The Gay Church building

Thousands of priests are closeted, and the Vatican's failure to reckon with their sexuality has created a crisis for Catholicism.

Photo: Governatorato S.C.5., Direzione dei Musei, All Rights Reserved

Photo: Governatorato S.C.5., Direzione dei Musei, All Rights Reserved

Photograph: Governatorato S.C.Five., Direzione dei Musei, All Rights Reserved

We have no reliable figures on just how many priests in the Catholic Church are gay. The Vatican has conducted many studies on its ain clergy only never on this subject. In the United states of america, however, where there are 37,000 priests, no independent study has found fewer than fifteen percent to be gay, and some have found as many as 60 percent. The consensus in my ain research over the past few months converged on around xxx to xl percent among parish priests and considerably more than that — as many as 60 percent or higher — among religious orders similar the Franciscans or the Jesuits.

This fact hangs in the air as a giant, unsustainable paradox. A church building that, since 2005, bans priests with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" and officially teaches that gay men are "objectively matted" and inherently tending toward "intrinsic moral evil" is actually composed, in ways very few other institutions are, of gay men.

The massive cognitive dissonance this requires is condign harder to sustain. The collapse of the closet in public and individual life in the past three decades has made the asymmetric homosexuality of the Cosmic priesthood much less easy to hide, ignore, or deny. This cultural and moral shift has not only inverse the consciousness of virtually American Catholics (67 per centum of whom support civil spousal relationship for gay couples) and gay priests (many of whom are close to quitting) but also broken the silence that long shrouded the subject area.

Five years ago, Pope Francis fabricated his watershed "Who am I to judge?" remark later beingness asked about a flawed gay priest. "A person one time asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality," Francis went on. "I replied with some other question: 'Tell me, when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love or reject and condemn this person?' We must always consider the person. Hither we enter into the mystery of the human being." In the final draft of the 2014 Synod on the Family, Francis included explicit mention of the "gifts and qualities" of homosexuals, request, "Are we capable of welcoming [them]?" These sentiments won 62 percent of the votes of the synod bishops — just shy of what was necessary to laissez passer, merely nevertheless evidence of a sharp shift in tone in official Catholic education.

They also triggered near panic on the Catholic right. Alarmed by the possibility that divorced and remarried people might be welcomed likewise equally gays, traditionalists launched a fierce rearguard campaign confronting the new papacy, with a focus on what some called a "Lavander Mafia" running the church, and broke new ground in connecting this directly to the horrifying revelations of sex abuse that came to light in 2002. In increasingly directly ways, they have argued that the root of the scandal was not corruption of power, or pedophilia, or clericalism, or the distortive psychological effects of celibacy and institutional homophobia, but gayness itself.

"There is a homosexual culture, not merely among the clergy merely fifty-fifty within the bureaucracy, which needs to exist purified at the root," the American fundamental Raymond Burke declared in August. Bishop Robert Morlino of Wisconsin agreed. "It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation," he wrote. "If you'll permit me, what the church needs at present is more hatred" of homosexual sexual behavior, "a sin so grave that it cries out to heaven for vengeance." Michael Hichborn, head of the fringe-right Lepanto Found, called for a "complete and thorough removal of all homosexual clergymen from the church building … It is going to be difficult and volition likely result in a very serious priest shortage, but it'south definitely worth the try."

The unseemly fall this past summertime of Primal Theodore McCarrick, 1 of the well-nigh powerful American cardinals of his fourth dimension, provided a cause célèbre for this faction. It emerged that McCarrick had abused at to the lowest degree ii children and then sexually harassed generations of adult seminarians with impunity. Here, it seemed, was a pedophile and an calumniating gay homo, at the very apex of the church, known to be sexually active with seminarians, protected past his peers, and tolerated for decades by many in the hierarchy, including the last three popes.

McCarrick gave the right an opening. New online media organizations — led by Breitbart-style websites such as LifeSite News and Church Militant — now routinely pounce on whatsoever incidents involving gay priests and have an influential audition in the Vatican. A wealthy group of conservative Catholics, the Better Church Governance, has even launched an investigation into the orthodoxy, carry, and, information technology's clear, sexual orientation of each of the 124 cardinals who will elect the next pope.

At the center of this struggle, of course, are gay priests, bishops, and cardinals themselves. They are caught in a whiplash of relative toleration embodied past Francis and hostility exemplified by his bourgeois predecessor, Pope Benedict Xvi. The 2005 ban on gay priests and seminarians is still in force and, in fact, was affirmed past Francis in 2016. Every bit a result, almost all gay priests are closeted, for fright of beingness targeted or terminated, which makes them uniquely barred from inbound the word. They heed as they are talked about and scapegoated — frequently in deeply offensive means and e'er as if they were not ane of the church's central ramparts. "Things have actually gotten worse since Francis became pope," one priest told me. "They are equating all gay priests with sexual abuse. There'southward a witch hunt."

A young priest in Rome, 1954. Photo: Bettman/Getty Images

Infirmary chapels, like those in airports, tin can exist strange places. Rarely anyone's refuge for very long, they can feel as transient and empty as they are antiseptic. But on a recent Sunday at noon, in a sprawling hospital on the edges of a midwestern metropolis, the congregation spilled out downward the hallways for Mass. They were clearly non strangers to ane another equally they nodded and chatted before the service began; there were old and young, black and white and brown, families and couples and a sprinkling of those who'd come alone. The Mass itself was unremarkable apart from a hitting homily when the priest talked of the joys of having null every bit the Christmas gifting season loomed. Information technology's a lesson he said he'd learned from serving the ill, the traumatized, the hungry, and the homeless afterwards a natural disaster overseas.

He told of a moment when he was returning from a field hospital forth an unlit path in the early on hours of the morning, surrounded past intense suffering on top of brutal poverty, nonetheless he was buoyed by the faith and tenacity of the poorest of the poor, the sickest of the sick. He stopped and looked up into the starlit sky, he said, and felt not despair simply hope.

"Ever a skilful message from that i," said the man next to me as Mass ended. I nodded: "Big crowd for a hospital." "Oh yeah," the man replied. "E'er. They come from all over. He's a rock star, this priest." I said nothing. Father Mike, every bit I'll call him, had texted me earlier to review the ground rules: "Per infirmary and my asking yous are non to interview anyone or identify yourself equally doing a story, journalist, etc." The full story of this man's life and service has to stay anonymous — as with almost every other priest I spoke with. Not even his near devoted congregants know he'south gay.

Just as a onetime registered nurse and skilled manager, he'due south a natural priest. In the few minutes I took to see him in my hotel foyer, he'd already learned from the receptionist that she was no longer celebrating Christmas later a recent near-death experience in a car crash. At 1 signal as we spoke the adjacent twenty-four hour period in the infirmary, he was greeted by a woman who asked for an on-the-spot confession and he shooed me bated; later I met an anguished gay homo from an ultra-Catholic family he was counseling; and for a few hours on Sun morning, he was with the wife and teenage sons of a dying man. Male parent Mike was the bandage on all of those open wounds. He has witnessed a couple hundred deaths in his career. One night, he told me, he sat with three patients at the hour of their deaths in quick succession.

Becoming a priest wasn't an like shooting fish in a barrel decision. Mike came from a troubled family, and his abusive parents converted to Catholicism when he was inbound his teens. He agreed to get to Sunday Mass because they promised him brunch at his favorite spot afterward, until, at the age of 15, he formally became a Catholic himself. At 17, he was sent to visit a priest for a 1-on-1 counseling retreat. "The very offset dark I was there, he very aggressively tried to get me in bed with him," Mike told me. "I was absolutely terrified." A year later, when his parents threw him out of the business firm, he went to alive with a youth government minister. "For two months I was there, and it was just abiding fighting off advances and innuendo." He reported the youth minister, even testified against him in court. Simply his ain priest backed the government minister, and, despite testimony from three other boys, the abuser was acquitted. "At that time, people actually believed priests," Mike sighed.

Despite all this, in the mid-1990s he entered seminary after graduating from higher. He institute himself constantly subjected to psychological evaluations and denied the usual summertime assignments. Fearing his teenage testimony against an abuser was blocking his ordination, he quit to become a disquisitional-intendance nurse. But he yet felt chosen to the church and eventually tried seminary again. He was ordained three years later.

I told him virtually people would detect this story bizarre, masochistic even.
Why join a church building that doesn't want yous — indeed, i that abused you? He stumbled for a while before finally blurting out, "Well, at the heart of it, it'due south about … information technology's about Jesus, and information technology'south about … I mean, I believe in God." His voice was raised, suddenly intense. "I'd found some people in campus ministry, when I was in college, who were really authentic. They loved each other, and they loved God; they loved 'the least of these.' They weren't perfect, but the overarching message was that Jesus is here, Jesus is in the Eucharist, and Jesus is in the faces of the poorest of the poor and those who are nearly marginalized." They told him he was obviously chosen to be a priest, and his time as a nurse deepened this confidence within him. "As I was serving my patients, most of whom died, I prayed with them when they wanted me to, I brought Communion to them when I could, and it was through them that I felt called to serve."

It is in that context of nurse to patient, pastor to flock, that today he manages his conflicts as a gay priest. "Every fourth dimension I walk into that hospital, no affair how I'g feeling or what I'm going through or the new Pennsylvania thousand-jury report on sex abuse, information technology all changes," he said. "When yous sit at the edge of the bed with someone whose transplant has failed, information technology becomes a middle-to-centre. Sometimes I retrieve we forget that, in the church, information technology's nearly that particular person and their humanity, their hopes and their fears, and their want to love and be loved."

Most of the gay priests I spoke with have never experienced abuse in the church. Many had already come up to terms with their sexual orientation earlier they entered the priesthood, but some wrestled with information technology in the seminary, and others later in life. "At that place is no typical experience," Father Joe, as I'll call him, told me. "At offset I wondered if I were a fraud, because I idea, Well, am I just trying to escape into a life in which I don't accept to deal with my sexuality? But I had people in accuse 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. Information technology'south 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 desire 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 empathize how God could use me even though the church didn't accept me."

Another, call him Father Andrew, described his choice of vocation as "convenient and existential": "I was eighteen and sexually aware only extremely depressed, and my father cornered me i mean solar day in the kitchen and made me come up out. I went to a psychologist, who told me, 'You're not going to change. You need to have yourself.' " Andrew's father was not happy about this recommendation and ended the therapy. In college, Andrew sought out more than handling, and then, of a sudden, his father died. Information technology threw him. "I kept thinking most life and death. I had started praying again and attending Mass. I was driving in the desert from Phoenix to Tucson and saw these grit devils, and I of a sudden heard in my head, 'Oh, be a priest. Y'all won't demand to bargain with sex; yous tin can be respected.' And and then my blood brother died — a car crash." By his junior twelvemonth, Andrew was in the seminary.

Information technology was in that location that Andrew had his start adult sexual experience. "I was 28 years old. I came out as bisexual. I lost weight, I built musculus, I got noticed more than by other seminarians, and I wanted to encounter what information technology was like beingness an adult," he said. "It was difficult. I wasn't attracted to kissing. I had one experience and couldn't ejaculate." He so threw himself into his work until, at 40, he faced a burnout. He took a leave of absence, spent 6 months in prayer and therapy, and when he returned, he sent an explanatory email to his boyfriend priests: "Equally i who has long suffered doubts about himself, I dedicate myself to bringing the love of God … to everyone who, similar me, sometimes questions their worth and value because of voices opposite to God'southward phonation."

The breakthrough came all of a sudden. "I said to my therapist, 'I call back I'm a good priest,' and he said, 'I bet you are.' And I burst out crying." Andrew'south vocalization cracked. "Being lumped in with pedophiles — it has a way of taking a toll on you." The scapegoating has wounded many of the priests I spoke with. It has go a double stigma: targeted by the hierarchy for being gay and by the general public for being pedophiles. Many of the people I spoke to, Catholics and non-Catholics, about the subject of gay priests rolled their optics and asked about the corruption of children. The news environment is saturated with stories about sex corruption — and rightly so — yet there are hardly any public examples of the overwhelming number of gay priests who would never dream of preying upon the powerless.

Many good gay priests, of grade, fail from fourth dimension to time, breaking celibacy in consensual adult affairs or trysts. They are not saints. But this is truthful of straight priests as well. These men are still sexual beings, flesh and blood. In these crises, they tend to practice one of two things: either fall so deeply in dearest that they cannot sustain a life without physical intimacy and so exit the church or, more often, recalibrate, confess, and recommit to the chaste life. "The best priests are those who accept missed the mark on occasion, the ones who know what information technology'due south like to be a real human," Father Andrew said. "It'southward a holy struggle. I've never seen celibacy as a souvenir; it has always been a discipline."

Father Joe spoke poignantly of falling in love. "I had a brief, sexually intimate human relationship 16 years ago. Information technology was my terminal human relationship. He didn't want to be with someone who couldn't exist fully out as a partner, and he wanted to get married. I asked if we could have a friendship that was also sexual, and he said no." The pain nevertheless flickers. "Today I have a close friendship with him, and we're non sexually intimate. But when he does accept a young man, I feel like, 'Well, who's there for me?' " At this betoken, Joe relies on close friends for emotional support. "I sometimes ask myself, 'When was the last fourth dimension someone touched me?' And I know that's not normal. I'll get a professional massage from time to time. My lapses these days are watching porn in my sleeping accommodation."

"At that place is an extreme reluctance to acknowledge that priests live celibacy well but not perfectly," a priest I'll call Male parent Leo explained. "But how practice you come up to a positive understanding of your sexuality when the church won't say you lot even accept a sexual orientation, merely 'same-sex attraction' or 'deep-seated homosexual tendencies'? How do y'all live a healthy sexuality in a context where your sexuality is stigmatized?" Afterward the 2005 ban on gay priests, Begetter Mike became attracted to conversion therapy and underwent a year and a half of trying to be cured of being gay. It was but afterwards that he came to run into how "none of it was true; it was all a lie."

Ambrose St. John (left) and John Henry Newman. Photograph: Governatorato S.C.Five., Direzione dei Musei, All Rights Reserved

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 information technology, these were usually followed by papal inaction or indifference. For example, equally 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 beingness too accepting of same-sexual practice honey and even sex: "Those very people who take been nourished by godly doctrine, who instruct others in what they ought and ought not to do … these do non espoused with prostitutes as fearlessly as they do with immature men … None is aback, no one blushes … the chaste seem to exist the odd ones, and the disapproving the ones in fault." There was considerable Christian business organization virtually sex in general — following the teaching of saints Paul and Augustine — only no consensus that homosexuality, if kept to intense mutual love and celibate friendship, was specifically problematic.

Fifty-fifty Saint Augustine had one particularly intense love thing with another immature man. "For I felt that my soul and his were one soul in two bodies," he wrote, "and therefore life was a horror to me, since I did not want to live as a half; and yet I was likewise afraid to dice lest he, whom I had loved so much, would completely die." This was not only a spiritual friendship, Augustine confessed. "I contaminated the spring of friendship with the dirt of lust and darkened its brightness with the blackness of desire." Some have speculated that Augustine'southward starkly Manichaean divide betwixt the spirit and the body is rooted in his disgust at his ain homosexual tendencies. The historical record, however, reveals that for all Augustine'due south influence, the practice of intense homoerotic friendship among the clergy was common over the following centuries, especially in monasteries. (As was the example in convents too. The gifts that lesbians have brought to the church are just as extraordinary, but because the priesthood is exclusively male and women are kept from positions of real power, lesbian nuns are, for better or worse, not caught upwards in this specific crisis.)

The masterpiece on the subject of "spiritual friendship" was, in fact, written past a gay homo, Saint Aelred, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx in England in the mid-1160s. He had had sexual relationships with men in his younger years, simply, vowing chastity equally a monk, he sublimated these desires into an idea of intense celibate honey for another human being. He took as a model the human relationship between Jesus and the "disciple whom Jesus loved," John, describing it at 1 betoken fifty-fifty as a "marriage." Aelred saw Jesus' intimacy with John — at the Last Supper, as they reclined, John famously rested his caput on Jesus' chest — as a model for attaching to some other person of the aforementioned sex, "to whom you tin be united in the intimate comprehend of the well-nigh sacred love … with whom you lot can rest, just the 2 of you, in the sleep of peace away from the dissonance of the world, in the comprehend of love, in the buss of unity."

By the 12th century, priests and monks were writing love poems to one another in what Boswell describes as an "outburst of Christian gay literature still without parallel in the Western world." Merely perhaps in response to this wide acceptance of gay spirituality, some began to campaign for a crackdown. Effectually 1051, Saint Peter Damian published a treatise, The Book of Gomorrah, whose rhetoric is strikingly similar to the online denunciations of our time: "absolutely no other vice can exist reasonably compared with this 1 … [it] is in fact the death of the body, the destruction of the soul … it removes truth utterly from the mind." He accused the church of beingness run by a gay cabal who covered for each other and gave one another absolution for their sins. The pope at the time, Leo Nine, nonetheless refused to ban gay clergy and argued that the problem was those who had sexual practice "every bit a long-standing practice or with many men." An occasional lapse could be forgiven, if confessed. Francis and Leo Ix would agree across the centuries.

Damian was a leading reformer of the church in his solar day, far across the gay-priest issue, and a synod in 1059 responded to all of his many proposals — except the one against gay clergy. Pope Alexander II even asked Damian for his but manuscript of The Book of Gomorrah in guild to copy information technology. Instead, Alexander locked it upwards! When confronted with this, co-ordinate to Damian, the pope "laughs and tries to placate me with the unctuous sense of humour of urbanity." In 1102, in a like moment, the Council of London decided to promulgate a decree confronting the newly defined sin of "sodomy" — only to have the publication stopped by the archbishop of Canterbury, who remarked that "this sin has hitherto been then public that inappreciably anyone is embarrassed past it."

The tide turned decisively in the 13th century with the theological genius Thomas Aquinas denouncing homosexual acts as "against nature." All sex activity — heterosexual and homosexual — was to be reserved only for married couples open up to procreation, and any other sexual activity was a grave sin. Homosexuals, in the new theology, were part of nature — many had noticed homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom, particularly among hares and hyenas — merely they were also somehow reverse to nature. Aquinas never resolved this paradox. Neither has the church.

As the taboo deepened in the succeeding centuries, in that location is lilliputian reason to believe that gay priests disappeared, only well-nigh went more fully underground. Nevertheless, same-sex love remained a profound part of Cosmic Christianity. The friendship that grew between Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier, for example, created the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, in the 16th century. Ignatius sent Francis to deliver Asia, and their long separation was a source of suffering for both. Francis once replied to a letter from Ignatius, "Amongst many other holy words and consolations of your letter of the alphabet, I read the final ones, 'Entirely yours, without ability or possibility of ever forgetting y'all, Ignatio.' I read them with tears, and with tears at present write them … You tell me how profoundly you lot desire to see me before this life closes. God knows the profound impression that those words of corking dearest fabricated on my soul." They never saw each other over again.

The greatest Catholic theologian of the 19th century, Primal John Henry Newman, devoted his personal life to another homo, Ambrose St. John. This does not mean the ii had a sexual relationship (although they might accept), only it does suggest that deep same-sex activity love was all the same alive in the highest echelons of the Catholic priesthood, even at the apex of Victorian repression and even in someone about to be celebrated every bit a saint. When St. John died, Newman wrote, "I take ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any tin exist greater, or anyone's sorrow greater, than mine."

Newman famously converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism and was part of the reformist and aesthetic Oxford Movement, which was strongly influenced past homosexual men. He insisted — "as my final, my imperative will" — that he be buried in the same spot every bit St. John. On the gravestone, the words the ii agreed on: "Out of shadows and phantasms into Truth."

The greatest Cosmic poet of the 19th century, the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, was gay; 1 of the deepest theologian-priests of the last century, Henri Nouwen, was likewise. Both suffered bouts of deep depression. Once more, there's no bear witness that either broke his vow of celibacy, but both vicious in love, both struggled with loneliness, and both produced work of enormous beauty and spirituality. Nouwen'due south greatest was a reflection on the parable of the Prodigal Son. One of Hopkins's most famous poems, "Pied Beauty," is a paean to "All things counter, original, spare, foreign; / Whatsoever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) / … He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change. / Praise him."

Only why is the priesthood so gay? Information technology is worth noting that the connection between homosexuality and spirituality is by no means restricted to Catholicism. Some evolutionary psychologists accept plant an ancient link betwixt gay men and tribal shamanism. Carl Jung identified the archetypal gifts of the homosexual: "a great capacity for friendship, which often creates ties of astonishing tenderness between men"; a talent for teaching, aesthetics, and tradition ("to be bourgeois in the best sense and cherish the values of the past"); "a wealth of religious feelings, which aid to bring the ecclesia spiritualis into reality; and a spiritual receptivity which makes him responsive to revelation."

Among gay priests themselves, I heard a variety of explanations. Some described to me how their sense of displacement as boys and teens made them more sensitive to the needs of other marginalized people: "You were an outsider, and you can help other outsiders and welcome them in." Some other merely said, "We understand suffering." Another spoke of the entreatment of belonging to a religious customs.

Others explained that they were drawn to the ritual of the church. "Catholicism was dissimilar, and I was different … I had a strong sense of mystical feel," 1 told me. Catholicism is a religion centered on the Mass, where the torso and the soul and the senses are every bit important as the mind. The Mass is, in some means, a performance. And I'1000 non sure how to say this without indulging in stereotypes, but at that place is something about the liturgy, ritual, music, and drama that attracts a certain kind of gay man. These types — also institute in the arts and scholarship — are sticklers for detail, ruthless about rules, and attuned to tradition and dazzler. In many ways, the old, elaborate High Mass, with its incense and processions, colour-coded vestments, liturgical complexity, musical precision, choirs, organs, and sheer drama, is manifestly, in part, a creation of the gay priesthood. Their sexuality was sublimated in a style that became integral and essential to Cosmic worship.

Then there is the common feel of a gay boy or teen, brought up in the church, who turns to God in struggling with the question of his departure and displacement from the normal. He is forced to ponder deeper questions than about of his peers, acquires powerful skills of observation, and develops a precocious spirituality that never fully leaves him. This resonates for myself every bit a Catholic boy and teen. The get-go person I e'er came out to was God, in a silent prayer on my manner to Communion. I was an chantry boy, knew well how to swing a brass thurible full of incense, could contend the nuances of transubstantiation by the historic period of eleven, and considered the priesthood as a vocation (I ended I wasn't practiced enough a person). Like many lonely gay Catholic boys, I saw in Jesus a model — unmarried, sensitive, outside a family, marginalized and persecuted but ultimately vindicated and forever alive.

But there are other reasons for gay men to seek the priesthood that are far from healthy. The offset is celibacy. If y'all were a young gay Catholic in centuries past, one way to avoid social ostracism, or constant questions nearly why you lacked an involvement in girls or women, was to become a priest. (I priest also told me the near powerful force behind vocations to the priesthood had long been mothers, who, intuiting that a son was "not the marrying kind," would encourage him to enter the church to salvage their family's social standing.) This pattern, though much less severe than in the past, endures. A profound lack of self-esteem, fueled in part by the church'due south homophobia, also led to some seeking the priesthood as a means to repress or somehow cure themselves.

"Before we're even teenagers, we realize that this whole thing is an abomination," said a priest I'll phone call Father John. "And and then we reach out to the teaching of the church building and effectively say, 'Fill me with what you lot are saying and I will get you. I will go a magisterial personality.' " Past magisterial, he meant embodying the Magisterium, the formal teaching of the church building. "In other words, 'I've given upward existence me.' And I have a feeling that's why you encounter so many of these guys who are really frighteningly grayness and impersonal. At some phase, they've agreed in their lives not to be themselves." I accept seen this in many priests; unable to be themselves, they become personae, symbols, and ultimately caricatures or fifty-fifty embodied masks.

Often, this unconscious struggle breaks down. It is simply too difficult non to be oneself. Some cope through cool flamboyance and loftier army camp; others sink into low. Alcoholism and addiction take over. "Oh my God," Father Andrew told me, "when I came back to the church in 2010, I couldn't get over how grossly obese these priests had go. They had been such athletes when they were immature." Another priest told me, "I buried it so deeply. And and then I had a meltdown. It was one of those moments of wanting something to happen with a friend. One evening, when I left his place, I realized I really wanted to have a human relationship with this guy. Then it came flowing out of me. I didn't want to be that person. I didn't want to be me."

Other gay priests, more self-aware and cynical, find there is a career to exist made in all of this falseness. From the 13th century onward, information technology's easy to run across how secretly gay men found in the church building, and the church lonely, a source of status and power. Marginalized exterior, within they could go advisers to monarchs, forgive others' sins, earn a stable living, bask huge privileges, and exist treated instantly with respect. Everything was suppressed, no questions were asked in seminaries, and psychological counseling was absent (and even now is rare). Scarred, scared men became priests, and certain distinct patterns emerged.

One, equally nosotros have come to learn, was sexual interim out and abuse. To conflate sexual corruption with the gay priesthood, as many now reflexively do, is a grotesque libel on the vast majority who have never contemplated such crimes and are indeed appalled by them. It is classic scapegoating. At the aforementioned time, to decouple the sexual-abuse crisis entirely from the question of gay priests is a willful avoidance of an ugly truth. Pedophilia is a carve up category exterior the question of sexual orientation. Merely some abuse of male person teens and young adults, besides equally abuse of other priests, is clearly related to homosexuality gone horribly astray — and around a quarter of the reported cases involve xv- to 17-year-old victims.

The scale of it in the late 20th century was boggling — but, in hindsight, predictable. If you do not deal honestly with your sexuality, it will deal with you lot. If you construct an institution staffed past repressed and cocky-hating men and build it on secrecy and consummate obedience to superiors, you lot have practically created a machine for dysfunction and predation. And the hideous truth is nosotros will never know the extent of the abuse in centuries by or what is yet going on, especially throughout places in the world (similar Africa and Latin America) where robust scrutiny of the church building is nonetheless sometimes taboo.

Another pattern was externalized homophobia: What you detest in yourself but cannot face, y'all law and punish in others. Information technology remains a fact that many of the most homophobic bishops and cardinals have been — and are — gay. Have the most powerful American fundamental of the 20th century, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, who died in 1967. He had an agile gay sex life for years while existence 1 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 deposition" and marriage equality as "madness." Sure enough, he was eventually forced to resign and exit the country subsequently beingness defendant of abusive sexual relationships with four other priests.

Anti-gay archconservative Central George Pell was recently found guilty of sexual abuse of boys in Australia. The founder of the once hugely influential hard-right, anti-gay cult the Legion of Christ, Marcial Maciel, was plant to take sexually abused countless men, women, and children. The leader of Church Militant, which is obsessed with gay priests, is a self-described "ex-gay." This is a good rule: Those in the hierarchy obsessed with the homosexual question oft plough out to be gay; those who are calmer tend to exist straight.

Benedict XVI has described himself as a bookish boy, balky to sports.
His soft speech is strikingly effeminate; he was seen constantly in the company of his rather dashing individual secretary, Georg Gänswein; and he bedecked himself in vestments of such extravagance they included ermine and custom cherry-red slippers. He was also the theologian who demonstrated a manic desire to police force the slightest difference from orthodoxy, who described gay people as "objectively disordered" and inclined toward an "intrinsic moral evil," and who, after he banned gay priests, called them "i of the miseries of the church." Fifty-fifty to suggest some kind of connection between all these aspects of someone who is also holy, chaste, and sensitive is to exist accused of a disgusting insinuation. But this is because then many in the hierarchy all the same cannot see homosexuality as being nearly dear and identity rather than acts and lust. As we uncover layer upon layer of dysfunction at the very top of the church, it may be time to point out how naked these bejeweled emperors can appear.

And this, of course, has added another layer of complexity to the story of gay priests: Generations matter. Those in their 70s and 80s grew upward in a different universe, where the cupboard was automatic and the notion of even discussing gay priests was scandalous. 1 priest described that generation to me as "so closeted they might as well be in Narnia." They may not fifty-fifty be enlightened they're gay. But their reaction to the modern reexamination of homosexual dear, and the consideration of sex as distinct from procreation, was panicked retrenchment. Those in their 50s or 60s or younger, by contrast, are mostly much more self-aware, and their Catholic peers and families much more accepting. This generational difference is the source of much of the conflict within the church's highest gay ranks.

At the outset of the church'due south tertiary millennium, the sex-abuse crisis exploded into public consciousness. Suddenly the entire arrangement of secrecy, clerical self-protection, embrace-ups, and scandal was brutally exposed. For most gay priests, this was a huge relief. They were as appalled equally anyone. Just they knew, too, that the system now being dismantled had concealed non only the crimes and abuses of bad priests but also the sins and consensual adult sexual practice of good ones. They had secrets too.

Remember: Celibacy is not an piece of cake job. It is incommunicable for most human beings to avoid falling in love or physically expressing their sexual existence at some indicate in their lives. In practice, these failures take often been confronted and confessed; equally long as the priests are honest and recommit to celibacy, they are allowed to become forwards. Some of the gay priests I spoke with acknowledged lapses but insisted that, in consultation with their spiritual directors and superiors, they chose celibacy when the selection became impossible to ignore or avoid. The goal, they explained, was to exist complimentary of whatever particular zipper so they could devote their entire selves to the church every bit a whole.

But most had some kind of by incident or failing that could be used against them if made public, even if it were just their identity as a gay man. And so a poisonous kind of omertà took concur, the priesthood acting as a forum of mutually assured devastation. Since many swain priests know virtually each other'due south sexuality and/or lapses, they all have the ability to blackmail 1 another. Mundane failings — like a brief matter — can become easily blurred with profound evils like child abuse. If you expose a child molester to his superior, for instance, he might betrayal your ain homosexuality and destroy your career.

This dynamic has made the clerical cupboard — not the fact of gay priests simply the fashion that fact has been hidden — a core mechanism for tolerating and enabling abuse. On elevation of all this, the vow of obedience to superiors gives gay bishops and cardinals huge sway over their priestly flock. Some, of course, realized this power could be leveraged for sex activity and abused it.

New procedures for the protection of minors were put in place after 2002. But so much impairment from the past has yet to be confronted. The McCarrick case in detail revealed that the design of darkening and toleration of corruption went to the very top of the church. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis all protected abusers or chose not to face up them. That some of the sex criminals were also responsible for directing vast sums of money to the Vatican — Maciel and McCarrick were legendary for their fund-raising — makes the toleration seem especially cynical.

We still practise not know why, exactly, the traditionalist Benedict XVI decided to be the get-go pope to resign the office, merely some were quick to annotation that he had compiled an all-encompassing dossier on sexual corruption in the church building … and notwithstanding somehow felt unable to act. Was he simply overwhelmed by the chore, taken aback past the scale of it, and fearful that the entire church could collapse? Francis, in one of his starting time press conferences equally pope, struck out on a different grade. He reiterated the distinction betwixt sins and crimes and, while denouncing abuse, did not insist on sexual perfection in the priesthood, as long every bit failures were confessed, sins absolved, and the priest was committed to a futurity of celibacy. Then he went further in allowing for adept gay priests in the church: "The problem is not having this tendency, no; we must be brothers and sisters to one another." The problem, he said, was if gays were to grade some kind of faction or foyer within the church — but this, he explained, applied to any lobby: "a lobby of misers, a lobby of politicians, a lobby of Masons."

Francis'due south shift in tone outraged conservatives in the Vatican. (It also, perhaps, worried some powerful sexual activity abusers, who recognized the function of the clerical closet in keeping everything quiet.) And when Francis sought the advice of McCarrick, a moderate liberal, those who knew almost McCarrick'due south abuse of seminarians erupted with acrimony. In one of the near dramatic acts of dissent in the history of the mod church, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the quondam Vatican nuncio to the The states, released a alphabetic character in August claiming that McCarrick'due south abuse had been known to both Benedict XVI and the Vatican since 2000; furthermore, Francis knew of McCarrick's corruption since 2013 and was now role of a cover-up. Bourgeois commentators, like ex-Cosmic Rod Dreher and the New York Times' Ross Douthat, spoke of a potential new "schism," with Dreher using slurs like "Lavender Mafia" to describe the threat he saw to established doctrine.

Viganò went further. He called on the pope to resign: "Nosotros must tear downwards the conspiracy of silence with which bishops and priests have protected themselves at the expense of their true-blue, a conspiracy of silence that in the optics of the world risks making the church await similar a sect, a conspiracy of silence not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the Mafia." Viganò also named some of the more liberal cardinals who were protégés of McCarrick. "No one at the Vatican was fooled for 1 moment," James Alison, a gay priest and theologian well sourced in church politics, told me. "This was nigh as shut to a public outing as everyone except a journalist from outside the Catholic circle would attempt." Alison believes this may have hurt Viganò's case. "It frightened even some of Viganò'due south more conservative allies into realizing that they could be outed too if this came to a major intra-cupboard war." So they pulled back. (The lull may exist temporary. A book due out in February, In the Closet of the Vatican , by the French journalist Frédéric Martel, is said to contain extraordinary evidence of gay hypocrisy in the Vatican for several decades.)

But Viganò's testimony on the key question — that an actively abusive homosexual fundamental was knowingly tolerated by John Paul II and Bridegroom XVI and consulted by Francis — had the band of truth. Tellingly, when confronted with the allegation, Francis made no endeavor to deny the charges, refused to release any documents that could disprove Viganò's claims, and instead chosen for "silence" and prayer.

In September, Francis appeared to lose his self-possession. He equated Viganò's alphabetic character with the work of the Devil: "In these times, it seems like the Smashing Accuser has been unchained and is attacking bishops. He tries to uncover the sins, then they are visible in order to scandalize the people." He convened a global top of cardinals to take place in Rome in Feb to discuss the entire question of sexual abuse in the church building. It may well go a moment of reckoning for his papacy — and those of his two predecessors. It may strength some kind of conclusion about the office of gay priests, clerical celibacy, and homosexuality beyond the church. Information technology is clear to everyone that the current apparatus of secrecy, hypocrisy, abuse, and homophobia needs to end if the church building's moral authority has any take a chance of being restored. But how?

O ne possible option is the preference of the Catholic right: for all those implicated in the McCarrick camouflage to resign, including, one presumes, Francis (and Pope Emeritus Benedict Sixteen?); for a massive investigation to be launched into how gay priests, bishops, and cardinals came to exist then common and powerful; and for strict enforcement of the 2005 ban on priests. But purging the priesthood of "homosexual tendencies" would require removing up to a third of the clergy in the U.S. and dismissing scores of bishops and cardinals, including many who have maintained celibacy, preached orthodoxy, and lived exemplary lives. Countless lay Catholics would watch their priests be outed and fired by the church building. How would they react?

The mass firings would brand the church building as baldly homophobic and easily lead to mass resignations and a further reject in vocations. So be it, the traditionalists say. They want a much smaller, purer church building. Merely few potential popes would want to be the one who precipitated the implosion. More to the point: It could make the problem worse. The church would lose all those priests who are adjusted enough to be honest about their orientation and keep all of those who are the most deeply damaged, closeted, and cocky-loathing. The potential for sexual abuse could increment.

A 2nd choice would be a fudge, a rerun of 2005, when the church said all gay priests should be fired and no gay men be admitted to the seminary … then did nothing much about it. This would be, in some means, the worst choice. It was precisely the simultaneous retention and anathematization of closeted gay priests that, over the decades, helped fuel the abuse and its camouflage.

A 3rd option would simply encourage an end to the clerical closet, which is to say, ask all priests to obey 1 of the Ten Commandments: not to lie about themselves. It would require gay priests to identify equally such to their superiors and parishioners and, in clearing the air, make a renewed public vow of celibacy. (Whether celibacy is healthy for the church is its own question, i oddly distinct from the current crisis; a relaxation of the rules wouldn't in itself resolve the church's position on homosexuality, and an embrace of homosexuality is compatible with a celibate priesthood.) Encouraging an end to the closet would underline the distinction the church building formally makes between homosexual identity and homosexual acts. It would deter disturbed closet cases from entering the priesthood and provide priestly part models for gay Catholics who find themselves called to celibacy. Those gay priests who refused to be fully transparent could get out. Cardinals and bishops and directors of seminaries could insist on frank discourse on the matter. Double lives would become far less common. If a priest is committed to celibacy and doing a skilful job, why is his public gayness a problem?

The only obstacle standing in the way of this path is the homophobia formally embedded into church doctrine in 1986 by the futurity Benedict XVI. The church building now explicitly teaches that gay people are "considerately disordered" because their very being leads them to an intrinsic moral evil. This "evil" is the orientation to take sex that cannot lead to procreation — the same reason the church opposes birth control for straight couples. The difference, of course, is that birth control is a option, while gayness isn't.

A better analogy would perhaps be the infertile, who also, simply because of the way they are, cannot have procreative sex. Just the church does not call them "considerately disordered." It eagerly marries them, as well equally elderly straight couples. In fact, the church embraces every other minority, person with a inability, and private persecuted or marginalized past society because of some involuntary characteristic. No other group of human beings is described by the church as "objectively matted."

At some point yous realize that this is, in the cease, the bottom line. At that place is a deep and un-Christian cruelty at the eye of the church building's teaching, a bigotry profoundly at odds with the church's ain commitment to seeing every person as worthy of respect, deserving of protection, and made in the image of God. Information technology'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 building's own feel. "The hierarchy is tying itself in knots in public over something it has already conceded in individual," Begetter Leo explained to me. The chore, information technology seems to me, is not to rid the church of homosexuality, which is an integral function of the human mystery, but of hypocrisy, dishonesty, and dysfunction. Impossible? I admit to, at times, a crushing fatalism. Only I also believe, every bit a Catholic, that nothing is incommunicable with God.

O due north a Sunday morning in late 2017, at the conservative parish of St. Bernadette in Milwaukee, Male parent Gregory Greiten was extremely nervous. The side by side day, the National Catholic Reporter would be publishing an article he wrote in which he would come out as gay. No 1 in his congregation knew in advance, and now he was about to say Mass. He wanted to tell his own parish start.

Father Greg — aye, this is his real name — had gone to a high-school seminary, where some same-sex teen experimentation had gone on, and he'd been exposed as 1 of the culprits and outed to his family. "I totally had a meltdown the twenty-four hour period my parents were called in," he told me. "I was crying my eyes out … The scars that were left — they gave me PTSD for years." He suppressed his sexuality and pursued what he saw as his calling to exist a priest but suffered a breakdown over his gayness when he was 24. In fourth dimension, he recovered and focused on his ministry building, but after 25 years of celibate priesthood, he finally decided he couldn't lie about himself anymore and retain his integrity. He found his way in 2017 to a retreat for gay priests run by New Ways Ministry, a gay-friendly Catholic grouping. "To come to a place where you could be so open and and then honest — it was and then liberating to be around people who only want to talk and be honest and follow their own path of authenticity." It boosted his confidence.

He was worried about his pension and health insurance, but "I thought, Well, if you want to take the priesthood from me, take it … I'm not masquerading as a straight man to help the church ignore the matter anymore. I drank that poisonous substance nearly of the years of my life. If you lot need me to lie near who I am, then the priesthood is a sham."

As we spoke, there was no anger in his voice, only a midwestern folksiness. He told me that the toll of the closet was immense on many around him, including suicides that had been hushed upwards. He was aware that it was relatively easy for him to come out; he knew his own tape of celibacy was unblemished since he was 24. Others were more than compromised and could exist more easily targeted. If he wasn't going to accept the atomic number 82, who else would?

That Sunday morning, when he stood up to deliver his homily, he felt his mouth dry out up. The church was packed, and equally he started to tell his story, the silence was shut to unbearable. He soldiered on. No response. Somewhen, a adult female stood up in the pews and he braced himself. "God bless you, Father! God bless y'all!" she yelled. And then, all at one time, the congregation rose and applauded. At the end of the homily, some other continuing ovation.

He hasn't looked back since. The archbishop of Milwaukee offered a public statement, regretting that Father Greg had come out but pledging to treat him with "understanding and compassion." Greg told me he has had no personal interaction with the archbishop since he told him he'd exist coming out. He did get a kind vocalism-mail on his birthday, though.

"This year has been ane of the best years of my life," Greg said. "I feel much closer to Jesus. Someone asked me if I had regrets and I said to him, 'Do you know what freedom is? Because if you do, y'all wouldn't take asked the question.' All that free energy that went into creating a faux self … the banter … all that pretending is done. I wish other priests could accept some of that freedom." Then he offered something unexpected: "I want to say something about my mom. My mom has done for me what the church has never done — which is to love and respect me for who I am and who God has created me to be." Maybe at some signal, Female parent Church will do the aforementioned.

*This article appears in the January 21, 2019, outcome ofNew York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

Gay Priests and the Lives They No Longer Want to Hide