Most of the gay priests I spoke with have never experienced abuse in the church. Many had already come to terms with their sexual orientation before they entered the priesthood, but some wrestled with it in the seminary, and others later in life. “There is no typical experience,” Father Joe, as I’ll call him, told me. “At first I wondered if I were a fraud, because I thought, Well, am I just trying to escape into a life in which I don’t have to deal with my sexuality? But I had people in charge of me who challenged me to ask myself if this were authentic, and I felt that this was the life and work that God was calling me to. It’s an ongoing discernment.” Then there was a moment of grace. “I was working in a hospital at the height of the AIDS crisis. A nun said to me, ‘What do you want to tell these people? They’re active homosexuals, drug users.’ I said, ‘I would talk about God’s mercy and be with them as they are.’ It helped me understand how God could use me even though the church didn’t accept me.” [...]
The preponderance of gay men in the priesthood is, in fact, nothing new in the history of the church. For well over a millennium, it was commonplace, and though there were occasional denunciations of it, these were usually followed by papal inaction or indifference. For example, as the late historian John Boswell demonstrated in his groundbreaking, controversial book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, a fourth-century Christian writer, John Chrysostom, attacked the leaders of the church for being too accepting of same-sex love and even sex: “Those very people who have been nourished by godly doctrine, who instruct others in what they ought and ought not to do … these do not consort with prostitutes as fearlessly as they do with young men … None is ashamed, no one blushes … the chaste seem to be the odd ones, and the disapproving the ones in error.” There was considerable Christian concern about sex in general — following the teaching of saints Paul and Augustine — but no consensus that homosexuality, if kept to intense mutual love and celibate friendship, was specifically problematic. [...]
Another pattern was externalized homophobia: What you hate in yourself but cannot face, you police and punish in others. It remains a fact that many of the most homophobic bishops and cardinals have been — and are — gay. Take the most powerful American cardinal of the 20th century, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, who died in 1967. He had an active gay sex life for years while being one of the most rigid upholders of orthodoxy. Monsignor Tony Anatrella, an advocate for conversion therapy consulted by the Vatican, was recently suspended for sexual abuse of other men. One of Europe’s senior cardinals, Keith O’Brien of Scotland, described homosexuality as a “moral degradation” and marriage equality as “madness.” Sure enough, he was eventually forced to resign and leave the country after being accused of abusive sexual relationships with four other priests. [...]
At some point you realize that this is, in the end, the bottom line. There is a deep and un-Christian cruelty at the heart of the church’s teaching, a bigotry profoundly at odds with the church’s own commitment to seeing every person as worthy of respect, deserving of protection, and made in the image of God. It’s based on a lie — a lie that the hierarchy knows is untrue, and a lie proven untrue by science and history and the church’s own experience. “The hierarchy is tying itself in knots in public over something it has already conceded in private,” Father Leo explained to me. The task, it seems to me, is not to rid the church of homosexuality, which is an integral part of the human mystery, but of hypocrisy, dishonesty, and dysfunction. Impossible? I admit to, at times, a crushing fatalism. But I also believe, as a Catholic, that nothing is impossible with God.
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