Vague, not vogue

If the press were to be believed, there’s good news to be celebrated. The news outlets have it that the Catholic Church, i.e. the Pope, has issued a decision allowing transgender people to be baptized, and in fact, to stand as godparents to (gasp) Catholic children.

Other facets of this permission include allowing transgender people to stand as witnesses to weddings, as well as gay couples to have their adopted children or their children from surrogacies baptized in the Catholic faith (more unwitting kids delivered to the altar to be co-opted, yay!).

Before we go any further, best to be clear with our definition of terms. This doctrinal ruling is meant for the benefit of transgender persons, which expressly includes people who have already undergone sex reassignment surgery, and not merely transvestites who wish to dress up as Cinderella’s pumpkin miracle worker. So losing one’s original genitalia isn’t supposed to be a disqualification from showing up to the sacramental celebrations in one’s finest white lace veil.

That being settled, we dissect the news (as the text is supposedly in Portuguese, best not to waste time by trying to plumb the original document). What go-signal did the Pope really give?

Closer scrutiny makes that tidbit of supposed good news subject to raised eyebrows (and yes, askance looks). Perhaps it’s not yet time to vogue down the aisle and up the altar. The qualifications accompanying the supposed permission may, in fact, legitimize the discriminatory decisions made by priests.

Take for example the permission for baptism. It comes with the caveat that there should be “no situations in which there is a risk of generating a public scandal or confusion among the faithful.”

No situations? None at all? That doesn’t augur well for a timid priest who might not be comfortable assuring himself that absolutely zero scandals will occur if he dares think of performing baptismal rites. What more a transphobic priest. This breed (of which there is plenty) might seize upon this phraseology to insist that indeed, there might be a chance, however slim, that a scandal might occur.

An enterprising bigot might even rally the faithful to create scandals on demand come baptism time. So there’s not really much comfort to be derived from this purported permission --unless one convinces the priest to don his robes and conduct the ritual at midnight whilst the townspeople are sleeping (shades of a sacrificial offering come to mind).

And what is a scandal anyway? When three people hold placards outside the church? When an online petition is circulated? When Marites meets Karen, and they accost the priest in public?

Then, there is the purported permission to become a godparent. The newly-minted doctrine admonishes the priest to ensure that he exercises “pastoral prudence”. By this, it is further elaborated that the priest must take care to ensure that again, there are no scandals, and also, that there is no “undue legitimization in the sphere of the educational community”.

“Pastoral prudence”, once we boil this down, really means that the priest has plenty of discretion, and once that priest has exercised such discretion, that’s pretty much the end of the conversation. There is hardly any room to argue with personal views or for a lawyer to whip out that favorite straw argument “grave abuse of discretion”.

The second injunction about legitimization, one would take to mean that there should be no inadvertent lessons taught to the Catholic faithful that transgenders are legitimate. Which seems hard to compute.

Does this mean that the transperson will stand there and be admonished by the priest that she/he should serve as a wonderful example to the kid to be baptized? And then afterwards, the fairy godparent mustn’t try to legitimize her/his existence to the community at large? To the kid, she/he could be a model to be emulated, a paragon of virtue, but to others in the community, perhaps not?

Where is the logic in this? Rather than making one feel celebratory, it seems all this has done is provide doctrinal cover for people on both sides of the aisle; those who want to welcome transgender people into the flock, and those bigots who wish to exclude them.

The better way, perhaps, given the history of denials and rebuffs by priests at their posts, would have been to provide clearer (and firmer) guidelines as to how to process these situations, and allow for more trans-participation. These vague pronouncements merely provide false hope, and do nothing to illuminate the baptismal gowns just waiting to be worn. As they say in legal circles -vague is void.