The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism by Mark D Jordan 248pp, University of Chicago Press, £16
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Italy, where the Bishop of Rome hangs his mitre, has the lowest birth rate in western Europe. Several explanations of this fact are possible, but it seems likely that practical disregard of the Pope's teaching on "artificial" methods of contraception has played a part. The limp arguments adduced in support of that doctrine may even have hardened Italian hearts against it. The voice of the Roman Catholic church in its homeland is, on this matter of sexual conduct, a shrill, small voice.

Gays in the US by contrast, if The Silence of Sodom is to be believed, need to pay keener heed to the Pope because "religious condemnation remains the most potent homophobic rhetoric" and "compelling cases can be made that identifying as a Catholic (or Christian) at this moment in American life can only be a form of collaboration with homosexuality's most dangerous enemies". However many such cases "can be made", Mark D Jordan makes none of them, just as when he alleges that the Catholic church "in a number of countries... represents the most powerful voice in favor of the repression and persecution of lesbians and gays", he names no such country. Like many Catholics, Professor Jordan has a blessed naivety about political realities; he probably imagines the Swiss Guard possesses a terrifying strike power.

A pervasive weakness of his book stems from his failure to distinguish what is specific to Catholicism, as distinct from Christianity or other religions and religion substitutes. The Pope holds no patent on fear and loathing. I once knew a Catalan Maoist who assured all who would listen that, as a result of the cultural revolution, only one homosexual remained in the People's Republic. Nor was it the Catholic church that subjected US homosexuals to electroconvulsive therapy; that was a bitter fruit of the Freudianism to which Jordan makes intermittent, unreflective appeals.

It might rather be charged against current Catholic doctrine and practice that they lack any distinctively Catholic wisdom or compassion, as for instance in those dioceses and religious orders, running scared from scandal, that have handed over the assessment of vocations to psychiatrists and "require extensive personality and psychological testing for their recruits... some have even resorted to penile response tests" (Charles R Morris, American Catholic). This sits oddly with other official teaching - liberation theology is condemned for relying on Marxist tenets thought incompatible with Christianity, while at the same time the church capitulates to a science of the soul that aims to cure homosexuality along with other lamentable aberrations of the human creature, such as religious belief.

Affliction, unlike fish, is not good for the brain, and abrasive years of conflicting loyalties as a gay Catholic have told on Jordan. He badly misstates some factual claims, as when he informs us that in the US "everyone seems to agree that there are now more homosexuals in the Catholic priesthood and religious life than in the population at large". Like many things everyone agrees on, this would be astounding if true, but he means only "a higher proportion" not "more". He doesn't bother to give statistics to back the allegation that "sexually active gay clerics and ex-clerics seem so often to prefer the leather or S&M 'subcultures' ". Some of the book is mere anecdotage: he met a gay bartender with a Sacred Heart of Jesus tattoo, from which he infers a kinship between homosexual and Catholic cultures.

Much that he says is as little specific to homosexuality as it is to Catholicism. He condescends to young men by telling them they cannot "truly appreciate what has already been done to [them] by the ambient homophobia", though he might as well have written "the ambient heterophilia" or any other force of acculturation. "Growing up Catholic" may well be "remembered as growing up in a kind of bondage", but the same is true for many of growing up in Aylesbury. He stipulates that "you have not felt the force of religious hate speech until you can condemn it angrily and in public precisely as hate speech", which amounts to saying that your view doesn't count unless it coincides with his. He sounds in this respect quite like some Catholic bishops.

Professor Jordan has my sympathy; it is hard to keep your temper and your wits when contemplating some pronouncements of the Catholic hierarchy, for instance the repulsive slur in the 1975 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's declaration on sexual ethics, that remarked on homosexuals' "inability to fit into society". It is not as a homosexual but as a Catholic that I find this objectionable; it betrays not only ignorance about the reality of homosexuals' lives but, worse, a sell-out of the gospel to the kingdom of this world, a rendering unto Caesar of things which are not his. It is not the church's business to assist in the manufacture of individuals who "fit into" society; her mission is to strive towards a society fit for the flourishing of the individuals whom God created. The church hierarchy has many times connived with coarse ethical majoritarianism; homosexuals have not been the only, or even the principal, victims of such connivance.

Many gays hate Christianity, perhaps especially Catholicism. This is unsurprising; as Auden said, "Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return". Yet history does not support what John Boswell in his pioneering book, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality , called "the common idea that religious belief - Christian or other - has been the cause of intolerance in regard to gay people". Gays who wish to do more than shore up their own preferred bigotry would do better to read Boswell than Jordan. And Catholics who are not wholly sated with the spurious certainties palmed off on them in place of the Gospel challenge will learn more from Gareth Moore's splendidly considered The Body in Context: Sex and Catholicism , which has the advantage of not isolating homosexuality from other questions in Christian sexual ethics.

Each group, and particularly anyone who belongs to them both, needs constant reminding that Christian teaching can be taught only by Christ-like means. He said "in my Father's house are many mansions", from which it probably follows that the house has many approach roads too. One thing at least homosexuals and Catholics must have in common - the hope that practising makes perfect.