“Individuals who describe themselves as gay”

Huh?

What are you saying here, Barbara? What are “individuals who describe themselves as gay”?

Are you trying to say, as many anti-gay activists do, that gay people really aren’t gay, they just think they are?

You do realize that this evidence of animus and bias only makes what you have to say seem lacking in credibility, don’t you?

Actually, I think that the Vatican is itself unintentionally providing a solution to the problem, as far as the future is concerned, with its present policies. As someone on another blog put it:

“Removing gay priests a) does nothing to prevent pedophiles from entering the clergy and b) knocks out a wide base of men who might actually be guilted into it.”

The RC bishops have lost much of their credibility by the exposure of their cover-up, over many decades, of sexual abuse by clergy. This means that more and more gay Catholics will think twice about letting the Church hierarchy dictate to them about how they should live their lives. This, combined with the attempt, in so far as it is successful, to ban gays from the priesthood, should mean that increasingly fewer gay Catholics will be “guilted into it”, as the blogger put it.

I might mention that a boyhood friend of mine did actually try the priesthood years ago as a means of copping out of being gay, but he was expelled from the seminary. It was only decades later that I found out what had led him to enter the seminary and why he had been expelled. I think that he had a lucky escape. I’m sure that he thinks so too.

What I would say, however, is that both homophobic and paedophilic abuse are liable to have very similar effects on the lives of those who are subjected to them, causing psychological and emotional injuries from which it may take many years to recover. The homophobic and the paedophilic abuser have much in common; indeed, they can even be the same person.

I do believe that there are many gay Roman Catholic priests who ought not to be priests, but who feel trapped in the priesthood, and I feel extremely sorry for them. I understand how this can happen, and I think that the benighted teaching of the RC Church on both celibacy and homosexuality is largely, if not wholly, to blame.

Let’s look at it this way. You’re a gay Catholic adolescent. As you enter puberty you realise that the interest in, and attraction to, the other sex which your peers are displaying is something that simply isn’t happening to you. Oh well, you tell yourself, I must be a late developer, and you wait patiently for so-called “normal” feelings to develop. They don’t. Instead, you find that all the people who erotically attract you are people of your own sex. You had never expected this! You try to ignore it. You start to have sexual dreams, as all adolescent boys do; but all your dreams are about other guys. You may try to kill these attractions by devoting an increasing amount of time to prayer, attending Mass, saying the rosary etc. You go to Confession more frequently. It doesn’t make any difference.

By the time you get into your late teens you start to think more seriously about your future. Your church teaches that your homosexual orientation is “an intrinsically disordered condition” and that any physical expression of it, no matter what the circumstances, is a sin, so if you can’t change your sexuality to make it fit your faith – and you almost certainly can’t, despite the claims of some fringe psychiatrists and of the “ex-gay” cults – then you have to spend the rest of your life with no prospect of a legitimate loving sexual relationship with anyone – a bleak prospect indeed. Life seems to have no purpose. But you can give your lonely life a purpose, as you mistakenly think, by becoming a Catholic priest. In fact, isn’t it obvious that that must be what God is calling you to do? What nobler calling could there be? And since you’ll be celibate, you won’t have to deal with your sexuality at all. Furthermore, if God is really calling you to the priesthood, then clearly you can’t really have this “intrinsically disordered condition” after all, so you can just bury the “issue” for good. But it’s an illusion. It’s rather like shoving an unpaid bill away in a drawer and hoping that it won’t come again.

The above is, I’m sure, a fair summary of the process by which some (or many?) gay Catholic men who have no vocation to the priesthood manage to convince themselves that they do have one.

I understand about this because once, years ago, I started thinking along those lines myself. I just thank God that I didn’t think along them for very long.

I know, because that was how my father counseled me.

Frankly, the sacrifice that is entailed in devoting oneself to that vocation–while knowing it means never experiencing the closeness of a loving, sexual relationship–is huge, and I’m actually surprised that so many are truly successful with maintaining their vows.

I’m truly torn on this issue.

On the one hand, I have to admire the spiritual strength of those who are successful in maintaining their vows, gay or not. Even though I cannot condone their preaching that I should strive to maintain a similar state of purity, I don’t think this warrants outing them.

On the other hand, if they are not maintaining their vows–especially if repeated–then, yes, they are liars and morally corrupt. I would hope they would have the moral strength to recognize their failure and leave the priesthood. If not, they should be outed.

How tortured they must be, all the time.

The untold story to-date, though, is the number of lesbians who are nuns. I know two ex-nuns who are lesbian, and I just have to wonder how many more are hiding in the closets of the nunneries.