One story in particular shocked me. A man, who had a short time left to live, sent for his mother, even though she had been hostile to him when he had come out to her. When she arrived at the hospital, he said that there was only one thing that he needed to hear, that she loved him. She refused to say the words and left. He died not long after.

It is at the cutting edge of despair and degradation and discrimination that we discover our humanity. This was true in Jesus’ time when he spent his time with lepers and whores; it is true today in those who minister to those who come in contact with AIDS. I will never forget the Late Late Show, quite a few years ago now, when Fr. Bernard Lynch spoke in a haunting monologue of his experiences with AIDS patients in New York. I sat up in bed in my little bedsit in Ranelagh, bawling my eyes out, so scared of the devastation and the horror of the picture he was painting.

Because I was gay, I knew it was my world, or a future aspect of it, that he was depicting. But I also realised that I was deeply shocked by the quality of unquestioning love and acceptance which this priest was radiating. As a teenager, I had walked out of Mass one Sunday, having listened to the “grave moral disorder” Papal Bullshit on homosexuality, and never returned. I doubt that I ever will. But there was a quality of compassion and spirituality which I had lopped off with my Catholicism. I felt the ache of its loss that night.

Appalling cruelty can be done in the name of Christian values. The Catholic Church’s institutionalised hypocrisy is so grotesque that I cannot understand how anyone with a smattering of vaguely functioning braincells has anything to do with it. However, there are individuals, such as the monk I met yesterday, and Father Lynch, who have the capacity to cut through the two thousand years of human corruption, greed and dishonour. They live in the shadow of the meretricious monolith of Catholicism, and suffer for it, for they are both openly gay men. But it seems to me that their sexuality, far from distancing them from their Christianity, actually draws them nearer to the man himself.

Let’s go back to when it all began.

It’s Holy Thursday, and Jesus has just washed his disciples’ feet. They’re having The Last Supper. He has just told them the disturbing news that one of them will betray him. The disciples look around, suspicious, wondering who it is he means.

Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.

Simon Peter therefore beckoned to him, that he should ask who it should be of whom he spake.

He then lying on Jesus’ breast saith unto him, Lord, who is it?

Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it.

And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon.

(John, Ch. 13, v. 23-26.)

The New English Bible refers to the unnamed man even more specifically as “the disciple Jesus loved”. I presume it is not inferred that he only loved this disciple; so I assume that it is a different kind of love to which John is referring. I know that in Greek there are many different words for love. Unfortunately I am not a Classics scholar, so I do not know which one was originally used in this instance.

Who is this man that Jesus chooses to be so intimate with, in the last few hours of his life? Instead of asking Jesus directly who the traitor is, Simon Peter gets this man to ask. Jesus obliges his companion and confidant by playing a deadly private game, pointing out his betrayer by giving him a piece of bread. We are not told if Simon Peter was let in on it. When Judas runs out, the other disciples are none the wiser, presuming he has been sent out shopping or on some other chore.

If they were to find where he was going, and what he was going to do, no doubt they would have lynched him. Only his beloved companion knew, who could be trusted to keep the distressing information secret, even in the knowledge that to keep it secret would hasten his lover’s death. This speaks to me of a profound and special love. Reminiscent of how the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. (I Samuel, Ch. 19 v.1)

In 1977, Gay News was successfully prosecuted by Mary Whitehouse for blasphemous libel, when it published James Kirkup’s poem “The Love that Dares to Speak its Name”. When I rang Gay Times, the people who bought the Gay News title after the ruination of the court case, to see if I could get my hands on a copy to see what the fuss was about, I was told that all the offending back issues had been destroyed by order of the courts. In the recently published Penguin Anthology of Homosexual Verse, there is a gap where the poem should be. I had to go to the Peace News’ office to dig out a back issue of theirs, for they published it in solidarity “to assert the principle of freedom of expression”. The poem describes the passion between a centurion and the crucified Jesus.

Homosexuality and Christianity is an explosive combination. The two together can produce self loathing, deception, and suicide. But the gift of meaning which a truly Christ-like gay man can offer to someone whose life is ending in the saddest way, such as the man whose mother spurned him, is proof that it need not necessarily be so.

The Church in Ireland is undergoing a severe shake-up at the moment, with Bishops revealed to be fathers, and priests unpunished recidivist child abusers. But if what the gentle Franciscan was saying yesterday is true, the real transformation will begin when it cannot be concealed any more that there are many priests and religious who are living with AIDS.

Forgiveness is called for; I hope that they will find it.