Homosexuality in the Priesthood and the Religious Life/Gay Priests
Kennedy, Eugene
BOOKS Homosexual priests & nuns: two assessments In no area is the humanity of the Catholic church-or its kinship with all other earthly institutions-more evident than in its attitudes toward...
...Bedeviled by, but absorbed with their problems of identity, they describe their plight of finding that within the church their longings for affiliation are regularly coun-terpointed by the traumas of actual and potential rejection...
...While this sample is small, it constitutes actual data, which coincide with impressions held by many persons who work closely with priests and seminarians...
...GAY PRIESTS Edited by James G. Wolf Harper & Row, $17.95, 192 pp...
...In the first part of Gay Priests, James Wolf, a married layman, reports and analyzes the responses of 101 gay priests to a questionnaire on a wide variety of attitudes and issues concerning their lives and work...
...through behavior that they so easily rationalize...
...For if, at one moment, the church can seem dogmatically unforgiving of the reminders of the flesh, in the next it can be as pastorally patient and understanding as Jesus was about sexual conflicts and failings...
...He seems somewhat irritated with prospective readers, urging them, if they "mainly want to know what percentage of priests are gay, to carefully examine your own motivation...
...Wolf's report, contentious or not, does present almost the only organized data we have on gay priests...
...While the reader is asked, especially by the essayists, to be sympathetic to the dilemma of gay men denied expression of their sexuality by an oppressive institution, there is apparently little interest in exploring the possible damage they may do to themselves and others (their partners, congregations, students...
...But I did not hear their voices in sufficient numbers in these books to make me conclude that the full-range of gay presence in the service of the church is represented...
...53.5 percent state that they have become more sexually active since ordination...
...They love the church but, often echoing the popular contemporary liberation themes, they find it an oppressor as blind and devouring of their humanity as a totalitarian regime...
...Even the reader most determined to be understanding will feel that gay clergy themselves are served poorly by a presentation that fails to explore the nature and demands of fidelity and trustworthiness in all human relationships...
...terribly alone," he urges the latter, whom he describes as "doubly marginalized," to "recognize and rejoice in the cen-trality of their position, the importance of religious life to gay culture throughout Christian history, and the prominence of gay people and their feelings and sensitivities within Christian religious life...
...A question such as yours may tell as much about you as it does about them...
...These are real men and women telling us of life on the frontlines of their experience as gay priests and religious...
...The many deeply dedicated gay priests and religious I have known over the years never struck me as embroiled with their own psyches...
...One cannot, however, mistake the tone of the introduction by Jay R. Feierman, M.D., identified as clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico...
...He rightly acknowledges that the survey component is burdened with sampling difficulties and the other hazards of social science exploration, suggesting that the results, although not "definitive," do "outline some interpersonal, psychological, and spiritual concerns that appear to be productive topics for more extensive research...
...The absence of any full description or understanding of the persons with whom priests have their sometimes numerous sexual contacts is distressing...
...Two-thirds of our sample," the author observes, "estimated between 40 percent and 60 percent of the ordained clergy are gay....Three-fourths of our sample estimated between 40 percent and 70 percent of current seminarians are gay...
...The second part consists of four essays written by gay priests about their personal and pastoral experiences...
...The Yale historian senses the damaged self-esteem underlying the cries from the hearts of these essayists...
...We must, therefore, be grateful for it, for much can be read, as biblical scholars remind us, even from fragments...
...They have all made peace, some heroically, with the burden that gay-ness, despite Boswell's assertion, seems to be at the present time in religious life...
...How can the full truth of the contemporary priesthood be constructed with the estimates that Wolf's respondents offer on the pervasiveness of gay clergy...
...Wolf, having splinted together two quite different approaches, assures us that, modest as the endeavor is, it works, and that, in effect, the truth is here for us to inspect...
...His most recent book is Cardinal Bernardin (Bonus Books).rdinal Bernardin (Bonus Books...
...Their ministerial energy flowed from this admirable self-forgetful-ness, as indeed it must for heterosexuals as well...
...Talking smoothly and confidently, Wolf wants us to make less rather than more of the uneven stitching in the seam that holds this opus together...
...And just as a husband's infidelity does not automatically lead to divorce from his wife, so the sexual activity of a priest does not irrevocably negate his commitment to and his position in the church...
...This many-storied structure rises on the substantial foundation of reflective chapters by historian John Boswell and theologians Rosemary Ruether and Daniel Maguire...
...EUGENE KENNEDY teaches in the psychology department at Loyola University (Chicago...
...Rather the book tends to confirm impressions that a sizable number of profoundly self-absorbed men are struggling with the difficulties of leading double lives...
...Liking and wanting to help people, more sensitive to the rhythms of the world and its inhabitants than many of their peers, they are vulnerable to hurt in every act of reaching out or serving others...
...Although Rosemary Ruether and Daniel Maguire contribute characteristically thoughtful chapters, it is Boswell who speaks like a knowing therapist to the feelings expressed in the autobiographical contributions of gay priests and religious that follow these opening essays...
...Many times, these contributors discuss the special "gift" of the gay person for ministry...
...Almost three-quarters of Wolf's sample claim that they have occasionally or frequently engaged in homosexual activity since ordination...
...Arriving at a moment of heightened concern about the extent and implications of homosexuality among the ordained and vowed, these volumes transcend the anecdotal evidence on which most discussions of this subject have so far been based...
...This start, with its revelations and limitations, makes the need for more intensive explorations of this issue all the more urgent...
...The highest assessments of gay clergy and seminarians come from those most recently ordained...
...Although he acknowledges that "there have been some tragic aspects to the intersection of homosexuality and religious life," resulting in "gays and lesbians [being...
...Eugene Kennedy unusual in past centuries...
...Boswell suggests that being gay is nothing new to the religious life, citing among other pieces of evidence, monastic poetry which implies that spiritual and erotic bonding between members of the same sex, if not commonplace, was not HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE PRIESTHOOD AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE Edited by Jeannine Gramick Crossroad, $14.95, 251 pp...
...One of the pseudonymous contributors to this book cannot possibly hear the narcissism in his observation that, "Needless to say, having a lover while continuing to live a celibate, rectory way of life can be extremely taxing...
...There is no saving irony in this comparison, no sense that acts of infidelity betray and finally kill many marriages far short of the divorce court...
...Granting that the needs of gay priests and religious must be addressed, so too, must the implications of this phenomenon for the church in the U.S...
...They speak as persons who, beneath the rage of battle, manage to find a peaceful niche in which to pray and think about their lives...
...These two books are products of this equivocal tradition, allowing us to hear the voices of homosexual priests and religious, as if in a vast antiphonal choir, singing of the sadness, joy, and hope of their lives...
...Combining this observation with the number of sexual contacts reported by his subjects justifies his somewhat restrained conclusion that "the findings of this study bring up many questions about past and future development of the Catholic clergy and the Roman Catholic church as a whole...
...Jeannine Gramick is well known for her work with gay religious and her book is largely composed of autobiographical reflections by men and women who have faced and come variously to terms with their homosexual identities...
...Discussing the confusion about celibacy, he suggests that it "is perhaps better to think of a priest's commitment to celibacy (in the traditional sense) as a commitment to fidelity with the church in much the same way as a man and a woman promise to remain faithful to each other in marriage...
...Still, the self-conscious tone of these assertions may leave the reader feeling that at least some of these individuals who see themselves as talented at helping others are also immensely preoccupied with their own emotional needs...
...though not always, it must be added, in perfect harmony...
...It is difficult to escape the speculation that a reinterpreted notion of the priestly life as "sexually active celibacy" is already in place in the culture of American Catholicism...
...Readers, who cannot but be touched by the goodness and sincerity of these men and women, will also better understand their inner worlds for which acceptance and support are so crucial for survival and functioning, the very simple human responses the official church systematically denies them through banning the Dignity chapters that seem so helpful to them...
...BOOKS Homosexual priests & nuns: two assessments In no area is the humanity of the Catholic church-or its kinship with all other earthly institutions-more evident than in its attitudes toward sexuality, which are warped by ambiguity as thick and tingling as the air after a lightning storm...
...Wolf also tells us that many members of the clergy, at least as typified by his respondents, "have gone beyond a stage of merely questioning the church's authority in requiring the vow of celibacy to a point where they have managed to compartmentalize their sexual lives...
...Their image, however, is largely absent from this survey...
...They are frequently models of dedication, asceticism, and self-sacrifice...
...The Catholic church has been blessed for years with wonderful priests and religious who have been homosexuals...
...While Wolf is at pains to present his subjects sympathetically, drawing, for example, on the work of the late social psychologist Gordon Allport to support his characterization of these men as "victims," he does not explore questions that may be validly asked on the basis of his own information...
...These, Wolf reminds us, are "impressions" that may reflect "wishful thinking," but he does conclude that homosexuality is not incompatible with the priesthood, suggesting that gays are not drawn to the priesthood to find an all-male sanctuary but out of higher-order motives of service...
...We may be grateful that a beginning has been made in exploring homosexuality in the Catholic church...
Vol. 117 • January 1990 • No. 2
