The Pope, the gays and the Dutch: Dutch secular responses to Pope Benedict XVI when homosexuality seems at stake

Abstract

This article provides a critical discourse analysis of Dutch perceptions of, and responses to, papal utterances that were perceived to be (primarily) about homosexuality. It looks not only at secular conceptions of religion, in which the Pope’s views on homosexuality are taken as exemplary of the irrationality and libido dominandi of religion, but also at certain postsecular uses of religion to rebuke the Pope. It explains Pope Benedict’s (perceived) obsession with homosexuality by locating it in the context of a Vatican discourse against ‘gender ideology’, whereas it explains the Dutch media’s preoccupation with homosexuality by explaining that the papal pronouncements are seen as a threat to the international role of the Netherlands as a moral guide and, more precisely, a threat to what the Dutch see as their moral ‘export product’: ‘gay marriage’.

Keywords:

• Gender
• homosexuality
• nationalism
• the Netherlands
• Pope Benedict XVI
• secularism

1. Introduction

In December 2012, ten thousands liked a Facebook page, ‘Geen bloemen naar de Paus’ (‘No flowers to the Pope’), which called on Dutch flower breeders to stop sending flowers to decorate St. Peter’s Square during the Easter speech of Pope Benedict XVI, because the latter ‘systematically accuses homosexuals’. The next day, the country’s main secular LGBT organisation, COC Netherlands, supported this call and sent out a press release accusing the Pope of having made ‘a frontal attack on homosexual women and men’ in his traditional Christmas Address to the Roman Curia.

The mere fact of this criticism might not come as a surprise: Pope Benedict – and the Vatican in general – has often been criticised for his views on (homo)sexuality by activists, scholars and politicians from many (other) Western countries. At the same time, the Netherlands is often considered a liberal and secular country, religious opposition to homosexuality seems to be rather weak compared to other Western countries, and the influence papal proclamations on issues like these have in the Netherlands are considered limited as well. So why have Pope Benedict’s pronouncements caused such stirs in Dutch public discourse?

In this article, I will look at the particularities of responses by participants in Dutch public discourse, i.e. certain framings of the Pope and of ‘religion’ in general, certain mobilisations and conceptualisations of ‘homosexuality’, and in particular certain deployments of secular and nationalist rhetoric. My aim is to better understand the role of religion in contemporary Dutch society and its intersection with secularism, evaluations of homosexuality and national identity. I will provide a critical discourse analysis of Dutch perceptions of, and responses to, papal pronouncements about homosexuality – or, more precisely, papal pronouncements that are perceived to be (primarily) about homosexuality.¹ I have selected pronouncements by Pope Benedict XVI that can be found in two Addresses to the Roman Curia (Benedict XVI 2008, 2012b) and two Messages for World Peace Day (Benedict XVI 2007, 2012a), because they have received the most attention in the media and have evoked many responses from LGBT organisations, politicians, celebrities and others.²

My primary focus is on the reception and framing of Pope Benedict’s pronouncements in Dutch public discourse. However – or rather therefore – I will also analyse the Pope’s pronouncements as such in some detail, which I will relate to earlier texts by the Pope and some Vatican departments. I do this at some length because it helps us to better understand the Dutch responses. Needless to say, it is beyond the scope of this article to make any claims as to how I, as a queer Catholic theologian, think the Pope or the Roman Catholic Church should address issues of gender and sexuality – if they should make any claims in this area at all.

Although the argument of this article is not strictly linear, three different subjects will be discussed in its three main parts: Section 2 is concerned with secular conceptions of religion and the implications for the possibility of rational dialogue; Section 3 shows how both certain participants in Dutch public discourse and the Pope are – to use a euphemism – fascinated by the topic of homosexuality – albeit in different ways; and Section 4 connects this Dutch preoccupation with homosexuality with Dutch national identity.

2. The regulation of religion and the impossibility of a rational dialogue

2.1. ‘The Pope places himself outside a rational dialogue’

The main topic of Pope Benedict XVI’s traditional Address to the Roman Curia in December 2008 is that of creation and the Holy Spirit. In that context, he argues, amongst others, that, instead of limiting herself to defending the natural environment, the Church ‘must also protect man from self-destruction. What is needed is something like a human ecology, correctly understood’.³ He proceeds,

If the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected, this is not some antiquated metaphysics. What is involved here is faith in the Creator and a readiness to listen to the ‘language’ of creation. To disregard this would be the self-destruction of man himself, and hence the destruction of God’s own work.

(…)

Rain forests deserve indeed to be protected, but no less so does man, as a creature having an innate ‘message’ which does not contradict our freedom, but is instead its very premise.

He then claims that we need to ‘defend love against sex as a consumer good, the future against the exclusive claims of the present, and human nature against its manipulation’ (Benedict XVI 2008, cf. 2007).⁴

Within a day, COC Netherlands, the country’s main secular LGBT organisation, posts on its website a rather objective and well-informed summary of what Benedict has said about sexuality and gender. It notes, amongst others, that Benedict has ‘explicitly targeted gender and implicitly targeted gay marriage’, and it ends by explaining that it is this ‘ideology’ that had made the Vatican oppose a recent UN declaration against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Two days later, on December 23, they issue a press release in which they criticise the Pope:

By making such pronouncements, the Pope places himself outside a rational dialogue on homosexuality and religion, because what fair-minded person – whether Catholic or not – can go along with this completely excessive way of thinking about homosexuality as the ‘ultimate evil’, leave alone agree with it? COC Netherlands cannot but ascertain that this Pope is an old armchair scholar who has clearly and completely lost touch with reality.

They don’t engage in a discussion with what the Pope has actually claimed, not only because of the limited space or because such is not the aim of a press release by an activist organisation, but mainly because they consider any ‘rational dialogue’ with the Pope on this subject impossible – not only practically impossible and not only impossible for COC itself, but theoretically impossible for any ‘fair-minded person’. COC is definitely not the only one that holds this view. On December 22, 2012, the anonymous administrator of the above-mentioned Facebook page posted: ‘I’m not against the Pope. Neither am I against religion. Everyone can believe whatever s/he jolly well likes’. That is, religious people can believe whatever they want, but they’re definitely not ‘fair-minded persons’. In a reader’s letter to a newspaper, a father of a gay son and former member of the Roman Catholic Church writes: ‘Any substantial response is redundant and too much honour for him’. (Brabants Dagblad, December 30, 2008) According to another reader, ‘this institute (…) do[es] not want dialogue but power’ (Brabants Dagblad, January 3, 2009). Four years later, again in response to the Pope’s annual Address to the Curia (to which I will turn below), a liberal-Jewish rabbi writes that ‘[t]olerance can only flourish when their beautifully presented theses [i.e. those of the Pope and the chief rabbi of France, whom Benedict had cited; MD] are debunked as intolerant’. (Het Goede Leven, January 12, 2013)

Here and in many other instances, the irrationality of the Pope’s view is merely stated, not substantiated. This is indicative of the cultural dominance of a secular mind-set. ‘Because secularism is based on a rationality shared by all human beings, it provides a universal discourse, whereas religions are held to be the expressions of particular cultures’. (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008, 9) Its supposed universality renders religion a – or the – deviation and, therefore, as German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has argued, religion ‘cannot lay claim to provide a cultural resource for the self-understanding of any truly modern mind’. (Habermas 2008, 26) These responses seem to imply that there’s hardly anyone in the Netherlands that would take the Pope’s claims seriously – anyone who would do so would run the risk of being considered not a ‘fair-minded person’. By disqualifying the Pope’s view as irrational, ‘intolerant’ and/or the product of a will to power, a possible incentive to take his view seriously and to engage in any kind of dialogue is cancelled out.

2.2. The language of creation and the limits of religion

In their press release, COC also comments that ‘[t]he pronouncements by the Pope on the connection between homosexuality and the survival of humanity can be taken [by states] as a Biblical justification of the criminalisation of homosexual acts’. What interests me here is the presupposition that the Pope’s pronouncements will only have an impact on states (or state leaders) that ascribe a certain authority to the Bible. However, the Pope had not, as some Biblicist Protestants do, provided a ‘Biblical justification’ in any strict sense, i.e. his claims were not based on Scripture alone. Instead, thinking from within the Catholic natural law tradition, he had spoken about ‘the language of creation’, a language that also non-Christians to some extent can read through the lens of philosophy and science (Benedict XVI 2008).⁵ According to this Catholic view on the relation between faith and reason, Benedict implies, a dialogue with the Church is possible even for those who don’t accept Scripture’s validity.

Benedict considers such a dialogue not only possible but also necessary. In his annual Address to the Curia in December 2012, he argues that the Church needs to engage in

dialogue with states, dialogue with society – which includes dialogue with cultures and with science – and finally dialogue with religions. (…) In her dialogue with the state and with society, the Church does not, of course, have ready answers for individual questions. Along with other forces in society, she will wrestle for the answers that best correspond to the truth of the human condition. The values that she recognizes as fundamental and non-negotiable for the human condition she must propose with all clarity. (Benedict XVI 2012b)

His assertion that the Church does not have ‘ready answers for individual questions’ contrasts with the widespread image amongst the Dutch public of Pope Benedict as, in the words of a columnist for a right-wing magazine, ‘an inviolable leader of the church who knows everything for sure’ (van der List 2013).⁶ Of course, one could wonder what the Church ‘recognizes as fundamental and non-negotiable’ when it comes to questions of gender and sexuality, and how that might limit the possibilities for any truly open dialogue.⁷ However, Benedict discursively emphasises that a dialogue between the Church on the one hand and (secular) states and organisations on the other is necessary. In December 2007, in his Message for World Peace Day 2008 (to which COC also referred in their press release), Benedict had cited the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which he had called ‘a landmark of juridic civilization of truly universal value’ (Benedict XVI 2007, sec. 4; emphasis in the original). This Declaration states that ‘the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State’ (UDHR art. 16.3 as quoted by Benedict XVI 2007, sec. 4). By appealing to this Declaration, Benedict not only wants to show that the Church’s teaching on marriage is, as he would put it in December 2008, ‘not some antiquated metaphysics’ (Benedict XVI 2008), but also that, in his view, any redefinition of marriage is at odds with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Put differently, he points to what he sees as an inconsistency in secular human rights discourse. Therefore, he presents the Roman Catholic Church – and himself as its representative – as an expert and active conversation partner on issues of human sexuality.

In December 2012, it is both the Pope’s Address to the Roman Curia (Benedict XVI 2012b) and his Message for World Peace Day 2013 (Benedict XVI 2012a) that cause a stir in the media. Following Dutch news agency ANP and using the headline ‘Pope wants to join forces with religions against gay marriage’, several newspapers note on December 21:

In some countries the Roman Catholic Church has already joined forces with Muslims, Jews and other believers against same-sex marriage legislation. Sometimes juridical, social and anthropological arguments are being used instead of religious ones. (Algemeen Dagblad, De Volkskrant, cf. De Telegraaf, PowNed)⁸

While there are definitely examples of religious (including Roman Catholic) persons or groups who, for strategic reasons, seem to refrain from using religious arguments, concepts and vocabulary altogether in their campaigns against same-sex marriage in certain countries, this is not what Benedict does. In his pronouncements at stake here, he presents a Catholic view on the family that aims to integrate so-called natural knowledge. So when he states that the family is ‘the basic cell of society from the demographic, ethical, pedagogical, economic and political standpoints’ (Benedict XVI 2012a), he means that this particular Catholic view on the family can be recognised from, or be supported by, other ‘standpoints’. But the secularist implication of these newspapers is that religious arguments are radically different from ‘juridical, social and anthropological arguments’.⁹

This illustrates what Habermas has argued: ‘From the viewpoint of secularism, the substance of faith is scientifically discredited either way. As such, discussions about religious traditions and with religious figures, who still lay claim to a significant public role, escalate into polemic’. (Habermas 2008, 27) By suggesting that the Pope’s view of the family as ‘the basic cell of society’ is a thoroughly religious view – as distinct from rational, secular knowledge – these media can easily discredit the Pope’s view. In short, a rational dialogue seems to be foreclosed either by suggesting that the Pope uses purely ‘religious’ arguments (which are then believed to make no sense to non-religious persons) or by suggesting that the Pope uses ‘non-religious’ arguments (which are considered inauthentic and a sign of a will to power when used by a religious leader).

2.3. The Pope as Pontius Pilate

The examples discussed above might give the impression that, generally speaking, the Pope – and, by extrapolation, Catholicism, Christianity or even religion – is put aside in Dutch public discourse. This, however, is not entirely the case. Let me discuss a few examples of a particular type of a secular use of religion. In the 2008 press release I quoted at the beginning of this section, COC quotes its chair, Vera Bergkamp, who warns that ‘[s]tates will use the Pope’s statements to retain such criminal laws, including the death penalty’. After this quote, the press release – notably not the quote of Bergkamp itself – proceeds:

Rome will likely deny this, but that only means that the Pope’s Christmas address pre-empts Easter: that means that the Pope will, just like Pilate, wash his hands of the consequences of his words.

Instead of evaluating the Pope’s remarks from a secular perspective, COC invokes Christian vocabulary from the passion narrative. Whereas, in COC’s reading, the Pope had presented homosexuality as ‘the ultimate evil’, COC now compares the Pope with one of the antagonists in the Gospels, Pontius Pilate.¹⁰ What we see here is a secular organisation using Biblical imagery to rebuke the Pope, taking over the role of the Church as the true interpreter of the Bible and Christian festivals.¹¹ Four years later (December 22, 2012), again in a press release responding to Benedict’s annual Address to the Roman Curia, COC quotes its new chair, Tanja Ineke, saying: ‘Instead of choosing a message of peace and love, the Pope chooses a frontal attack on homosexual women and men in this Christmastide’. Instead of responding from, for example, a human rights discourse, COC again chooses to use normative language from the Christian tradition. Even in a post-Christian society as the Netherlands, many are longing to hear a ‘message of peace and love’ in Christmastide – or at least they are more sensitive to hear messages that sound like the opposite, especially when such a message comes from the Pope.

It is not exceptional that, when a religious leader, group or organisation condemns non-heterosexuality, someone who either doesn’t self-identify as religious or self-identifies as not religious responds by claiming that, after all, God is love and that religion – often Christianity is mentioned here – is primarily about love. Let me provide two more examples. In April 2005, just after Cardinal Ratzinger had become the new Pope, gay youth magazine Expreszo released a poster showing pink smoke coming out of the Vatican chimney. Its slogan read: ‘Doesn’t it become time for a religion that loves all people?’, which implies that there’s currently no such religion and that LGBTs are the main victims of religions. ‘It’s not an accusation against the Vatican or the Pope, but a call to the Church to accept everyone’, explains Expreszo’s chief-editor. ‘After all,’ he argues, ‘God has also created gays’. (Rotterdams Dagblad, April 25, 2005)

Shortly after Pope Francis has been elected in 2013, a secular feminist publicist writes a column annex open letter to the new Pope (Trouw, February 19, 2013). She starts: ‘Now I’m not a member of this big divine fan club, but I do really love humanity and, therefore, I would like to ask you something. About neighbourly love’. She doesn’t, so to speak, love God (cf. ‘this divine fan club’), but she does share with Catholics a love of humanity, which she suggests is a simple and easy thing to feel or do (cf. the understated ‘something’). Yet, she suggests, even that was too much for Pope Benedict:

This went a bit wrong with your predecessor. There was, for example, this trifle in 2008 in which the Vatican opposed a UN resolution that intended to end the discrimination and persecution of homosexual men and women. (…) And then there was also the Christmas speech, in which Benedict said – almost but still not literally – that homosexuality is at odds with natural order and, moreover, a threat to the future of humanity. (…) So my question to you is: Could you be that Pope who reaches out to gays, lesbians and transgenders, and who welcomes them on God’s lap? For I think that that’s what Jesus would have done.

Such claims about neighbourly love, creation and what Jesus would do are also common amongst (liberal) Christians, but it’s striking to encounter them amongst non-religious participants in public discourse, who sometimes even formulate their suggestions etsi Deus daretur. Interestingly, if an imam has said something similar to what the Pope had said, very few non-believers respond that ‘Allah has also created gays’ or make claims as to ‘what Muhammad would have done’. Although there are, of course, multiple examples of online comments to news items on the Pope in which people argue to remove religions from the public sphere or to simply ‘abolish all religions’, in the responses discussed here, we see that they want the Church to play a particular role in society.¹² As Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood (2013, ix) note, summarising what scholars such as Talal Asad and Charles Taylor have argued, ‘secularism does not merely organize the place of religion in nation-states and communities but also stipulates what religion is and ought to be’. I would like to add that this stipulation or regulation of religion is argued for from a secular perspective on sexuality – or, as Joan Scott (2013; cf. Jordan 2011) has put it, from a ‘sexular’ perspective.

3. Gays, gender and the ‘manipulation of nature’

3.1. ‘A frontal attack on homosexual women and men’

Over the last decade at least, COC has frequently responded to Vatican pronouncements. In the earlier mentioned press release of December 21, 2008, their then chair, Vera Bergkamp, spoke of ‘an excessive preoccupation with homosexuality’ at the Vatican, and in 2012, their current chair, Tanja Ineke, spoke of an ‘obsession’ with homosexuality (cf. Algemeen Dagblad, December 22, 2012). Although it makes sense for an LGBT organisation to focus on passages about (homo)sexuality and gender identity in the Pope’s speeches, it is interesting to see a ‘preoccupation with homosexuality’ in Dutch media reports on the Vatican. As the media act as ‘grids of cultural intelligibility’ (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2004, 53), let’s pay some closer attention to their coverage of Pope Benedict’s two Addresses to the Curia (2008, 2012b) and his Message for World Peace Day 2013 (2012a).

The first thing that strikes me is that they often single out the passages on family, gender and sexuality. Moreover, just like COC, they too take these passages as primarily directed against homosexuals. In 2008, the Pope’s Address was covered by printed and online media using headlines such as ‘Pope: save humanity from homosexuals’ (De Volkskrant, December 24, 2008), ‘Pope: save humanity from homosexual behaviour’ (NRC and Elsevier, December 22, 2008) and ‘Pope: homosexual behaviour as bad as disappearance rainforest’ (Trouw, December 22, 2008). In 2012, the headlines read: ‘Gays threat to human nature’ (NOS and PowNed, December 21, 2012), ‘Pope: gays destroy the essence of humanity’ (De Telegraaf, December 21, 2012), ‘Pope: unite religions against gays’ (PowNed, December 21, 2012) and ‘Pope slogs at gays again’ (nu.nl, De Telegraaf and Nederlands Dagblad, December 21, 2012). Several of these media have the Pope arguing that ‘gays manipulate the role God has given to them and thereby destroy “the essence of human life”’ (nu.nl, Nederlands Dagblad and PowNed).¹³

On December 24, 2012, commercial TV news programme RTL Nieuws has an item on the sudden rise in numbers of Dutch people de-registering from the Roman Catholic Church after the Pope’s Address ‘in which he says that gays deny their true nature’. Directly after the reporter has explained that ‘the Pope has insulted many homosexuals with his Christmas speech’, they show Pope Benedict at the point where he says (in Italian): ‘They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves’. The suggestion is the Benedict has spoken of ‘homosexuals’ in the previous sentence and that ‘they’ refers back to them. On that same day, one of the RTL Nieuws presenters (not the one who presents the news that day) writes a blog post on the RTL Nieuws website, explaining that she will undo her Church membership because of ‘the news on the Pope, who had used his Christmas speech to bash homosexuals again’. Two days earlier, another national TV/radio presenter (and a so-called ‘gay celebrity’) had also publicly announced he would undo his membership of the Roman Catholic Church and had called others to do the same. He had commented: ‘I think that, after all the disclosures of the past few years, it would suit the Church if she remained silent on the issue of sexuality for a few decades’¹⁴ (nu.nl, December 22, 2012)

In short, the overall suggestion in the media is that Benedict had launched an explicit and intentional attack ad hominess – or, as COC chair Tanja Ineke put it in COC’s press release in December 2012, ‘the Pope chooses a frontal attack on homosexual women and men’.¹⁵

3.2. The Vatican discourse against the ideology of gender

As I’ve explained in the introduction to this article, I’m concerned with Dutch perceptions of, and responses to, papal pronouncements that are perceived to be (primarily) about homosexuality. In order to show that they (i.e. the media, COC Netherlands and others) ‘read’ the Pope in a particular way, I need to analyse the relevant papal Addresses and Messages themselves in some detail. Placing them in the context of other relevant Vatican documents, I will show that the Pope had made slightly different claims than was often assumed.

When we look at Benedict’s Addresses and Messages, we discover that explicit references to ‘homosexuality’ are actually strikingly absent.¹⁶ Words like ‘homosexuals’ or ‘gays’, as used by the Dutch media quoted above, don’t occur in these texts. The Pope’s terminology also differs from that of (previous) Vatican documents. He doesn’t speak of ‘homosexual persons’ with their ‘intrinsically disordered acts’ or their ‘objectively disordered’ ‘inclinations’, ‘tendencies’ or ‘conditions’ – the terminology of a 1986 document that Cardinal Ratzinger had signed as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF 1986; cf. Vosman 1999).¹⁷ Neither does he speak about any possible dangers of (male) homosexual acts, which some Vatican departments seem to have done previously.¹⁸

Benedict does, however, speak of contemporary attempts to make opposite-sex marriage ‘juridically equivalent to radically different types of union’ (Benedict XVI 2012b). Seven years earlier, he had been more specific when he spoke of ‘various forms of the erosion of marriage, such as free unions and “trial marriage”, and even pseudo-marriages between people of the same sex’ (Benedict XVI 2005a; emphasis added). So although he emphasises that same-sex marriages erode opposite-sex marriage on the most fundamental level, my point is that he’s also concerned with other types of unions (e.g. civil partnerships) that practically ‘replace’ or symbolically undermine (opposite-sex) marriage.

His concern, however, is even more fundamental than with such types of unions per se. At least as early as 1985, Ratzinger himself had already criticised the ideas of radical feminism (cf. Case 2011, 815). His pronouncements as Pope echo a broader Vatican discourse against secular theories of gender.¹⁹ In 2000, the Pontifical Council for the Family (PCF) had argued that ‘[c]laiming a similar status for marriage and de facto unions (including homosexual unions) is usually justified today on the basis of categories and terms that come from the ideology of “gender”’, according to which

masculine and feminine genders in society are the exclusive product of social factors, with no relation to any truth about the sexual dimension of the person. In this way, any sexual attitude can be justified, including homosexuality, and it is society that ought to change in order to include other genders, together with male and female, in its way of shaping social life. (PCF 2000, sec. 8; emphasis added)

The word ‘including’ before ‘homosexual unions’ resp. ‘homosexuality’ in these PCF quotes is equivalent to the word ‘even’ before ‘pseudo-marriages between people of the same sex’ in the 2005 quote from Benedict and indicates that same-sex marriages are seen as the most extreme result of this ‘ideology’.²⁰ Four years later, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – presided by Cardinal Ratzinger, but working under the authority of Pope John Paul II – issued a document which presented the Church as ‘an expert in humanity’ (CDF 2004, sec. 1) and which criticised these ‘ideologies’ of gender in a similar fashion, warning that they ‘call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality’ (CDF 2004, sec. 2).²¹

Benedict seems to be criticising several aspects of Western secular culture more broadly that ‘trivialise’ (Benedict XVI 2005a) or ‘manipulate’ (Benedict XVI 2008) nature, i.e. both the natural environment and the human body. Benedict and the Vatican in general believe that these views are condensed – amongst others or primarily – in theories of gender. For Benedict, the human body has sexual difference as its core natural characteristic, whereas he believes (all) gender theories subordinate the body to the mind: ‘Licentiousness, which passes for the discovery of the body and its value, is actually a dualism that makes the body despicable, placing it, so to speak, outside the person’s authentic being and dignity’. (Benedict XVI 2005a) Moreover, in Benedict’s view, if ‘the traditional family’ disappears, also the basic cell of society disappears in which one learns true peace: when ‘gender theory’ becomes more popular and when same-sex marriage is legalised in a growing number of countries, in particular in Europe, this causes a threat to political stability (cf. Case 2011; Samson, Jansen, and Notermans 2011).

3.3. Fixed natures

To summarise my argument in this section so far, the overall suggestion in Dutch media was that the main or only focus of Benedict’s Addresses and Messages was on homosexuality, that he had explicitly spoken of homosexuals (or homosexuality), and that he had called homosexuals – either solely or primarily, and either personally or categorically – a threat to humanity. This is only partially true. In his Addresses and Messages, the Pope, elaborating earlier documents from some Vatican departments – and subtly changing some of their vocabulary – criticises (certain) gender theories and takes political attempts towards the legalisation of same-sex marriage as the most telling and extreme result of these theories. Yet he does this in the context of a more substantial Ideologiekritik: he’s concerned with broader global developments (in particular in Europe) in which he discerns different types of the manipulation of nature, a body-mind dualism, a commodification of sexuality and a misunderstanding of human freedom.

Let me make two critical analytical remarks here. First, when the Pope speaks about ‘human nature’, he refers to sexed human bodies, which he reads in an essentialist and heteronormative way. However, many people promoting the interests of LGBTs also use a concept of nature, yet they conceptualise it differently than the Pope and the Vatican. The sexual orientation of lesbian, gay and bisexual persons – just like heterosexual orientation – is taken as a ‘natural’, pre-social given. In transgender persons, it is often believed that these persons are, so to speak, ‘born in the wrong body’, so the tension here is an intrapersonal one, i.e. a tension between a pre-socially ‘given’ gender identity and a body that’s at odds with this gender identity. Although I could cite many queer theorists/theologians to criticise both conceptualisations of nature, that’s beyond the scope of this article. What strikes me is that the Pope’s implication that this secular view on sexual orientation and gender identity reveals a body-mind dualism was hardly countered – it seems that such a coherent counter-narrative isn’t available amongst LGBT advocates in the Netherlands. It could be that many consider the Pope’s view as merely a ‘religious’ view that can therefore be scientifically discredited (cf. Section 2.2). In that case, not only a dialogue with the Pope is evaded, but also a dialogue with any person who holds views similar to the Pope – and these are not, as one might think, only religious persons.

My second remark has to do with the Pope’s and/or the media’s focus on homosexuals. Having discussed news reports in Section 3.1, let me now turn once again to Dutch public discourse and focus on some op-ed pieces in national dailies. In December 2012 and January 2013, a few intellectuals discussed the question whether ‘the media’ had fairly covered the Pope’s pronouncements, what the Pope had or hadn’t said, and how that mattered. Several critics argued that the pope had not explicitly targeted LGBT’s, and that the media and COC had been unsympathetic readers.²² Some of them also commented that the pope should have been more aware of the public and non-academic context of his statements (Corsius 2012; Koster 2012; Snel 2012). Historian Jan Dirk Snel noted that ‘[i]t is striking that so many people accuse the pope of “anti-gay hate”’. Well then, no reasonable human being will discover a single trace of that in his views, no matter how much you possibly disagree with him’. (Snel 2012; emphasis added) Bas Heine (2012), columnist for a major Dutch newspaper, disagreed: ‘What irritates me about Ratzinger’s speech is not explicit hate against gays, but rather this shrouded tone, this veiled language of Christian humanism, this cautious murmuring, this not saying what you actually mean’. He called the pope’s words ‘dangerous’ because of their ‘blackmailing apocalyptic tone (…). Gays are portrayed as enemies of humanity’. Snel had a different explanation of the absence of explicit references to homosexuality: ‘What Heine calls “shrouded” rather seems to be a cautious academic way of thinking. Who wants to see in the pope a radical opponent of unbridled capitalism will find quite some more explicit quotes. But as soon as moral issues are concerned, Ratzinger is strikingly reticent’. (Snel 2013) Professor of Christian Ethics Theo Boer caught it nicely when he tweeted on December 22, 2012 – with a sense of irony: ‘What the pope criticises in paragraphs 5&6 is in fact the sexual morality of (almost) an entire culture’. Although I find Snel’s wording (not ‘a single trace’ of ‘anti-gay hate’) too strong, I tend to agree with Snel and Boer. What is more important, however, is that, despite the ambiguity of Benedict’s pronouncements, most Dutch media took them as blunt attacks on homosexuals – and, occasionally, on LGBTs.

4. The Netherlands: the merchant and/or the vicar

4.1. ‘No flowers to the Pope’

Let’s now turn to the Facebook page ‘Geen bloemen naar de paus’ (‘No flowers to the Pope’) that I referred to at the beginning of this article. It was started by an anonymous person on December 21, 2012.²³ It soon received more than 28,000 likes and caught the attention of the televised, online and printed media (e.g. NOS, December 22, 2012, and RTL Nieuws, Hart van Nederland and Joop.nl, December 23, 2012). COC Netherlands shared it on their own Facebook page the next day and put a recommendation of the page below a press release on their website: ‘Please support the Facebook call “No flowers to the Pope” – for why should we send “flowers from the Netherlands” each year to a Pope who constantly offends and condemns LGBTs?’

The Facebook page’s main image addresses the senses of hearing and seeing amongst its visitors. It shows a black-and-white image of Benedict that makes him look evil. In his left hand he holds a wilted yellow sunflower. A red diagonal line across the image symbolises the No. On top of the image it says in Dutch: ‘Bedankt voor die bloeme!’ Because of the intended spelling mistakes – one could translate it as ‘Zanks for ze flowers!’ – almost every Dutch citizen immediately recalls how for many years the Polish Pope John Paul II as well as his successor, the German Pope Benedict XVI, had tried to pronounce ‘Bedankt voor de bloemen!’ in their Easter greetings to the Netherlands before giving the Urbi et Orbi blessing from the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

The page’s ‘description’ is provided in 10 languages, which shows that the international image of the Netherlands is considered at stake.²⁴ It reads as follows:

Since 1985 Dutch flower breeders give huge amounts of free flowers to brighten up St. Peter[’]s Square during the Easter speech of the Pope. A nice promotion for this important industry in The Netherlands.

But does the Pope deserve this? Why give flowers to someone who systematically accuses homosexuals? Why would a flower breeder in a modern, tolerant nation as The Netherlands be associated with the prehistoric and insulting ideology of the Pope?

We think there are better and more humane things in which the Dutch flower breeders could profile their industry. So: No flowers to the Pope!

The text uses similar framings as we have discussed above: the Pope is presented as ‘someone who systematically accuses homosexuals’ (cf. Section 3.1) and with his ‘prehistoric and insulting ideology’ he places himself outside a rational dialogue (cf. Section 2.1). But let me elaborate a bit on the Netherlands as an exporter of flowers and as a ‘tolerant nation’.

4.2. ‘Our best export product’

In historical works that are directed at a broader audience, Dutch development cooperation has frequently been characterised through the use of two interrelated archetypes or characters that juxtapose self-interest and altruism, respectively: the merchant (koopman) and the vicar (dominee) (van Dam and van Dis 2014, 1638).²⁵ In a different way, they can also be – and have been – applied to foreign policy more broadly: as a merchant the State protects and promotes Dutch economic interests, while as a vicar it promotes certain values and rights (that are considered Dutch or European/Western more generally) to the rest of the world (Herman 2006, 159). Taking up the latter role is, of course, more difficult towards states on which the Netherlands are economically dependent. For example, when in 2013 the Netherlands celebrated 400 years of diplomatic relationships with Russia, the tension between these two roles was strong: on the one hand, the Netherlands had strong economic ties to Russia, whereas on the other hand, Russia had just effected a ban on ‘gay propaganda’.

The Facebook page’s description suggests that in this case the tension between these two roles is not very strong: Dutch flower breeders are assured that they can simply profile their industry elsewhere. So the Netherlands can rather freely take up the role of vicar. But besides flowers, there’s another Dutch export product that apparently needs to be promoted. Since the late 1990s, ‘issues like abortion, euthanasia, the medical use of cannabis, the legalization of prostitution and same-sex marriage’ have become ‘part of the Dutch moral export product’. (Herman 2006, 865; cf. Kennedy 2005, 15–17) This goes in particular for the latter issue. In 2001, the Netherlands were the first country to open marriage for same-sex couples. One of the driving forces behind this, former editor-in-chief of the Gay Krant, Henk Krol, has called same-sex marriage ‘our best export product’ (e.g. De Telegraaf, November 23, 2009). In 2012, when he was a candidate for the Parliamentary elections, a journalist asked him to respond to the statement: ‘In its foreign policy, the Netherlands should be guided primarily by economic interests; the merchant goes before the vicar’. He responded: ‘Of course, economic motives are important on foreign policy. But I’m proud that the Netherlands are more than just a merchant. Equal marriage rights – nicknamed “gay marriage” – that is the most beautiful immaterial Dutch export product’. (Radio Nederland Wereldomroep, August 6, 2012; cf. De Volkskrant, October 4, 2013) The phrase ‘our best export product’ has been taken over by, amongst others, COC Netherlands (e.g. press release March 30, 2011) and Boris van der Ham, former MP for the liberal democrats and current chair of the Humanistic Association Netherlands (e.g. website Humanistisch Verbond, April 2, 2015). In a slightly different way, a liberal democrat in Amsterdam has called same-sex marriage ‘our most visible export product’ (website D66 in Amsterdam, April 1, 2016) and in 2011, then Minister of Education (responsible for LGBT Emancipation), Marja van Bijsterveldt, has called ‘defending the freedom, tolerance and equal rights’ of LGBTs ‘an important export product of the Netherlands’ (website Rijksoverheid, December 9, 2011; cf. De Volkskrant, December 28, 2011). By calling same-sex marriage ‘our best export product’, they use a merchant-like term to play the vicar’s card. Same-sex marriage is presented not only as a good thing, but also as a Dutch invention: if other states legalise same-sex marriage, they are considered to be following the Dutch example. If states would instead follow the Pope’s warnings, this would affect the international reputation of the Netherlands as a frontrunner in LGBT emancipation. Whereas the opening of civil marriage for same-sex couples in 2001 had been largely presented and perceived as a secular victory over religious regulations of sexuality (cf. Derks 2017), a backdrop in the international reputation of the Netherlands in this area as the result of Vatican lobbying would be particularly painful.

5. Conclusion

The reception of, and responses to, the pronouncements by Pope Benedict XVI discussed in this article teach us a few things about the role of religion in contemporary Dutch society and how this intertwines with secularism, sexuality and nationalism. The fact that often those passages that addressed issues of marriage, sexuality and gender in the Pope’s Addresses and Messages were highlighted and taken to be primarily directed against gays and lesbians indicates that views on homosexuality have become a test case of the Pope’s – and, more generally, a religion’s – credibility.

In Section 2.3 I have discussed a few examples of how certain actors in public discourse who don’t self-identify as Christians still make claims about what the Christian religion is actually about. They consider Christianity primarily a matter of morality – of ‘norms and values’, a catchphrase introduced by former Prime-Minister Jan Peter Balkenende (Christian democrats) and still frequently used across the political spectrum. This is a more subtle postsecular use of Christianity than the one we find in certain right-wing nationalist discourses that rebuke Islam by deploying a particular construction of ‘the Judeo-Christian tradition’ of the Netherlands (cf. e.g. van den Hemel 2014). Moreover, while several secular participants in public discourse deployed a Christian vocabulary in their responses to the Pope, such is very unlikely to happen in response to pronouncements by an imam.

At the same time, the Pope can easily be dismissed because religious arguments are considered a priori irrational or irrelevant from a secularist perspective (Sections 2.1–2.2). More specifically, when it comes to issues of sexuality and gender, the suggestion is that there’s nothing the Dutch can learn from the Pope (Section 3). The focus on what the Pope – or ‘religions’ in general – allegedly think and say about homosexuality could well have the effect of overlooking similar views amongst secular citizens, especially in a post-Christian country as the Netherlands.

The reception of the Pope also indicates that the secularist and the Vatican worldviews are fundamentally different: both the Pope and secularist people are having a hard time trying to understand each other – if only they haven’t stop trying. Many media, COC and others took the Pope’s pronouncements as a fundamental attack on gay men and lesbian women. This can partly be explained by the fact that, in the secular Netherlands, there is a strong focus on the rights and freedoms of individuals. Pope Benedict’s Encyclicals, Addresses and Messages are more philosophical, more abstract, more collective. Moreover, it is striking to see that many in the Netherlands focussed on what Benedict had said – or what they thought he had said – about homosexuality, less or not on what he had said about sexual difference, abortion and euthanasia – even though these are also considered Dutch ‘export products’ (Herman 2006, 865; cf. Kennedy 2005, 15–17). One possible explanation is that (male) homosexuals can be more easily politically staged as dramatic characters than women (who are most directly or fundamentally affected by views and decisions concerning sexual difference and abortion).

Notes on contributor

Marco Derks is a PhD candidate at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, and Executive Secretary of the Netherlands School for Advanced Studies in Theology and Religion. He is a theologian and scholar of religion, sexuality and gender. He has published articles in e.g. Biblical Interpretation, Theology & Sexuality and Scholar & Feminist Online, and he is co-chair of the Gay Men and Religion Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Academia: https://uu.academia.edu/MarcoDerks. LinkedIn: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/marcoderks. Website: http://marcoderks.wordpress.com.

Funding

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) [grant number 327-25-004] and is part of the research project ‘Contested Privates: The Oppositional Pairing of Religion and Homosexuality in Contemporary Public Discourse in the Netherlands’ (Amsterdam Center for the Study of Lived Religion, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & Chair of Religion and Gender, Utrecht University).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

This article draws upon papers presented (and comments received) at the joined conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) and the Dutch Association for the Study of Religion (NGG) in Groningen, The Netherlands, on May 11, 2014; and at the conference ‘Beyond “Lesbians and Gays in the Church”: New Approaches to the Histories of Christianity and Same-Sex Desire’ at Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom, on September 26, 2015. Besides those who provided comments on these papers, I would like to thank in particular Anne-Marie Korte and Ernst van den Hemel for their substantial feedback on earlier drafts of this article, and Peter-Ben Smit for helpful explanations of Vatican logic and terminology.

Notes

1. I have collected material from Dutch public discourse by searching the LexisNexis database (Dutch newspapers and magazines), using Google’s and Twitter’s search engines, by checking particular websites that I deemed relevant (e.g. that of COC Netherlands) and by looking up sources referred to in previously collected material.

2. The Pope’s Message for World Peace Day 2013 was issued on December 8, 2012, i.e. two weeks before he would address the Curia.

3. This is an echo from his predecessor’s Encyclical Centesimus Annus: ‘The first and fundamental structure for “human ecology” is the family’. (John Paul II 1991, sec. 39) In his 2015 Encyclical Laudatio Si, Pope Francis would make a similar claim (Francis 2015, sec. 5).

4. This latter claim is what Benedict believes to have been the intention of Pope Paul VI’s Encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) on birth regulation (and on the meaning of sexuality in general).

5. In his 2004 debate with Habermas, then Cardinal Ratzinger put it as follows: ‘The natural law has remained (especially in the Catholic Church) the key issue in dialogues with the secular society and with other communities of faith in order to appeal to the reason we share in common and to seek the basis for a consensus about the ethical principles of law in a secular, pluralistic society’. (Ratzinger 2006, 69).

6. Van der List writes: ‘As a personality he [Francis] is the opposite of his predecessor, the shy intellectual Benedict XVI. The common (volkse) Francis wants to dissipate humbleness. Not as an inviolable leader of the church who knows everything for sure, but a simple rural pastor who searches for the right way together with the beloved believers’. (van der List 2013) The implication here is that that Benedict was indeed such an ‘inviolable leader’. Although van der List’s main point seems a bit critical towards Francis – he argues that the ‘cheered Pope Francis alienates conservatives’ – this opposition in favour of Francis in opposition to Benedict is made frequently in the media.

7. For example, Gene Burns has argued that the Vatican ‘not only looks at the world differently than do liberal states; to some extent it rejects the legitimacy of liberal state authority entirely over sexual matters that the hierarchy insists are not open to debate’. (Burns 2013, 88–89).

8. De Telegraaf used the same wording but a different headline, whereas PowNed also used a different headline and spoke of ‘economic arguments’ instead.

9. A similar example can be found in what cultural anthropologists Judith Samson, Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans write about the Vatican discourse against ‘gender ideology’ (to which I will turn below). They claim that ‘[t]he new discursive strategies on countering acceptance of homosexuality by referring to gender theories can […] be seen as a continuation of this trend within the Christian Right to attempt to beat their (discursive) opponents with their own secular means, rather than with their theological expertise’ (Samson, Jansen, and Notermans 2011, 295). They might be right when it comes to the most important example they focus on in their article, Gabriele Kuby, a German Roman Catholic author, a fervent critic of non-heterosexuality and a strong promotor of the Vatican’s view on ‘gender ideology’. But Samson et al. also make this claim with respect to Benedict, to whom they devote less than two pages and little critical analysis. Not only do they seem to be making a dubious distinction between secular and religious knowledge, but they also seem to overlook that in several documents and speeches Benedict XVI systematically integrates ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ knowledge.

10. In a similar fashion, TV presenter Cornald Maas (who, amongst others, presented the national broadcasting of the Canal Parade during Amsterdam Pride in 2010–2013) called the Pope ‘the Anti-Christ’ (NOS, December 22, 2012). These and other disqualifications of the Pope might be part of a longer history of Dutch (Calvinist) anti-papism (cf. e.g. van de Sande 1989).

11. By comparing the Pope with Pontius Pilate, COC puts LGBTs de facto on par with Jesus, placing them in a redemptive position, ‘in Christ’.

12. Two brief remarks to prevent possible misunderstandings. First, they are, of course, responding to the leader of the global Roman Catholic Church, so strictly speaking, it remains implicit what role they ascribe to the (Roman Catholic) Church in Dutch society. Second, I’m not suggesting that their remarks are a kind of reinforcement of Christianity in a secular public sphere.

13. I have translated homoseksuelen as ‘homosexuals’ and homo’s as ‘gays’. Algemeen Dagblad (December 14, 2012) put ‘euthanasia’ in their headline when covering the Pope’s Message for World Peace Day 2013, but mentioned ‘euthanasia, abortion and gay marriage’ in the first line.

14. These ‘disclosures’ concern the sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, which might also explain why the responses to the Pope were even more fierce in 2012 than in 2008.

15. Ruth Heß (2010, 121–22) notes similar news coverage in Germany. At the end their 2012 press release, COC notes: ‘In recent pronouncements, the Pope seems to turn not only against homosexuals, he also seems to attack transgenders’. This can be taken as a correction of the focus on gays and lesbians in many media reports. However, it could also be that COC implies that Benedict has found a new, additional target, for example compared to his earlier pronouncements in 2008. In that case it should be noted that it isn’t Benedict who has changed, but rather COC itself. In their response in 2008 they had not explicitly mentioned transgenders as such. It was only around 2010 that they – as well as the Government (cf. Jivraj and de Jong 2011, 144n3) – had started to explicitly include transgenders (and bisexuals) in their mission and activism using the LGBT (Dutch: LHBT) acronym that had been common for a much longer time in the Anglo-Saxon world. Whether the Government followed COC or the other way around is neither clear nor relevant. By asserting that Benedict ‘also seems to attack transsexuals’, COC might be reinforcing the image of a hateful Pope who’s always on the look for new targets.

16. These terms are also absent in many other texts written – or at least signed – by Pope Benedict that touch upon issues of family/marriage and sexuality/gender (e.g. Benedict XVI 2005, 2005a, 2005b, 2009).

17. With the exception of Considerations regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons (CDF 2003), the Vatican seems to have stopped using the concept of ‘homosexual persons’ altogether since the late 1980s, probably because progressive Catholics had taken this as a sign that the Congregation considered homosexuality an integral or even essential part of the personhood of gays and lesbians, and that, therefore, homosexual relations could somehow be permitted. The role of Cardinal Ratzinger is ambiguous: ‘The Vatican letter on the pastoral care of homosexual persons may have been signed by Joseph Ratzinger, cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but its content and terminology bear the mark of Pope John Paul II. (…) It contributes but one more reason for puzzlement as to the cause for what appears at first glance as almost an obsession with the subject [of sexuality; MD]’. (Modras 1988, 119).

18. First, there is the claim of Homosexualitatis Problema that ‘the practice of homosexuality may seriously threaten the lives and well-being of a large number of people’ (CDF 1986, sec. 9), which may have referred to, among others, the AIDS epidemic that was on its highs in the 1980s. Second, in 2005, just after the start of Benedict’s papacy, the Congregation for Catholic Education had issued a document that intended to ban men with ‘deep-seated homosexual tendencies’ from the priesthood and the seminaries. It could well be that the undefined ‘negative consequences’ of ordaining men with such tendencies refer to sexual abuse of boys by priests (CCE 2005).

19. For more detailed analyses of this Vatican discourse see especially the work of Mary Anne Case (2011, 2016) and, on a secondary note, also Ruth Heβ (2010, 120–24), Judith Samson, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans (2011) and Gene Burns (2013).

20. Benedict himself doesn’t use the word ‘ideology’ to frame secular theories of gender (Benedict XVI 2007, 2008, 2012b).

21. Interestingly, the document Considerations regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons does not use the word ‘gender’ at all (CDF 2003).

22. A columnist for a conservative Roman Catholic new website even expressed a complaint against national broadcasting organisation NOS at the Contact Point Discrimination Internet for deliberately misrepresenting the Pope’s words (Trouw December 28, 2012). He was supported by, e.g. ‘media priest’ Roderick Vonhögen on Twitter ‏(@mediapriester, December 24, 2012)

23. On December 25, in a Christmas greeting, the administrator wrote: ‘Many people wonder who the initiator of this page is. I don’t find it that relevant to go public personally.’

24. There are some differences in formulation and length between these ten versions, but these differences are not relevant for my argument. The English text I have quoted here is similar to the Dutch text, except that in the Dutch version the word ‘prehistoric’ is missing.

25. The images of merchant and vicar ‘can purportedly be traced back to the origins of the Dutch Republic in the sixteenth century, which came into existence after commercial and religious motives caused the inhabitants of the Low Countries to rebel against their Spanish king’ (van Dam and van Dis 2014, 1638).