On January 9, Pope Benedict XVI made fresh headlines by declaring that gay marriage undermines "the future of humanity itself." This statement went further than his earlier pronouncements on the subject, which described same-sex unions as merely a threat to the family. Like all his other public statements about sex in general, it prompted the usual frenzy of Twitter and Facebook activity. And it brought my own blood to the boil, hitting too close to home for someone who had celebrated his own same-sex nuptials only months after Benedict became pope. But why should I have cared? Why should anyone care? The pope has always spoken his mind, more often than not in open defiance of the zeitgeist. And he will again.

Since 2005, the world has come to know Benedict in much the same way it knew him as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger: as a predictable conservative, a clerical ideologue easy to ignore. Why should we care what he says about gay rights, women's reproductive health, or stem cell research when we know that social movements, the courts, and even governments continue to nudge forward the inevitable march of progress? Does the pope even matter, given that so many millions of Catholics have not only tuned him out but abandoned their faith altogether?

For most of the last quarter century, I was one of the millions who effectively tuned him out. In 1986, as the Vatican's prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Cardinal Ratzinger released a pastoral letter to the world's bishops declaring that homosexuality was an "objective disorder." Among other things, he said that people like me were twisted and sick, that our sexuality was a "problem," and that gay unions were not "complementary" because procreation was neither the purpose nor the possible result of our sex. Thus, to be out and proud I would only be confirming my "disordered" and "essentially self-indulgent" inclination.

Revenge of the Augustinians

On what theological grounds did Cardinal Ratzinger base these claims? And why has the man held onto these ideas ever since, without moving an inch as Pope Benedict? As with his instructions on reproductive health and virtually every other issue, it all comes down to Augustinian theology. Aurelius Augustine (354-430), founder of imperial Catholicism and "original sin", was the original law-and-order Catholic. His hierarchical understanding of the faith called for the subordination of the individual to the Church as institution. His doctrine of original sin tried to explain the sin of every human being from the biblical story of the fall of Adam, which was based on "primal" or sexual sin. This view saw sexual pleasure for its own sake, rather than exclusively for procreation, as a sin to be suppressed.

Augustinians are fond of quoting the Book of Leviticus to condemn homosexuality. Theirs is a black-and-white theology that sees pluralism as "relativism" and tends to reduce morality to a series of dualistic, us-and-them distinctions—or, as the liberal theologian Hans Kung has put it: "a great clash between belief and unbelief, humility and arrogance, love and the quest for power, salvation and damnation." Augustine himself believed that violence against heretics could be theologically justified—a carte blanche that would later lead to forcible conversions, the Inquisition, and a Church legacy of holy wars against all forms of deviance.

Ratzinger/Benedict has always been an Augustinian. The political implications of his theology became apparent in the spring of 1968, when campus revolts were sweeping through Europe. Ratzinger, then the chair in dogmatics at Tubingen University, was confronted by left-wing students who denounced Christianity by symbolically defiling a crucifix during one of his lectures. Both the Christian and the anti-communist in him recoiled: from that moment on, his entire mission became a rearguard action against liberalism and socialism. His new theology was all about fear and obedience, deference to authority, and respect for papal infallibility. From 1981, when Pope John Paul II handpicked him as CDF prefect, until 2005, when he succeeded him and became Pope Benedict, Ratzinger had a free hand to mould the Church according to his own Augustinian principles.

By the spring of 1987, the Church's radical shift to the right on most issues was turning Roman Catholicism into the kind of club to which I had no interest in belonging. Unless I was prepared to commit to a life of self-loathing closetry and self-denial, or accept a futile identity politics of victimhood as a member of the gay Catholic group Dignity, there was only one way to go—and that was out the door. So, after the final mass of spring semester at my campus parish near UVic, I quietly decided to shun the Church before it could shun me. That turned out to be more complicated than it sounds.

Far from the pews

Having grown up in the comforting embrace of Vatican II, I found leaving the Church rather like switching to a low-carb diet: I knew it was the right thing to do but lacked the will power to follow through. My three eldest brothers were raised on the Latin mass, Baltimore catechism, and the cane-wielding nuns of St. Ann's Convent. But my fourth eldest brother, two sisters and I were raised on the folk mass, priests who dressed like hippies, and the left-wing social justice agenda of Remi De Roo. Among other things, the Bishop of Victoria encouraged his flock to get involved in parish decision-making, support women's equality, oppose the capitalist greed of Conrad Black, and stand up for Latin American peasants against the whims of U.S. imperialism. Since by doing these things we would all be on the side of the angels, the Church didn't feel like something I needed to quit. Plus, Catholicism in the 1970s and early 80s made few onerous demands of its flock—especially if one's parents happened to be liberals.

During my undergrad years, it was the music that kept me involved. Rather than dirge-like hymns accompanied by a clunky old pipe organ, the post-Vatican II liturgy featured bouncy pop and folk melodies that could be sung in multiple harmonies with guitar and piano accompaniment. Earnest? Definitely. But more sophisticated—and less cheesy—than the gag-inducing likes of "Kumbaya" or "They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love." (Think Crosby, Stills, and Nash, set to the New Testament.) For a couple of years, I enjoyed belting out tenor harmonies as a member of my campus parish's liturgical ensemble.

But once I had finally left the Church, the trade-off for these comforts was a no-brainer. Finally free to pursue my own life guided by no other authority than instinct, common sense, or the principles of fair play, I enjoyed truckloads of guilt-free sex and romance while taking the next decade and a half to catch up for lost time. Far from the pews, I made all kinds of friends and lovers who led fascinating lives without requiring religion as a compass. Through these encounters, the worlds of art, literature and music began to open wide, offering so much more now that I no longer filtered these things so unconsciously through a Catholic lens. Eventually, I woke up to realize that I was not only a lapsed Catholic but an atheist, as well.

But taking the boy out of the Church does not, by definition, take the Church out of the boy. Although I was an "ex" Catholic, I was talking so much about the Church as to leave the impression I was still in the thick of it. The first few years were a gestalt-fest of self-loathing anger as I "recovered" from the regime of self-denial I had allowed the Church to impose. Once I got over that, I moved on to righteous indignation about priestly celibacy, clerical sex abuse, and the hypocrisy of Vatican homophobia in light of the priesthood’s status as the largest gay club in the world. Before long I grew bored of all that as well, and after a few years finally stopped paying attention to any news coverage of the Church. After 18 years away from its embrace, I was fairly confident I had gotten over it. Then Pope John Paul II died, Ratzinger succeeded him, and I got drawn in again.