Shadow of shame: The conflict facing gay priests

I am delighted that my research and I are referenced in this fine article.

By Dani Garavelli

LOOKING back from a distance of more than 20 years, Fr Joe can see that his decision to join the priesthood was motivated in part by his homosexuality. Coming of age in the 1970s, when there was still a huge stigma attached to coming out as gay, it provided an alternative to getting married and having children.

small_front“I was hugely idealistic and genuinely believed in the priesthood, but I think it was also the only respectable way to be Catholic and single,” he says. “I wouldn’t have recognised it at the time, but I think I was trying to escape having to tell my family about my sexuality or even having to face up to it properly ­myself.”

Once ordained, however, he realised being gay in a church which considers ­homosexuality to be intrinsically disordered brings problems of its own. Prey to the same temptations as everyone else, but unable to talk openly about them, many homosexual priests find themselves feeling undervalued and ­isolated. Trying to navigate their way in a highly sexualised society, with little or no pastoral support, it’s hardly surprising if they sometimes find it difficult to keep their vows.

“I think celibacy is always a struggle, it’s the same for all priests – in fact it’s the same for married people – you try to keep your integrity, to stay true to what you have been called to, ” says Fr Joe, who was a priest in Scotland but has now moved abroad. “I belong to a religious order that means you live with other guys; it means you have emotional support and your chances of being ­lonely are less. The ones I feel really sorry for are the diocesan priests who are alone in a parish. I think celibacy must be even more difficult for them. They have no-one to confide in when they are feeling low or horny or any other normal ­human way of feeling.”

As with any same-sex environment, such as a boarding school or prison, there can also be a kind of “super-heated effect” in the seminary or church where, regardless of sexual orientation, men have crushes on other men and that is more likely to spill over into sexual ­behaviour when the whole subject of sexuality is taboo. “I think that is something gay men in the Church are prone to,” Fr Joe says. “Because the subject is hidden, it creates this secret club kind of environment because priests who are gay are only likely to be open with other priests who are gay, you become part of a secret club, not because you want to, but because your peers are your support group.”

Fr Joe’s experiences are not rare. Studies have suggested the priesthood attracts a disproportionate number of gay men, with Dominican Friar-turned-journalist Mark Dowd suggesting earlier this week, the figure could be as high as 50 per cent. Such statistics have become headline news because even as the Church has become increasingly strident in its position on such issues as gay marriage it is being claimed that an increasing number of homosexual priests, Bishops and even Cardinals are breaking their vow of chastity.

There have, of course, been many scandals in the past involving heterosexual priests and Bishops, who have had affairs and fathered children. But now Italian newspapers are speculating Benedict XVI’s unprecedented resignation was inspired by a dossier revealing a powerful network of actively gay priests in the highest echelons of the Vatican. The dossier was compiled in the wake of the Vatileaks scandal, which saw papers taken from the Pope’s desk published in a blockbuster book, and after Italian journalist Carmelo Abbate took a hidden camera into Rome’s gay nightclubs to expose a group of priests who said mass by day and had sex with male escorts by night.

Back at home, there have been controversies too. In 2008, a man was jailed for blackmailing a priest he had encountered at a meeting point for gay men in Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow. And now, of course, there are the allegations that Cardinal Keith O’Brien engaged in ­“inappropriate behaviour” with several priests, allegations which, though ­contested, led him to step down.

From a secular viewpoint, the scandal lies less in the sexuality of the priests, but in the perceived hypocrisy of an ­institution which is seen as homophobic being an apparent cauldron of gay activity. But this contradiction also raises questions as to the degree to which the Catholic Church’s attitude towards ­homosexuality – and the climate of ­secrecy it engenders amongst gay priests – has contributed to its own travails.

The fact the priesthood is attractive to homosexuals is neither new nor surprising. Neither are the Church’s efforts to cover this up. Back in the 1980s, Richard Wagner, an openly gay priest from Illinois, who was completing a doctorate in human sexuality, interviewed 50 gay priests about their experiences in order to examine how they reconciled their own identity with the Church’s absolute ban on homosexual activity. As a result of the media firestorm surrounding the publication of his dissertation “Gay Catholic Priests: A Study Of Cognitive And ­Affective Dissonance”, he says he was hounded out of his religious order. “In one way, the Church is the perfect place for closeted homosexual to prosper,” he says. “But at some point, these people have to face their sexuality and either address it and become comfortable with it or have it contaminate the rest of their lives. When you live in the confines of the seminary there’s not the same kind of distraction you have when, after ordination, you are in ministry in a world awash with sexual imagery. Hopefully that washes over those who are healthy and integrated in terms of their sexuality, but those who are troubled are lost. I was merely pointing out there was a significant population of gay priests, good men who had committed their lives to the Church, who were struggling with their sexuality and there was no encouragement or help.”

The atmosphere such isolation fosters, the deep-seated shame it engenders, lends itself to exactly the kind of abuses of power or inappropriate behaviour O’Brien has been accused of. “A combination of the Church’s immature attitude to sex and the secrecy of the gay priest is a really powerful, really poisonous mix,” Fr Joe says.

The irony is that as society as a whole has become more accepting of homosexuality (and recent research suggests the Catholic laity is less concerned about issues like premarital and gay sex than other Christian denominations), the Church’s position has become more entrenched, with O’Brien, originally perceived as a liberal, at the vanguard of the campaign against same-sex marriage.

“They say their job is not to reflect society, but to challenge society, but I think the Church has lost its moral authority to speak about homosexuality because it has shown so little tolerance of and support for gay and lesbian people,” says Fr Joe, who went out of his way to ensure his Scottish parish was inclusive. “It says, ‘Oh it’s not the sinner we hate, it’s the sin,’ but to my mind, that’s rank hypocrisy.”

In the wake of the succession of sex abuse scandals which has shaken the Church over the past 10 years, the hierarchy tried to clamp down on the ordination of gay priests – a move which was hugely controversial, not only because of the hurt it caused existing gay priests, but also because it implied a connection between homosexuality and paedophilia.

Under the new policy, introduced in 2005, men with “transitory” homosexual leanings could be ordained following three years of chastity, but men with “deeply rooted” homosexual tendencies or those who were sexually active could not. The Church also introduced a tougher screening process. Many candidates for the priesthood in England and Wales, for example, are sent to St Luke’s Centre in Manchester, where they are subjected to a battery of psychological tests.

The sense they are not wanted has made existing gay priests feel even more demoralised. “There’s been a constant drip, drip, drip of negativity, taking away guys’ self-esteem, coming from this hypocritical section of the Church,” Fr Joe says.

Today Wagner runs a website and receives calls from troubled gay priests all over the world. Some of them, he says, want to lead the ascetic life they signed up for, others are looking for sexual ­fulfilment, but all are trying to reconcile two conflicting parts of their own ­personality – their vocation and their sexuality.

“They want to know how to navigate this maelstrom of sexual negativity and try to put that together with the Gospel message of authenticity and integrity and truthfulness, but it’s nearly impossible to do,” he says.

The fact that some highly placed gay clergymen endorse the Church’s line on homosexuality could be viewed as the height of cynicism, but others, who have seen the workings of the Church at close hand see it as a manifestation of their inner conflict. “There are a lot of self-hating priests, but there are others who are frightened – they feel they have to toe the line or they will be out of a ­living,” says Fr Joe.

Vatican adviser John Haldane has suggested one way out of the current crisis is to compel priests – gay or heterosexual – to renew their vow of celibacy or leave the Church. Yet it is hard to feel anything but sympathy for committed priests who took their vows before they really understood their own sexuality or how important the need for companionship might become in later life. “There are men who think they can take this vow and live up to it, especially if they are fairly young,” says Elena Curti, deputy editor of The Tablet. “They are full of enthusiasm and idealism and they can survive on that for the first decade or two, but in my experience, when they get older, into their 40s and 50s, they feel immensely isolated. They see their peers around them with children and a real, intense loneliness kicks in and it’s often at that stage they stage they leave.”

Since the Church can’t afford to lose any more clergy, it seems more sensible to relax the rules on marriage as O’Brien suggested days before he resigned. Celibacy is not a matter of doctrine and there are many liberals who would be happy to see it dropped. This feeling has been strengthened by the Church’s decision to welcome married Anglican priests into the fold. But relaxing the rule on celibacy would not help ease the plight of gay priests; if anything it would make it worse. They would have to continue to battle with their own sexuality while watching their peers enjoy loving relationships.

Fr Joe is realistic; he knows whoever becomes Pope, the Church’s attitude towards homosexuality is unlikely to be radically overhauled in the near future. So what changes would he like to see? “The first thing and the easiest thing in the world, is a change of tone. Notch the warmth up 10 degrees and stop talking about homosexuality in terms of sin and disorder,” he says. “Secondly if the Church wants authority to speak on that matter it needs to show a clear level of pastoral support for lesbian and gay people that is non-judgmental on a spiritual and practical level.

“Then you it look at how the doctrine of the Church is expressed – whether it accurately reflects a good understanding of anthropology or sociology or psychology, or whether the Church is operating from an outdated model.” Fr Joe says that’s a 100-year project. But one thing’s for sure, unless the Church starts to ­address the disparity between the homophobia it spouts and the conduct of its own priests soon, the new Pope is likely spend his time in the Vatican as his predecessor did – firefighting one sex scandal after another.

Complete Article HERE!

Swiss abbot makes fiery appeal for church reform

By Christa Pongratz-Lippitt

A fiery appeal for church reform by an influential Swiss abbot has attracted widespread attention throughout Europe, and has, moreover, been welcomed by the future president of the Swiss bishops’ conference.

Abbot Martin WerlenFifty-year-old Abbot Martin Werlen, leader of the Abbey of Einsiedeln and himself a member of the Swiss bishops’ conference, first voiced his appeal in a sermon on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Second Vatican Council in October. The sermon was later published in a 39-page brochure that sold out within three days and is now in its third edition.

Titled “Discovering the Embers Under the Ashes,” it echoes remarks by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini in his last interview before his death Aug. 31. Referring to the state of the church today, Martini spoke of his sense of powerlessness and how Catholicism’s “embers” were “hidden under the ashes.”

Werlen said he is alarmed by the present state of the church. “The situation of the church is dramatic, not only in the German-speaking countries,” he said. “It is dramatic not only because of the rapidly decreasing number of priests and religious or because of plummeting church attendance. The real problem is not a problem of numbers. What is missing is the fire! We must face the situation and find out what is behind it.”

He said there is leeway for reform and discussed possible reforms at length.

For example, he said, the church could learn from the way the Orthodox church deals with remarried divorced people, who are not barred from Communion. The Catholic church has never condemned the Orthodox approach, Werlen emphasized.

Local churches should also have more say in episcopal nominations, he said, recalling that religious orders have always elected their superiors democratically over the centuries.

On priestly celibacy, he quoted the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1990. The code says that clerical celibacy “is to be greatly esteemed everywhere,” but adds that “likewise, the hallowed practice of married clerics in the primitive Church and in the tradition of the Eastern Churches throughout the ages is to be held in honor.”

There is also a lot of leeway as far as cardinals are concerned, Werlen pointed out. Women and men from all over the world, both young and old, could be elected to the cardinalate for a period of five years and could meet with the pope every three months in Rome. “Such meetings could bring a new dynamism into church leadership,” Werlen suggested.

The church could also “rediscover” synodal processes. “If bishops’ synods are so influentially prepared and accompanied by the Roman Curia that nothing new can emerge, is that a witness of faith?” he asked. As at Vatican II, “bishops should realize their responsibilities and with the help of theologians, and together with the pope, face changes in full faith — and let paper remain paper!”

Werlen wrote that he deplores the lack of courage, vision and creativity in today’s church, which he says is crawling along “with the hand brake on.”

“The problems are known. Pope Benedict on occasion refers to them. But nothing concrete is done to solve them,” Werlen said.

Sweeping problems under the table or forbidding discussion of certain issues undermines the church’s credibility, he warned.

“Not taking a situation or a person seriously is an act of disobedience. When those in authority in the church do not fulfill their duty and are therefore disobedient, initiatives are started as emergency measures … which can lead to schisms or to people leaving the church. The disobedience deplored by church officials is often the consequence of those very church officials’ own disobedience. I can understand why so many initiatives were started in recent years.”

But polarization between conservatives and progressives in the church, which he said has now reached a “frightening” level, has a deadening effect, he cautioned.

“I myself together with the Einsiedeln community would like to take another path, namely that of seeking the embers in the ashes,” he said. He pointed out that Einsiedeln is in dialogue with both the Lefebvrist Society of St. Pius X and the progressive Catholic theologian Fr. Hans Küng.

Within a week after the brochure was first published, Werlen received more than a 1,000 emails and 100 letters, many from prominent Catholics. He said he was “quite overwhelmed” by this and added, “The embers are there. One can feel people of different generations heaving a deep sigh of relief.”

After reading the brochure, Bishop Markus Büchel of Sankt Gallen, newly elected president of the Swiss bishops’ conference, released the following statement: “Abbot Werlen has taken up urgent questions the faithful are asking; he has outlined the problems very clearly and has put forward possible solutions. This is an impetus for very necessary discussions in the church that are also a great concern of mine. That is why I am most thankful to him.”

Büchel has been elected to succeed Bishop Norbert Brunner of Sion as conference president for three years starting Jan. 1.

Werlen became abbot of Einsiedeln in 2001. The abbey is a famous pilgrimage shrine in the oldest part of Switzerland, its heartland. Between 150,000 and 200,000 pilgrims annually visit the shrine, which at times rivaled Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Complete Article HERE!

Marriage would have made me a better priest

One of Ireland’s best-known priests has revealed the anguish the Church’s requirement of mandatory clerical celibacy has caused him.

Fr Brian D’Arcy admitted: “I would have been a much better priest had I married.”

Marriage would have provided “a companion, a closeness, a friend, someone to call home” as well as requiring “making sacrifices for somebody else,” he told BBC NI. “At the end of my life, I don’t have a home. Ideally religious life is supposed to be a type of home. It isn’t, not now anyway.”

In a BBC documentary, he says he contemplated leaving the priesthood in the wake of his disciplining by the Vatican.

Last April, it emerged he had been told by the Vatican watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, that he must submit his writings and broadcasts to an approved Church censor before publication.

“Is the price of being a priest that you stay quiet, that you don’t be a whistle blower, and that the price of dying a priest is that you don’t speak the truth?”

The documentary makers followed the Enniskillen-based priest for several months as he talked to people within the Church about whether he should stay or leave after 50 years in the Passionist order.

Among those he consu-lted were the dissident Austrian priest, Fr Helmut Schüller, who is actively lobbying for reform of some of the Church’s core teachings, as well as Cardinal Sean Brady, who affirms the priest’s media work.

He is frank about the pain of his experience of sexual abuse, which occurred when he was an 18-year-old seminarian. “I was preyed upon by a member of my own order. Of course, the threat was made that unless I co-operated with this, that I would not be ordained.”

One of his biggest regrets is returning home to Ireland from South Africa in 1994. “I was 25 years ordained in 1994 and I went to Africa to get away from it. The Smyth affair had been going on for a year before and I was so disillusioned with the priesthood that I couldn’t even celebrate my silver jubilee. One of my regrets in life is that I ever came home.”

Complete Article HERE!

The nun who became a sex therapist

Dr Fran Fisher’s latest book blows the lid off the repressed sexuality of convent life. And it’s a subject the former nun knows first hand

By Joanna Moorhead

From nun to sex therapist isn’t an obvious career path but, says the former Sister Jane Frances de Chantal, “when you’ve been starved for a while, you certainly appreciate the feast at the end of it”.

In the Name of God, Why?: Ex-Catholic Nuns Speak Out about Sexual Repression, Abuse & Ultimate Liberation  by Dr. Fran Fisher

Today, Sister Jane is Dr Fran Fisher, a California “sexologist” in US-speak. But she was born and raised in Yorkshire and entered a Franciscan convent in Derbyshire aged 18. She left two years later, met and married an academic, and moved to the US. It wasn’t until she was in her 40s, she says, that she began to understand how much her Catholic upbringing, and her experience of being a nun, had damaged her sexual instincts.

With her children growing up, she saw a course in sex therapy advertised and her interest was immediately piqued. “I enrolled, and what happened next blew my head off. One day the tutor said we were going to discuss our masturbation history and I thought, can I really do this? Somewhere inside I was still a nun even after all these years … I was still sexually naive. I realised that the legacy of my time in the convent was the cause of most of the problems in my marriage. It had been drummed into me as a novice that I didn’t really have ownership over anything, even my own body.”

Fisher decided to combine her new professional direction, running workshops and counselling, with her own past, and to find out whether other former nuns had had similar experiences: the result is a book in which she interviews 28 women who, like her, took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience only to later leave orders. She talked to them about their sexuality before, during and after their time in the convent and discovered many similarities. “Most of the women I interviewed had been raised in strict Catholic families. Many had an alcoholic father. Quite a few had a history of physical and/or sexual abuse. A lot of them described the convent as a safe place to go.”

Fisher, who is now in her early 60s, realised that some of the traits of her own childhood were typical – in particular the fact that both her Irish Catholic parents had wholly negative attitudes towards sex. Her father, she says, almost always described women in pejorative terms; her mother, meanwhile, thought sex was “dangerous, dirty, vile, nasty and filthy”. When Fisher, then aged 14, feared she was pregnant – after an episode of petting that didn’t involve intercourse – her mother fuelled her fears, leaving her with a sense of “never wanting to have anything to do with a man again”.

The convent had the allure of a place where women were pure and mysterious and – most importantly – safe. But once inside its walls, her sexuality began to surface. Fisher became increasingly unhappy, lost a lot of weight, and eventually left the convent one Saturday morning while all the other sisters were at mass. She was, she says, still as naive about sex as she was when she arrived. But that wasn’t the case with all the women she interviewed. “Those who spent decades in a convent had usually experienced a sexual awakening. Some had relationships with other nuns, some with priests, some with laypeople.”

Some of them, too, talked to Fisher about how they were aware of sexual abuse that was going on in the Catholic church – but most, she says, were unable or unwilling to do anything about it. “Very few nuns were whistle-blowers,” she says. “When you’re a nun, you give away your ability to judge a situation.” Obedience meant not taking the lead and not questioning those who were obviously in positions of authority – such as male priests.

Some of the women in the book describe exploitative and unequal sexual relationships with priests – relationships they later questioned but which, at the time, they accepted as “necessary” for the men. As for having a healthy, “normal” sexual relationship, some of the women Fisher interviewed were middle-aged before this happened for the first time. “One woman described having intercourse for the first time aged 52. Another told me that when she first got a boyfriend, aged 50, she had sex every night for the first two or three months. Her partner thought he was going out with an Amazonian – but she said to him: “I’ve waited half a century for this, just lie back and shut up!'”

Fisher, like some of those she interviewed, did eventually experience a happy and more typical sex life. But she is fiercely critical of the Catholic system that allows naive young women (these days, more usually they are from Africa or Asia rather than Europe or North America) to uproot themselves from their families and enter a convent.

“The practice of taking young women (or men) from a childhood of indoctrination and expecting them to make a lifelong commitment to celibacy in their early 20s is clearly wrong,” she says. “And it’s still going on. Not long ago, I saw some young nuns being interviewed on TV. I saw their faces, and I thought: it’s still happening. There are still young women in some parts of the world for whom a convent offers a sanctuary from difficult questions about sex, an education, opportunities. But it’s running away from life, and there’s a huge toll in terms of individual fallout down the line. The church shouldn’t allow it to happen.”

Complete Article HERE!

Tom Rastrelli: Priests who lie; the dilemma of sexual orientation and the priesthood

People don’t expect their priests and bishops to lie, but as Michelangelo Signorile’s recent post illustrated, clerics do lie. Some even make a virtue of it. I know this from experience, for I was ordained a Catholic priest on a lie.

In spring 2002 I walked with my spiritual director along the blacktop road encircling the seminary. He’d been my confessor and guide for two years, helping me discern God’s presence in all aspects of my life, intimate and mundane. Over our heads, a canopy of newborn leaves rustled in a sunny breeze, a welcome relief from the bitter fog that had engulfed the church and my vocational surety.

For the previous two months an unprecedented number of bishops and priests, starting with Cardinal Law of Boston, had fallen from grace for participation in the sexual abuse of children and the ensuing cover-up. Their duplicity was palpable in my knotted back and abdomen. In a few months I’d be ordained a priest. I didn’t want to do so on a lie.

“I’m coming out of the closet,” I said.

My spiritual director loosened his clerical collar and lit a cigarette. “Where’s this coming from?” he asked. A couple of chattering wrens whooshed past.

I backtracked through six years of seminary formation. At events I had hobnobbed with supposedly holy men, some of whom had been harboring pedophiles. A few had done the deed themselves. By shaking their hands, mine were dirty. I knew the ecclesiology, how the bishops’ authority stemmed from a direct line to Jesus, but they were still criminals. Who were they to declare homosexuals “intrinsically depraved”?

When I’d applied for seminary, the director of seminarians — the priest who’d recruited me — explained that orientation didn’t matter, only celibacy. But on my intake interviews he’d told me to answer “yes” when the archdiocesan psychologist asked if I was attracted to women, and “no” when he asked if I was attracted to men. It was for the greater good, he said. Frightened of being cast out and ashamed of my true nature, I had lied as instructed.

In light of the sexual abuse scandal, lying about my orientation was no longer acceptable. I thought of what a gay friend who’d left seminary had said. His words became my own: “I don’t know if I can separate my private and public selves. Isn’t integration the goal of spiritual direction?”

“Of course it is,” my spiritual director said, more gravelly than usual. He stopped and turned to me. A tree cast a web of shadows over his face. His strawberry nose grew flushed, as he gestured with his hands. “Here’s the thing, Rastrelli. You have to ask yourself: Am I going to be a gay priest, or a priest” — he rolled his fingers and cigarette through the air like a barrel — “who happens to be gay?”

“What’s the difference?” I turned my head to inhale, trying to avoid his secondhand smoke. “Either way I’m gay. It’s a part of me.”

“But are you gay first, and then a priest? Or a priest first, and then gay?” He smiled, satisfied with the distinction.

“Both/and.” I’d hit him with what he’d taught me in class. “Both/and” was the paradoxical answer for every ultimate question in Catholic theology: Scripture or tradition? Faith or works? Is Jesus divine or human? Are we sinful or good? is faith a solo or communal experience?

“Touché,” he said. We walked. He sucked his cigarette. “You’re a smart guy, Rastrelli. Give it some thought.”

I kicked a pebble onto the grass. “I have. I don’t want to lie about my sexuality.”

“It’s not lying if those asking don’t have a right to the information.”

He hadn’t even flinched. I wanted to shake the nicotine from his bones, to scream, “It was that kind of thinking that landed the bishops in the papers!” Still, part of me wanted him to be right. Silence was simpler, easier, and maybe my need to come out was just pride at work. My promise of obedience demanded that I surrender my ego. My vocation was about God, not my orientation. But couldn’t we priests be honest with one another? I had to try.

“Gay Catholics don’t have positive role models,” I said. “I don’t know of a single gay priest that’s healthy. Do you?” I stopped. He kept walking. This was as close as I’d ever come to asking him if he was gay. I suspected he was. He’d lived with another priest for decades. They vacationed and picked out carpeting together. They spoke about their cat as if she were their child. Even if he and his housemate weren’t having sex, they were a couple. I stepped in stride with him. “How am I supposed to be an integrated gay priest when I have no one to look up to? How does celibacy actually work?” I stopped again. “I’m asking you.”

He turned to me. His face became whiter than a funeral pall. “I’m sorry, Rastrelli, but that’s not a conversation I’m comfortable having with a student.”

He resumed his pace. I followed silently.

The breeze picked up. The undulating trees sounded like the ocean breaking on the shore. I choked back the urge to ask, “Are you gay?” I felt like a sinking ship in a fleet that had wandered into a minefield. After laying the mines himself, the fleet commander had ordered radio silence.

I didn’t want to drown alone. I didn’t want to hear him lie. I wanted the truth, but the truth was dangerous. Were I to come out amid sexual-abuse headlines, homophobic Catholics wrongly blaming gay priests for the scandal would demand my dismissal.

My spiritual director was right. Who were they to judge, to put my orientation before my vocation? They had no right to that knowledge. It was safer to be a priest who happened to be gay. Perhaps it was God’s will. The fear accompanying us back to the seminary told me so.

That day, I learned the unspoken rule passed down through generations of priests: the doctrine of justification for lying by clergy. I went on to be ordained a priest. I preached that “the truth will set you free” while living in silence and shame. After a long journey and much pain, I came out. I left the priesthood, finally refusing to live the lies that I’d been taught to venerate.

Complete Article HERE!