Gay Priests

(I spend my life wavering between belief and doubt. I am in high doubt mode now. Hence, there are no articles on faith or saints or mystical experiences. I am mostly focused on church politics right now.)

Goodbye, Good Men, a book arguing against gay men in the priesthood and in favor of a celibate, heterosexual male priesthood, makes three tacit assumptions:

• Gay men are less capable of genuine holiness than straight men
• Gay men are more likely to have sex with minors than straight men
• Celibate people are able to attain higher levels of spirituality than non-celibate people.

If one accepts these assumptions, it is easy to assume that rooting gays--or at least non-celibate gays--out of the priesthood will result in a re-invigorated priesthood.

Since it is seemingly impossible to measure holiness and spirituality, I would like to address the point about gay behavior with minors. As a woman, I have vivid memories of being fourteen years old and approached by men of all ages in a sexual way. Many of these approaches occurred while I was walking home from school carrying an armload of books. In other words, I was not at a party, loitering on the streets, or behaving in a provocative way.

These experiences have convinced me that an attraction to adolescents is not the exclusive province of gays. Rather, it is a trait common among men regardless of sexual orientation. As I understand it, the abuse rates for heterosexuals and for homosexuals who are comfortable with their orientation are virtually identical. From this perspective, a priesthood of straight men would decrease the abuse of boys but would increase the abuse of girls. The net benefit would be zero.

My own, anecdotal, experience with priests is that gay priests are frequently more compassionate than straight ones. The last straight pastor at my church not only alienated me and a close female friend, he also antagonized the other priest to the point that they were not speaking. At the end of mass, the officiating priest typically intoduces the pastor, who speaks briefly about church functions. Instead of saying "Here's our pastor, Father X." the priest would simply say "Be seated," and let the pastor come forward and read. The coldness spoke volumes. The previous pastor treated the associate pastor like a colleague, with full access to the checkbook and other privileges. This straight pastor took that privilege away, for no reason, and created the position of "business manager" as a ruse for stripping this authority from the associate priest.  The only good thing I can say about this priest is that he was definitely NOT a pedophile. While this is a good start, it is not nearly enough.

This same priest, after I had a falling out with one of his young friends who treated me abusively (according to someone who heard her voicemails to me), refused to shake my hand after mass and made a big show of making a horrified face and turning away from me, thus letting other parishioners streaming out of church just how he felt about me. In other words, he did not even provide the bare minimum of pastoral care.


This pastor also fired the long-time caretaker of the property, who had worked there for close to 15 years and had done an excellent job, and replaced him with someone else, apparently out of some sense of personal friendship. The man he fired had a terminally ill wife. This job was their only income. The person who replaced him had a healthy, working wife.

Other straight priests of my acquaintance are alcoholics, have girlfriends, or are involved in financial irregularities. Get real: physically and mentally healthy men do not give up sex for long periods of time. The gay priests are not celibate and neither are the younger straight priests. In Europe, priests have girlfriends who are ostensibly live-in housekeepers. In the U.S., one reads every few years about priests with girlfriends or priests getting sued by former sexual partners. One need only read Boccaccio and other literary figures to understand how frequently the rules of celibacy are flouted. Since human nature hasn't changed since then, the problems that existed then will continue to occur.

A similar phenomen has happened on a higher level. The former archbishop was widely regarded as gay. As I understand it, this was something of a scandal and the Vatican had the new archbishop come in to straighten things out. But, as people who follow Catholic politics realize, the old archbishop, with all of his faults, was at least nice to everyone. The new one, a straight man, is so lacking in civility that a Catholic commented "No one worries about priestly morale any more. There is none."

All of this is a long way of saying that human nature is flawed, regardless of whether people are gay or straight and that a straight priesthood will have a slightly different set of problems. However, the overall quality of the priesthood may not be better.