KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
avier Cortada's complex feelings about the Catholic church are difficult to put into words, but they flow easily onto canvas. The Miami artist's work, filled with religious icons, pulses with love and disappointment, hope and frustration.
"I draw on my faith in my art, because that's who I am," said Cortada, 42. "A lot of my paintings are about religious issues. But I'm a little confused about if I still consider myself a Catholic."
A year ago, Cortada, a former altar boy, left the church over its stance on homosexuality. Though he and his partner felt at home at Gesu Catholic Church in downtown Miami, the Vatican's position on gay marriage convinced him that he could no longer attend a church that discriminated against him, he said.
Cortada still considers the Catholic church his home, and he no longer feels he has to choose between his faith and his sexual orientation. He wishes, however, that his church would come to the same conclusion.
Despite many mainstream Christian denominations' condemnation of homosexuality, increasing numbers of gay people who profess Christianity have been coming out spiritually, urging both their churches and the gay community to rethink the assumption that being a gay Christian is an oxymoron.
What's happening
Though some have turned to more liberal denominations and others have formed groups within their denomination to fight discrimination, many gay people who profess Christianity are holding fast to their religious identities. They'll argue there's nothing inherently anti-gay in Christianity, and being anti-gay is decidedly not Christian.
Still, some Christians maintain the Bible clearly states that one cannot live a gay lifestyle and be faithful to Christianity.
"It's just not linguistically credible to make the case that there's anything but a prohibition on homosexuality in Scripture," said John Aman, a spokesman for the Center for Reclaiming America, a conservative Christian organization in Fort Lauderdale that lobbies against gay marriage and abortion.
Others call such views a distortion of Christianity's central message of love.
To Cortada, Christ is the ultimate comforter. In a painting called "Modern Leper," Cortada shows Christ comforting an AIDS patient. Jesus and the infirm man are touched by flecks of golden light, but figures in the background cast ominous shadows in their direction.
"It's about Jesus reaching out to people in modern society who feel ostracized," Cortada said.
Cortada still donates paintings to Catholic day-care centers and Genesis House, a Catholic charity, out of a deep respect for the church's commitment to providing social services. But he'll wait until there's another pope, one who accepts homosexuals, before he attends Catholic Mass.
Others see the acceptance of homosexuality by churches as inevitable.
Other situations
"I'm just in the wrong place at the wrong time," said Daniel Dower of Miami Shores, a former Catholic priest who attends St. Rosa of Lima Catholic Church with his partner of eight years.
Sooner or later, Dower figures, the church will revise its position, just as its leaders have apologized for the church's tacit acceptance of slavery and the Holocaust.
"There are people in the church who disapprove of homosexuality, but I know they're wrong," said Dower, who was ordained as a priest in 1984 and was outed six years later by a fellow priest at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. "There are differences between what individuals believe and the core beliefs of a Roman Catholic."
Patricia Huff, 60, who was reared as a Baptist in Tennessee, said anti-gay rhetoric and dogma forced her out of the church at age 16. After drifting to other faiths she found more accepting of her sexual orientation, Huff began to reconsider Christianity.
"I was agnostic for a long time," said Huff, a resident of Kendall. "Around 40-something, I started thinking about how to line up better spiritually."
But Huff said she found it hard to divorce her spirituality from her Christian upbringing. Despite the anti-gay rhetoric in her church, Huff couldn't shake the instinct that "God is love and Christ is love."
"My early upbringing was Christian, and the culture here is Christian," Huff said.
Huff now attends Miami's Unity on the Bay, a worship center where about 30 percent of the congregants are gay.
For many gay people who profess Christianity, remaining in a church that rejects them is simply too painful.
Karen Weldin, 51, of Stigler, Okla., drives 200 miles with her partner every Sunday to attend a United Church of Christ service that is accepting of gays and lesbians.
Reared a Southern Baptist, Weldin left that church in 2000 after hearing one too many homophobic sermons. Sometimes she questions her decision.
"I would still like to be a member of a Southern Baptist church to stay and work from the inside," said Weldin, who is now the director of Soul Force, an interfaith organization that works to end religious bias against gays. "But I encourage people to get out because it's an abusive situation."
Another view
Others have found ways to embrace a conservative Christian theology without compromising their sexual identity.
Dr. Joseph Pearson, who heads the Christ Evangelical Bible Institute in Phoenix, Ariz., founded the institute 12 years ago to give gay people who profess Christianity the opportunity to get a conservative Protestant biblical education.
"There are many wonderful training programs that are conservative and provide good, solid biblical foundations but their doors are closed to us," said Pearson, who was reared a Baptist in Chicago and did not want to give up his theological heritage.
"There are other denominations that have become affirming, but we would consider them to be theologically liberal."
Like Pearson, the Rev. Tommy Watkins has been told by Baptist preachers that he can't be gay and Christian, much less a gay Christian minister. As a gay black Baptist, Watkins, who now attends St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Coconut Grove, Fla., said that since he has accepted who he is spiritually and sexually, he feels at home pretty much anywhere.
But getting black churches to embrace gays and lesbians has been slow going, he said. "I wouldn't sacrifice who I am for the church, which is not doing what it's supposed to do, to reach out to all God's children," he said.
Herndon Davis, author of "Black, Gay & amp; Christian" (self-published, $16) still goes to Sunday services and Bible study at his Baptist church in Atlanta. "It was difficult to stay, but if I didn't, who would stay to challenge the church?" he said.
It's a question that still bothers Cortada.
"I know it's wrong for me to leave because the Christian thing to do is to fight for what's right," he said.
But he likens his view of the Catholic church to his painting of Augustin Verot, the first bishop of St. Augustine, who worked to provide schools for black children but at the same time supported slavery. His prejudice was a product of his time, not his faith, Cortada says.
In Cortada's colorful rendition of the bishop, his right arm is raised in triumph, his left foot shackled to a mangrove.
"By my staying involved in what the world perceives to be a hierarchical institution, I was acquiescing to the views of that institution," he said. "I took that shackle off my foot and walked away."