BELLES OF ST. MARY'S :

A gay culture in the church (John Leo, May 29, 2002, Jewish World Review)

Years ago an old friend, now deceased, was ordained a priest and joined a new community in the Midwest. My friend was homosexual, and it slowly dawned on me, on a visit out there, that the other priests in the house seemed to be gay, too. So was the local bishop, according to the clerical grapevine.

I wish I could say I was overcome by an intense desire to figure out what was going on, but I wasn't. We pushed these things out of our minds in those days. Sample questions I could have asked my friend but didn't: Will straight priests feel welcome in this house, and if not, wasn't this place going to be a gay institution? What would that mean? And, what are the chances that a houseful of like-minded, high-energy, homosexual men would remain celibate? If they were sexually active, didn't this make them hypocrites, committing themselves publicly to a rule they were all ignoring? [...]

The rise of the sexually active gay subculture among the clergy didn't cause the horrors of priestly sex abuse. The vast majority of gay priests would never prey on the young.
But did the subculture play the role of enabler in the scandals? I think it did, expanding tolerance for the forbidden and generating a sense of futility among the rule-keepers. Self-deception is infinitely expandable. One man's justification for violating celibacy or the ban on nonmarital sex is another man's justification for "intergenerational love," formerly child rape.

The way out for the church is not to hunt down and expel every last gay priest, which would be impossible anyway. But it should restore the pressures to keep priests, gay and
straight, from acting out sexually, whether by showering with a mature friend or preying on a child. The key principles are easily learned: Maybe celibacy will be changed some day, but if you make a vow to stay celibate, you ought to keep your word. And in the seminaries, Catholic sexual morality should be taught by people who actually believe it. Is this controversial?

When even John Leo, who prides himself on his political incorrectness, is cowed into not asking such questions, it's no wonder that the problem grows to crisis proportions. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 29, 2002 9:13 AM