Frederic Gugelot, La conversion des intellectuels au Catholicisme en France (1885-1935) (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1998).

I flipped through the book, and a small section grabbed me right away.

I translate, somewhat periphrastically, from pp. 336-339:

L'homosexualite

Purity appears in effect one of the stakes of a number of conversions. The sexual question performs its role in the birth of spiritual interrogations. The most tortured are those which expose their love of men. From Psichari in Africa to Massignon in Egypt, from Gheon to Max Jacob, from Cocteau to Sachs in France, the question reaches across this study. It weighs upon the struggles which they experience. Homosexuality appears then as a precipitating factor.

In October 1906, on the packet boat leaving for Egypt, Louis Massignon met Luis de Cuadra, a Spanish aristocrat converted to Islam: they maintained an homosexual relationship at Alexandria:

'At the age of twenty, the thought that he was the sole master of his body as of his soul and a stay in Egypt engaged him in ghastly aberrations', notes Paul Claudel on the secrets of Massignon. But a moral malaise entered him, and during his trip in Mesopotamia in 1908, the crisis burst, which began with his own shamefulness: 'Then I began to suffer because of myself. Examination of conscience: that is where I ended up, after 4½ years of amorality, rightly eliminated for the greed of my knowledge and of my pleasure.'

It is not possible to communicate [at the mass] since this sin belongs to the reserved cases so that his confessor could not restore [i.e. reconcile] him. He then made an appeal to a papal delegate at Beirut, 28 June 1908. Massignon draws the fundamental themes of his spiritual life from some episodes of his conversion: hospitality, substitution [representation?], and compassion: 'It is for that that God has permitted that we should have with them our "season in hell".' He consecrates, moreover, the first of the Three Prayers of Abraham to Sodom.

This conflict against the self by way of faith-Gheon illustrates it perfectly. Because his conversion is going to modify his life and his work profoundly. If in the milieu NRF [I can't locate this], homosexuality is an accepted reality, Gheon is nevertheless one of those rare individuals who lives without complexes. He who has been for a time the companion of the life of Gide tries to modify his sexual behaviour after his return to Catholicism: 'I shall lead hitherto [the life] of a lay brother who smiles to the world without being soiled by it.' He judges severely his homosexual tendencies which constitute the object of a hard combat after his conversion: 'Of all my sins this is the worst, the most frequent, the most spontaneous.' From the first prayer, he attempts to master his desire and in particular his looking. 'I am beginning to be able to turn aside my looks ... scarcely a look lingered too much on someone of whom a momentary image overthrows me, then I chase it ... When will I have eyes purified and separated from my sensual flesh and from the principle of the world?'

He multiplies notes which demonstrate him full of joy when he was able not to look at the other, not to desire him, and full of despair when his eyes failed. This hard conflict is, however, absent from the narrative of conversion. His notes from day to day bear lots of reflections which are excised from the book which was destined for all.

Gheon seems to think that his edifying value would be stained by such an admission. How else would one explain this almost total absence of the subject? The distance between his war-time notebooks and the narrative of conversion is flagrant: the converted offers a conversion cleared of every shocking element. This struggle against his homosexuality appears to be a victory for Gheon. The notebooks reveal his successes and his desire for purity.

Max Jacob avows in Saint Matorel, the novel of his conversion, this same sin:

Ought I admit that I have been a sodomite, without joy, it is true, but with ardour? But you, forgive me, my God, if you are in me as you are around me, because you know my innocence [of intent].

Does he not go as far as to prescribe the reading of the Gospel and of the Imitation to Marcel Jouhandeau to fight against his homosexuals desires! He becomes even a specialist of the question to whom appeal is made when a difficulty arises in the process of conversion. Thus Maurice Sachs reads The Defence of Tartuffe at the moment where obstacles arise opposite his final decision to convert or not. Likewise he advises his friend against entering a seminary.

The desire for purity corresponds to one of the desires of conversion; it is undeniable that the question of sexuality weighs upon the process. Stanislas Fumet arranges the entire drama of Julien Green in these few words: 'The sexual drama is for him, as he is well aware, a very important element since one has a soul.' Many converts would follow him.

Conversion therefore induces profound modifications of behaviour and of the life of the converts. By a practice both assiduous and quasi-mystical, they witness to their concern for a life totally Christian, bathing in the Absolute. It is thus not astonishing to see that there are many who draw toward an ecclesiastical commitment.

So what shall we Christians do? Should we disown these people who were overwhelmed by an unnecessary, indeed neurotic, guilt over their sexual behaviour? Canadian Anglicans would have no interest in these folk because Anglicans now appear to believe that it is preferable that those in homosex culture ought, almost indeed as a moral necessity, remain where they are.

Contemporary Anglicans across the country do not want a Christian message of human transformation by divine grace. Sex is no longer to be subjected to the searching light of what hitherto the Church has always regarded as immorality. Now, to state the obvious, homosex is not the only sin, and it is not the worst.

The problem at the present time, however, is that its acceptance and promotion are having such a negative, corrosive, corrupting effect upon social institutions, including marriage, freedom of speech, freedom of religious conscience. Other sexual failings such as adultery and fornication do not strive to impose themselves upon the consciences of children.

Well, Hollywood might be excepted here. The perpetrators of these immoral acts do not aspire to social acceptance, however frequent such lapses might be. These also attack marriage and the family, but just about everyone knows that they are bad for us all.

---David G Mullan is Professor of History and Religious Studies at Cape Breton University. He is the author and editor of a number of books on Scottish Protestantism. He
attends a parish of the Diocese of the Holy Cross, TAC, Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada.