Priest counseled gay Catholics before silencing
July 31, 1937 - Jan. 1, 2014
The Rev. Robert Nugent, a Roman Catholic priest who spent more than 30 years counseling gay and lesbian Catholics and their families until the Vatican silenced him in 1999, died Jan. 1 in Milwaukee. He was 76.
The cause was lung cancer, said Sister Jeannine Gramick, a nun who worked with him in founding New Ways Ministry, a group advocating full acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in the church and in society.
Before his censure — in a ruling written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI six years later — Father Nugent had walked a fine line between obedience to church doctrine and what he said was a calling to minister to a group at the margins of orthodox Catholic faith.
New Ways Ministry, which he and Sister Gramick started in 1977 in a storefront office in Mount Rainier, Md., sought to push back those margins. It provided counseling and group retreats to help explain church doctrine to gay and lesbian Catholics (and their often devastated parents); tried to help them come to grips with a dogma that described homosexual sex as an “intrinsic evil”; and, more broadly, made it an article of faith that despite appearances it was still possible to be both a Catholic and a gay person.
The ministry gave its founders a platform from which they tried to open communication on a topic the church considered closed. In the two decades before they were ordered to stop, they lectured widely and met often with bishops, theologians and heads of national Catholic organizations in efforts to widen their perspective on gays in the fold.
For his efforts, Father Nugent was censured by the church for being too accommodating toward a behaviorally “disordered” population, and scolded by his gay and lesbian flock for being too orthodox.
Responding to complaints from American conservative clergy, Vatican officials first warned Father Nugent against imparting “ambiguous” information in his workshops. They then barred him in 1978 from performing sacramental duties like confession and communion. New Ways Ministry, which was never officially sanctioned by the church, came under a Vatican investigation in 1988.
In Roman Catholic dogma, “homosexual orientation” is not a moral wrong in itself (though it “may indicate a tendency toward evil”), and the church instructs its members to show compassion and respect toward gays and lesbians. But it regards same-sex intercourse as “a violation of divine and natural law,” because it cannot lead to procreation, and thus considers it an “intrinsic evil” and a mortal sin.
Father Nugent, who took pains to assure superiors of his fealty to the church and its doctrines, had come to adopt a more accepting view. “People don’t choose to be gay or lesbian,” he told an interviewer in 1997. “They must be recognized for who they are.”
He and Sister Gramick tended to skirt the “intrinsic evil” message, said Francis DeBernardo, a layman who became executive director of New Ways Ministry in the mid1980s, after the church authorities initially ordered them to give up their leadership roles. “Whether people were having morally approved or unapproved sex was not the focus of the ministry,” Mr. DeBernardo said.
Cardinal Ratzinger, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office charged with safeguarding church teaching, said — in effect — that it should have been.
Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, has expressed a more welcoming view, though the doctrine remains the same. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Pope Francis said in July. The remark gave Father Nugent “great consolation,” Sister Gramick said.
Forbidden to minister to gay and lesbian Catholics, Father Nugent returned to pastoral duties in 2000 at St. John the Baptist Church in New Freedom, Pa., in York County in the south-central portion of the state, where he remained until retiring last year. Sister Gramick is executive co-director of the National Coalition of American Nuns, a small liberal group.
Charles Robert Nugent was born in Norristown, Pa., outside Philadelphia, on July 31, 1937. He graduated from St. Charles Seminary in Philadelphia and was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in 1965. He entered the Salvatorian order, as the society is known, in 1977.
Father Nugent and Sister Gramick began working together in the early 1970s. A member of the order School Sisters of Notre Dame, she ran a counseling project for lesbian and gay Catholics at Villanova University, outside Philadelphia, and he began helping out while studying there for a master’s degree in library science.