Sur les Meetic pour mineurs, un problème de majeurs
Gay priests stand quietly at the center of the Catholic Church’s sexual crisis.
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin — Gregory Greiten was 17 years old when the priests organized the game. It was 1982 and he was on a retreat with his classmates from St. Lawrence, a Roman Catholic seminary for teenage boys training to become priests. Leaders asked each boy to rank which he would rather be: burned over 90 percent of his body, paraplegic or gay.
Each chose to be scorched or paralyzed. Not one uttered the word “gay.”
The lesson stuck. Seven years later, he climbed up into his seminary dorm window and dangled one leg over the edge. “I really am gay,” Father Greiten, now a priest near Milwaukee, remembered telling himself for the first time. “It was like a death sentence.”
The closet of the Roman Catholic Church hinges on an impossible contradiction. For years, church leaders have driven gay congregants away in shame and insisted that “homosexual tendencies” are “disordered.” And yet, thousands of priests are gay.
The stories of gay priests are hidden from the outside world, known only to one another, if they are known at all.
Fewer than about 10 priests in the United States have dared to come out publicly. But gay men probably make up at least 30 to 40 percent of the American Catholic clergy, according to dozens of estimates from gay priests and researchers. Some priests say the number is closer to 75 percent.
Two dozen gay American priests and seminarians shared details of their lives with The New York Times. Almost all of them required confidentiality. A few had been forbidden to even speak about homosexuality. The church almost always controls a priest’s housing, health insurance and retirement pension. He could lose all three if his bishop finds his sexuality disqualifying, even if he is celibate.
The environment for gay priests has grown only more dangerous. The fall of Theodore E. McCarrick, the once-powerful cardinal who was defrocked on February 16 for sexual abuse of boys and young men, has inflamed accusations that homosexuality is to blame for the resurgent abuse crisis.
Studies repeatedly find there to be no connection between being gay and abusing children. And yet prominent bishops have singled out gay priests as the root of the
“It really never was my shame. It was the church’s shame. They’re the ones that should have the shame for what they have done to myself and many, many other L.G.B.T. people.” FATHER GREGORY GREITEN
problem, and right-wing media organizations attack what they have called the church’s “homosexual subculture” or “gay cabal.”
Even Pope Francis has grown more critical in recent months. He has recommended that men with “this deep-seated tendency” not be accepted for ministry.
A few years ago, this shift was almost unimaginable. When Pope Francis uttered his revolutionary question, “Who am I to judge?” in 2013, he tempted the closet door to swing open. A cautious few priests stepped through. But the sex abuse crisis and widespread blaming have driven many priests deeper into the closet.
“The vast majority of gay priests are not safe,” said Father Bob Bussen, a priest in Utah who was outed about 12 years ago.
“Life in the closet is worse than scapegoating,” he said. “It is not a closet. It is a cage.”
The code is taught early, often in seminary. Numquam duo, semper tres, the warning goes. Never two, always three. Move in trios, never as a couple. The higher-ups warned for years: Any male friendship is too dangerous and could slide into something sexual.
“You couldn’t have a particular friendship with a man, because you might end up being homosexual,” said a priest. “And you couldn’t have a friendship with a woman, because you might end up falling in love, and they were both against celibacy. With whom do you have a relationship that would be a healthy human relationship?”
Today, training for the priesthood in the United States usually starts in or after college. But until about 1980, the church often recruited boys to start as teenagers, who are in the throes of puberty. For many priests and bishops over 50, this environment limited healthy sexual development. Priests cannot marry, so sexuality from the start was about abstinence, and obedience.
Father Greiten was 24 when he realized he was gay and considered jumping from his dorm window. He did not jump, but confided his despair in a classmate. His friend came out himself. It was a revelation: There were other people studying to be priests who were gay. It was just that no one talked about it.
“It’s kind of like an open closet,” Father Greiten said. “It’s the making of it public, and speaking about it, where it becomes an issue.”
Many priests said they had had sex with other men to explore their sexual identity. Some have watched pornography to see what it is like for two men to have sex.
“I was in my 50s when I came out. I entered the seminary at 18, a young, enthusiastic, white, male virgin who doesn’t know anything, let alone straight or gay. There were years that I carried this secret. My prayer was not that, would God change me. It was that I would die before anyone found out.” FATHER BOB BUSSEN
They found more anguish than pleasure.
The closet means that many priests have held the most painful stories among themselves: The seminarian who died by suicide, and the matches from a gay bar found afterward in his room. The priest friends who died of AIDS. The feeling of coming home to an empty rectory every night.
So they find ways to encourage one another. They share books like Father James Martin’s groundbreaking “Building a Bridge,” on the relationship between the Catholic and L.G.B.T. communities. Some have signed petitions against church-sponsored conversion therapy programs, or have met on private retreats, after figuring out how to conceal them on their church calendars. Occasionally, a priest may even take off his collar and offer to unofficially bless a gay couple’s marriage.
Some may call this rebellion. But “it is not a cabal,” one priest said. “It is a support group.”
Just over a year ago, after meeting with a group of gay priests, Father Greiten decided it was time to end his silence. At Sunday Mass, during Advent, he told his parish he was gay, and celibate. They leapt to their feet in applause.
His story went viral. A 90-yearold priest called to say he had lived his life in the closet and longed for the future to be different.
His archbishop, Jerome E. Listecki of Milwaukee, issued a statement saying that he wished Father Greiten had not gone public. Letters poured in calling him “satanic,” “gay filth” and a “monster” who sodomized children.
Studies show that homosexuality is not a predictor of child molestation. This is also true for priests, according to a study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City after revelations in 2002 about sex abuse in the church.
The research, which church leaders commissioned, found that same-sex experience did not make priests more likely to abuse minors, and that four out of five people who said they were victims were male. Researchers found no single cause for this abuse, but identified that abusive priests’ extensive access to boys had been critical to their choice of victims.
The notion that a certain sexual identity leads to abusive behavior has demoralized gay priests for decades. This perception persists at prominent Catholic seminaries. At the largest in the United States, Mundelein Seminary in Illinois, few ever talk about sexual identity, said one gay student, who is afraid to ever come out. Since last summer, when Mr. McCarrick was exposed for abusing young men, students have been drilled in rules about celibacy and the evils of masturbation and pornography.
“Classmates will say, ‘Don’t admit gays,’” said the student. “Their attitude is that it is gay priests who inflict abuse on younger guys.”
Priests are wondering if their sacrifice is worth the personal cost. “Am I going to leave the priesthood because I’m sick of that accusation?” asked Father Michael Shanahan, a Chicago priest who came out publicly three years ago. “Become more distant from parishioners? Am I going to hide? Become hardened, and old?”
A few years after the 2002 scandal, the Vatican banned gay men from seminaries and ordination. When the abuse crisis broke out again last summer, the former Vatican ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, accused “homosexual networks” of American cardinals of secretly working to protect abusers. And a new book titled “Sodoma” in Europe (“In the Closet of the Vatican” in the United States) claims to expose a vast gay subculture at the Vatican.
A group of gay priests in the Netherlands recently took the bold step of writing to Pope Francis, urging him to allow gay, celibate men to be ordained.
Father Greiten reflected on it all. He wished he could talk to Pope Francis himself.
“It’s not just about the sexual abuse crisis,” he said. “They are sexually traumatizing and wounding yet another generation. We have to stand up and say no more sexual abuse, no more sexual traumatizing, no more sexual wounding. We have to get it right when it comes to sexuality.”