What I believe about gay marriage and gay clergy—that anyone who identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) should have the same access to these opportunities (and all others, for that matter) as straight people—owes nothing to the Catholic tradition in which I was raised. These beliefs grew out of my liberal political persuasion and my friendships with members of the LBGT community.

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Hic, haec, hoc…huis, huis, huis…

When I was in high school—a diocesan parish Catholic institution—all honors students had to take four years of Latin. This was in the late 1980’s. Old-fashioned or not, Latin was the official tongue of the Catholic intellectual tradition and therefore part of our preparation to go out into the wider world according to the nuns that ran my school.

This made sense to my Italian Catholic mother and grandmother, both of whom remembered the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass well, and, in my mother’s case, had endured long years of schooling in Latin growing up in the 1940’s and 1950’s. This is not to say that Mom and Gram did not enjoy the mass in the vernacular, but there was something about it that the more familiar, informal English language version couldn’t quite capture, they used to say.

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While America frets about the bedroom activities of its leaders, many young adults across the country and across traditions agonize--most often in silence--about navigating romance and sex in a way that doesn't leave them alienated, even rejected, by their faith. Once a child hits puberty, and sometimes even well before, she is often slammed with the (mostly) don'ts of her tradition's teachings about sex, often in a form that is much like chicken soup (so thin as to lack any nourishment at all), and often in a way that if she learns anything about her current sexual predicament, the takeaway involves how she stands to lose everything--her relationship with God, her standing in her community, the respect of a future spouse--if she should commit sexual transgressions before marriage.

Or if she doesn't receive such extensive scare tactics, sometimes adult "mentors" feel a simple Nike-esque "Don't do it" suffices. (That was about all I got as a Catholic young adult.)

For the most part, a young person can either take it or leave it when it comes to teachings on sex by their religious tradition--and more often than not, they face "leaving it," or at least "compartmentalizing it," if they want their faith lives to weather the storm of adolescence, college, and often a decade or more afterward.

So debating whether or not sex outside of marriage is "OK" in the face of a few particular scandals seems disingenuous to me, beside the point even, when the vast majority of our youth are faced with navigating the waters of sex outside of marriage without much if any of the real heavy-lifting of this difficult task done with the help of adults in their community.

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I don’t know that it is a mark of health or sickness, so much as a sign of the information age in which we live, and the fact that people have access to explore a variety of religious traditions like never before, as well as access historical-critical analysis about their own faiths that, in times past, used to more or less be restricted to the walls of the ivory tower, and sometimes goes a long way (for some) toward dismantling what a person once took for granted.

Though, on the health and sickness spectrum—I am not surprised that the number of adults who identify as evangelical Christian is growing, and the number who affiliate as Catholic is plummeting—save the immigrant population helping percentages stay steady for Catholics in the U.S. I say this based on my own investigations into young adult religiosity in America (see Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance & Religion on America’s College Campuses). I believe that what may indeed lead so many adults to identify shifts in their religious identities is tied more to their relationships to religious traditions during young adulthood than anything else.

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The Question: What can Pope Benedict XVI say and do to repair the growing rifts between the Vatican, the clergy and the laity in America?

In the realm of my imagination (because I don’t have much hope for these in the realm of reality), let’s just say that someone handed me a magical Catholic lamp and a Pope Benedict-like genie popped out to grant me three Catholic wishes. If this were to happen, I’d ask for the following:

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