News

05/05/2001 The Tablet
Gays in the priesthood
Mark Dowd

There has been an influx of homosexuals into the Catholic priesthood. This taboo subject is to be explored in a Channel 4 film today. Its presenter, a former Dominican friar, thinks the phenomenon demands a revision of Catholic teaching.

‘HOMOSEXUALITY is a time-bomb ticking in the Church and I think it could explode very soon." These aren't the words of the gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, nor of some trendy sociologist, but of Sr Jeannine Gramick, the School Sister of Notre Dame who has refused to obey the Vatican's silencing order on this most taboo of all subjects. What does she mean and is she right?

Time to put some cards on the table. I am a gay Catholic and a former Dominican friar. I've always been intrigued by the conundrum of why a Church that describes the homosexual orientation as "a strong tendency towards an intrinsic moral evil" should have so many gay men in its ranks. Donald Cozzens only stated in his book The Changing Face of the Priesthood last year what many have felt secretly for a long time, namely that in many parts of the world the priesthood is becoming a gay profession. Fr Cozzens is in good company. The outgoing rector of Allen Hall, James Overton, recently backed up Cozzens in The Tablet, as does the present rector of St John's seminary at Wonersh, Kevin Haggerty. He told me that "a reasonable proportion" of men in seminary life are gay, and warns of the dangers of students dividing into cliques along gay or straight lines.



Kevin Haggerty also told me that the issue switches on "amber lights if not red lights" for the Catholic hierarchy. In Rome Archbishop Bertone, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, stated recently that "men with a homosexual orientation should not be admitted to seminary life". The very orientation itself, it seems, is suspect. Cardinal Ratzinger's deputy says being gay evokes "moral concern" because it is "a strong temptation towards acts that are always in themselves evil". It's the irony of all ironies: a Church with a growing manpower crisis depends on a large cohort of men whose very sexual orientation it treats with grave suspicion.

Does all this really matter? "Celibacy makes equals of us all", is the common refrain. Yes, it does matter in my opinion and here is why.

First, it is not in the wider Church's interest to have a large number of its priests being described as "objectively disordered" by the teaching authority. It flies directly in the face of much of the common-sense teaching that the Pope evoked in his encyclical on priestly formation, Pastores Dabo Vobis, in the early 1990s, which emphasised an acceptance of all the priest's complex psychological make-up and humanity. Instead, present doctrine leaves whole swaths of the clergy feeling second-rate and flawed.

Those who are concerned about the disproportionate numbers of gay men in priestly life need look no further than the heady cocktail of the Vatican's hostile language on the matter and the celibacy law for an explanation. If a young homosexual man takes these words to heart, does not the priesthood appear to offer him, perhaps unconsciously, the promise of a life which will guarantee sexual abstinence and a way of dealing with the marriage question? I remember the relief I felt as a young Dominican when I was able to head off enquiries from curious relatives about the conspicuous absence of a girlfriend on the scene. "Oh, but of course you can't tie the knot with a young girl can you, you're giving your life to God and the Church?" Quite. I am not suggesting that thousands of clergy are acting in bad faith: vocations are subtle and complex mixtures of psychological and spiritual forces. But I am convinced that, at least in part, a combination of obligatory celibacy for the secular priesthood and the Vatican's utterances on homosexuality have fed off each another to bring us to our present position.

The psychological testing and questioning introduced at the selection stage prior to entry to seminary have been introduced to give superiors a clearer idea of the sexual make-up of aspiring candidates. Whatever one might think of such procedures (and I have nothing against them myself), it is patently contradictory to encourage ease and openness about sexuality in prospective seminarians who are homosexual against the backdrop of the Church's hostile language on the subject.

It was notable in James Overton's interview with The Tablet that he was hasty to point out that there was no evidence of sexual practice among gay men at Allen Hall. I have no reason to doubt his sincerity. But I heard a different side to this matter from two former students of the English College in Rome, Chris Higgins and Dennis Caulfield. These are men of deep integrity who managed to square the nightmare situation of being lovers in a seminary by ultimately acting out of honesty: leaving their priestly surroundings and living out the truth of their lives with family and friends. But their accounts of the underground world of sexual repression in Rome give food for thought.

Such was the taboo nature of this subject that a number of gay students "acted out" their sexual inclinations in a climate where they felt they could not discuss the matter with superiors or spiritual directors. Admission of "failure" on homosexual practice was thought to carry certain threat of expulsion. Chris and Dennis recall men going off to parks in Rome and clubs for sexual liaisons and then later adamantly justifying that their celibate status was still intact. "For some men", says Chris, "celibacy was simply defined as not falling in love so you could have sex with someone without getting involved and still remain ‘celibate'. What you did with your body was just flesh."

THAT is not all. Chris's partner Dennis recalls that there were other extraordinary mind-games at play among the students. "Some of the people who were the most anti-gay and inclined to invoke the Church's teaching to put other people down were people who I knew to be gay themselves", he says, "and mixed in gay circles with other gay men."

The tabloid press will no doubt home in on these incidents and depict them as salacious and scandalous. The real scandal is what lurks beneath all this behaviour: the inability of the Catholic Church to have a serious and truthful dialogue about an issue which goes right to the very heart of its power structures and sexual teaching. The brave Fr Cozzens told me that this subject is a "can of worms" for the hierarchy because it begs so many questions about those aspects of Catholic life that we have come to see as part of the furniture. The emerging gay sexual identity of large numbers of the priesthood is an advancing and unwelcome gift for the Church. I will be mocked for using the word "crisis" but even compared with five years ago, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and the contradictions are more evident than ever before.

The option that Rome should take seems to me clear-cut: come clean and attempt an intelligent theological explanation of the phenomenon. Explain why God might want to call to priestly service a number of "objectively disordered" men which is out of all proportion to the numbers of gays in society. Or if that does not suit, then have a re-think. Perhaps the gay orientation is not "disordered" after all, and if it isn't, then I am not the only homosexual Catholic waiting to see how my Church can fashion a way forward that allows me to express my love for another human being unreservedly while being relieved of the label "sinner", "self-indulgent" and "morally evil".