A church that, since 2005, bans priests with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” and officially teaches that gay men are “objectively disordered” and inherently disposed toward “intrinsic moral evil” is actually composed, in ways very few other institutions are, of gay men. The massive cognitive dissonance this requires is becoming harder to sustain.
The collapse of the closet in public and private life in the past three decades has made the disproportionate homosexuality of the Catholic priesthood much less easy to hide, ignore, or deny. This cultural and moral shift has not only changed the consciousness of most American Catholics (67 percent of whom support civil marriage for gay couples) and gay priests (many of whom are close to quitting) but also broken the silence that long shrouded the subject.įive years ago, Pope Francis made his watershed “Who am I to judge?” remark after being asked about a flawed gay priest. “A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality,” Francis went on. “I replied with another question: ‘Tell me, when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person. Here we enter into the mystery of the human being.” In the final draft of the 2014 Synod on the Family, Francis included explicit mention of the “gifts and qualities” of homosexuals, asking, “Are we capable of welcoming ?” These sentiments won 62 percent of the votes of the synod bishops - just shy of what was necessary to pass, but still evidence of a sharp shift in tone in official Catholic teaching.
They also triggered near panic on the Catholic right. Alarmed by the possibility that divorced and remarried people might be welcomed as well as gays, traditionalists launched a fierce rearguard campaign against the new papacy, with a focus on what some called a “Lavender Mafia” running the church, and broke new ground in connecting this directly to the horrifying revelations of sex abuse that came to light in 2002. In increasingly direct ways, they have argued that the root of the scandal was not abuse of power, or pedophilia, or clericalism, or the distortive psychological effects of celibacy and institutional homophobia, but gayness itself. “There is a homosexual culture, not only among the clergy but even within the hierarchy, which needs to be purified at the root,” the American cardinal Raymond Burke declared in August. Bishop Robert Morlino of Wisconsin agreed. “If you’ll permit me, what the church needs now is more hatred” of homosexual sexual behavior, “a sin so grave that it cries out to heaven for vengeance.” Michael Hichborn, head of the fringe-right Lepanto Institute, called for a “complete and thorough removal of all homosexual clergymen from the church … It is going to be difficult and will likely result in a very serious priest shortage, but it’s definitely worth the effort.” “It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation,” he wrote.
The unseemly fall this past summer of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, one of the most powerful American cardinals of his time, provided a cause célèbre for this faction. It emerged that McCarrick had abused at least two children and then sexually harassed generations of adult seminarians with impunity.