For years, the Catholic Church has been in the throes of a heated debate over how accepting it should be of gay relationships.
The church teaches that gay behavior is sinful; however, no institution is immune from changes in the world around it.
The Michigan Catholic Conference — which oversees health care for Catholic employees in the state — announced in a letter last week that it is modifying its coverage in a way that will make it possible for gay employees of the church to get health benefits for their partners and spouses.
It does so in a way, however, that doesn’t affirm gay marriage, but simply redefines who qualifies for health coverage in a way that could include same-sex couples.
The move comes less than a year after a deeply divided Supreme Court delivered a historic victory for gay rights, ruling 5 to 4 that the Constitution requires that same-sex couples be allowed to marry no matter where they live.
The letter, sent to pastors and church employees, said health care coverage will be expanded to include legally domiciled adults. A person is considered an LDA, the letter notes, if they’re 18 or older, are financially interdependent with the church employee, and have lived with that person for at least six months.
Under the previous arrangement, a same-sex spouse would not be covered by health insurance because the Catholic Church defines a spouse as someone of the opposite gender, according to the Detroit Free Press.
A person’s sexual orientation or behavior will not factor into the church’s decision to provide employees with health care, according to Dave Maluchnik, director of communications for the MCC. Instead, he said, the church’s primary consideration will be residency.
“The church’s teaching on marriage and human sexuality is not changing,” Maluchnik told The Washington Post. “Our health benefit plan is expanding its eligibility to include a legally domiciled adult and, as such, the benefit is not dependent upon the relationship. It’s dependent upon residency. As long as the qualifications are met, then the benefit can be extended.”
The letter does not include the words “gay” or “same-sex relationship” and Maluchnik said projecting homosexuality into the letter was “a narrow reading” on the eligibility change. He pointed out that the rule change could just as easily apply to a friend, cousin, sibling or parent who lives with the employee.
But gay rights advocates celebrated the change nonetheless.
“The Catholic Church prides itself on being about families, so it’s good to see them taking a step that will actually protect families,” Stephanie White, executive director of Equality Michigan, told The Post.
She said the eligibility change is particularly important in Michigan, where there is no state law that protects LGBT people from discrimination. White believes the change also highlights the benefit of having federal agencies take a lead on “issues of fairness” and predicts that in time, people will realize there’s no reason not to outlaw discrimination.
“The policy also shows that even groups and businesses that are resistant to basic non-discrimination protections can find a way to follow the law and treat everyone equally,” White said.
Maluchnik noted that the decision to expand eligibility came after lengthy discussions among church officials. The alternative to expanding eligibility —removing spousal coverage entirely — would have hurt employees, he said.
“This decision was made following extensive consultation with the National Catholic Bioethics Center and also with our legal counsel to help us ensure that the health plan is compliant with federal and state laws and at the same time being consistent with Catholic teaching,” he said.
He told The Post that the modification to the church’s health plan occurred because of the federal government’s decision to “redefine marriage and the definition of a spouse.”
“It complies with federal law, as it is, in 2016,” Maluchnik told the Free Press. “This is the world in which we now live.”
Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain: Catholic Church can in no way associate itself with same-sex marriage.
Bishop Blanchet High School in Seattle has refused to run an announcement in its alumni magazine for the same-sex marriage of an alumna who once served as student body vice president and homecoming queen.
In response to the submission by the 1997 graduate, the school sent her a letter saying, in part, “… the archdiocese does not permit this type of information to be published in our Catholic school magazine.”
The reaction has been a much-circulated Facebook post by James Nau, who was student body president in Blanchet’s class of 1997 and homecoming king.
In an open letter to the Archdiocese of Seattle, Nau quoted St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians — “if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it” and wrote:
“The policy which prohibits the public acknowledgment of (the) marriage stands behind a faith that you no doubt believe is right, but it does so at the cost of what is greater: Love.
“When there is an opportunity to rejoice in love that exists among the members of your community, you have chosen instead to shut them out, and on this issue Pope Francis has warned, ‘a church with closed doors betrays herself and her mission.'”
Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain firmly closed all doors to same-sex marriage after Washington voted for marriage equality in 2012.
Sartain published a “policy refresher” raining down prohibitions on same-sex “marriage” — quotation marks courtesy of the archbishop. They include:
“No priest or deacon or lay minister may officiate at a same-sex marriage.”
“No church facility or school facility may be offered for such an event, even if it is to be witnessed by a non-Catholic minister or civil official.”
“No church facility or school facility may be used for a reception after such an event.”
“No church ministers, ordained or lay, may offer ‘wedding preparation’ for such couples.”
The archbishop’s chilly, hard-line stand on same-sex marriage has never gone down well with many Catholics.
Then-Gov. Chris Gregoire, a Catholic, helped persuade the Legislature to vote for marriage equality. Eastside Catholic High School students walked out of school and mounted a sustained protest in late 2013 after the school’s vice principal was forced out over marriage to his husband.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, a devout Catholic, went to St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in 2013 to marry his husband, Michael Shiosaki, in a deeply traditional ceremony.
Nau has received a strong, affirming response to his Facebook post, 227 “likes,” 59 comments and 122 shares by mid-afternoon Thursday.
“The Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle has played a large role in my life,” he wrote.
Nau is a graduate of St. Louise School, Blanchet and Seattle University. He has mentored fellow Catholics at confirmation, worked at CYO summer camps, taught and coached for three years at Blanchet, and participated in campus ministries. He stood vigil beside the body of Archbishop Thomas Murphy as the popular prelate lay in state at St. James Cathedral.
“It is my education by the Archdiocese of Seattle that has made me into the person who writes this letter,” he concluded.
In a subsequent update, Nau writes that he received a “gracious” email response from Antonio DeSapio, in which the president of Bishop Blanchet thanked Nau for his engagement but said that “we cannot knowingly publish anything that is contrary to Church teachings.”
The experience has been “very alienating,” Nau wrote in a response to DeSapio, adding:
“As a teacher, I keep thinking about what this policy says to your current students, and I hope that you consider what this incident teaches the students in the Archdiocese who might be gay or questioning their sexual identity as well as what it says to their friends, families and teachers who love and support them.
“What does it teach students whose parents are gay?”
The Blanchet denial, as with removal of the vice principal at Eastside Catholic, appears to have had an unintended consequence — one worth pondering at the archdiocesan chancery on First Hill.
The Eastside Catholic students came together in their protest and bonded with students at other Catholic high schools, such as Seattle Prep and Blanchet.
The refusal to announce the wedding appears to have similarly connected and reconnected Blanchet alumni. Here is how Nau put it to DeSapio:
“Thanks to social media, we do not lack the means to come together in support and celebration of one of our own, but your policy forces us to do it outside your walls.
“Do you wish for Blanchet to remain an institution that forces large portions of its warm and affirming alumni community to exist separate from itself?
“This effort to rally . . . has more quickly and effectively connected me with my classmates than any issue of the Blanchet magazine. … My connection to the archdiocesan community has grown not because of your policy, but because of our shared objection to it.”
The Rev. Fred Daley greets Grace Moran, 13, before the start of mass at All Saints Church in Syracuse, N.Y., on Dec. 5. Daley came out in 2004.
God, what are you calling me to do here, prayed the priest. Come out, or stay in the closet?
After 23 years in Chicago parishes, the question had pushed its way to the surface.
He weighed his options. He thought about his parishioners. Many, he knew, were accepting of gay people, even of same-sex marriage, but others — less so. He had grown up in a large Catholic family; he understood what people’s faith meant to them. He didn’t want to harm his flock, or the Catholic Church.
He wondered if he could be penalized in his job. And, in truth, he considered his status. He knew many Catholics had what he might call a romanticized view of the priesthood: Priests are supposed to be pure, almost above the world of sexuality, selflessly willing to give up creating a family of their own to serve God. This would mean falling from that pedestal.
Then, he weighed these factors against the impact his coming out could have on the lives of young gay people in treatment for addiction or who are suicidal, on the parents and grandparents who feel they must choose between their gay child and their church. For some, knowing their priest is gay — and at peace with it — could be healing, he felt.
Father Warren Hall gives Mass as more than 50 Seton Hall couples renew their vows at a special Mass service at the Chapel on the Seton Hall campus in South Orange, NJ, on Friday, February 14, 2014.
He thought of his complex feelings. He had no ax to grind, and he wasn’t an advocate.
He set the rules at the outset: He did not want to be identified in this article. But at the end of the first conversation, he said: I’m leaning towards using my real name.
At a time when the phrase “coming out” is starting to sound almost quaint, the Catholic priesthood may be one of the last remaining closets — and it’s a crowded one. People who study gay clergy believe gay men make up a significant percentage of the 40,000 ordained priests in the United States, including some who believe they may even be the majority. Meanwhile, the number who are out is minuscule.
The Catholic Church is in the throes of a historic period of debate about homosexuality. Between Pope Francis’s now-famous “Who am I to judge?” line and two high-profile, global meetings he called in the past year to open up discussion about sex and family, there has perhaps never been as much dialogue among Catholics about how far to extend the welcome mat to gay people.
Francis is expected in the next couple of months to release his conclusions from the meetings. Both sides claimed a measure of victory two weeks ago when he told a Vatican court that “there can be no confusion” between the family willed by God and any other type of union. To some, it was a sign that Francis will not give a doctrinal inch; others saw it as evidence that he might not put up a fight on civil unions.
Gay priests are invisible in this debate; the church does not research the topic. However, interviews with a dozen priests and former seminarians who are gay, and experts on gay priests, reveal a group of men mostly comfortable with their sexuality. Many express no urgency for the church to accept it. Some, however, say the priesthood remains sexually repressive; one said there is an “invisible wall” around the topic among priests.
They speak forcefully about the tough work they had to do to accept their sexuality and how important a part it is of who they are. But their acceptance of the closet often harks back to an earlier time.
This is in part, they say, because as priests they vowed to put service to God over all else.
The Rev. Warren Hall decided to join the tiny number of out priests after he was removed as campus minister of Seton Hall University last May. Officials noted he had supported a group on Facebook that advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and racial justice.
But while Hall has since been outspoken about the need for more tolerant, open dialogue about human sexuality, he said he understands why gay priests don’t come out — or see gay rights as their cause.
“Priests want to be good priests, they want to do their job,” said Hall, who was reassigned to a Hoboken, N.J., parish. “More priests are rightfully more concerned about homelessness versus getting caught up in something about sex. We should be more concerned about those issues [like homelessness] that are impacting people.”
But some also fear the consequences of coming out in the Catholic Church, whose hierarchy frames a gay life as a diversion from God’s ideal. Parts of church teaching call being gay “objectively disordered.”
The Chicago priest remembers wanting to speak from the pulpit when same-sex marriage became legal in California in 2008. But he talked himself out of it. “I thought: ‘Oh my gosh, if I talk about it, they’ll think I’m gay.’ ”
He is torn as he watches the spike in dioceses firing employees who marry someone of the same gender, but his instinct has been to defer to the church.
“I have a problem with Monday-morning quarterbacking. There’s always stuff you don’t know about why people are fired,” he said. It grates on him, though. “But where do you draw the line? There are all kinds of folks not in line on morality stuff.”
Priests who have come out — in some cases citing the need to confront anti-LGBT discrimination — say they have found scant support among other priests.
“Parishioners were very supportive. Religious women were very supportive. One group that was silent were my brother priests. Gay as well as straight,” said the Rev. Fred Daley, a Syracuse, N.Y., priest who came out in 2004 after he was angered by people blaming gay priests for the global clergy sex abuse crisis. “In a sense, it was like I sort of broke the rules of the clerical club.”
The mixture of fealty to God and the church and concern about harming parishioners or their standing in the priesthood has led some gay priests to gauge each situation before opening up.
A New York priest says he comes out only in rare private circumstances, when counseling someone struggling to accept their homosexuality. “I’ve been in multiple situations where someone will say: ‘I’m a piece of s—.’ I’ll say: ‘Do I look like a piece of s— to you? God made me this way.’ ”
A Pennsylvania priest says he’s “quietly subversive,” speaking acceptingly of gay people but not to just anyone. Even the confessional is not a truly safe place for him to tell someone who is gay that it’s not a bad thing. “We have too much to lose. I’ve invested my life in this business.”
Priests’ views of the church’s handling of homosexuality are not uniform. Some blamed Catholicism for the decades it took them to accept themselves. Others credited their training and the help of other priests with their self-knowledge, saying homophobia in the non-church culture is the problem.
Even as the doctrine banning same-sex relationships has not changed, the church has varied its emphasis and message on the topic.
The most recent authoritative statement came in 2005, from Pope Benedict XVI, who, seeking to clarify doctrine after the sweeping changes under the Second Vatican Council, wrote that being gay is “objectively disordered.” The church, “while profoundly respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture,’ ” Benedict said,
The message seemed clear, say many priests and several people who train seminarians. Many who had considered coming out of the closet decided to stay in.
Yet the intent behind Benedict’s words has been debated. Some say he never meant to bar gay men who are celibate. Others say he meant to keep out men who feel strongly defined by their sexuality, and perhaps would be challenged by celibacy.
Regardless, there is no question that in the past few years church leaders are emphasizing far more that Catholicism accepts people who are gay — it’s the sexual relationships or marriage that is the problem. Francis’s famous “Who am I to judge?” comment was said after a question about gay priests.
Last spring, a Jesuit — Francis’s community — wrote about being gay in a blog post believed to be the first time a Jesuit has come out with the explicit permission of his superiors. Damian Torres-Botello denied requests to be interviewed for this article.
In some communities, particularly the Jesuits, gay priests can be out — to a point, the priests interviewed said. Others say Benedict’s words created a lasting chill for gay men and that conditions are much harsher today.
“If there is a seminarian who is gay, my recommendation would be: Don’t tell anybody,” Hall said.
Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, a D.C. priest-psychologist who helps seminaries create materials about sexual health, said there is a hesitancy today to admit people who are gay and that the percentage of gay priests has dropped. All other priests interviewed disagreed.
“They’re more conservative, but no less gay,” said the Pennsylvania priest of the incoming, younger generation of clergy.
The Chicago priest doesn’t disregard the church’s teaching on sexuality, but he tries to emphasize the church’s teaching that sexuality is an expression of the divine and encourages people topray and discern their own place. His place, he says, is that of a man who didn’t understand he was gay when he entered the priesthood and now views his sexuality as a gift to his ministry.
“There’s a level of witnessing here that’s important for me to do. The Christian faith has a lot to say about the underdog, about the marginalized or the leper, the blind, the lame, the ostracized woman prostitute, widow, the little one,” he said.
“I’d like to be one of those priests, who, with great respect for the church’s teaching, can say: I’m a human being. I’m a son — one of six — I’m gay and I’m a priest, period.”
Prayer has led him to believe this article is part of that witness. He has decided he wants to be known: His name is Michael Shanahan.
When he conducted the funerals, Tom Bonderenko tells me, he always wore his priestly garments and white stole. Even when no one showed up for the graveside service.
“It was important to show dignity and respect,” Tom says. He taps the coffee cup in his lap nervously. “I’m sorry,” he says. He clears his throat but it doesn’t keep his eyes from welling up. “No one has asked me about this in a really long time.”
We are sitting in his office at Moveable Feast, the Baltimore meal delivery agency for those with life-threatening illnesses, where Tom has served as director for the last eight years. His office is spacious and cheerful, but this conversation is a difficult one. He had discreetly closed his office door behind me when I arrived.
When Moveable Feast was founded in 1989 to deliver meals to home-bound AIDS patients, Tom was engaged in a different, more literal ministry to the disenfranchised. He was a priest staffing a homeless shelter for Catholic Charities of Baltimore. It was there he met someone with AIDS for the first time.
“A young man came to the door of the emergency shelter, sometime in 1987,” he says. “He was covered in black marks. Lesions, you know. Everywhere. He said he needed to clean up before his first doctor appointment the next day.”
Tom had grown up in New York City, and as a gay man he had known people who died very suddenly, as far back as the early 1980’s. But he had never stood face to face with someone so ill with the dreaded disease.
I couldn’t help but ask Tom how he felt, meeting that person.
Tom stares out his office window, and his eyes are so beautiful, romantically blue, framed with creases of worry. The eyes of a priest. He turns back to me with an answer. “Here was a young man who was going to find out from a doctor the next day that he had AIDS,” he manages. He starts tapping his coffee cup again, and he bows his head reverently. “And he was about to be told that he was going to die.”
Tom never saw the young man again.
People with AIDS became more common at the shelter before long. Tom got to know the regulars, and they began to ask him to perform their funeral services.
“They just wanted to know they would be buried,” he says quietly. “They didn’t want or need anything religious. Most of them were estranged from their families, drug abuse, that sort of thing. I think they were embarrassed to reach out to relatives. Sometimes, when they died we would find a member of the family to come, but usually it was just me and the departed at the gravesite.”
The burials were performed at unmarked graves in a lonely section of Baltimore Cemetery. The caskets were as charity required, simple wooden boxes, and they always contained a body. The funeral home would not cremate someone who died from AIDS because they were afraid of poisoning the air.
“I would always conduct the service out loud,” says Tom, now sharing the sacred details. “I would speak about the departed, and say what I knew of them, about where they were from. And then I would ask if anyone present had been harmed by the departed…”
I imagined Tom, in his vestments and alone in a forgotten graveyard, asking intimate questions out loud to the grass and the trees and the disinterested silence. “I would say that if the departed had harmed anyone,” he goes on, “for that person to please forgive them.” Tom’s voice falters. “And then I would ask the departed to forgive, too. I would tell them, ‘you’re on the other side now. Let it go.’”
Tom’s office becomes very still. I feel as if I’m holding my breath.
“I think they just didn’t want to be alone,” Tom says, and now he looks at me without regard for his tears. “We don’t do this alone.”
Because of you, I think to myself. They weren’t alone because of you, Tom.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, again, wiping his face. “I haven’t talked about this in so long.” He considers the faraway scene he has conjured, his graveside questions to no one, and then adds, “It was the most important, meaningful thing I have ever done.”
I wonder aloud if the experience bolstered his religious faith or challenged it instead. He looks surprised by the question. “Well,” he answers after a moment, “I believe it strengthened my faith. Yes.” I want very much to believe him.
Tom left Catholic Charities, and the priesthood, not long after he conducted the last of his burials for the homeless. A decade later he joined Moveable Feast and embraced its mission to provide sustenance for people in need, people like those to whom he once ministered.
Tom’s fellow staff members know little about his life a generation ago. Most of them aren’t aware of the aching memories beneath the calm surface of their sensitive and capable boss. They may not fully understand why Tom leaves the office once a month to distribute food personally to homebound clients.
But they will tell you that when Tom Bonderenko returns from those deliveries, he always has tears in his eyes.
Extraordinary Assembly of Synod of the Bishops on the Family 1, Oct. 2014.
The influential Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga has acknowledged the presence of a “gay lobby” in the Vatican. In a new interview, he says that Pope Francis has adopted a gradual approach to address it – and that Catholic teaching won’t change.
The Honduran newspaper El Heraldo asked the cardinal whether there actually was an attempted or successful “infiltration of the gay community in the Vatican.”
Cardinal Maradiaga responded: “Not only that, also the Pope said: there was even a ‘lobby’ in this sense.”
“Little by little the Pope is trying to purify it,” he continued. “One can understand them, and there is pastoral legislation to attend to them, but what is wrong cannot be truth.”
Cardinal Maradiaga is the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras and the coordinator of the Council of Cardinals who advise Pope Francis on the reform of the Curia.
HIs interview, published Jan. 12, also touched on some perceptions about Pope Francis.
The newspaper said some people have interpreted Pope Francis’ other remarks to think there was a possibility the Church would support same-sex marriage.
The cardinal rejected this possibility.
“No, we must understand that there are things that can be reformed and others cannot,” he said. “The natural law cannot be reformed. We can see how God has designed the human body, the body of the man and the body of a woman to complement each other and transmit life. The contrary is not the plan of creation. There are things that cannot be changed.”
A previous report about the Pope working to counter the “gay lobby” was widely read, but its accuracy was uncertain.
In June 2013 the left-leaning Chilean Catholic website “Reflexión y liberación” claimed that Pope Francis had told a meeting of the Latin American Confederation of Men and Women Religious that there is a “gay lobby” in the Church and “we have to see what we can do (about it).”
However, the Latin American Confederation of Men and Women said that this report rested on a summary account that relied on the memory of participants, not a recording. This summary was intended for meeting participants and was not intended for publication. The confederation said the reported assertion “cannot be attributed with certainty to the Holy Father.”
Pope Francis in a July 28, 2013 in-flight interview returning to Italy from Brazil briefly discussed this alleged lobby in the context of penitence, confession and God’s forgiveness.
“So much is written about the gay lobby. I have yet to find anyone who can give me a Vatican identity card with ‘gay’ [written on it]. They say they are there,” the Pope said.
He said that all lobbies are bad and “the gravest problem for me.” Citing the Catechism’s teaching against marginalizing homosexual persons, he said, “If a person is gay and seeks the Lord and has good will, well who am I to judge them?”
Cardinal Maradiaga also spoke to El Heraldo about reform and changes to the Church.
“We should not expect there will be major reforms in the doctrine of the Church,” he said. “The reform is the organization of the Curia.”
He acknowledged resistance to Curia reform, saying there are people who “resist any changes” precisely because “they do not know the life of the Church.”
The Church is “not merely a human institution,” he explained. Rather, it is “humane-divine” and “natural and supernatural.” This means “there are things that do not really depend on what is human.”
The cardinal’s remarks on a “gay lobby” follow years of increasingly prominent agitation for doctrinal change from non-Catholics and some Catholics.
As CNA has reported previously, LGBT activists have backed conferences and advocacy events to counter the narrative of the Catholic Church, especially during its synods on the family. These actions include the formation of a coalition called the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics and an advocacy campaign that targeted synod attendees in hopes of countering the influence of bishops from West Africa.
