As Catholic Sex Abe Crisis Deepens, Conservative Circl Blame Gay Prits : NPR

Contents:

• 80 PERCENT OF PRITS THE VATIN ARE GAY: NEW BOOK
• THE GAY CHURCH
• CATHOLIC DCE SAYS GAY AND TRANS PEOPLE N'T BE BAPTIZED OR RECEIVE COMMUNN
• WHAT ABOUT ‘GAY’ PRITS?
• ONE GAY PRIT’S STORY
• GAY PRITS: BREAKG THE SILENCE
• GAY FORMER PRIT: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 'IS A SICK STUTN'
• I ME OUT AS A GAY, CATHOLIC PRIT ON THE FEAST OF THE ANNUNCIATN
• FOUR FIVE VATIN PRITS ARE GAY, BOOK CLAIMS
• AS CATHOLIC SEX ABE CRISIS DEEPENS, CONSERVATIVE CIRCL BLAME GAY PRITS

80 PERCENT OF PRITS THE VATIN ARE GAY: NEW BOOK

For years, church lears have driven gay ngregants away shame and sisted that “homosexual tennci” are “disorred.” And yet, thoands of the church’s prits are gay.The stori of gay prits are unspoken, veiled om the outsi world, known only to one another, if they are known at all.Fewer than about 10 prits the Uned Stat have dared to e out publicly.

A prit Florida put this way: “A third are gay, a third are straight and a third don’t know what the hell they are.”Two dozen gay prits and semarians om 13 stat shared timate tails of their liv the Catholic closet wh The New York Tim over the past two months.

THE GAY CHURCH

McCarrick, the once-powerful rdal who was ocked last week for sexual abe of boys and young men, has flamed accatns that homosexualy is to blame for the church’s rurgent abe crisis.Studi repeatedly fd there to be no nnectn between beg gay and abg children. And yet proment bishops have sgled out gay prits as the root of the problem, and right-wg media anizatns attack what they have lled the church’s “homosexual subculture,” “lavenr mafia,” or “gay bal.”Even Pope Francis has grown more cril recent months. He has lled homosexualy “fashnable,” remend that men wh “this ep-seated tenncy” not be accepted for mistry and admonished gay prits to be “perfectly rponsible, tryg to never create sndal.”This week, Pope Francis will host a much-anticipated summ on sex abe wh bishops om around the world.

Wispread spegoatg has driven many prits eper to the closet.“The vast majory of gay prits are not safe,” said Father Bob Bsen, a prit Park Cy, Utah, who was outed about 12 years ago after he held Mass for the L.G.B.T.Q. The higher-ups warned for years: Any male iendship is too dangero, uld sli to somethg sexual or uld turn to what they lled a “particular iendship.”“You uldn’t have a particular iendship wh a man, bee you might end up beg homosexual,” explaed a prit, who once nicknamed his iends “the P.F.s.” “And you uldn’t have a iendship wh a woman, bee you might end up fallg love, and they were both agast celibacy.

But I was gay, so the only other thg left was, I uld be a prit.”The sexual revolutn happeng outsi semary walls might as well have happened on the moon, and natnal ton the fight for gay rights, like the Stonewall rts, on Mars.One prit a ral dce said the l remd him of how his elementary school forced left-hand stunts to wre wh their right hand. Many gay prits spoke of beg pulled between nial and nfn, fally g out to themselv their 30s or 40s.Father Green was 24 when he realized he was gay and nsired jumpg om his dorm wdow.

CATHOLIC DCE SAYS GAY AND TRANS PEOPLE N'T BE BAPTIZED OR RECEIVE COMMUNN

It was jt that no one talked about .He reached out to a former semary profsor who he thought might also be a gay man.“There will be a time your life when you will look back on this and you’re gog to jt love yourself for beg gay,” Father Green remembered this man tellg him. “It’s the makg of public, and speakg about , where be an issue.”One prit, whose parish has no ia he is gay, remembered a backyard cktail party a few years ago where fellow prits were sayg “vile” thgs about a gay bishop. But there is still way too much homophobia the church.”All prits mt wrtle wh their vows of celibacy, and the few prits who are publicly out make clear they are chaste.Still, many prits said they had had sex wh other men to explore their sexual inty.

“I knew om the begng wasn’t gog to last.”Though open, the closet means that many prits have held the most paful stori among themselv for s: The semarian who died by suici, and the match om a gay bar found afterward his room.

WHAT ABOUT ‘GAY’ PRITS?

Letters poured llg him “satanic,” “gay filth” and a “monster” who sodomized children.“We have to get right when to sexualy.”The ia that gay prits are rponsible for child sexual abe remas a persistent belief, pecially many nservative Catholic circl.

Wh every new abe revelatn, the tangled threads of the church’s sexual culture bee even more impossible to sort out.Study after study shows that homosexualy is not a predictor of child moltatn. McCarrick was exposed for abg young men, stunts have been drilled l about celibacy and the evils of masturbatn and pornography.“Classmat will say, ‘Don’t adm gays,’” said the stunt. When the abe crisis broke out aga last summer, the former Vatin ambassador to the Uned Stat, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, acced “homosexual works” of Amerin rdals of secretly workg to protect abers.

ONE GAY PRIT’S STORY

A group of gay prits the Netherlands recently took the unually bold step of wrg to Pope Francis, urgg him to allow gay, celibate men to be ordaed.“Instead of seeg creased acuntabily on the parts of the bishops, uld bee once aga a nmnatn of lbian, gay, transsexual people wh the church,” John Coe, 63, a permanent an Kentucky, who me out last year, said about the summ.Stg his parish’s small unselg room, Father Green reflected on all. A total of about 80 percent of the most revered clerics the Roman Catholic Church are homosexual spe the church’s opposn to gay rights, acrdg to the extensively rearched book by French journalist Frédéric Martel.

The gay prits adhere to an unspoken lled “the closet, ” where is unrstood that, for stance, a rdal or bishop who nounc homosexualy is more likely to be gay, acrdg to the book “In the Closet of the Vatin. A church that, sce 2005, bans prits wh “ep-seated homosexual tennci” and officially teach that gay men are “objectively disorred” and herently disposed toward “trsic moral evil” is actually posed, ways very few other stutns are, of gay men.

This cultural and moral shift has not only changed the nscns of most Amerin Catholics (67 percent of whom support civil marriage for gay upl) and gay prits (many of whom are close to qutg) but also broken the silence that long shroud the subject. Alarmed by the possibily that divorced and remarried people might be weled as well as gays, tradnalists lnched a fierce rearguard mpaign agast the new papacy, wh a foc on what some lled a “Lavenr Mafia” nng the church, and broke new ground nnectg this directly to the horrifyg revelatns of sex abe that me to light 2002.

GAY PRITS: BREAKG THE SILENCE

In creasgly direct ways, they have argued that the root of the sndal was not abe of power, or pedophilia, or clerilism, or the distortive psychologil effects of celibacy and stutnal homophobia, but gayns self.

” Michael Hichborn, head of the ge-right Lepanto Instute, lled for a “plete and thorough removal of all homosexual clergymen om the church … It is gog to be difficult and will likely rult a very ser prit shortage, but ’s fely worth the effort. Here, seemed, was a pedophile and an abive gay man, at the very apex of the church, known to be sexually active wh semarians, protected by his peers, and tolerated for s by many the hierarchy, cludg the last three pop.

At one pot as we spoke the next day the hospal, he was greeted by a woman who asked for an on-the-spot nfsn and he shooed me asi; later I met an anguished gay man om an ultra-Catholic fay he was unselg; and for a few hours on Sunday morng, he was wh the wife and teenage sons of a dyg man. The news environment is saturated wh stori about sex abe — and rightly so — yet there are hardly any public exampl of the overwhelmg number of gay prits who would never dream of preyg upon the powerls.

GAY FORMER PRIT: THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 'IS A SICK STUTN'

For example, as the late historian John Boswell monstrated his groundbreakg, ntroversial book Christiany, Social Tolerance, and Homosexualy, a fourth-century Christian wrer, John Chrysostom, attacked the lears of the church for beg too acceptg of same-sex love and even sex: “Those very people who have been nourished by godly doctre, who stct others what they ought and ought not to do … the do not nsort wh prostut as fearlsly as they do wh young men … None is ashamed, no one blh … the chaste seem to be the odd on, and the disapprovg the on error. ” There was nsirable Christian ncern about sex general — followg the teachg of sats Pl and Augte — but no nsens that homosexualy, if kept to tense mutual love and celibate iendship, was specifilly problematic. Homosexuals, the new theology, were part of nature — many had noticed homosexual behavr the animal kgdom, particularly among har and hyenas — but they were also somehow ntrary to nature.

Carl Jung intified the archetypal gifts of the homosexual: “a great pacy for iendship, which often creat ti of astonishg tenrns between men”; a talent for teachg, athetics, and tradn (“to be nservative the bt sense and cherish the valu of the past”); “a wealth of relig feelgs, which help to brg the ecclia spirualis to realy; and a spirual receptivy which mak him rponsive to revelatn.

I ME OUT AS A GAY, CATHOLIC PRIT ON THE FEAST OF THE ANNUNCIATN

In many ways, the old, elaborate High Mass, wh s cense and procsns, lor-d vtments, lurgil plexy, mil precisn, choirs, ans, and sheer drama, is obvly, part, a creatn of the gay prithood. But some abe of male teens and young adults, as well as abe of other prits, is clearly related to homosexualy gone horribly astray — and around a quarter of the reported s volve 15- to 17-year-old victims. He was also the theologian who monstrated a manic sire to police the slightt viatn om orthodoxy, who scribed gay people as “objectively disorred” and cled toward an “trsic moral evil, ” and who, after he banned gay prits, lled them “one of the miseri of the church.

Some of the gay prits I spoke wh acknowledged laps but sisted that, nsultatn wh their spirual directors and superrs, they chose celibacy when the choice beme impossible to ignore or avoid.

FOUR FIVE VATIN PRITS ARE GAY, BOOK CLAIMS

” The problem, he said, was if gays were to form some kd of factn or lobby wh the church — but this, he explaed, applied to any lobby: “a lobby of misers, a lobby of policians, a lobby of Masons. (Whether celibacy is healthy for the church is s own qutn, one oddly distct om the current crisis; a relaxatn of the l wouldn’t self rolve the church’s posn on homosexualy, and an embrace of homosexualy is patible wh a celibate prithood. For gay, lbian, bisexual and queer people, that would mean endg same-sex relatnships, and for trans people, would mean livg as the sex they were assigned at birth, although the guidance says trans people who have unrgone "physil chang to the body" aren’t required to reverse, acrdance wh Catholic doctre, the guidance says children of same-sex married upl n be baptized if they are raised the Catholic fah and tght that same-sex marriage go agast the church's teachgs.

AS CATHOLIC SEX ABE CRISIS DEEPENS, CONSERVATIVE CIRCL BLAME GAY PRITS

’”Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignyUSA, which advot for LGBTQ rights the Catholic Church, said the guidance is part of a larger trend of dc’ "makg statements that look like they're tryg to be helpful to gay, queer and transgenr people but that are really dog harm to the spirual, emotnal and physil health of our muny and to fai. And so this ll for the civil regnn and protectn of gay civil unns, 's really an affirmatn of the humany of gay and lbian persons - that he's sayg that bee gay and lbian persons are human begs, that society, that the state, that ernments have an obligatn and a duty to protect their basic human rights.MARTIN: Do extendg the right to a civil unn and acknowledgg that LGBTQ people should be allowed to have a partner their life through a civil unn and a fay - do that mean children?MASSINGALE: Absolutely.