Month: March 2013

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Cleveland priest excommunicated for role in breakaway worship community

By Brian Roewe

Cleveland Bishop Richard Lennon has issued a decree formally excommunicating Fr. Robert Marrone, the pastor who followed his parishioners from St. Peter Church to the independent worship community that formed in the wake of their parish’s closing.

“It is with sadness I recognize that the Reverend Robert J. Marrone, a priest of the Diocese of Cleveland, has broken communion with the Catholic Church,” Lennon’s decree, issued Monday, reads. “He is found to have withdrawn submission to the pastors of the Church and from communion with the members of the Church subject to them.

“I hereby declare that by doing so freely and with knowledge, the Reverend Robert J. Marrone has incurred ipso facto the automatic penalty (latae sententiae) of excommunication as stated in canon 1364, [paragraph 1] of the Code of Canon Law,” he said.

Fr. Robert Marrone censes the congregation during the Community of St. Peter liturgy Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011, at 7100 Euclid in Cleveland. (Peggy Turbett)

The decree accuses the priest of schism and forbids him from participation in celebrations of the sacraments or in public worship. Marrone can neither receive sacraments nor hold a position in any ecclesiastical office. Canon law allows him 10 days from his excommunication’s publishing to appeal the decree — in this case, until March 14.

Marrone addressed his status in a brief statement to members of the Community of St. Peter, stating the action “reflects the continuous pattern [in the diocese] which has marked the process of clustering, consolidation, closing, suppressions and reopening of parishes. I must, as I have stated repeatedly in the past, follow my conscience in this matter.”

Marrone expressed his gratitude to the community while reaffirming his commitment as their pastor-administrator.

“I will continue to serve the Community of Saint Peter as long as they call me to do so and as long as I am able to fulfill the responsibilities of the work entrusted to me,” he said.

The community scheduled a meeting for registered members only March 11 to discuss their pastor’s current status and future.

At posting time, Marrone had not responded to NCR’s request for comment.

In a statement accompanying his official decree, Lennon said, “The desired effect of excommunication is not to ban someone from the Church permanently. Rather it is a temporary status meant to be medicinal and to encourage the person to reconcile with the Church.”

He added that though excommunicated, Marrone remains a member of the church but has harmed his relationship with it and God through his actions, specifically holding a leadership position with the breakaway St. Peter community.

In March 2009, Lennon announced the closing of St. Peter Parish as part of a wave of closures across the diocese. In all, he shuttered 50-plus parishes and churches, primarily in response to decreasing membership and increasing costs.

Several parishioner groups appealed their cases to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy, and in March 2012, it ruled in favor of 11 parishes, saying Lennon improperly shuttered them and ordering their immediate reopening.

Among those was St. Peter, which, given its unique circumstances, presented a more difficult process than the others. Unwilling to disband as a community upon learning of their church’s closure, a large contingent of St. Peter parishioners chose instead to incorporate themselves in October 2009 as a group outside the diocese’s authority.

A year later in August, they gathered for the first time at their new worship site, a renovated warehouse on Euclid Street. Marrone celebrated the Mass despite his prohibition to publicly celebrate sacraments under the terms of his requested one-year leave from priestly ministry.

Lennon in his statement said he met with Marrone a month before that celebration but said the priest refused to talk. Further attempts to meet also proved futile.

In January 2011, Lennon took a first step toward action against Marrone, giving him a formal canonical warning that he must resign from leadership with the Community of St. Peter. Marrone declined.

In May, Lennon issued a “Declaration of Loss of Canonical Office,” which removed Marrone as pastor of St. Peter Parish and requested he reconcile with the diocese by leaving the Community of St. Peter or face suspension from ministry.

“I will not comply with your decree to leave the community of Saint Peter because I must, before all else, follow what my conscience dictates,” Marrone responded in a letter to Lennon.

A month after St. Peter Parish officially reopened, Lennon in October began the administrative penal process outlined by canon law, with a formal canonical warning sent to Marrone in late October.

Addressing the diocese, Lennon urged parishioners to pray for Marrone and pray that the incident could bring the diocese together.

“I pray that this action may be perceived by the faithful as an initiative to bring unity and peace to the Body of Christ,” he said.

Complete Article HERE!

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Church’s two-faced attitude to gays cruel

By Fintan O’Toole

A few years ago, I was on a studio-based television show. One of my fellow guests was a reasonably well-known Catholic priest. He was in a buoyant, perhaps reckless mood, pepped up by the adrenalin surge that comes with the nervous anticipation of a live appearance before the nation. And he was charmingly, delightfully camp.

He flirted harmlessly with everybody, made amusingly risqué comments to the make-up ladies about another male guest who had just sat in the same chair, created self-consciously exaggerated gestures with his hands. He was for all the world like Mary O’Rourke in a dog collar.

I watched on the television in the green room as he went live on air, riveted to see what the nation would make of this camp clerical persona. But the persona had vanished. The priest had performed an exorcism on himself. It would not be true to say that he was now a paragon of macho manliness. But there is a priestly demeanour – soft, asexual, unthreatening, controlled, precise – and he seemed to have just slipped it on like a mask. He was fluent and self-confident and charming, but all the campy exaggerations were gone. The charm was now bland, the body language stilted, the voice half an octave lower.

I have no idea whether or not the priest in question is gay and it’s none of my business anyway. Being camp doesn’t mean you’re gay and most gay men are not camp. But it was pretty clear, at least, that he was quite comfortable, behind the scenes, with a version of himself that matched a certain kind of gay male persona. And equally clear that he could switch that persona off at will, that he could be a different person on the altar, on the pulpit, in a parishoner’s home, on television. Maybe he had worked out some kind of compromise with himself and, if so, he seemed able to manage it with admirable agility.

Everybody who has had contact with clergy over the years knows that there are many, many priests who are gay. How could it be otherwise? At the very least, one would expect the same proportion of homosexuality in the priesthood as in the general population. But – and Colm Toibín has written particularly perceptively about this – the likelihood is that the proportion within the priesthood is actually significantly higher than among the general population of men.
Sexuality is a very troubling issue for young gay men, especially if they come from families where coming out would be impossible. The celibate priesthood seems to offer a refuge from those storms of doubt and guilt. Even when it becomes clear that the storms will not subside, the black suit and white collar create a decent disguise.

There’s no great shame in this. There are far worse sins than hypocrisy and if everyone who is hypocritical about sex were sent to hell, heaven would be an awfully lonely place. But it is awfully weird. It creates an institution that is very like the priest I encountered in the TV studios: with one face for the public, another in private. There may be some hermit in the mountains or anchorite in the desert who does not know that many, many priests, nuns, bishops and cardinals are gay. But for everyone else in the church, it’s just a fact – a fact that cannot be true.

How those who are gay cope with their situation is their own affair, but there are some public consequences to this strange doubleness. One of them is particularly paradoxical: it ups the ante in the game of homophobia. Knowing that many good priests are gay doesn’t result in tolerance and decency. It creates a perverse form of denial, that of protesting too much.

It is, alas, not at all accidental that Cardinal Keith O’Brien, alleged by four priests to have “attempted to touch, kiss or have sex” with them, has been the most hysterical denouncer of proposals to legalise gay marriage, which he compared to legalising slavery.

Even more damagingly, but just as paradoxically, the two-faced approach has fed into the church’s appalling responses to child sexual abuse. The confusion and evasion that surround the perfectly normal state of homosexuality generated an atmosphere in which all sex, whether with consenting adults or with victimised children, is treated on the same level, as a fall from grace and an administrative problem to be managed.

And, in the end, the church’s double life in relation to homosexuality is just cruel. Some priests manage maintaining two different personas very well. Some perhaps even take a kind of pleasure in it. But for some, even at the very top of the clerical tree, it is an appalling strain.

When the desire to touch and be touched, to love and be loved, is “inappropriate behaviour”, it must become appallingly hard to know what is and is not appropriate. In an age when covering up the inevitable outbreaks of desperate desire is increasingly impossible, the church must learn to embrace what is normal and natural.

Complete Article HERE!

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Vatican spokesman brings flowers as women’s second-class status in church comes under scrutiny

BY NICOLE WINFIELD

The Vatican’s spokesman came to his press briefing Friday bearing flowers for female journalists to mark International Women’s Day. “On behalf of all of us men, congratulations and happy Women’s Day!” said a beaming Rev. Federico Lombardi.

A heartfelt gesture, to be sure, but one that came a day after an awkward acknowledgement: The upcoming election of the pope will be an all-male affair — except for the women who cook for, clean up after and serve the 115 cardinals who will pick the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, half of them women.

Lombardi’s admission came when a reporter noted that one of the video clips the Vatican had provided of preparations in the Sistine Chapel featured a woman at a sewing machine, making the skirting for the tables where cardinals will sit. Aside from the seamstress, the reporter inquired, how many women are involved in the conclave process?

Lombardi said the total number wouldn’t be known until all Vatican personnel involved in the conclave take their oath of secrecy. But he noted that several women work at the Vatican’s Santa Marta hotel, where the cardinals will eat and sleep during the conclave, which begins on Tuesday.

For many observers, Lombardi’s comment was a tacit acknowledgment of what many consider women’s second-class status in Catholic Church, despite the fact they take a leading role in staffing Catholic schools, hospitals and other charitable institutions that are the cornerstone of the church’s social outreach.

“It is fine to sew and be a seamstress, but women have much to contribute to the political … health and well-being of the people on the planet,” said Janice Sevre-Duszynska, a member of the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement who says she was ordained a priest in 2008.

She and other members of the women’s ordination movement, as well as other dissident groups calling for greater participation of women in leadership positions in the church, have descended on Rome to try to have their voices heard in the papal election.

Lombardi noted that women’s role in the church was discussed Friday during the pre-conclave meetings that cardinals have attended this week to discuss the problems of the church and who should lead it.

He didn’t provide any details.

Complete Article HERE!

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Roman Catholic leaders need to get rid of their groupthink

By Lisa Miller

Recent events prompt a stating of the obvious. The Roman Catholic Church is not now, nor has it ever been, a democracy. It values neither free speech nor freedom of the press. Its leaders are not elected officials, so they do not sweat opinion polls. Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals do not represent the interests of their members, and members, if dissatisfied with their leadership, cannot vote those leaders out. The next pope, the Vatican press office continually reminds us, will be selected not by the 115 cardinals who will soon be sequestered in the Sistine Chapel, but by God.

But in the 21st century, this blatant disregard of democratic principles rankles. Even the cardinals from the United States showed uncharacteristic irritation when their daily news conferences in Rome were canceled last week. Italian newspapers had published leaked accounts of the closed-door meetings at which the voting cardinals are gathering pre-conclave and painted the leadership of the church as divided, rancorous and political. No one accused the Americans of leaking outright, but the news conferences abruptly stopped, and the U.S. cardinals weren’t happy. “In true old-style Catholic school teacher fashion, someone talks and everybody stays after school,” Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told the Associated Press.

After decades of sex scandals, financial improprieties and rumors of further financial scandals to come, the American cardinals had been demanding more transparency from the church’s governing body, the Curia. “Obviously, we want to know and learn as much as we can relative to governance in the Church, and the Curia is part of that issue,” said Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston. “So, certainly we want to discuss and learn what we can, and I think that will go on as long as the cardinals feel they need the information.”

When their news conferences were shut down, the USCCB issued a news release: “The U.S. Cardinals are committed to transparency.” Others in the College of Cardinals, the statement seemed to be saying, not so much.

Transparency is not just a post-Enlightenment, democratic ideal. It’s a post-Watergate value, learned the hard way. Corrupt leaders betray the faith and trust of generations to come. Healing and renewed trust in authority happens only when all the secrets have finally been revealed. No one understands this better than Americans, who have gotten used to seeing their government and business leaders apologize, express remorse, and — sometimes cynically, sometimes not — remediate their sins before re-committing themselves to power. The church’s continued refusal to do this after wave upon wave of revelations of abuse of innocents and corporate malfeasance infuriates even her most loyal members.

Institutions as wide-ranging as Google and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia have made transparency a core value. A group called Transparency International ranks countries on the basis of the perceived corruption in their governments. (The United States is 19th, after the United Kingdom but before Chile.) How is it in a world such as this, the men at the Vatican’s highest levels continue to close ranks and insist not only on their own authority but also on their own moral privilege? How is it that the church can continue to be faced with evidence that it abused children and insist that it protects the weak and the vulnerable?

A rereading of Jonathan Haidt’s wonderful book “The Righteous Mind” (just out in paperback) is illuminating here. Groups of like-minded people reinforce their own beliefs. And worse. They convince themselves that those beliefs are moral, even righteous. Individuals “lie, cheat and cut corners quite often when we think we can get away with it,” he writes, “and then we use our moral thinking to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others. We believe our own post hoc reasoning so thoroughly that we end up self-righteously convinced of our own virtue.”

Groups are worse. Evolutionarily speaking, “group selection pulls for cooperation, for the ability to suppress antisocial behavior and spur individuals to act in ways that benefit their groups. Group-serving behaviors sometimes impose a terrible cost on outsiders.” In other words, in the most powerful groups, people work together — suppressing individual quirks and desires — to protect the group. And then they overlay that group-serving behavior with a moral righteousness that explains and exonerates their ruthlessness. Democratic values — openness, transparency, diversity, free exchange of ideas — do not come naturally to groups, Haidt explains. The brilliance of the American experiment is that it created the freedom for many different groups to thrive.

But then Haidt issues this warning, which the men who run the church would do well to heed: The most effective groups take good care of the people within them.

And the group known as the Catholic Church includes all of its believers, not just the cardinals.

Complete Article HERE!

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Unfit for purpose and in denial: a church that has lost all authority

As a matter of urgency, the new pope must extend the gift of marriage to all priesthood candidates. Failure to do that will mean, in less than a generation, a priesthood comprised solely of social misfits and emotionally damaged refugees from reality.

By Kevin McKenna

Of all the theories advanced explaining why the Catholic priesthood attracts so many young gay men, this is the most valid: it is a direct consequence of the church’s official attitude to homosexuality and the way that this has insinuated itself into the fabric of what we might call a traditional Catholic family with its roots in Ireland.

In such an upbringing homosexuality is still treated as the sum of all sins. Catholic families long ago found a way of dealing with abortion, extramarital sex and divorce, the other three horsemen of the Catholic apocalypse, whenever they occurred close to home, but not homosexuality.

The others could all be processed and interpreted as very human failings stemming from the powerful instinct of physical desire and our need for affection and love. The Christian virtues of understanding, compassion and forgiveness are built to outlast initial shock and hurt in these “acceptable” moral failings. Not so homosexuality.

For how many Catholic parents have secretly prayed that their son “does not turn out gay” or obsess about their response if the eldest boy shows no interest in football and insists on taking a shower every day and buying all his own clothes? The church’s pastoral care and guidance for its own gay community is nonexistent. Catholic gays are non-people in my church; they are “los desaparecidos” and one day many of us will be called to account for how we have treated them.

The church has nothing to say to a child reared in these circumstances and who is beginning to encounter issues with his sexual identity. And so, by a perverse irony, the Catholic priesthood becomes a viable option for him. For what better way to submerge your “problem sexuality” than by committing yourself to a life of celibacy and a lifetime of reflection on the burden that God has deemed you must bear for your redemption and his glory?

Neither of these, though, explains why a church which has become a haven for homosexual men has become so obsessive about warning the rest of us about the dangers of gay sex.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Britain’s most senior Catholic cleric, has been accused of “inappropriate behaviour” towards four priests, stretching back 30-odd years. Thus far he has refused to “deny” the claims, merely to “contest” them. The press office for the Catholic church in Scotland, by way of explanation, lamely insists that the cardinal does not know the identity of his accusers, nor the details of which he is being accused.

Has such behaviour occurred so many times that the cardinal simply has trouble recalling specific instances? Or might he genuinely think that what the priests describe as “inappropriate behaviour” was merely a misunderstanding arising from an encounter with an over-affectionate and tactile boss?

The sullen “no comments” and “I can’t help you” are curious, too. This is an organisation that has become the church’s de facto witchfinder-generals, ever vigilant for examples of anti-Catholicism and never missing an opportunity to portray this country as bigoted and backward.

Like the entire hierarchy of the global Catholic church, they are in complete denial about a culture of sexual dysfunction that has been operating at its core for several decades. Hardly a year passes without an example of grotesque sexual behaviour, both homosexual and heterosexual, by a priest or bishop in the church.

The damage to the church is incalculable. In response to last week’s Observer story, the historian Tom Devine, a Catholic, described it as the church’s biggest crisis since the Reformation. It means that the Scottish Catholic church has lost all authority to speak on matters of human relationships until it at least recognises the root of the problem. Quite simply, the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland is no longer fit for purpose. It hasn’t been for a long time now: its default position is denial and concealment before accusing its critics of being motivated by bigotry.

The Vatican says it will investigate the complaints of the cardinal’s accusers. I have very little faith that an inquiry conducted in another country and of indeterminate legal structure and under the authority of another old man in Rome – identity, as yet, unknown – will deliver anything resembling a just outcome.

Nothing less than a full-scale investigation into the structure and leadership of the Scottish Catholic church will suffice to begin the task of recovering its lost authority. The commission to oversee this must be headed by an overseas cardinal of impeccable character and must comprise clergy and lay people in equal measure.

As a matter of urgency, the new pope must extend the gift of marriage to all priesthood candidates. Failure to do that will mean, in less than a generation, a priesthood comprised solely of social misfits and emotionally damaged refugees from reality. Ordinary Catholics have been incessantly grossly betrayed by the Catholic hierarchy. It is time we ignored the weekly collection plate until we receive some answers.

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Lesbian provisions prompt Catholic bishops to oppose Violence Against Women Act

File under: Cut Your Nose Off To Spite Your Face!

By Lauren Markoe

Five key Catholic bishops are opposing the newly authorized Violence Against Women Act for fear it will subvert traditional views of marriage and gender, and compromise the religious freedom of groups that aid victims of human trafficking.

The act, to be signed into law by President Obama on Thursday (March 7), is intended to protect women from domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking, and allows the federal government to spend money to treat victims and prosecute offenders.

But for the first time since the original act became law in 1994, it spells out that no person may be excluded from the law’s protections because of “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” — specifically covering lesbian, transgender and bisexual women.

That language disturbs several bishops who head key committees within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that deal with, among other issues, marriage, the laity, youth and religious liberty.

“These two classifications are unnecessary to establish the just protections due to all persons. They undermine the meaning and importance of sexual difference,” the bishops said in a statement released by the USCCB on Wednesday.

“They are unjustly exploited for purposes of marriage redefinition, and marriage is the only institution that unites a man and a woman with each other and with any children born from their union,” the statement continued.

The bishops also take issue with the lack of “conscience protection” for faith-based groups that help victims of human trafficking, an addition they sought after the Obama administration decided in 2011 to discontinue funding for a Catholic group that works with trafficking victims, many of whom were forced to work as prostitutes.

The administration instead funded other groups that, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, could provide a full range of women’s health services, including referrals for contraception or abortion, both of which the Catholic Church opposes.

“Conscience protections are needed in this legislation to ensure that these service providers are not required to violate their bona fide religious beliefs as a condition for serving the needy,” reads the statement of the bishops, who have supported previous versions of the act.

The statement was signed by:

— Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, Calif., chairman of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development

— Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco, chairman of the Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage

— Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind., chairman of the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth

— Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty

— Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles, chairman of the Committee on Migration

The bill passed the Senate 78 to 22 on Feb. 12, and the House passed it on Feb. 28 on a vote of 286 to 138, with no Democrats in opposition. Some Republicans objected to the bill for reasons similar to the bishops’.

Complete Article HERE!

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Former Catholics say rigid church forced them to leave

Opposition to female ordination and the prohibition on marriage for priests are among the factors causing an exodus from the Catholic Church.

By: Leslie Scrivener
Joanna Manning, former nun, award-winning religion teacher, advocate for the poor and activist-intellectual, was battle-weary.

For decades she had challenged the Catholic Church, arguing for women’s ordination, the right of priests to marry and accountability in repeated sexual abuse crises.

So Manning, once the public face of the reform movement in Catholic Canada and a persistent burr in the side of the church establishment, decamped a decade ago.

She is now a priest in the Anglican Church.

“I did go through a period of grieving for the loss of the vision I’d grown up with after Vatican II,” says Manning, now 69, referring to the 1962-1965 council to modernize the church. “But the church hierarchy had shut down and retreated . . .”

Critics say the Catholic Church hierarchy is disconnected from many if not most of its followers on issues of reform. Theologian Hans Kung writes that a recent poll in Germany shows 85 per cent of Catholics say priests should be allowed to marry, 79 per cent say divorced persons should have permission to remarry in the church and 75 per cent favour ordaining women.

“There’s a catastrophic shortage of priests, in Europe and in Latin America and Africa,” Kung wrote in the New York Times last week. “Huge numbers have left the church or gone into ‘internal emigration,’ especially in the industrialized countries.”

Around the world there are 49,000 parishes without a resident priest pastor.

The question, says Kung, author of the forthcoming book Can the Church Still Be Saved? , is whether cardinals, gathering to elect a new pope — likely in the next 10 days — will discuss progressive issues, or be “muzzled, as they were at the last conclave, in 2005, to keep them in line.”

In Canada many churches have closed and priests have been brought in from other countries to serve. The Catholic Register has reported that in the Archdiocese of Halifax, elderly priests have been brought out of retirement to serve in parishes.

In the sprawling diocese of London, 42 Catholic churches — including half those in Windsor — closed between 2006 and 2008. About one-third of the remaining parishes are “clustered” or share a priest. Declining attendance, the shortage of priests and the high costs of maintaining old buildings have all contributed to the shuttering, says Connie Paré, the diocese’s director of pastoral planning. “It was a very painful process.”

Speaking from her Bloor West home, Manning recalls of her break with Catholicism that she “had put too much energy into something in which I could see no future.” Her spiky white hair, jeans and purple jacket, worn with a clerical collar, contribute to her youthful appearance. “At my age I could no longer give my life over to resisting.”

She looked elsewhere for a place to practise her faith and found, about 10 years ago, San Lorenzo Anglican church on Dufferin St., which has a Spanish-speaking congregation.

“I’d been in exile and alien in my own church,” says Manning, who received horrific hate mail for her views. “Finally, I’d found a place where I was accepted for who I was without having to check anything at the door, including my brain.”

About five years after she joined the San Lorenzo community, Manning, who is single and has two adult sons and two grandchildren, was unprepared when her fellow parishioners suggested she consider the Anglican priesthood. “It was like I was surprised by the Spirit.”

Women have been ordained as Anglican priests in Canada since 1976.

Manning was ordained in 2011. More than half of those who attended the service were Catholic.

Among them was Ted Schmidt, retired teacher, author and former editor of the Catholic New Times. “This was a woman so far ahead of the institutional leadership she would be shot as the enemy,” says Ted Schmidt, a church progressive. “She’s a prophetic person.”

Manning now works as an assistant curate at two parishes, the inner city All Saints Sherbourne and All Saints Kingsway. She finds herself living with a “deep, abiding joy. A place where I can exercise all my gifts.”

She compares her present state to 10 years ago. “My energies were being drained by struggle. I felt a real outsider. I’d been rejected and was on the fringes of the church. Today my energy is so positive, I feel a flowering . . . at my age to have a second chance to do God’s work in the world.”

The Anglican Church has also attracted Catholic men who wanted to marry and raise families as much as they wanted to be priests. The Rev. Canon Joseph Asselin has been the rector of St. Cuthbert’s Anglican Church in Oakville for the past 13 years.

He was raised Catholic — and was a student of Ted Schmidt — and was so committed that as a young person never once missed Sunday mass over 20 years. His mother continues to attend mass up to four times a week.

Asselin was steeped in Catholic social teaching, he says, and was taught to challenge the culture of consumerism and materialism. His experiences in the church were positive. “I was so happy to have healthy role models and mentors.”
But he could never consider being a priest in the Catholic Church. “This could never happen because I always wanted to be a husband and father. Probably, what I find the greatest joy in is being a father.”

He and his wife, Maureen, an elementary school teacher, have a teenage daughter and son, whose photos adorn his church office.

“The Catholic Church is turning its back on a lot of people who have a genuine calling to be priests, and they are the poorer for it,” says Asselin, 49. “No surprise,” he adds, “women can have the same calling.”
He counts many Catholics in his congregation and has married divorced Catholics who do not want to go through painful, lengthy annulments.

“I am able to relate to families here, with all the joys and challenges of being in a family,” he says.
He adds that the Anglican Church has options for men who feel the calling to live celibate lives as monks.

“When you see priests not leading sexually health lives, it saddens me, because they have been asked to a live a life that is not really for them.”

A radical option for Catholic women who feel called to the priesthood is to be ordained in the Catholic Church.
The price is excommunication.

Monica Kilburn-Smith, a 52-year-old Calgary hospice chaplain and mother of two, is a member of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests group, and was ordained in 2008. “The first priests and bishops in our movement were ordained by male bishops in full communion with Rome, who did this out of their own conviction/conscience that it was wrong for women to be refused this sacrament,” she explains.

Pope John Paul II said that the church has no authority to ordain women, using the argument that the first apostles were all men.

Later, Pope Benedict XVI declared that anyone taking in a woman’s ordination was committing a grave sin.

Kilburn-Smith’s St. Brigid of Kildare Catholic Faith Community is growing, she says, with 200 on the mailing list and up to 60 coming to a monthly service held in a United church. By the fall she hopes to say mass twice monthly.

“When women come to mass for the first time and see a woman in vestments and all that represents, on the surface and at deeper levels, it hits them and makes them cry,” says Kilburn-Smith. “It’s not about me; it’s seeing a woman as a person as a representative of God.”

The movement is not just about getting women into the priesthood, but also about a renewed church for the 21st century.

Why not leave the church and join a denomination that ordains women? “To leave women’s voices out just seems wrong,” Kilburn-Smith says.

“If you see something isn’t right, and you feel called in your own faith, why would you go? The Anglican Church changed because women were ordained. It didn’t come from the hierarchy.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Flocks and shepherds

As a conclave gathers to elect a pope, many in the Catholic church want change

WANTED: man of God; good at languages; preferably under 75; extensive pastoral experience; no record of covering up clerical sex abuse, deeply spiritual and, mentally, tough as old boots. It is a lot to ask, but that is the emerging profile of the man many of his fellow-cardinals would like to see replace Benedict XVI as the next pope.

On March 4th the princes of the church began a series of preliminary “general congregations”, the first step to electing a pontiff. They have much to discuss. After four sessions, they had still not—as expected—fixed a date for the Conclave, the electoral college, made up of cardinals below the age of 80, which will actually choose the next pope.

The papal spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said the members of the general congregation, who include older cardinals, are not “hurrying things”. By March 6th, when they adjourned, the assembly had heard 51 speeches. As Father Lombardi tactfully put it, they spoke “freely and with rather effective colour”. That is code for candour—even bluntness. Indeed, given the crises the church faces, delicacy might seem remiss.

The procedure is usually to identify the main threats facing the church and then find the cardinal best able to deal with them. Of the subjects cited by Father Lombardi, half concerned the Vatican itself. Deeper questions include the loss of religious faith in Europe; the challenge from evangelical Protestantism in Latin America; persecution of Christians in the Middle East and clerical sex abuse. But none is as pressing as the turmoil in the Roman Curia, the church’s central administration.

Benedict, intellectually fearless yet personally timid, was unable to keep order. Many in Rome believe that was the true reason for his departure. The Curia has become a battleground. Prelates loyal to the secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who in many cases were appointed by him or come from his native region of Piedmont, are at furious odds with papal diplomats who resented the appointment of a secretary of state with no knowledge of their business. Other feuds abound too. The leaking of documents by the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, though apparently motivated by genuine dismay at decisions taken in the Vatican, was entwined with this venomous plotting and squabbling.

Following the will of God
The findings of an investigative panel of three cardinals will cast a long shadow over the conclave. Last month an Italian newspaper wrote of a ring of gay prelates, some being blackmailed by outsiders. In the first general congregation, three cardinals—reportedly all Europeans—demanded (in vain) access to the findings. If the report will indeed be kept secret until it is handed to the new pope, it is unclear who made that decision. Secrecy fosters suspicions that the contents are dreadful.

The episode may also strengthen the resolve of the mainly English- and German-speaking cardinals who want a vigorous pope to clean up the Curia. This was last reformed under Paul VI, who reigned from 1963 to 1978. Cardinal George Pell, the burly archbishop of Sydney, said he wanted “a strategist, a decision-maker, a planner, somebody who has got strong pastoral capacities already demonstrated so that he can take a grip of the situation.”

For I have sinned

Among those watching the decision making in Rome with apprehension, fear and optimism is the Catholic priesthood. In many countries, their declining and ageing ranks are beset by the revelation of past scandals—both at the parish and at the top. This week Scotland’s most senior cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, admitted that his sexual conduct at times “has fallen below the standards” expected of him. A radio interview by his former counterpart in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, marked by a nervous laugh and opaque language, compounded the ire.

Victims of sexual abuse believe the reckoning has barely begun. They want not just proper investigation, but apologies and punishments—and in some cases cash. For them, Benedict exemplified the secretive, cautious response that aggravated the misconduct. It will be hard for any new pope to meet their expectations.

Along with frustrations of church politics and shame about misconduct, attendance at mass is falling. In America it has declined by over a third since 1960. In Britain data from the 2011 census show a similar trend, with numbers of Christians down 12 percentage points since 2001. Average Sunday attendance has fallen for the past 20 years. In mostly Catholic Italy only 39% attend on a monthly basis.

But parish life goes on. Timothy Radcliffe, the former head of the Dominican order, says priests are mostly happy, albeit overstretched. After a peak of 110 vocations in England and Wales in 1996, the figure dropped to a mere 19 in 2006. But this year 38 ordinations are expected. In a reversal of the old days of Western missionaries, many were born overseas. Father Stephen Wang, of Allen Hall seminary in London, counts men from Africa, India and Australia in this year’s cohort of 54.

Movements such as “Youth 2000” and World Youth Day encourage vocations through what has been called “evangelical Catholicism”, says Father Wang, in which the faith is “more confident” about presenting itself. Traditionalist groups such as the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter or the Institute of Christ the King are attracting younger members. The provost of the Brompton Oratory, a traditionalist church in central London, is Father Julian Large, a 43-year-old former journalist who draws a youthful following.

The brighter shore

In some respects the woes of the church in the West seem far away from the parts of the world where it is thriving. In a leafy sanctuary from the heat and frenzy of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s biggest city, Father Aurel da Silva sits under a tree on the tidy front lawn of a monastery. On the wall behind him hangs an oversize portrait of Michel Nielly, who a half-century ago established it as a beachhead for the Dominican order. Today it houses some 30 seminarians from across the region and its small wooden chapel attracts Abidjan’s elites for Sunday mass.

Near the guardhouse, employees raise money for local charities by selling mushrooms that grow in the monastery’s garden. Ceramic water filters distributed to the poor are also displayed prominently. A pink leaflet posted on a bulletin board advertises job-training programmes for unemployed youth. When violence engulfed Côte d’Ivoire after its disputed 2010 presidential election, the towering St Paul’s cathedral in the heart of Abidjan sheltered nearly 2,000 people.

The rapidly growing African Catholic church, says Father da Silva, has great ambitions as a social force. But autonomy must be the watchword. The doctrinal debates and papal intrigue in Rome hardly concern him. “I haven’t spent time in Rome, but I don’t need to,” he says. “What I do here is more important.”

Some of his seminarians have softer attitudes to the Vatican, but they insist that the church’s social message is secondary: spirituality comes first. The African church is no hotbed of liberalism. Its leading contender for the papacy, the Ghanaian cardinal Peter Turkson, is widely regarded as a conservative in the mold of Benedict.

But one of Father da Silva’s older colleagues stakes out a more radical position. The church must evolve, he says. His priorities are: the end of clerical celibacy, women’s ordination, and, above all, greater tolerance for dissent: “You have to accept other people’s way of thinking.”

Those views chime across continents and oceans. In the beautiful, desolate west of Ireland is the village of Moygownagh, the home parish of Father Brendan Hoban. He is a co-founder of the Association of Catholic Priests, which aspires to represent the 2m Irish people who attend mass at least once a month. It is campaigning for an end to celibacy, “inclusive ministry” (code for women priests) and a rethinking of sexual teaching, especially on contraception.

Nearly a quarter of Ireland’s 4,500 priests (and probably a higher share of its able-bodied, energetic ones) has joined. It is in touch with similar bodies in Austria, where a grass-roots initiative among priests incurred a papal rebuke last year, as well as France, the Czech Republic, Australia and the United States.

The Irish association has special credibility. It speaks for a country where the hierarchy is reeling from horrific revelations about abuse in church-run institutions and clerical cover-ups, but where the population, despite the onrush of secularism, remains relatively pious by the standards of the rich world.

The village exemplifies both the crisis and strength of Irish Catholicism. Half of its residents attend weekly mass and most of the remainder look to the church for rites of passage, from first communion to anniversary masses for the dead. Despite the recession, generous donations are paying for church refurbishment.

Moygownagh belongs to a small diocese with 32 priests serving 22 parishes; that number sounds high, and it reflects a flood of vocations in the 1960s and 1970s. But only seven priests are under 55. Father Hoban is nearly 65. When he retires, he expects that the village will be left without a priest of its own for the first time in centuries. In his parents’ time, he recalls, a local farming family would be proud if a son joined the priesthood. Now, he says, even a “faithful Catholic family might panic” if a son announced a similar vocation. “They would feel he was embarking on a life of stress, isolation and low social prestige.”

Almost all the church’s recent woes can be ascribed, in Father Hoban’s view, to the top-down decision-making which has marked the past two papacies. Like many Catholic liberals, he feels that the trouble started when the church hierarchy hijacked the devolutionary reforms of the second Vatican council and blocked change or implemented it badly.

The result, viewed from an Irish village, is that “Rome doesn’t listen to the national bishops; the bishops don’t tell Rome the truth because Rome doesn’t want to hear it; the bishops don’t listen to the priests, the priests haven’t listened enough to the people.” With lay involvement, the child-abuse cover-ups would not have happened. He does not want the church to be “literally democratic”, but nor should it “preserve structures inherited from the Roman empire.”

What do priests of his school expect from the conclave? “In some ways we don’t hope for that much, because all the cardinals have been appointed under the present order. But we hope that some can see the dysfunctionality of the Vatican in its present form…the cardinals need to bite the bullet and appoint somebody who can challenge the Curia.”

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Catholic Patriarchy: What the Papal Transition Means and What Feminists Can Do About It

By Mary Hunt

The obvious question is why any self-respecting feminist would worry about the Pope, the Roman Catholic Church, and its machinations. My simple answer is POWER. Religion is one of the many sources that shape how power is shared (or not) in this world. Feminists need to pay attention to the sharing of power if we think we are going to reshape the world in a more just and egalitarian way. As someone who speaks “Catholic,” indeed as a theologian rooted in the tradition, I think there is a lot of power in the balance at the moment, and I want to see it shared.

The papal transition underway in Rome is a classic example of patriarchy prancing for the world to see live and in color. It is without a doubt the biggest religious news story thus far in the 21st century, and there is not a woman in sight. Think about that in light of the media coverage. Apart from the many women reporters now in Rome, the players in this story are all men, all the time.

Of course women are seen in the vast crowds that flock to St. Peter’s Square or greeting the helicopter bearing the out-going pope at his new digs at Castel Gandolfo. But there are virtually no women in the big news of the papal transfer save the nuns who were relocated from their convent so that the Pope Emeritus will have a new place to live in his old neighborhood. They are symbolic of the problem I am underscoring, as I doubt they were consulted. Even the Virgin Mary was consulted!

Likewise, the story of the implosion of the patriarchal church (what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has better called “kyriarchy”[1]) is utterly devoid of women. Whether the Vatican banking scandal, sexual abuse, or episcopal cover-up, this has been a men’s show from the beginning, and they have done a royal job of making a mess.
I do not think women would necessarily have avoided these pitfalls. However, the historical fact is that as far as we know, women were not involved. Therein lies the most obvious place to start looking at this situation from a feminist perspective. Who else isn’t there and why? Young people, married people, out LGBTIQ people, more than a few men of color, the list is endless. Yet no one seems to notice, or if they do notice they do not seem to care. I notice and I care!

The Conclave will start soon. 115 mostly older men will select the successor to the man who named them as cardinal electors (virtually all of the cardinals were named by Benedict XVI or John Paul II for whom Benedict was the shadow pope for several years). Chances are good that the new pope will be even more conservative than the two before him. Perhaps he will be a little more charismatic, or a little better manager, maybe even from a developing country, but the fundamental conservative trajectory is set, not to be undone.

I would guess that he has already been selected. What organization the size of the Roman Catholic Church would be without a succession plan with an 86 year old CEO? I suspect he is already at work despite the many myths and stories of the secrecy and spirituality of the conclave, and now the display of robes in small, medium and large on hand to fit the fellow who is saddled with the impossible job of being pope. The current discussion, as far as I can tell, is really about what team will hold sway. All heads of Vatican offices must resign at the end of a papacy. So there are many personnel matters, i.e. who will have what power, being decided at the official meetings that began in Rome on March 4, 2013.

There are also lots of informal meetings going on constantly as the gentlemen reshuffle the deck. This is a power shift akin to when a Republican defeats a Democrat. There are a lot of careers and plenty of ideology at stake for which the actual pope is but a vivid symbol. The best analogy is electing a U.S. president because of whom s/he will elect to the Supreme Court. Think of how carefully they have to vet all of the players now that Scotland’s Cardinal O’Brien has been brought down by his former lovers. Skeletons in closets do tend to rattle when the stakes are high, and the stakes are high in terms of the power to shape the future direction of this big church.

No matter who is elected, the process is mortally flawed because it represents a model of church that is long out of date. Until and unless structural changes take place to develop a well integrated, representative governing model in which all members of the Catholic community—including women, married/partnered people, young people—are involved there will be no change. Beginning with local base communities and parishes, adult members need to have real decision-making power about personnel, money, property, sacramental, and social justice work. The same goes for dioceses and regions such that increasingly representative bodies make decisions that clerics cannot overrule. This includes people from the poorest most marginalized parts of the world whose well being and dignity ought to be the center of Catholic concern but clearly is not. We who are part of the community expect and demand that we exercise voice, vote, and responsibility in ministry and in governance.

I am not interested in the personal characteristics of a new pope, even in betting on the outcome of the papal horse race. That is the patriarchal frame of the discussion, which I think feminists need to reject. If I respond favoring Cardinal X over Cardinal Y, or if I sketch out the characteristics of a “kinder gentler” pope, then I am conceding that the model is acceptable. It is not.

I am interested in getting rid of the papacy and other trappings of monarchy in favor of a democratic, participatory model of church. Please don’t suggest that I become a Presbyterian. Though some of my best friends are Presbyterians, I am what a Catholic can and should look like in the 21st century. This is the change we need.

Even though my goal of dismantling the kyriarchy is unlikely to hold sway, I want to look at the religious significance of the elite, exclusionary approaches to governance that are playing out on worldwide television and web because they have a shaping influence. I try to forget what I know about all of the inner dealings of the Roman Catholic Church (electing a pope is like watching the law and sausage being made—not a pretty sight) and imagine what those who simply see the spectacle played out on screen think. I suspect that what people see is at once convincing and confusing.

The trope of tradition is very persuasive. Even though the most recent pope resigned and then made up new rules for the conclave that will replace him, most people do not see the clear elasticity of the church. Those in power reserve to themselves such conscience-bound decisions as resigning from the papacy, while women who make choices about their own bodies are labeled sinners. The gentlemen change the conclave rules with the wave of a Motu Proprio (“on his own impulse”) as they call it, but when we lay people decide on our own impulses to use birth control or to love in a same-sex way we are considered sinful.

The smoke and mirrors that the media report on draw people’s attention to mistaken notions of timeless, tradition-bound splendor. It is hard to compete with the costumes—everyone knows about the pope’s red shoes that signify the blood of the martyrs—the music, the buildings, the grounds for what appears to be God’s own realm. People love the quaint notion that the Cardinal electors will be locked away without their smart phones to let the Holy Spirit decide on the pope’s successor. I do not want to offend anyone, but I am realistic enough to think the deal is long done and the pageantry, not unlike the Wizard of Oz, is simply good for business.

What astounds me is why intelligent people, especially those in the media, are not scratching their heads in utter confusion about the whole scene. Shareholders, stakeholders have absolutely no input into the process. Imagine if this kind of election took place in Cuba or in Washington! I would think they would have some critical questions to ask—where are the women, where are the young people, where are more people of color who make up the growing majority in the church? Of a billion people this tiny cadre has all the power? What is wrong with this picture?

A great deal is wrong with it. The worst part, in my view, is the instrumentalization of religion, of people’s faith, to reinscribe and reinforce ways of being and acting as if they were the will of the divine. This is blasphemy. I make no such counter claim that my approach is what God wants. Rather, I assume that human beings can and should organize themselves in ways that reflect their most deeply held values. To see 115 men hold the power in a worldwide community is frightening because of what it means about their sense of the divine. Obviously they think God favors men over women, the few over the many, their privileged information over the sensus fidelium. Where they read this in Christian scripture is not clear. I respectfully disagree and urge us to change the power model as quickly as possible, beginning by withdrawing financial support from the institutional Roman Catholic Church.

There are deep social implications of the world’s largest Christian denomination modeling a monarchical way of being in an increasingly democratic world. Apart from looking ridiculous and offending people at every turn such that the second largest denomination in the US is ex-Catholics, the outcome of this exercise is to reinforce the power of patriarchy. If these men can act with impunity then other corporations can have few if any women in their boardrooms. If this monarchical model is acceptable, than governments do not need to allow their citizens voice and vote. If God wills the outcome of a papal election, then surely God wills wars, ecocide, and other human-made problems. I reject this theology.

It may be imputing too much power to the Roman Catholic Church to say that it shapes people’s worldviews. But there is virtually no other religious body—not Islam, not Judaism, not the World Council of Churches—that will be the focus of such attention, that will be able to foist its narrative on the world for free in the next few weeks. Given the fact that it is misogynist, exclusivist, kyriarchal in every sense of “lordship” over the majority, I think feminists need to reject it while still affirming the underlying fundamental values of love and justice.

Several feminist strategies are important for countering this approach and creating constructive new ways of being church that focus on participation, safety, and accountability. Keep it simple—stop, look, listen—as we say to children when we teach them to cross the street.

STOP the process.
There is no reason that the papacy cannot remain vacant for a time. Church history includes examples of deadlocked conclaves, lengthy meetings that lasted months unto years. Pope Benedict’s own resignation and subsequent change of conclave rules are evidence of the elasticity of customs and laws.

The current situation of the church is grave: sexual abuse and cover-ups, financial problems, loss of trust and transparency, tawdry sexual conduct, and most importantly, the wholesale exclusion of most members of the community, especially women, from decision-making. Given this gravity, the best solution is simply to call off the conclave. The energies and resources saved can be channeled into envisioning and constructing new, more inclusive ways of being church where safety and accountability are paramount.

LOOK at the facts.
Contemplative Catholic spirituality invites “a long loving look at the real.” Despite the pomp and pageantry of the papal transition, institutional Catholicism is in tatters. No amount of white smoke can obscure the corruption and infighting. No Gregorian chant can drown out the cries of those who have been abused. No reading of the Gospel can excuse the oppressive treatment of women and same-sex loving people.

By contrast, small base communities, some parishes, and many religious communities are robust places where sacraments and solidarity are the norm. Groups across the globe work on social justice, education, and health care based on Catholic commitments without institutional connections. The disconnect is profound between hierarchy and laity. Nonetheless, educated, willing, and capable Catholics abound who embrace the responsibility to be church despite the scandalous actions of the leaders.

LISTEN to the Spirit.
Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit infuses the world with grace. Rather than watch a new pope emerge from the delegates who have been handpicked by the previous two popes, it is time for new ways of organizing and governing the more than one billion members of the Catholic community. Contemporary culture of inclusion and participation demands it, and technology makes it possible.

One new model of church would include a team of people from around the world who represent various and sundry national/regional groups, different styles of worship and ministry, various lifestyles and families, religious and secular people. It would be a democratic assembly of equals, a global network of the people of God, who delegate the fruits of their decisions to ministers who carry out the will of the body in teaching and preaching, sacraments and social justice, finances and public witness.

For those who are not Catholic, this is a time to stop worrying about charges of anti-Catholicism and join voices with those of Catholic feminists who cry foul on the process and the product of the upcoming conclave. Those who have no stake in Catholicism can be helpful by asking the obvious questions of who is not included, involved, able to minister, make decisions, and otherwise exercise adult faith. There is no need to settle for the answer, “They do this because they are Catholic,” and be told if it is not your tradition to have no voice.

The stakes, when examined in global terms, are simply too high. If religions shape worldviews, then everyone has the right and responsibility to look critically at it and go about the communal task of creating something better.

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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.

“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!