'It Is Not a Closet. It Is a Cage.’ Gay Catholic Priests Speak Out
The crisis over sexuality in the Catholic Church goes beyond abuse. It goes to the heart of the priesthood, into a closet that is trapping thousands of men
MILWAUKEE — Gregory Greiten was 17 years old when the priests organized the game. It was 1982 and he was on a retreat with his classmates from St. Lawrence, a Roman Catholic seminary for teenage boys training to become priests. Leaders asked each boy to rank which he would rather be: burned over 90 percent of his body, paraplegic, or gay.
Each chose to be scorched or paralyzed. Not one uttered the word “gay.” They called the game the Game of Life.
The lesson stuck. Seven years later, he climbed up into his seminary dorm window and dangled one leg over the edge. “I really am gay,” Father Greiten, now a priest near Milwaukee, remembered telling himself for the first time. “It was like a death sentence.”
The closet of the Roman Catholic Church hinges on an impossible contradiction. For years, church leaders have driven gay congregants away in shame and insisted that “homosexual tendencies” are “disordered.” And yet, thousands of the church’s priests are gay.
The stories of gay priests are unspoken, veiled from the outside world, known only to one another, if they are known at all.
Fewer than about 10 priests in the United States have dared to come out publicly. But gay men likely make up at least 30 to 40 percent of the American Catholic clergy, according to dozens of estimates from gay priests themselves and researchers. Some priests say the number is closer to 75 percent. One priest in Wisconsin said he assumed every priest is gay unless he knows for a fact he is not. A priest in Florida put it this way: “A third are gay, a third are straight, and a third don’t know what the hell they are.”
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For the rest of this article, see
(Article brought to my attention by Gene Palumbo.)
It's an eye-opening, shocking, depressing, anger-kindling collection of anecdotes and reflections. Those poor men!
ReplyDeleteI will promise here that I will offer nothing but support, solidarity and love to any priest who wishes to come out.
It seems pretty clear there are things the seminaries can do that they aren't doing to help seminarians have a healthy psychosexual development to live lives as gay, celibate priests.
But the aspect of it that makes me despair are the homophobes out in the parishes. The church authorities can control seminary curriculum and instruction, but they can't control the hatred in people's hearts.
The most depressing incident in that story was the priest who outed himself before his congregation, saying he was gay and celibate, and his congregation gave him an ovation. (As I think most congregations would. They know the guy. A lot probably would not be surprised.) But then -- this is the sad part -- the phone calls and letters started coming from the people who don't know him, and all they heard was "gay," "celibate" not penetrating the closed minds that heard "gay."
ReplyDeleteSheesh. Upon whose authority did they write and call their spew?
But I wonder about the NYTimes's timing. The Vatican meeting this week is about sexual predation, which is not a gay thing, but there are a lot of spewers out there who would like to turn it into that. We got enough problem without a sideshow of spewing.
The timing is likely related to the release of the book,
ReplyDeleteIn the Closet of the Vatican, which NCR is excerpting.
The book release on February 21 is obviously timed to capture the press's attention. It could easily overshadow the Bishops Meeting in Rome. One is reminded of Vigano's release of his Testimony to coincide with the Papal plan flight back from Ireland.
I suspect the triad (celibacy, gay orientation, abuse) will have to be faced in the coming months. The right will blame sexual abuse on gays; the left will blame sexual abuse on celibacy.
While clericalism has been the principle cause of the coverup of sexual abuse, the general coverup of the frequent non-observance of celibacy by gay and heterosexual priests has contributed to the coverup of child sexual abuse.
While married priests will not solve the problems of sexual abuse and clericalism, right now married priests along with women deacons is about the only thing that will give hope to our people. The current crowd of male celibates cannot solve our problems. We need a whole change in clerical leadership. Maybe if we bring in married priests and women deacons things can be turned around.
Here is a little different take from a Catholic woman. I confess that part of it resonated with me.
ReplyDeleteWhen I went to American Psychological Association meetings, the program was full of psychologists lamenting themselves as victims because they were women, or gay, or black or Hispanic. All of these were reasonably well off academics or clinicians.
ReplyDeleteThere was very little time on the program devoted to persons with severe mental illness because few psychologists worked in public mental health settings (the salaries are too low), and even fewer psychologists owned up to their own severe mental illness.
One social scientist has argued that persons with severe mental illness are among the poorest people on earth. First they have to contend with their own thoughts and emotions. Then they have to contend with other people’s reactions to their thoughts, emotions and behavior. And finally they have to deal with the economic results of their disease such as years and decades of being unable to work.
Sometimes at these conventions I was tempted to challenge these “victims” to try putting themselves into the shoes of the mentally ill.
I have a lot of sympathy for victims of sexual abuse. I have personally analyzed a lot of data that shows that these people need far more treatment than the non-abused person who suffers from depression, anxiety, etc.
I am sympathetic to gay people particularly when they are young. In college, I spent a long time listening to a good friend as he came to terms with his being gay. It certainly did not seem to be something that he had chosen. A professional friend who is gay devoted his life to children’s mental health because of his own difficulties in adolescent. I have seen him as a model for gay people. He was honest about his orientation without making much of it. My own acceptance of gay marriage is largely due to how normal his relationship with his significant other was. If it looks like a marriage, talks like a marriage, walks like a marriage, then maybe it is a marriage.
"He was honest about his orientation without making much of it." He sounds like a well-adjusted person.
Delete"One social scientist has argued that persons with severe mental illness are among the poorest people on earth. First they have to contend with their own thoughts and emotions. Then they have to contend with other people’s reactions to their thoughts, emotions and behavior. And finally they have to deal with the economic results of their disease such as years and decades of being unable to work."
DeleteThat's pretty insightful. My own (modest) experience in working with people experiencing homelessness is that mental illness is, far and away, the main reason for their inability to achieve sufficient prosperity and stability to escape homelessness.
I'm afraid that I find it hard to talk about this because I have a particular bias about it.
ReplyDeleteI think that heterosexuals don't have same sex attractions. People who think that everyone has same sex attractions and that homosexuals are just giving in to "temptation" have same sex attractions that they themselves are wresting with.
Totally subjective on my part. When I was in an all boys Jesuit high school in Chicago, we all knew who the gay guys were. Most of us didn't care. And none of the non-gay guys that I knew had to wrestle with a decision about who to take to the prom.
Having said that, I have another bias. In this degenerate age, we have sexualized love too much. Love is far more complicated. Sex is not as important to it as we think. These poor priests are caught in a "debate" which itself is a sign of how shallow we have become.
About heterosexuals not having same sex attractions, sometimes adolescent kids do have same-sex "crushes", not sexual as much as a hero-worship kind of thing. For most it's a phase and they soon move on.
DeleteI agree with you that we have sexualized love too much.
Gay people tend to know about their preferences from a young age. I see nothing "disordered" about it. The Church's guidelines about decency and respect for others transcend sexual orientation. The Church's understanding about sexuality needs work.
DeleteAt 64 with a passle of health problems, I agree that sex isn't very important to love and marriage. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bought that at 30 or 40.
I'll piggy-back onto this posting and post a link to a VERY LENGTHY commentary by James Alison re: the Martel book:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.abc.net.au/religion/frédéric-martel-and-the-structure-of-the-clerical-closet/10843678
There might be a way to test Martel's theory: if the numbers are so high, then it should be visible in the statistics of mortality in the 1980s and early 1990s, when AIDS had a high fatality rate.
ReplyDelete