock to my retreats for gay Christians at Kirkridge; among them Gene Robinson, the future gay bishop.



I would be remiss today if I failed to pay tribute to Rev. Joseph Doucé. Joseph was a Baptist minister. He was born in Belgium and became a minister in the church in Holland. He opened a specialized ministry in Paris called Christ, the Liberator, to all sexual outcasts, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and transsexuals. He had a special ministry to pedophiles and the victims of pedophiles



When Rev. Doucé heard of my work, he came to New York to meet with me. On several occasions I attended and spoke at his Sunday services in Paris. Joseph was responsible for the publication and distribution of my books in French. In 1990, Rev. Doucé invited Charlie and me to come to Strasburg for me to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of all the Christian gay and lesbian groups in Europe. After the conference he and his lover returned together with us to Paris. The next day we flew back to New York. A few days later we received a tearful phone call from his lover. He told us that men disguised as Parisian police came to the center and arrested Joseph. When his lover went to the police station they denied any knowledge of the arrest. We eventually found out that he was kidnapped by secret police who brought him to a secret prison in Paris where they tortured him for several weeks and finally murdered him and dumped his body in a woods outside of Paris. They were acting on a rumor that Rev Doucé had a list of high government officials who were pederasts and they wanted that information at any cost. Later we heard that the murderers of Rev. Doucé were openly bragging about their murder of the pedophile Doucé. To my knowledge they were never brought to justice. Rev. Joseph Doucé is a true martyr in the cause of gay liberation.



To bring this reflection to a close, I believe that we are witnessing an extraordinary transformation of the Church from a patriarchal, authoritative institution into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a democratic Church that recognizes the Holy Spirit dwelling within all its members and sees authority as coming from the ground up.



At his discourse at the last supper Jesus is reported in the gospel of John: “It is necessary that I should go away before the Spirit can come to you. If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit will dwell in your hearts and lead you into all truth.” What was that necessity? Why could the Holy Spirit not come as long as Jesus was alive?



I believe that Jesus was expressing a basic law governing human growth into spiritual maturity. As humans, we must grow from dependence on external authority to dependence on an authority that dwells within us. To achieve that growth we need fallible authorities. If our parents had been infallible we could never develop into mature adults making our own decisions and taking responsibility for them.



Thank God that Church authorities have proved so fallible. The result has been a maturing of the people of God. This began when the Vatican fumbled the issue of birth control, forcing millions of Catholic to exercise their freedom of conscience, make their own decisions and take responsibility for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what the present Pope is against when he decries moral relativism. Speaking of our last Pope, Archbishop Weakland had this to say:



He (John Paul II) did not read the signs of the time, namely, the opening of Vatican II toward more participatory government on all levels of church life…Discerning the action of the Spirit in the whole Church was not on his agenda. This failure was probably the most important lost opportunity of the post-conciliar period (pp.407-408).



One of the greatest beneficiaries of the fallibility of church authorities has been the LGBT Catholic community. We came to realize early on that we could not accept and obey Church teaching on homosexuality without destroying ourselves physically, psychologically and spirituality. Consequently, as a matter of survival we had to take distance from Church teaching, develop our freedom of conscience and learn to hear what the Spirit of God is saying to us through our experience. The result has been that the LGBT community is leading the way to transform the Catholic Church into a Church of the Holy Spirit.



“The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone! This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” THANK YOU!! New Ways Ministry for your many decades of heroic service to the Church and to the Catholic LGBT community Thank you, God, for all the special maturing graces you are pouring out on the people of God. Thank you especially for the special role you are calling the LGBT community to play in establishing the kingdom of God.

Veni creator spiritus. Mentes tuorum visita; Imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora. A special heartfelt thank you, Holy Spirit!



John J. McNeill



jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com












Gratitude for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit


I believe a new form of adult, mature spirituality is rapidly repl;acing the immature dependence in spiritual life on external authority. Jesus prdicted that maturing process at the last supper when he told the apostles 'it is necessary that I go away for the Spirit to come to you"! So too our dependence on external authoity must give way to a dependence on the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts

In this advent season of gratitude I want to share my personal gratitude to the role the Holy Spirit has played in my ministry to LBGT people by posting the talk I gave at the New Ways Ministry award to me of the Building Bridges award.



Acceptance Speech for Building Bridges Award



I want to express my gratitude to Jeannine Gramick, SL., Frank DeBernardo

and the Board and Staff of New Ways Ministry for honoring me with the Bridge Builder Award.



Let us pause for a moment of silent prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to be with us here in this room and touch our heats with God’s love!



Meister Eckhardt once wrote: If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was one heartfelt “thank you, God,” that would suffice for salvation!



And Ignatius Loyola in the preamble to his spiritual exercises wrote: “All the good things in this world belong to us, but the glory belongs to God.” The way we make sure that the glory goes to God, Ignatius pointed out, was by a continuous spirit of gratitude.



I am aware that the Holy Spirit has been with me always over the past 84 years. I would like to reflect with you on some dramatic moments in my life and ministry when the action of the Holy Spirit was palpable and express my debt of gratitude and hope that you will search for parallel moments in your life.



One of those special gifts of the Holy Spirit over the past few weeks was reading the memoirs of Archbishop Weakland: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, an extraordinary book by a gay member of the hierarchy which throws incredible hope-filled light on the future of the church. I emailed Archbishop Weakland and asked him if he had a message for this audience. Rembert wrote to me that his message would be simple. “Be not afraid. Cast out into the deep!”



My text for these remarks today is the words ascribed to Jesus in Mark 12 quoting Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”



The first moment I want to recall goes back 65 years. Having enlisted in the army when I was 17, I went into combat with General Patton’s third army on the border of Germany. My infantry unit managed to cross the border. The German army counterattacked. My unit found itself surrounded by German tanks. I remember taking off my T-shirt to signal my surrender. A German soldier was assigned to march me back to a prisoner collection point. I was certain that the guard intended to shoot me. As we walked down a country lane we came upon a roadside shrine with a crucifix. I signaled the guard that I wanted to say a prayer. As he leaned on his rifle and smoked one of my camel cigarettes, I knelt to pray. I remember making an act of contrition. And then saying:” Lord I am only 18; I am too young to die!”

Well, here I am at 84 still in decent health, so that prayer was certainly answered.



The next event occurred while I was a kriegsgefangenen (prisoner of war). The Germans starved the American prisoners. I went down to 90 lbs and looked like a skeleton. One day we were sent out to a farm to chop wood where the SS were raising mink. A slave laborer from eastern Europe was mixing a mash of vegetables for the animals. I could not take my eyes off the food. While the guard’s back was turned the slave laborer took a potato from the mash and threw it to me. The guard would have killed him if he saw him feed a prisoner. I made a gesture of thanks and the slave laborer’s response was to make the sign of the cross. That action was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. I date my vocation to religious life to that moment. Here was a man who had the courage to risk his life to feed a total stranger. And he found that courage in his faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I wanted to be able to imitate that man. My prayer from that moment to this is: Lord, grant me the grace to know what your will for me is and grant me the courage to be able to do it.



The next memorable moment was my discovery of the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel while studying theology at Woodstock seminary. Fr. Sponga, the rector, gave a seminar on Blondel. A whole new world of philosophical and theological thinking opened up to me and filled me with joy and hope. I was set on fire by Blondel’s opening words in his book, Philosophy of Action: “I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity, Unless I can choose life, choose death, choose eternity , I am not.” God created us free and will always respect that freedom! I will never forget reading this line in Blondel’s philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God, is by becoming one with our authentic self!” (One of my deepest regrets is not having done more to make Blondel’s thought available to an American audience. My nephew Tim McNeill the publisher of Dalai Lama’s Wisdom Press is in the process of putting my doctorate thesis, from Louvain University published under the title, The Blondelian Synthesis, on the computer.)



One of the next striking manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life occurred at one of the darkest moments in my life. I was in France doing graduate studies. In my loneliness, I began to compulsively act out sexually. I was so filled with shame, guilt and self-loathing that I began to contemplate suicide. Right at that moment I felt I heard the Spirit assuring me that I should continue to trust God; that somehow he would make use of this moment in my future ministry. I felt peace flood back into my heart. I did not fully understand what happened until years later when I first read Henri Nouwen”s great book, Wounded Healers, with its message that the greatest gift a spiritual healer brings to his ministry is his own experience of having been healed in his woundedness.



The next occurrence was during a trip to Toronto from Le Moyne college in Syracuse, NY, during the Vietnam war, on New Years Eve of 1965. I had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. So much so that the Democratic party asked me to enter the Democratic primary as a peace candidate for congress against the hawk candidate, James Hanley. When I asked permission to do this from my Jesuit provincial he advised against it pointing out that Fr. Drinan was running for congress that same year in Boston. He felt that if there were two Jesuits running for congress that would be interpreted as a Jesuit conspiracy to take over America.



I had gone to Toronto to try to bolster the moral of my students who fled to Canada because their status as conscientious objectors to the war had been denied. While there I visited a gay bar called the St. Charles bar and met Charles Chiarelli who has been my life partner since then for the past 43 years. I could never have carried out my ministry if I had not had a deep personal experience with Charlie of the goodness and holiness of gay love.



Another debt of gratitude I owe the Holy Spirit is the support I have received from my sister, Sister Sheila. Sis was a Franciscan nun in the convent of St. Mary of the Angels in Williamsville, NY. Sister had a progressive bone disease for many years and lived in the infirmary of her mother house. When she heard that I was involved in a ministry to gay and lesbians, she prayed to the Spirit for a sign to confirm that my ministry was from God. A fellow nun returned from the missions in Africa asked my sister if the John McNeill who wrote The Church and the Homosexual was her brother. When Sis said yes the nun asked her to thank me. Nearly all her personnel at the hospital she directed were gay men. She did not know how to deal with them until she read my book. That book put her at ease in dealing with the gay orderlies. Sis took that as her sign. She told me whenever I gave a retreat or talk to a gay or lesbian audience let her know exactly when. She would gather twenty to thirty elderly nuns in the infirmary and they would pray in front of the blessed sacrament that God would use me to bring the message of God’s love to my audience. I was always consciously aware of the spiritual power of those prayers. As symbol of that spiritual alliance, Sis had this beautiful rainbow stole made for me. We continued that ministerial alliance until Sis’s death from bone cancer in 1995. I am sure Sis is still with us with her prayers today.



Several events occurred during the writing of my first book that I ascribed to the Holy Spirit working overtime. After several years of research I wrote a long article titled, The Christian Male Homosexual and mailed it off to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a conservative priests’ journal. The editor wrote back that my article arrived just in time. He had made the decision to resign as editor and enter the Trappist order. So he decided to publish the article over three issues in 1972. The response was so positive that my Jesuit colleagues at Woodstock seminary asked me to major the articles into a book.

While doing research on my book the librarian at Union Theological gave me a copy of an anonymous research article on scripture and homosexuality which I found out several years later was the first draft of John Boswell’s brilliant book: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.



Once the manuscript of the book was completed, I began the process of undergoing censorship within the Jesuit order to receive an imprimi potest. First, on a request from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, I sent it to seven Jesuit moral theologians in the United States. All seven found it a serious theological contribution and approved its publication. General Pedro Arrupé hesitated and requested that I mail the manuscript to Rome where it would be censored by several Roman Jesuit moralists. They also approved publication.



Just as my manuscript arrived on Father Arrupé’s desk, a world famous sculptress named Jacqueline Ziegler arrived from the United States to sculpt the head of Father Arrupé. Jacqueline, several years before, had come to Syracuse, New York after many years with the peace corps in Africa and joined the faculty of Le Moyne college as the professor of fine arts. We became close friends. Jacqueline made the decision to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and asked me to be her spiritual director. On the feast of St. Ignatius in July 1974, I baptized her in the student chapel at Le Moyne. (Jacqueline did a larger than life sculpture of my head which is now with my archives at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.)



Just as Pedro Arrupé began to read my manuscript, Jacqueline began to sculpt his head and tell him about this wonderful Jesuit, who baptized her, named John McNeill at Le Moyne college. I don’t know what effect this had on Father Arrupé’s decision to grant me his imprimi potest. But I am sure it did not hurt.



Archbishop Weakland in his memoirs has this to say about Arrupé: “If from all the people I have known in my life in the Church, I had to select only one for sainthood, it would be Pedro Arrupé”.

.



The next event was the actual publication of the book, The Church and the Homosexual in 1976. I had prayed to God to act as my public relations agent and God certainly delivered. A major article by the religion editor Kenneth Briggs was on the front page of the New York Times. Special articles appeared in Time magazine and Newsweek. I made three appearances on the Phil Donohue show and several on the Larry King Live show.



The day of its publication I was invited to appear on the Today show. It was Tom Brokaw’s first day as host. He did not feel confident to handle such a hot potato as a theological work on homosexuality, so he invited Russell Barber, the religion editor, to sit in with him for the interview. Russell told me later that he was furious at having to take my book with him for his weekend on Fire Island, but ended up delighted when he read the book and invited me to appear on his Review of Religion show a few days later.



There were innumerable manifestations of the grace of the Holy Spirit over the years. But the one that stands out as most remarkable occurred during a trip to Europe in 1988 after the publication of my second major work, Taking a Chance on God: Liberation Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, and Friends. Charlie and I had been invited to do a series of conferences at various universities in Holland. We decided to take a trip to Paris for a few days. On arriving in Paris, I called Jacques Perotti, the assistant to Père André and the founder of David and Jonathan, a gay group for French speaking Catholics. Jacques told me that there was an international meeting of David and Jonathan groups in a monastery outside of Paris and invited me to address the group. I warned him that my French was almost non-existent and I would need a translator. When I arrived I gave a one hour talk in the best French I ever used. I believe that God gave me the gift of tongues that day. As a result David and Jonathon translated my book into French and made it their official manual.



Once again I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit when I faced the choice of giving up all ministries to LGBT people or being dismissed from the Jesuits after 40 years. I went to Gethsemane Abbey to seek God’s help in making that decision. While there, a Trappist monk came to my room and gave me a copy of the Buddist boddisatva vow of universal compassion. As I read that vow it became clear to me what God wanted of me…to continue the ministry and pay the price. I sought the spiritual help of Fr. Matthew Kelty, the guest master at the monastery. I remember him saying to me: “John, God has put you in touch with the suffering of the gay and lesbian community in a special way. Now it is your duty to do whatever you can do to relieve that suffering!”



Shortly after my dismissal from the Society of Jesus, Walter Wink, the biblical theologian and my colleague on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, wrote me a letter in which he said: “John, when the Vatican imprudently slammed the door on you, it blew open a thousand other doors.” That was a prophetic statement. Bishop Paul Moore, of the New York Episcopal diocese wrote to me inviting me to join his church and carry on my ministry there. When William Sloane Coffin retired as minister at Riverside Church, the Maranatha gay group at Riverside submitted my name as a candidate to replace him as pastor. (I always hoped Cardinal O’Connor got wind of that!) Robert Raines, the Methodist director of Kirkridge Retreat Center organized a letter of protest to Rome signed by several famous protestant pastors and theologians, among them, Paul Moore, Harvey Cox and Sloan Coffin. In the letter, they asked the Vatican to restore me because my ministry to LGBT people was as important to their churches as it was to the Roman church. Scores of gay clergy from all denominations began to flock to my retreats for gay Christians at Kirkridge; among them Gene Robinson, the future gay bishop.



I would be remiss today if I failed to pay tribute to Rev. Joseph Doucé. Joseph was a Baptist minister. He was born in Belgium and became a minister in the church in Holland. He opened a specialized ministry in Paris called Christ, the Liberator, to all sexual outcasts, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and transsexuals. He had a special ministry to pedophiles and the victims of pedophiles



When Rev. Doucé heard of my work, he came to New York to meet with me. On several occasions I attended and spoke at his Sunday services in Paris. Joseph was responsible for the publication and distribution of my books in French. In 1990, Rev. Doucé invited Charlie and me to come to Strasburg for me to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of all the Christian gay and lesbian groups in Europe. After the conference he and his lover returned together with us to Paris. The next day we flew back to New York. A few days later we received a tearful phone call from his lover. He told us that men disguised as Parisian police came to the center and arrested Joseph. When his lover went to the police station they denied any knowledge of the arrest. We eventually found out that he was kidnapped by secret police who brought him to a secret prison in Paris where they tortured him for several weeks and finally murdered him and dumped his body in a woods outside of Paris. They were acting on a rumor that Rev Doucé had a list of high government officials who were pederasts and they wanted that information at any cost. Later we heard that the murderers of Rev. Doucé were openly bragging about their murder of the pedophile Doucé. To my knowledge they were never brought to justice. Rev. Joseph Doucé is a true martyr in the cause of gay liberation.



To bring this reflection to a close, I believe that we are witnessing an extraordinary transformation of the Church from a patriarchal, authoritative institution into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a democratic Church that recognizes the Holy Spirit dwelling within all its members and sees authority as coming from the ground up.



At his discourse at the last supper Jesus is reported in the gospel of John: “It is necessary that I should go away before the Spirit can come to you. If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit will dwell in your hearts and lead you into all truth.” What was that necessity? Why could the Holy Spirit not come as long as Jesus was alive?



I believe that Jesus was expressing a basic law governing human growth into spiritual maturity. As humans, we must grow from dependence on external authority to dependence on an authority that dwells within us. To achieve that growth we need fallible authorities. If our parents had been infallible we could never develop into mature adults making our own decisions and taking responsibility for them.



Thank God that Church authorities have proved so fallible. The result has been a maturing of the people of God. This began when the Vatican fumbled the issue of birth control, forcing millions of Catholic to exercise their freedom of conscience, make their own decisions and take responsibility for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what the present Pope is against when he decries moral relativism. Speaking of our last Pope, Archbishop Weakland had this to say:



He (John Paul II) did not read the signs of the time, namely, the opening of Vatican II toward more participatory government on all levels of church life…Discerning the action of the Spirit in the whole Church was not on his agenda. This failure was probably the most important lost opportunity of the post-conciliar period (pp.407-408).



One of the greatest beneficiaries of the fallibility of church authorities has been the LGBT Catholic community. We came to realize early on that we could not accept and obey Church teaching on homosexuality without destroying ourselves physically, psychologically and spirituality. Consequently, as a matter of survival we had to take distance from Church teaching, develop our freedom of conscience and learn to hear what the Spirit of God is saying to us through our experience. The result has been that the LGBT community is leading the way to transform the Catholic Church into a Church of the Holy Spirit.



“The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone! This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” THANK YOU!! New Ways Ministry for your many decades of heroic service to the Church and to the Catholic LGBT community Thank you, God, for all the special maturing graces you are pouring out on the people of God. Thank you especially for the special role you are calling the LGBT community to play in establishing the kingdom of God.

Veni creator spiritus. Mentes tuorum visita; Imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora. A special heartfelt thank you, Holy Spirit!



John J. McNeill



jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com









Gratitude for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit


I believe a new form of adult, mature spirituality is rapidly repl;acing the immature dependence in spiritual life on external authority. Jesus prdicted that maturing process at the last supper when he told the apostles 'it is necessary that I go away for the Spirit to come to you"! So too our dependence on external authoity must give way to a dependence on the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts

In this advent season of gratitude I want to share my personal gratitude to the role the Holy Spirit has played in my ministry to LBGT people by posting the talk I gave at the New Ways Ministry award to me of the Building Bridges award.



Acceptance Speech for Building Bridges Award



I want to express my gratitude to Jeannine Gramick, SL., Frank DeBernardo

and the Board and Staff of New Ways Ministry for honoring me with the Bridge Builder Award.



Let us pause for a moment of silent prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to be with us here in this room and touch our heats with God’s love!



Meister Eckhardt once wrote: If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was one heartfelt “thank you, God,” that would suffice for salvation!



And Ignatius Loyola in the preamble to his spiritual exercises wrote: “All the good things in this world belong to us, but the glory belongs to God.” The way we make sure that the glory goes to God, Ignatius pointed out, was by a continuous spirit of gratitude.



I am aware that the Holy Spirit has been with me always over the past 84 years. I would like to reflect with you on some dramatic moments in my life and ministry when the action of the Holy Spirit was palpable and express my debt of gratitude and hope that you will search for parallel moments in your life.



One of those special gifts of the Holy Spirit over the past few weeks was reading the memoirs of Archbishop Weakland: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, an extraordinary book by a gay member of the hierarchy which throws incredible hope-filled light on the future of the church. I emailed Archbishop Weakland and asked him if he had a message for this audience. Rembert wrote to me that his message would be simple. “Be not afraid. Cast out into the deep!”



My text for these remarks today is the words ascribed to Jesus in Mark 12 quoting Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”



The first moment I want to recall goes back 65 years. Having enlisted in the army when I was 17, I went into combat with General Patton’s third army on the border of Germany. My infantry unit managed to cross the border. The German army counterattacked. My unit found itself surrounded by German tanks. I remember taking off my T-shirt to signal my surrender. A German soldier was assigned to march me back to a prisoner collection point. I was certain that the guard intended to shoot me. As we walked down a country lane we came upon a roadside shrine with a crucifix. I signaled the guard that I wanted to say a prayer. As he leaned on his rifle and smoked one of my camel cigarettes, I knelt to pray. I remember making an act of contrition. And then saying:” Lord I am only 18; I am too young to die!”

Well, here I am at 84 still in decent health, so that prayer was certainly answered.



The next event occurred while I was a kriegsgefangenen (prisoner of war). The Germans starved the American prisoners. I went down to 90 lbs and looked like a skeleton. One day we were sent out to a farm to chop wood where the SS were raising mink. A slave laborer from eastern Europe was mixing a mash of vegetables for the animals. I could not take my eyes off the food. While the guard’s back was turned the slave laborer took a potato from the mash and threw it to me. The guard would have killed him if he saw him feed a prisoner. I made a gesture of thanks and the slave laborer’s response was to make the sign of the cross. That action was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. I date my vocation to religious life to that moment. Here was a man who had the courage to risk his life to feed a total stranger. And he found that courage in his faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I wanted to be able to imitate that man. My prayer from that moment to this is: Lord, grant me the grace to know what your will for me is and grant me the courage to be able to do it.



The next memorable moment was my discovery of the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel while studying theology at Woodstock seminary. Fr. Sponga, the rector, gave a seminar on Blondel. A whole new world of philosophical and theological thinking opened up to me and filled me with joy and hope. I was set on fire by Blondel’s opening words in his book, Philosophy of Action: “I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity, Unless I can choose life, choose death, choose eternity , I am not.” God created us free and will always respect that freedom! I will never forget reading this line in Blondel’s philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God, is by becoming one with our authentic self!” (One of my deepest regrets is not having done more to make Blondel’s thought available to an American audience. My nephew Tim McNeill the publisher of Dalai Lama’s Wisdom Press is in the process of putting my doctorate thesis, from Louvain University published under the title, The Blondelian Synthesis, on the computer.)



One of the next striking manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life occurred at one of the darkest moments in my life. I was in France doing graduate studies. In my loneliness, I began to compulsively act out sexually. I was so filled with shame, guilt and self-loathing that I began to contemplate suicide. Right at that moment I felt I heard the Spirit assuring me that I should continue to trust God; that somehow he would make use of this moment in my future ministry. I felt peace flood back into my heart. I did not fully understand what happened until years later when I first read Henri Nouwen”s great book, Wounded Healers, with its message that the greatest gift a spiritual healer brings to his ministry is his own experience of having been healed in his woundedness.



The next occurrence was during a trip to Toronto from Le Moyne college in Syracuse, NY, during the Vietnam war, on New Years Eve of 1965. I had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. So much so that the Democratic party asked me to enter the Democratic primary as a peace candidate for congress against the hawk candidate, James Hanley. When I asked permission to do this from my Jesuit provincial he advised against it pointing out that Fr. Drinan was running for congress that same year in Boston. He felt that if there were two Jesuits running for congress that would be interpreted as a Jesuit conspiracy to take over America.



I had gone to Toronto to try to bolster the moral of my students who fled to Canada because their status as conscientious objectors to the war had been denied. While there I visited a gay bar called the St. Charles bar and met Charles Chiarelli who has been my life partner since then for the past 43 years. I could never have carried out my ministry if I had not had a deep personal experience with Charlie of the goodness and holiness of gay love.



Another debt of gratitude I owe the Holy Spirit is the support I have received from my sister, Sister Sheila. Sis was a Franciscan nun in the convent of St. Mary of the Angels in Williamsville, NY. Sister had a progressive bone disease for many years and lived in the infirmary of her mother house. When she heard that I was involved in a ministry to gay and lesbians, she prayed to the Spirit for a sign to confirm that my ministry was from God. A fellow nun returned from the missions in Africa asked my sister if the John McNeill who wrote The Church and the Homosexual was her brother. When Sis said yes the nun asked her to thank me. Nearly all her personnel at the hospital she directed were gay men. She did not know how to deal with them until she read my book. That book put her at ease in dealing with the gay orderlies. Sis took that as her sign. She told me whenever I gave a retreat or talk to a gay or lesbian audience let her know exactly when. She would gather twenty to thirty elderly nuns in the infirmary and they would pray in front of the blessed sacrament that God would use me to bring the message of God’s love to my audience. I was always consciously aware of the spiritual power of those prayers. As symbol of that spiritual alliance, Sis had this beautiful rainbow stole made for me. We continued that ministerial alliance until Sis’s death from bone cancer in 1995. I am sure Sis is still with us with her prayers today.



Several events occurred during the writing of my first book that I ascribed to the Holy Spirit working overtime. After several years of research I wrote a long article titled, The Christian Male Homosexual and mailed it off to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a conservative priests’ journal. The editor wrote back that my article arrived just in time. He had made the decision to resign as editor and enter the Trappist order. So he decided to publish the article over three issues in 1972. The response was so positive that my Jesuit colleagues at Woodstock seminary asked me to major the articles into a book.

While doing research on my book the librarian at Union Theological gave me a copy of an anonymous research article on scripture and homosexuality which I found out several years later was the first draft of John Boswell’s brilliant book: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.



Once the manuscript of the book was completed, I began the process of undergoing censorship within the Jesuit order to receive an imprimi potest. First, on a request from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, I sent it to seven Jesuit moral theologians in the United States. All seven found it a serious theological contribution and approved its publication. General Pedro Arrupé hesitated and requested that I mail the manuscript to Rome where it would be censored by several Roman Jesuit moralists. They also approved publication.



Just as my manuscript arrived on Father Arrupé’s desk, a world famous sculptress named Jacqueline Ziegler arrived from the United States to sculpt the head of Father Arrupé. Jacqueline, several years before, had come to Syracuse, New York after many years with the peace corps in Africa and joined the faculty of Le Moyne college as the professor of fine arts. We became close friends. Jacqueline made the decision to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and asked me to be her spiritual director. On the feast of St. Ignatius in July 1974, I baptized her in the student chapel at Le Moyne. (Jacqueline did a larger than life sculpture of my head which is now with my archives at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.)



Just as Pedro Arrupé began to read my manuscript, Jacqueline began to sculpt his head and tell him about this wonderful Jesuit, who baptized her, named John McNeill at Le Moyne college. I don’t know what effect this had on Father Arrupé’s decision to grant me his imprimi potest. But I am sure it did not hurt.



Archbishop Weakland in his memoirs has this to say about Arrupé: “If from all the people I have known in my life in the Church, I had to select only one for sainthood, it would be Pedro Arrupé”.

.



The next event was the actual publication of the book, The Church and the Homosexual in 1976. I had prayed to God to act as my public relations agent and God certainly delivered. A major article by the religion editor Kenneth Briggs was on the front page of the New York Times. Special articles appeared in Time magazine and Newsweek. I made three appearances on the Phil Donohue show and several on the Larry King Live show.



The day of its publication I was invited to appear on the Today show. It was Tom Brokaw’s first day as host. He did not feel confident to handle such a hot potato as a theological work on homosexuality, so he invited Russell Barber, the religion editor, to sit in with him for the interview. Russell told me later that he was furious at having to take my book with him for his weekend on Fire Island, but ended up delighted when he read the book and invited me to appear on his Review of Religion show a few days later.



There were innumerable manifestations of the grace of the Holy Spirit over the years. But the one that stands out as most remarkable occurred during a trip to Europe in 1988 after the publication of my second major work, Taking a Chance on God: Liberation Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, and Friends. Charlie and I had been invited to do a series of conferences at various universities in Holland. We decided to take a trip to Paris for a few days. On arriving in Paris, I called Jacques Perotti, the assistant to Père André and the founder of David and Jonathan, a gay group for French speaking Catholics. Jacques told me that there was an international meeting of David and Jonathan groups in a monastery outside of Paris and invited me to address the group. I warned him that my French was almost non-existent and I would need a translator. When I arrived I gave a one hour talk in the best French I ever used. I believe that God gave me the gift of tongues that day. As a result David and Jonathon translated my book into French and made it their official manual.



Once again I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit when I faced the choice of giving up all ministries to LGBT people or being dismissed from the Jesuits after 40 years. I went to Gethsemane Abbey to seek God’s help in making that decision. While there, a Trappist monk came to my room and gave me a copy of the Buddist boddisatva vow of universal compassion. As I read that vow it became clear to me what God wanted of me…to continue the ministry and pay the price. I sought the spiritual help of Fr. Matthew Kelty, the guest master at the monastery. I remember him saying to me: “John, God has put you in touch with the suffering of the gay and lesbian community in a special way. Now it is your duty to do whatever you can do to relieve that suffering!”



Shortly after my dismissal from the Society of Jesus, Walter Wink, the biblical theologian and my colleague on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, wrote me a letter in which he said: “John, when the Vatican imprudently slammed the door on you, it blew open a thousand other doors.” That was a prophetic statement. Bishop Paul Moore, of the New York Episcopal diocese wrote to me inviting me to join his church and carry on my ministry there. When William Sloane Coffin retired as minister at Riverside Church, the Maranatha gay group at Riverside submitted my name as a candidate to replace him as pastor. (I always hoped Cardinal O’Connor got wind of that!) Robert Raines, the Methodist director of Kirkridge Retreat Center organized a letter of protest to Rome signed by several famous protestant pastors and theologians, among them, Paul Moore, Harvey Cox and Sloan Coffin. In the letter, they asked the Vatican to restore me because my ministry to LGBT people was as important to their churches as it was to the Roman church. Scores of gay clergy from all denominations began to flock to my retreats for gay Christians at Kirkridge; among them Gene Robinson, the future gay bishop.



I would be remiss today if I failed to pay tribute to Rev. Joseph Doucé. Joseph was a Baptist minister. He was born in Belgium and became a minister in the church in Holland. He opened a specialized ministry in Paris called Christ, the Liberator, to all sexual outcasts, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and transsexuals. He had a special ministry to pedophiles and the victims of pedophiles



When Rev. Doucé heard of my work, he came to New York to meet with me. On several occasions I attended and spoke at his Sunday services in Paris. Joseph was responsible for the publication and distribution of my books in French. In 1990, Rev. Doucé invited Charlie and me to come to Strasburg for me to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of all the Christian gay and lesbian groups in Europe. After the conference he and his lover returned together with us to Paris. The next day we flew back to New York. A few days later we received a tearful phone call from his lover. He told us that men disguised as Parisian police came to the center and arrested Joseph. When his lover went to the police station they denied any knowledge of the arrest. We eventually found out that he was kidnapped by secret police who brought him to a secret prison in Paris where they tortured him for several weeks and finally murdered him and dumped his body in a woods outside of Paris. They were acting on a rumor that Rev Doucé had a list of high government officials who were pederasts and they wanted that information at any cost. Later we heard that the murderers of Rev. Doucé were openly bragging about their murder of the pedophile Doucé. To my knowledge they were never brought to justice. Rev. Joseph Doucé is a true martyr in the cause of gay liberation.



To bring this reflection to a close, I believe that we are witnessing an extraordinary transformation of the Church from a patriarchal, authoritative institution into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a democratic Church that recognizes the Holy Spirit dwelling within all its members and sees authority as coming from the ground up.



At his discourse at the last supper Jesus is reported in the gospel of John: “It is necessary that I should go away before the Spirit can come to you. If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit will dwell in your hearts and lead you into all truth.” What was that necessity? Why could the Holy Spirit not come as long as Jesus was alive?



I believe that Jesus was expressing a basic law governing human growth into spiritual maturity. As humans, we must grow from dependence on external authority to dependence on an authority that dwells within us. To achieve that growth we need fallible authorities. If our parents had been infallible we could never develop into mature adults making our own decisions and taking responsibility for them.



Thank God that Church authorities have proved so fallible. The result has been a maturing of the people of God. This began when the Vatican fumbled the issue of birth control, forcing millions of Catholic to exercise their freedom of conscience, make their own decisions and take responsibility for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what the present Pope is against when he decries moral relativism. Speaking of our last Pope, Archbishop Weakland had this to say:



He (John Paul II) did not read the signs of the time, namely, the opening of Vatican II toward more participatory government on all levels of church life…Discerning the action of the Spirit in the whole Church was not on his agenda. This failure was probably the most important lost opportunity of the post-conciliar period (pp.407-408).



One of the greatest beneficiaries of the fallibility of church authorities has been the LGBT Catholic community. We came to realize early on that we could not accept and obey Church teaching on homosexuality without destroying ourselves physically, psychologically and spirituality. Consequently, as a matter of survival we had to take distance from Church teaching, develop our freedom of conscience and learn to hear what the Spirit of God is saying to us through our experience. The result has been that the LGBT community is leading the way to transform the Catholic Church into a Church of the Holy Spirit.



“The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone! This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” THANK YOU!! New Ways Ministry for your many decades of heroic service to the Church and to the Catholic LGBT community Thank you, God, for all the special maturing graces you are pouring out on the people of God. Thank you especially for the special role you are calling the LGBT community to play in establishing the kingdom of God.

Veni creator spiritus. Mentes tuorum visita; Imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora. A special heartfelt thank you, Holy Spirit!



John J. McNeill



jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com











Gratitude for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit


I believe a new form of adult, mature spirituality is rapidly repl;acing the immature dependence in spiritual life on external authority. Jesus prdicted that maturing process at the last supper when he told the apostles 'it is necessary that I go away for the Spirit to come to you"! So too our dependence on external authoity must give way to a dependence on the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts

In this advent season of gratitude I want to share my personal gratitude to the role the Holy Spirit has played in my ministry to LBGT people by posting the talk I gave at the New Ways Ministry award to me of the Building Bridges award.



Acceptance Speech for Building Bridges Award



I want to express my gratitude to Jeannine Gramick, SL., Frank DeBernardo

and the Board and Staff of New Ways Ministry for honoring me with the Bridge Builder Award.



Let us pause for a moment of silent prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to be with us here in this room and touch our heats with God’s love!



Meister Eckhardt once wrote: If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was one heartfelt “thank you, God,” that would suffice for salvation!



And Ignatius Loyola in the preamble to his spiritual exercises wrote: “All the good things in this world belong to us, but the glory belongs to God.” The way we make sure that the glory goes to God, Ignatius pointed out, was by a continuous spirit of gratitude.



I am aware that the Holy Spirit has been with me always over the past 84 years. I would like to reflect with you on some dramatic moments in my life and ministry when the action of the Holy Spirit was palpable and express my debt of gratitude and hope that you will search for parallel moments in your life.



One of those special gifts of the Holy Spirit over the past few weeks was reading the memoirs of Archbishop Weakland: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, an extraordinary book by a gay member of the hierarchy which throws incredible hope-filled light on the future of the church. I emailed Archbishop Weakland and asked him if he had a message for this audience. Rembert wrote to me that his message would be simple. “Be not afraid. Cast out into the deep!”



My text for these remarks today is the words ascribed to Jesus in Mark 12 quoting Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”



The first moment I want to recall goes back 65 years. Having enlisted in the army when I was 17, I went into combat with General Patton’s third army on the border of Germany. My infantry unit managed to cross the border. The German army counterattacked. My unit found itself surrounded by German tanks. I remember taking off my T-shirt to signal my surrender. A German soldier was assigned to march me back to a prisoner collection point. I was certain that the guard intended to shoot me. As we walked down a country lane we came upon a roadside shrine with a crucifix. I signaled the guard that I wanted to say a prayer. As he leaned on his rifle and smoked one of my camel cigarettes, I knelt to pray. I remember making an act of contrition. And then saying:” Lord I am only 18; I am too young to die!”

Well, here I am at 84 still in decent health, so that prayer was certainly answered.



The next event occurred while I was a kriegsgefangenen (prisoner of war). The Germans starved the American prisoners. I went down to 90 lbs and looked like a skeleton. One day we were sent out to a farm to chop wood where the SS were raising mink. A slave laborer from eastern Europe was mixing a mash of vegetables for the animals. I could not take my eyes off the food. While the guard’s back was turned the slave laborer took a potato from the mash and threw it to me. The guard would have killed him if he saw him feed a prisoner. I made a gesture of thanks and the slave laborer’s response was to make the sign of the cross. That action was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. I date my vocation to religious life to that moment. Here was a man who had the courage to risk his life to feed a total stranger. And he found that courage in his faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I wanted to be able to imitate that man. My prayer from that moment to this is: Lord, grant me the grace to know what your will for me is and grant me the courage to be able to do it.



The next memorable moment was my discovery of the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel while studying theology at Woodstock seminary. Fr. Sponga, the rector, gave a seminar on Blondel. A whole new world of philosophical and theological thinking opened up to me and filled me with joy and hope. I was set on fire by Blondel’s opening words in his book, Philosophy of Action: “I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity, Unless I can choose life, choose death, choose eternity , I am not.” God created us free and will always respect that freedom! I will never forget reading this line in Blondel’s philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God, is by becoming one with our authentic self!” (One of my deepest regrets is not having done more to make Blondel’s thought available to an American audience. My nephew Tim McNeill the publisher of Dalai Lama’s Wisdom Press is in the process of putting my doctorate thesis, from Louvain University published under the title, The Blondelian Synthesis, on the computer.)



One of the next striking manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life occurred at one of the darkest moments in my life. I was in France doing graduate studies. In my loneliness, I began to compulsively act out sexually. I was so filled with shame, guilt and self-loathing that I began to contemplate suicide. Right at that moment I felt I heard the Spirit assuring me that I should continue to trust God; that somehow he would make use of this moment in my future ministry. I felt peace flood back into my heart. I did not fully understand what happened until years later when I first read Henri Nouwen”s great book, Wounded Healers, with its message that the greatest gift a spiritual healer brings to his ministry is his own experience of having been healed in his woundedness.



The next occurrence was during a trip to Toronto from Le Moyne college in Syracuse, NY, during the Vietnam war, on New Years Eve of 1965. I had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. So much so that the Democratic party asked me to enter the Democratic primary as a peace candidate for congress against the hawk candidate, James Hanley. When I asked permission to do this from my Jesuit provincial he advised against it pointing out that Fr. Drinan was running for congress that same year in Boston. He felt that if there were two Jesuits running for congress that would be interpreted as a Jesuit conspiracy to take over America.



I had gone to Toronto to try to bolster the moral of my students who fled to Canada because their status as conscientious objectors to the war had been denied. While there I visited a gay bar called the St. Charles bar and met Charles Chiarelli who has been my life partner since then for the past 43 years. I could never have carried out my ministry if I had not had a deep personal experience with Charlie of the goodness and holiness of gay love.



Another debt of gratitude I owe the Holy Spirit is the support I have received from my sister, Sister Sheila. Sis was a Franciscan nun in the convent of St. Mary of the Angels in Williamsville, NY. Sister had a progressive bone disease for many years and lived in the infirmary of her mother house. When she heard that I was involved in a ministry to gay and lesbians, she prayed to the Spirit for a sign to confirm that my ministry was from God. A fellow nun returned from the missions in Africa asked my sister if the John McNeill who wrote The Church and the Homosexual was her brother. When Sis said yes the nun asked her to thank me. Nearly all her personnel at the hospital she directed were gay men. She did not know how to deal with them until she read my book. That book put her at ease in dealing with the gay orderlies. Sis took that as her sign. She told me whenever I gave a retreat or talk to a gay or lesbian audience let her know exactly when. She would gather twenty to thirty elderly nuns in the infirmary and they would pray in front of the blessed sacrament that God would use me to bring the message of God’s love to my audience. I was always consciously aware of the spiritual power of those prayers. As symbol of that spiritual alliance, Sis had this beautiful rainbow stole made for me. We continued that ministerial alliance until Sis’s death from bone cancer in 1995. I am sure Sis is still with us with her prayers today.



Several events occurred during the writing of my first book that I ascribed to the Holy Spirit working overtime. After several years of research I wrote a long article titled, The Christian Male Homosexual and mailed it off to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a conservative priests’ journal. The editor wrote back that my article arrived just in time. He had made the decision to resign as editor and enter the Trappist order. So he decided to publish the article over three issues in 1972. The response was so positive that my Jesuit colleagues at Woodstock seminary asked me to major the articles into a book.

While doing research on my book the librarian at Union Theological gave me a copy of an anonymous research article on scripture and homosexuality which I found out several years later was the first draft of John Boswell’s brilliant book: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.



Once the manuscript of the book was completed, I began the process of undergoing censorship within the Jesuit order to receive an imprimi potest. First, on a request from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, I sent it to seven Jesuit moral theologians in the United States. All seven found it a serious theological contribution and approved its publication. General Pedro Arrupé hesitated and requested that I mail the manuscript to Rome where it would be censored by several Roman Jesuit moralists. They also approved publication.



Just as my manuscript arrived on Father Arrupé’s desk, a world famous sculptress named Jacqueline Ziegler arrived from the United States to sculpt the head of Father Arrupé. Jacqueline, several years before, had come to Syracuse, New York after many years with the peace corps in Africa and joined the faculty of Le Moyne college as the professor of fine arts. We became close friends. Jacqueline made the decision to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and asked me to be her spiritual director. On the feast of St. Ignatius in July 1974, I baptized her in the student chapel at Le Moyne. (Jacqueline did a larger than life sculpture of my head which is now with my archives at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.)



Just as Pedro Arrupé began to read my manuscript, Jacqueline began to sculpt his head and tell him about this wonderful Jesuit, who baptized her, named John McNeill at Le Moyne college. I don’t know what effect this had on Father Arrupé’s decision to grant me his imprimi potest. But I am sure it did not hurt.



Archbishop Weakland in his memoirs has this to say about Arrupé: “If from all the people I have known in my life in the Church, I had to select only one for sainthood, it would be Pedro Arrupé”.

.



The next event was the actual publication of the book, The Church and the Homosexual in 1976. I had prayed to God to act as my public relations agent and God certainly delivered. A major article by the religion editor Kenneth Briggs was on the front page of the New York Times. Special articles appeared in Time magazine and Newsweek. I made three appearances on the Phil Donohue show and several on the Larry King Live show.



The day of its publication I was invited to appear on the Today show. It was Tom Brokaw’s first day as host. He did not feel confident to handle such a hot potato as a theological work on homosexuality, so he invited Russell Barber, the religion editor, to sit in with him for the interview. Russell told me later that he was furious at having to take my book with him for his weekend on Fire Island, but ended up delighted when he read the book and invited me to appear on his Review of Religion show a few days later.



There were innumerable manifestations of the grace of the Holy Spirit over the years. But the one that stands out as most remarkable occurred during a trip to Europe in 1988 after the publication of my second major work, Taking a Chance on God: Liberation Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, and Friends. Charlie and I had been invited to do a series of conferences at various universities in Holland. We decided to take a trip to Paris for a few days. On arriving in Paris, I called Jacques Perotti, the assistant to Père André and the founder of David and Jonathan, a gay group for French speaking Catholics. Jacques told me that there was an international meeting of David and Jonathan groups in a monastery outside of Paris and invited me to address the group. I warned him that my French was almost non-existent and I would need a translator. When I arrived I gave a one hour talk in the best French I ever used. I believe that God gave me the gift of tongues that day. As a result David and Jonathon translated my book into French and made it their official manual.



Once again I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit when I faced the choice of giving up all ministries to LGBT people or being dismissed from the Jesuits after 40 years. I went to Gethsemane Abbey to seek God’s help in making that decision. While there, a Trappist monk came to my room and gave me a copy of the Buddist boddisatva vow of universal compassion. As I read that vow it became clear to me what God wanted of me…to continue the ministry and pay the price. I sought the spiritual help of Fr. Matthew Kelty, the guest master at the monastery. I remember him saying to me: “John, God has put you in touch with the suffering of the gay and lesbian community in a special way. Now it is your duty to do whatever you can do to relieve that suffering!”



Shortly after my dismissal from the Society of Jesus, Walter Wink, the biblical theologian and my colleague on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, wrote me a letter in which he said: “John, when the Vatican imprudently slammed the door on you, it blew open a thousand other doors.” That was a prophetic statement. Bishop Paul Moore, of the New York Episcopal diocese wrote to me inviting me to join his church and carry on my ministry there. When William Sloane Coffin retired as minister at Riverside Church, the Maranatha gay group at Riverside submitted my name as a candidate to replace him as pastor. (I always hoped Cardinal O’Connor got wind of that!) Robert Raines, the Methodist director of Kirkridge Retreat Center organized a letter of protest to Rome signed by several famous protestant pastors and theologians, among them, Paul Moore, Harvey Cox and Sloan Coffin. In the letter, they asked the Vatican to restore me because my ministry to LGBT people was as important to their churches as it was to the Roman church. Scores of gay clergy from all denominations began to flock to my retreats for gay Christians at Kirkridge; among them Gene Robinson, the future gay bishop.



I would be remiss today if I failed to pay tribute to Rev. Joseph Doucé. Joseph was a Baptist minister. He was born in Belgium and became a minister in the church in Holland. He opened a specialized ministry in Paris called Christ, the Liberator, to all sexual outcasts, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and transsexuals. He had a special ministry to pedophiles and the victims of pedophiles



When Rev. Doucé heard of my work, he came to New York to meet with me. On several occasions I attended and spoke at his Sunday services in Paris. Joseph was responsible for the publication and distribution of my books in French. In 1990, Rev. Doucé invited Charlie and me to come to Strasburg for me to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of all the Christian gay and lesbian groups in Europe. After the conference he and his lover returned together with us to Paris. The next day we flew back to New York. A few days later we received a tearful phone call from his lover. He told us that men disguised as Parisian police came to the center and arrested Joseph. When his lover went to the police station they denied any knowledge of the arrest. We eventually found out that he was kidnapped by secret police who brought him to a secret prison in Paris where they tortured him for several weeks and finally murdered him and dumped his body in a woods outside of Paris. They were acting on a rumor that Rev Doucé had a list of high government officials who were pederasts and they wanted that information at any cost. Later we heard that the murderers of Rev. Doucé were openly bragging about their murder of the pedophile Doucé. To my knowledge they were never brought to justice. Rev. Joseph Doucé is a true martyr in the cause of gay liberation.



To bring this reflection to a close, I believe that we are witnessing an extraordinary transformation of the Church from a patriarchal, authoritative institution into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a democratic Church that recognizes the Holy Spirit dwelling within all its members and sees authority as coming from the ground up.



At his discourse at the last supper Jesus is reported in the gospel of John: “It is necessary that I should go away before the Spirit can come to you. If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit will dwell in your hearts and lead you into all truth.” What was that necessity? Why could the Holy Spirit not come as long as Jesus was alive?



I believe that Jesus was expressing a basic law governing human growth into spiritual maturity. As humans, we must grow from dependence on external authority to dependence on an authority that dwells within us. To achieve that growth we need fallible authorities. If our parents had been infallible we could never develop into mature adults making our own decisions and taking responsibility for them.



Thank God that Church authorities have proved so fallible. The result has been a maturing of the people of God. This began when the Vatican fumbled the issue of birth control, forcing millions of Catholic to exercise their freedom of conscience, make their own decisions and take responsibility for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what the present Pope is against when he decries moral relativism. Speaking of our last Pope, Archbishop Weakland had this to say:



He (John Paul II) did not read the signs of the time, namely, the opening of Vatican II toward more participatory government on all levels of church life…Discerning the action of the Spirit in the whole Church was not on his agenda. This failure was probably the most important lost opportunity of the post-conciliar period (pp.407-408).



One of the greatest beneficiaries of the fallibility of church authorities has been the LGBT Catholic community. We came to realize early on that we could not accept and obey Church teaching on homosexuality without destroying ourselves physically, psychologically and spirituality. Consequently, as a matter of survival we had to take distance from Church teaching, develop our freedom of conscience and learn to hear what the Spirit of God is saying to us through our experience. The result has been that the LGBT community is leading the way to transform the Catholic Church into a Church of the Holy Spirit.



“The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone! This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” THANK YOU!! New Ways Ministry for your many decades of heroic service to the Church and to the Catholic LGBT community Thank you, God, for all the special maturing graces you are pouring out on the people of God. Thank you especially for the special role you are calling the LGBT community to play in establishing the kingdom of God.

Veni creator spiritus. Mentes tuorum visita; Imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora. A special heartfelt thank you, Holy Spirit!



John J. McNeill



jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com












Gratitude for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit


I believe a new form of adult, mature spirituality is rapidly repl;acing the immature dependence in spiritual life on external authority. Jesus prdicted that maturing process at the last supper when he told the apostles 'it is necessary that I go away for the Spirit to come to you"! So too our dependence on external authoity must give way to a dependence on the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts

In this advent season of gratitude I want to share my personal gratitude to the role the Holy Spirit has played in my ministry to LBGT people by posting the talk I gave at the New Ways Ministry award to me of the Building Bridges award.



Acceptance Speech for Building Bridges Award



I want to express my gratitude to Jeannine Gramick, SL., Frank DeBernardo

and the Board and Staff of New Ways Ministry for honoring me with the Bridge Builder Award.



Let us pause for a moment of silent prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to be with us here in this room and touch our heats with God’s love!



Meister Eckhardt once wrote: If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was one heartfelt “thank you, God,” that would suffice for salvation!



And Ignatius Loyola in the preamble to his spiritual exercises wrote: “All the good things in this world belong to us, but the glory belongs to God.” The way we make sure that the glory goes to God, Ignatius pointed out, was by a continuous spirit of gratitude.



I am aware that the Holy Spirit has been with me always over the past 84 years. I would like to reflect with you on some dramatic moments in my life and ministry when the action of the Holy Spirit was palpable and express my debt of gratitude and hope that you will search for parallel moments in your life.



One of those special gifts of the Holy Spirit over the past few weeks was reading the memoirs of Archbishop Weakland: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, an extraordinary book by a gay member of the hierarchy which throws incredible hope-filled light on the future of the church. I emailed Archbishop Weakland and asked him if he had a message for this audience. Rembert wrote to me that his message would be simple. “Be not afraid. Cast out into the deep!”



My text for these remarks today is the words ascribed to Jesus in Mark 12 quoting Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”



The first moment I want to recall goes back 65 years. Having enlisted in the army when I was 17, I went into combat with General Patton’s third army on the border of Germany. My infantry unit managed to cross the border. The German army counterattacked. My unit found itself surrounded by German tanks. I remember taking off my T-shirt to signal my surrender. A German soldier was assigned to march me back to a prisoner collection point. I was certain that the guard intended to shoot me. As we walked down a country lane we came upon a roadside shrine with a crucifix. I signaled the guard that I wanted to say a prayer. As he leaned on his rifle and smoked one of my camel cigarettes, I knelt to pray. I remember making an act of contrition. And then saying:” Lord I am only 18; I am too young to die!”

Well, here I am at 84 still in decent health, so that prayer was certainly answered.



The next event occurred while I was a kriegsgefangenen (prisoner of war). The Germans starved the American prisoners. I went down to 90 lbs and looked like a skeleton. One day we were sent out to a farm to chop wood where the SS were raising mink. A slave laborer from eastern Europe was mixing a mash of vegetables for the animals. I could not take my eyes off the food. While the guard’s back was turned the slave laborer took a potato from the mash and threw it to me. The guard would have killed him if he saw him feed a prisoner. I made a gesture of thanks and the slave laborer’s response was to make the sign of the cross. That action was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. I date my vocation to religious life to that moment. Here was a man who had the courage to risk his life to feed a total stranger. And he found that courage in his faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I wanted to be able to imitate that man. My prayer from that moment to this is: Lord, grant me the grace to know what your will for me is and grant me the courage to be able to do it.



The next memorable moment was my discovery of the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel while studying theology at Woodstock seminary. Fr. Sponga, the rector, gave a seminar on Blondel. A whole new world of philosophical and theological thinking opened up to me and filled me with joy and hope. I was set on fire by Blondel’s opening words in his book, Philosophy of Action: “I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity, Unless I can choose life, choose death, choose eternity , I am not.” God created us free and will always respect that freedom! I will never forget reading this line in Blondel’s philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God, is by becoming one with our authentic self!” (One of my deepest regrets is not having done more to make Blondel’s thought available to an American audience. My nephew Tim McNeill the publisher of Dalai Lama’s Wisdom Press is in the process of putting my doctorate thesis, from Louvain University published under the title, The Blondelian Synthesis, on the computer.)



One of the next striking manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life occurred at one of the darkest moments in my life. I was in France doing graduate studies. In my loneliness, I began to compulsively act out sexually. I was so filled with shame, guilt and self-loathing that I began to contemplate suicide. Right at that moment I felt I heard the Spirit assuring me that I should continue to trust God; that somehow he would make use of this moment in my future ministry. I felt peace flood back into my heart. I did not fully understand what happened until years later when I first read Henri Nouwen”s great book, Wounded Healers, with its message that the greatest gift a spiritual healer brings to his ministry is his own experience of having been healed in his woundedness.



The next occurrence was during a trip to Toronto from Le Moyne college in Syracuse, NY, during the Vietnam war, on New Years Eve of 1965. I had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. So much so that the Democratic party asked me to enter the Democratic primary as a peace candidate for congress against the hawk candidate, James Hanley. When I asked permission to do this from my Jesuit provincial he advised against it pointing out that Fr. Drinan was running for congress that same year in Boston. He felt that if there were two Jesuits running for congress that would be interpreted as a Jesuit conspiracy to take over America.



I had gone to Toronto to try to bolster the moral of my students who fled to Canada because their status as conscientious objectors to the war had been denied. While there I visited a gay bar called the St. Charles bar and met Charles Chiarelli who has been my life partner since then for the past 43 years. I could never have carried out my ministry if I had not had a deep personal experience with Charlie of the goodness and holiness of gay love.



Another debt of gratitude I owe the Holy Spirit is the support I have received from my sister, Sister Sheila. Sis was a Franciscan nun in the convent of St. Mary of the Angels in Williamsville, NY. Sister had a progressive bone disease for many years and lived in the infirmary of her mother house. When she heard that I was involved in a ministry to gay and lesbians, she prayed to the Spirit for a sign to confirm that my ministry was from God. A fellow nun returned from the missions in Africa asked my sister if the John McNeill who wrote The Church and the Homosexual was her brother. When Sis said yes the nun asked her to thank me. Nearly all her personnel at the hospital she directed were gay men. She did not know how to deal with them until she read my book. That book put her at ease in dealing with the gay orderlies. Sis took that as her sign. She told me whenever I gave a retreat or talk to a gay or lesbian audience let her know exactly when. She would gather twenty to thirty elderly nuns in the infirmary and they would pray in front of the blessed sacrament that God would use me to bring the message of God’s love to my audience. I was always consciously aware of the spiritual power of those prayers. As symbol of that spiritual alliance, Sis had this beautiful rainbow stole made for me. We continued that ministerial alliance until Sis’s death from bone cancer in 1995. I am sure Sis is still with us with her prayers today.



Several events occurred during the writing of my first book that I ascribed to the Holy Spirit working overtime. After several years of research I wrote a long article titled, The Christian Male Homosexual and mailed it off to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a conservative priests’ journal. The editor wrote back that my article arrived just in time. He had made the decision to resign as editor and enter the Trappist order. So he decided to publish the article over three issues in 1972. The response was so positive that my Jesuit colleagues at Woodstock seminary asked me to major the articles into a book.

While doing research on my book the librarian at Union Theological gave me a copy of an anonymous research article on scripture and homosexuality which I found out several years later was the first draft of John Boswell’s brilliant book: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.



Once the manuscript of the book was completed, I began the process of undergoing censorship within the Jesuit order to receive an imprimi potest. First, on a request from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, I sent it to seven Jesuit moral theologians in the United States. All seven found it a serious theological contribution and approved its publication. General Pedro Arrupé hesitated and requested that I mail the manuscript to Rome where it would be censored by several Roman Jesuit moralists. They also approved publication.



Just as my manuscript arrived on Father Arrupé’s desk, a world famous sculptress named Jacqueline Ziegler arrived from the United States to sculpt the head of Father Arrupé. Jacqueline, several years before, had come to Syracuse, New York after many years with the peace corps in Africa and joined the faculty of Le Moyne college as the professor of fine arts. We became close friends. Jacqueline made the decision to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and asked me to be her spiritual director. On the feast of St. Ignatius in July 1974, I baptized her in the student chapel at Le Moyne. (Jacqueline did a larger than life sculpture of my head which is now with my archives at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.)



Just as Pedro Arrupé began to read my manuscript, Jacqueline began to sculpt his head and tell him about this wonderful Jesuit, who baptized her, named John McNeill at Le Moyne college. I don’t know what effect this had on Father Arrupé’s decision to grant me his imprimi potest. But I am sure it did not hurt.



Archbishop Weakland in his memoirs has this to say about Arrupé: “If from all the people I have known in my life in the Church, I had to select only one for sainthood, it would be Pedro Arrupé”.

.



The next event was the actual publication of the book, The Church and the Homosexual in 1976. I had prayed to God to act as my public relations agent and God certainly delivered. A major article by the religion editor Kenneth Briggs was on the front page of the New York Times. Special articles appeared in Time magazine and Newsweek. I made three appearances on the Phil Donohue show and several on the Larry King Live show.



The day of its publication I was invited to appear on the Today show. It was Tom Brokaw’s first day as host. He did not feel confident to handle such a hot potato as a theological work on homosexuality, so he invited Russell Barber, the religion editor, to sit in with him for the interview. Russell told me later that he was furious at having to take my book with him for his weekend on Fire Island, but ended up delighted when he read the book and invited me to appear on his Review of Religion show a few days later.



There were innumerable manifestations of the grace of the Holy Spirit over the years. But the one that stands out as most remarkable occurred during a trip to Europe in 1988 after the publication of my second major work, Taking a Chance on God: Liberation Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, and Friends. Charlie and I had been invited to do a series of conferences at various universities in Holland. We decided to take a trip to Paris for a few days. On arriving in Paris, I called Jacques Perotti, the assistant to Père André and the founder of David and Jonathan, a gay group for French speaking Catholics. Jacques told me that there was an international meeting of David and Jonathan groups in a monastery outside of Paris and invited me to address the group. I warned him that my French was almost non-existent and I would need a translator. When I arrived I gave a one hour talk in the best French I ever used. I believe that God gave me the gift of tongues that day. As a result David and Jonathon translated my book into French and made it their official manual.



Once again I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit when I faced the choice of giving up all ministries to LGBT people or being dismissed from the Jesuits after 40 years. I went to Gethsemane Abbey to seek God’s help in making that decision. While there, a Trappist monk came to my room and gave me a copy of the Buddist boddisatva vow of universal compassion. As I read that vow it became clear to me what God wanted of me…to continue the ministry and pay the price. I sought the spiritual help of Fr. Matthew Kelty, the guest master at the monastery. I remember him saying to me: “John, God has put you in touch with the suffering of the gay and lesbian community in a special way. Now it is your duty to do whatever you can do to relieve that suffering!”



Shortly after my dismissal from the Society of Jesus, Walter Wink, the biblical theologian and my colleague on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, wrote me a letter in which he said: “John, when the Vatican imprudently slammed the door on you, it blew open a thousand other doors.” That was a prophetic statement. Bishop Paul Moore, of the New York Episcopal diocese wrote to me inviting me to join his church and carry on my ministry there. When William Sloane Coffin retired as minister at Riverside Church, the Maranatha gay group at Riverside submitted my name as a candidate to replace him as pastor. (I always hoped Cardinal O’Connor got wind of that!) Robert Raines, the Methodist director of Kirkridge Retreat Center organized a letter of protest to Rome signed by several famous protestant pastors and theologians, among them, Paul Moore, Harvey Cox and Sloan Coffin. In the letter, they asked the Vatican to restore me because my ministry to LGBT people was as important to their churches as it was to the Roman church. Scores of gay clergy from all denominations began to flock to my retreats for gay Christians at Kirkridge; among them Gene Robinson, the future gay bishop.



I would be remiss today if I failed to pay tribute to Rev. Joseph Doucé. Joseph was a Baptist minister. He was born in Belgium and became a minister in the church in Holland. He opened a specialized ministry in Paris called Christ, the Liberator, to all sexual outcasts, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and transsexuals. He had a special ministry to pedophiles and the victims of pedophiles



When Rev. Doucé heard of my work, he came to New York to meet with me. On several occasions I attended and spoke at his Sunday services in Paris. Joseph was responsible for the publication and distribution of my books in French. In 1990, Rev. Doucé invited Charlie and me to come to Strasburg for me to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of all the Christian gay and lesbian groups in Europe. After the conference he and his lover returned together with us to Paris. The next day we flew back to New York. A few days later we received a tearful phone call from his lover. He told us that men disguised as Parisian police came to the center and arrested Joseph. When his lover went to the police station they denied any knowledge of the arrest. We eventually found out that he was kidnapped by secret police who brought him to a secret prison in Paris where they tortured him for several weeks and finally murdered him and dumped his body in a woods outside of Paris. They were acting on a rumor that Rev Doucé had a list of high government officials who were pederasts and they wanted that information at any cost. Later we heard that the murderers of Rev. Doucé were openly bragging about their murder of the pedophile Doucé. To my knowledge they were never brought to justice. Rev. Joseph Doucé is a true martyr in the cause of gay liberation.



To bring this reflection to a close, I believe that we are witnessing an extraordinary transformation of the Church from a patriarchal, authoritative institution into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a democratic Church that recognizes the Holy Spirit dwelling within all its members and sees authority as coming from the ground up.



At his discourse at the last supper Jesus is reported in the gospel of John: “It is necessary that I should go away before the Spirit can come to you. If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit will dwell in your hearts and lead you into all truth.” What was that necessity? Why could the Holy Spirit not come as long as Jesus was alive?



I believe that Jesus was expressing a basic law governing human growth into spiritual maturity. As humans, we must grow from dependence on external authority to dependence on an authority that dwells within us. To achieve that growth we need fallible authorities. If our parents had been infallible we could never develop into mature adults making our own decisions and taking responsibility for them.



Thank God that Church authorities have proved so fallible. The result has been a maturing of the people of God. This began when the Vatican fumbled the issue of birth control, forcing millions of Catholic to exercise their freedom of conscience, make their own decisions and take responsibility for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what the present Pope is against when he decries moral relativism. Speaking of our last Pope, Archbishop Weakland had this to say:



He (John Paul II) did not read the signs of the time, namely, the opening of Vatican II toward more participatory government on all levels of church life…Discerning the action of the Spirit in the whole Church was not on his agenda. This failure was probably the most important lost opportunity of the post-conciliar period (pp.407-408).



One of the greatest beneficiaries of the fallibility of church authorities has been the LGBT Catholic community. We came to realize early on that we could not accept and obey Church teaching on homosexuality without destroying ourselves physically, psychologically and spirituality. Consequently, as a matter of survival we had to take distance from Church teaching, develop our freedom of conscience and learn to hear what the Spirit of God is saying to us through our experience. The result has been that the LGBT community is leading the way to transform the Catholic Church into a Church of the Holy Spirit.



“The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone! This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” THANK YOU!! New Ways Ministry for your many decades of heroic service to the Church and to the Catholic LGBT community Thank you, God, for all the special maturing graces you are pouring out on the people of God. Thank you especially for the special role you are calling the LGBT community to play in establishing the kingdom of God.

Veni creator spiritus. Mentes tuorum visita; Imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora. A special heartfelt thank you, Holy Spirit!



John J. McNeill



jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com