Oy vey! Has the Vatican Co-opted Oscar Wilde?

[Ralph]

The Times January 05, 2007

Vatican comes out of the closet and embraces Oscar

Although Oscar Wilde had a gay relationship, the Vatican is championing his razor-sharp moral maxims, not his lifestyle (Corbis)


Ruth Gledhill - matters of faith

Oscar Wilde, poet, playwright, gay icon and deathbed convert to Catholicism, has been paid a rare tribute by the Vatican. His aphorisms are quoted in a collection of maxims and witticisms for Christians that has been published by one of the Pope’s closest aides.

Wilde (1854-1900) had long been regarded with distaste by the Vatican — a dissolute and disgraced homosexual who was sentenced for acts of gross indecency over his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas.

The book, compiled by Father Leonardo Sapienza, head of protocol at the Vatican, includes such Wildean gems as “I can resist everything except temptation” and “The only way to get rid of a temptation is yield to it” — hardly orthodox Catholic teaching.

Father Sapienza said that he had devoted the lion’s share of Provocations: Aphorisms for an Anti-conformist Christianity to Wilde because he was a “writer who lived perilously and somewhat scandalously but who has left us some razor-sharp maxims with a moral”. The book also includes contributions from the Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila.

Father Sapienza said that Wilde had been a great writer of powerful force and dazzling intelligence who was now chiefly remembered not for his promiscuity but for plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband as well as moral tales such as The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a vain young man pays a terrible price for selling his soul to gain eternal youth.

Father Sapienza said that he wanted to “stimulate a reawakening in certain Catholic circles”. Christianity was intended to be a radical cure, not a humdrum remedy for the common cold: “Our role is to be a thorn in the flesh, to move people’s consciences and to tackle what today is the No 1 enemy of religion — indifference.”

“What a surprise!” La Repubblica’s said. “A homosexual icon has been accepted by the Vatican.” Orazio La Rocca, a Vatican watcher, described the book as a bombshell.

Pope Benedict XVI is a stern opponent of gay marriage and has reinforced Catholic teaching that homosexuality is a disorder. On the other hand he has belied his reputation as a hardliner since his election, reserving most of his fire for apathy and relativism in an attempt to revive Christian faith in Europe.

Wilde, who was married and had two children, was arrested and tried in 1895 over his relationship with Lord Douglas (known as Bosie), son of the Marquess of Queensberry, who had accused Wilde of sodomy. The writer sued Queensberry but lost and was sentenced to two years’ hard labour.

He displayed a long fascination with Catholicism, once remarking: “I am not a Catholic — I am simply a violent Papist.” He was born in Dublin to a Protestant family but fell under the spell of Catholicism at Oxford. He even made a journey for an audience with the Pope, but declared: “To go over to Rome would be to sacrifice and give up my two great Gods: Money and Ambition.” The way for Wilde’s rehabilitation was paved six years ago by a Jesuit theologian, Father Antonio Spadaro. On the centenary of Wilde’s death, he raised eyebrows by praising the “understanding of God’s love” that had followed Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading.

Father Spadaro said that at the end of his life Wilde had seen into the depths of his own soul and in his last works, such as De Profundis, had made “an implicit journey of faith”. He said that Wilde had come to see that God was capable of “breaking hearts of stone and entering into them with mercy and forgiveness”.

The wit and wisdom of Wilde

#

Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither
#

I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage
#

One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead. I see an intimate connection between the life of Christ and the life of the artist. Christ’s place indeed is with the poets
#

I can resist everything except temptation
#

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
#

It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution
#

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it
#

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about
#

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them
#

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner
#

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it
#

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing
#

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes
#

What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to use

[jbuck919]

Since I have now EXCEEDED MY 6000TH POST having hardly ever made one out of a newspaper or journal article, I thought no harm would be done by quoting the Belfast Telegraph, copyright January 5, 2007:

The Vatican goes Wilde
Friday, January 05, 2007

By Paul Vallely

He hardly seems the obvious candidate for Catholic approval, but the Irish author who was once a byword for decadent behaviour is quoted in a new book by a Roman priest as an example to 21st-century Christians.

"I can resist everything except temptation," Oscar Wilde once famously said. He was speaking for us all. Even for the Church of Rome, it turns out. For that very remark is quoted, with approbation, by a leading Vatican writer, Fr Leonardo Sapienza - a member of the protocol department of the Pontifical Household of Pope Benedict XVI - in a book out yesterday. It is quite a rehabilitation for a man whom the Church once regarded as the apotheosis of sodomite notoriety.


In the past, Fr Sapienza - his name means wisdom in Italian - has compiled collections of the sayings of Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II. But his latest offering, Aphorisms for an Anti-Conformist Christianity, includes several of Wilde's most celebrated remarks. The 19th-century homosexual, the Roman luminary concludes, was "endowed with brilliant intelligence, a trenchant author, sarcastic and provocative, who lived dangerously and a little scandalously" but whose words offer great examples to 21st-century Christians.


What is going on? After all, this is the Church that brands as an "intrinsic moral evil" the homosexual acts for which Wilde's catamite, Lord Alfred Douglas, coined the phrase "the love that dare not speak its name". Wilde was, after all, a byword for the decadence upon which the Victorian values of the age showered ignominy.


Yet it is only the latest such rapprochement. Six years ago, on the centenary of Wilde's death, the Vatican-backed Jesuit quarterly La Civilta Cattolica praised the homosexualist author of such cynical aphorisms such as "there is no sin except stupidity", and "a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it".


Wilde's writings, said Fr Antonio Spadaro, in the years that followed his two-year sentence of hard labour in Reading jail for "acts of gross indecency with other male persons", demonstrated spiritual values and an "understanding of God's love" that revealed he had seen into the depths of his own soul after a lifetime of "degradation, vanity and frivolity".


The relationship between Oscar Wilde and the Church of Rome has long been an ambivalent one. Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 to a Protestant Anglo-Irish family, but is believed to have been secretly baptised a Catholic around the age of four, at the behest of his mother, in defiance of her husband's wishes. Wilde's father, an agnostic and a Freemason, disliked his son's interest in the Church at school in Dublin. He sent him off to Oxford, threatening to disinherit the youth if he converted.


But Oxford was not the high church of wan Anglicanism and secularism that his father hoped. Wilde persisted in what his father called his "Romanish leanings" and was duly disinherited. Undeterred, he languished in an Oxford aesthetic of incense, benediction, high mass and mystical Newmanism.


Whether his explorations were spiritual or a symptom of youthful rebellion is not entirely clear. In those days the Roman Church was still the Whore of Babylon to many Englishmen. It had been less than 50 years since the Emancipation Bill allowed Roman Catholics to hold public office in England. Rome, said Wilde, helped "us grasp at the skirts of the Infinite". On many occasions he came close to converting. But, in the end, he told a friend "to go over to Rome would be to sacrifice and give up my two great gods, Money and Ambition."


He left Oxford a year later in 1878. His entrance into London society was spectacular: his dandified dress, pronouncements on fashion and opinions on art were both polished and outrageous. Literary and financial success followed; throughout the 1880s his plays became hits. Yet, though in this period Wilde gradually lost interest in Catholicism, the language and liturgy of the faith animated his conversations and literary output.


Even at the high point of his personal decadence, the "Apostle of Aestheticism" (as he dubbed himself) drew his themes from the moral universe of the Catholic faith. After he married, and fathered two sons, he published several books of stories for children, including "The Selfish Giant", which are rooted unmistakably in Christian theology in their stories of death, sacrifice and life beyond the grave.


His 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray - condemned at the time as "a poisonous book" full of "moral and spiritual putrefaction," which "constantly hints, not obscurely, at disgusting sins and abominable crimes" - also draws its moral from Catholic tradition. It tells the story of a man who sells his soul for eternally youthful looks. While the protagonist seems never to age, his portrait in the attic gradually reveals in hideous detail the grotesqueries of Gray's self-indulgent callousness towards others. The painting clearly stands for the soul steadily stained by sin regardless of outward claims or the appearance of piety.


Wilde's artistic and social circle was similarly equivocal. Many of the unconventional poets and artists, voluptuaries and aesthetes, with whom he surrounded himself eventually converted to Catholicism, including his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and Aubrey Beardsley, the pre-eminent artist of the English Decadence, who matched Wilde in both scandalous reputation and prodigious talent thanks to the phallic and hermaphroditic drawings with which he illustrated Wilde's Salome. Beardsley asked in his last letter that his drawings be destroyed. John Gray, the poet who was the model for Dorian Gray, even became a Catholic priest in Edinburgh.


But Gray cut himself off from Wilde after the trial. In 1895 Lord Alfred Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensbury (the man who devised the rules for boxing) left a calling card at a London club addressed to "Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [sic]". Wilde, who at the time had two hit plays running in London, brought an action for libel. But he lost and was subsequently tried for gross indecency, jailed and made bankrupt. His life was ruined.


From prison he sent out a request for books to Robbie Ross, a young Canadian whom Wilde had introduced to homosexuality, and who was to stand by Wilde through the dark years that followed. He asked for a Bible, works by St Augustine, Dante, and Newman and a life of St. Francis of Assisi.


The works he produced on his release, De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, were like nothing he had produced before. Prison brought Wilde once again face to face with Catholic themes - but these were now purged of exoticism and romanticism. They were about sin and suffering, tempered by the cruelties he witnessed in prison: the anonymous shame of the inmates, the faces of children torn from their parents, the isolation of a condemned man awaiting execution.


It was this that led the Vatican theologian in 2000 to speak of the "implicit journey of faith" Wilde had made. He even compared the public humiliation of Wilde at Clapham Junction station, en route to Reading, with the mocking of the arrested Jesus Christ.


There is one other piece in the jigsaw. On his deathbed in Paris in November 1900, Oscar Wilde finally converted to Catholicism. In an age when Wilde has acquired the status of a proto-martyr for the cause of gay rights, this deathbed embrace of the enemy is often portrayed as an anomalous aberration, the act of a very sick man in a moment of grave weakness.


What is intriguing is that the man who finally sent for the priest was Robbie Ross, himself a Catholic but one who had long tried to dissuade the author from converting - certain that Wilde would "relapse" into sinful behaviour. Wilde had often joked with friends that "Catholicism is the only religion to die in". But Ross felt that, in his closing years, Wilde was demonstrating a changed attitude.


There was still the old joshing. A few months before his death Wilde had travelled to Rome. On Holy Saturday he went to tea at the Hotel de l'Europe and there a man he did not know suddenly came up to him and asked if he would like to see Pope Leo XIII the next day. Wilde, ever the joker, bowed his head and, borrowing a phrase from the Mass, said "Non sum dignus ". But the man produced a ticket. On Easter Day, Wilde appeared in the front row among the pilgrims at the Vatican and received a blessing from the Pope.


For five months the Irishman had been suffering from a terrible rash - perhaps, biographers have speculated, the late effects of syphilis, eating bad mussels, an allergic reaction to his hair dye or vitamin deficiency dermatitis from overuse of alcohol (he was on a litre of brandy a day, plus copious amounts of absinthe). Whatever, the rash vanished.


Wilde later wrote: "When I saw the old white Pontiff, successor of the Apostles and Father of Christendom pass, carried high above the throng, and in passing turn and bless me where I knelt, I felt my sickness of body and soul fall from me like a worn garment, and I was made whole." But still he hesitated. "My position is curious," he epigrammatised, "I am not a Catholic: I am simply a violent Papist."


Three weeks before his death he remained on the brink, telling a reporter from the Daily Chronicle that "I intend to be received before long." It was only as Wilde lay dying that Robbie Ross called in an English Passionist, Fr Cuthbert Dunne. Wilde was delirious, but he at once became lucid, indicated he wanted to be received into the Church and, after several visits from the priest, died a Catholic two days later.


But did he mean it? The Vatican - with its conviction that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who do not need to - clearly thinks so. Many prominent gay activists are more sceptical.


Wilde himself has something to say on that. "The world had always loved the Saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God," he wrote in De Profundis. "Christ seems to have always loved the sinner as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man... The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that. It is the means by which one alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their gnomic aphorisms: 'Even the Gods cannot alter the past'. Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it."


Wilde always, of course, insisted on having the last word.


I was very happy to share that with you as my MORE THAN 6000TH POST.