>From the Toronto *Globe*and*Mail*, Friday 1993 12 03.  Reproduced
without permission

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>A Question of Guilt< / *The Anglican Church had made its feelings
about gay clergy perfectly clear before one of its own moved away
from the community where he was known to one where he was not.*

PRIEST'S DEATH WAS VIOLENT, BUT NOT MINDLESS

                by Douglas Chambers

Some time on the night of November 8, Rev Warren Eling was murdered
in the rectory of his parish, St James the Apostle, in Montreal.
He was strangled.

Warren Eling was my first boyfriend more than 30 years ago, and
his death has continued to outrage and anger me ever since I first
heard about it.  My outrage is against the evidence of continuing
homophobic violence that it represents:  the death throes of a
murderous patriarchy wreaking its random vengeance on gays now as
it did on women in Montreal five years ago.

My anger, though, is for the underlying causes, the causes behind
the causes, that led to Warren's death.

The police are after the killer, probably a piece of rough trade
who picked Warren up in a bar and lured him home to his death.
What will they find if they *do* find anyone?  A killer, yes, but
an agent of something that probably even he does not consciously
understand.

The Bishop of Toronto has spoken of this as an act of "mindless
violence." It is nothing of the kind.  This violence, this killing,
like the violence in our society generally, is promulgated:  by the
media, by the state, by the churches themselves.

"Hatred is not a family value," read the bumper stickers, but
everywhere it is legitimated by the ravings of a popular press now
legally prevented from inciting racial hatred (though not sexual
hatred) and by Sunday-morning TV.  The denunciation of alternative
sexuality is the accreditation of violence.  It escapes culpability
(and the rigours of the human-rights code -- even the law) under
the cloak of religion.  And such "respectable" denominations as
the Anglican Church have done nothing to dissociate themselves from
it.

A man who urges another to crime is an accessory before the fact,
but a church that harries its gay clergy out of the chancel, out
of the church itself, is no less guilty.  It condemns them to a
life devoid of secure loving relationships, one of furtive
secrecies, of complicity in the hypocrisy of sexual denial.  It is
the "final cause" of what happened (and goes on happening in less
overt ways) on the night of November 8.

Warren Eling left the diocese of Toronto in the wake of the Jim
Ferry case:  the case of a priest in a stable and loving
relationship who had been "outed" by one of his congregation and,
thus, dismissed by his bishop.  That case was *Kristalnacht* for
any Anglican priest known to be gay, no matter how "respectable."
At any moment, the jackboots of denunciation might be at the door.
Warren went to Montreal, far from most of his friends and the
community he knew, depressed and increasingly desperate -- in the
literal sense of "without hope".  he went to his death.

Was he simply a victim ... or a martyr?  One of the great priests
of his own church, John Donne, recognised that the line between
the two is often difficult to establish.  In TS Eliot's *Murder in
the Cathedral*, one of the murderers tries to persuade the audience
that Thomas  a Becket was asking for what he got.

It's an easy way to avoid looking at the issues.  And ours is,
after all, a society in which victims of rape are made to feel
guilty for inviting their own abuse and victims of poverty for
their shiftlessness ... though not, interestingly, victims of heart
disease for their diet.

Those priests who thought themselves under grace have found
themselves condemned by the scribes and pharisees who "bawl
allegiance to the law":  a law, whether religious or social, that
has been prompt in the past to regard all but white male
heterosexuals as inferior.

It will not do for bishops to deplore the consequences of the
hatred -- sexual as well as racial -- that their own churches have
promulgated overtly and covertly.  The bishops have had a hand in
this death.  A torrent of denunciatory rhetoric is not a substitute
for thoughtful examination of why this "fine priest and good man"
is no longer alive, let alone a bishop.

I am not one of these Christians, but I can tell vocation when I
see it, and many of these clergy -- Warren among them -- are called
by something as powerful as their sexuality.  But hen, so were the
apostles, and the only evidence of apostolic relationships that
the Gospels provide is one of "special friendship," not
heterosexual bliss.  John was the "disciple whom Jesus loved," a
phrase that would not be misconstrued as passionless (as it has
been) if John's name had been Joan.

In 1673, Edward King, a promising young priest forced out of
England by a ruthless and uncompromising church, was shipwrcked
at sea on his way to Ireland.  In his memory, Milton wrote the
finest elegy in the language, *Lycidas*, and he was in no doubt as
to the cause of King's death:  not the sea, not the wind, not the
rock ... but the bishops.  "Blind mouths that scarce themselves
know how to hold a sheephook," he called them.  I wish I could
write as powerfully for Warren.

[Douglas Chambers is a professor of English at the University of Toronto]

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