News: Fr. Bryan Massingale, a Black, gay priest and theologian at @FordhamNYC dreams of a church that celebrates and embraces LGBTQ people. An incredible talk given to LGBTQ students from Jesuit colleges and universities…. https://t.co/oa1ec2feFQ
As a child in inner-city Milwaukee, Father Bryan Massingale’s grandmother gave him a leather-bound copy of The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, along with a dream that he might need it someday.
“My grandmother was not delusional. She did not live in denial of reality,” said Massingale, a Jesuit priest who holds an endowed chair in ethics at Fordham University, in New York City. “Her gift was a vision, an act of hope. It was a dream, a hope, a reminder that the neighborhood, with its drugs, violence and rodent-infested corner store with overpriced goods, did not define or limit who I could be.”
That’s important to know, he declared, since he was speaking as “a Black, gay priest and theologian” at Fordham’s recent Ignatian Q Conference for LGBTQ students from Jesuit campuses. This event was a “space for our dreaming, for queer dreams” of hope for “despised and disdained and stigmatized peoples,” he added.
“I dream of a church where gay priests and lesbian sisters are acknowledged as the holy and faithful leaders they already are,” he said, in a published version of his address. “I dream of a church where LGBTQ employees and schoolteachers can teach our children, serve God’s people and have their vocations, sexuality and committed loves affirmed. …
“I dream of a church that enthusiastically celebrates same-sex loves as incarnations of God’s love among us.”
Theological visions of this kind inspire hope for some Catholics and concern for others.
Thus, the North American phase of the Vatican’s global Synod on Synodality found “strong tensions within the Church,” while participants in the virtual assemblies also “felt hope and encouragement and a desire for the synodal process to continue,” according to the 36-page report (.pdf here) released on April 12 by U.S. and Canadian Catholic leaders.
Catholics are “called to act co-responsibly in a synodal fashion, not to wait until we know how to do everything perfectly, but to walk together as imperfect people,” said one group, in its summary of the process. Another group added: “When Church structures and practices are dynamic and able to move with the Holy Spirit, everyone is able to ‘use their gifts in service of the Church and of each other.'”
Calling for “greater inclusivity and welcome” within the church, the final report said this was especially true with “women, young people, immigrants, racial or linguistic minorities, LGBTQ+ persons” and “people who are divorced and remarried without an annulment.”
But the report also warned about the “danger of false or unrealistic expectations regarding what the synodal process is meant to be and to ‘produce,’ since people living in “North American culture” tend to focus on “measurable results and … winners and losers.” Some participants, for example, questioned calls for “radical inclusion,” while asking about the “pastoral and even doctrinal implications” of that term.
The explosive nature of these debates jumped into the news weeks later when the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York hosted, next to a side altar, a “God is Trans” exhibit.
In his written explanation of his art, Adah Unachukwu said this display “maps the queer spiritual journey” through “Sacrifice, Identity and Communion.” There is, he added, “no devil; just past selves” and “Communion rounds out the spiritual journey, by placing God and the mortal on the same plane.”
After seeing headlines, Archdiocese of New York officials promised to investigate the exhibit at the Paulist Fathers parish. The congregation also offers, on its website, an “Out at St. Paul” ministry to the “Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Trans and Queer community.”
Media reports early this week noted that parish leaders changed the name of this art exhibit, but that it remained in place.
Massingale delivered his Fordham address before that controversy. However, he did stress that Catholics must dare to share dreams of change – even those with “an inherently subversive quality” – while seeking a “new and more just social order.”
Referring to the “wedding banquet at Cana,” when Jesus turned water into wine, the Jesuit theologian called for a changed church in which “people of all races, genders and sexualities rejoice at the presence of love” and a world in which “spiritual wounds will be healed, where faith-based violence will be no more, where fear and intolerance are relics of history.”
In recent years the official position on clerical immunity has changed, but do we show it in action?
“If anyone causes one of these little ones — those who believe in me — to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18,6)
We are all aware of the child abuse scandal in the Church. Under instructions from Rome, priests who had been involved in child abuse were not referred to secular criminal authorities.
I myself came across such a case. After I had spoken to a group of Catholic women campaigning for the ordination of women, one person, whom I shall call Dawn, approached me. We became good friends. We stayed in touch. On one occasion she told me her experience as a child.
“I’m an orphan”, she said. “My father divorced my mother and went abroad. My mother died when I was twelve years old. I landed up in an orphanage managed by religious sisters. The sisters treated me well. I’m greatly indebted to them. But our spiritual director inflicted permanent damage.”
“What did he do?,” I asked.
“Well, he came to the orphanage once a week to hear our confessions. Remember this was the 1970’s. If we needed to discuss any special problem, we could meet him in a small parlor nearby. Well, on one occasion he told me at the end of confession to meet him in in the parlor afterward.”
“I don’t know if I should go into details”, she told me. “But I suppose it is a relief for me to share my story. On that day I waited till all confessions were over. Then I joined him in the parlor. He locked the door from the inside keeping the key in the door, sat down and asked me to come closer. ‘I want to see if you are healthy and OK’, he said. Then he lifted my skirt, pulled down my panties and interfered with me . . . I froze. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. But he said everything was alright. I didn’t need to worry … This happened a couple of times. On the last occasion, he tried to rape me. I cried, managed to open the door and ran out of the room.”
“Didn’t you tell anyone?”, I asked.
“Yes, I finally did. When Mother Superior found me sobbing in the dormitory, she took me to her office. I told her what had happened. She was upset. She embraced me and said: ‘I’ll sort this out’. She did, in quite a dramatic way. I was sent to another orphanage far away from the priest.”
“And what happened to him?”
“Nothing as far as I know. Years later when I had grown up and got my first job, I visited the original orphanage. I was told the priest was still the spiritual director. I don’t know if he molested other girls …”
Dawn also confided to me that, on account of that early experience and her resulting dread of men, she had never been able to marry.
Accountability
The horror of child abuse committed by some bishops and priests is now well recognized. The Catholic Church handled the crisis badly, especially under Pope John Paul II. The reasons were a serious underestimation of the emotional damage done to the victims; the failure to understand that child abuse springs from deep psychological disorders that lead to re-offending; and the belief that avoiding scandal to the Church’s reputation should outweigh other considerations.
But another, more destructive, reason lay in the old concept that clerics were exempt from secular law. It was laid down in the earliest medieval form of it in these words: “The drawing of a cleric before a civil judge is prohibited by the sacred canons and the external (secular) laws, both in civil and in criminal cases” (12th century. Decree of Gratian, ch. 32, no 24). It remained enshrined in Church Law until 1983.
And the principle of clerical exemption is closely linked to another erroneous concept: that ordained persons are somehow only accountable to their ecclesiastical superiors and to God.
Christ and exemption from secular law
It is clear that Jesus would be very upset by child abuse. He clearly stated: “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18,6).
Notice the phrase: “If any of you”. There is no room here for clerical immunity. It includes ‘apostles’ or whoever would claim a rank among his disciples.
But what about exemption from secular law?
Well, Jesus taught that the Jews of his time should pay taxes to their secular rulers, the Romans. Remember the incident. When the Pharisees and Herodians ask him about this, he said: “Show me the coin used for the tax.” And when they brought him a denarius, he asked: “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.”
Then Jesus declared: “Well, then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22,19-21). This is all the more telling because the Romans were foreign intruders.
Another telling feature is that, when Jesus cured lepers, he always instructed them to subject themselves to the priests in Jerusalem who were in charge of checking whether someone was infected by leprosy or not.
Keeping lepers isolated was crucially important in Jewish society at the time to prevent further infections. Those specialized priests were the officially appointed authority.
To a leper in the Galilean hill country Jesus gives this order: “See that you don’t tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded, as a testimony to them” (Matthew 8,4).
To the ten lepers on the border between Samaria and Galilee Jesus says: “Go and show yourself to the priests!” (Luke 17,14). Jesus did not consider them immune from the established law.
When Jesus stands trial before Pilate, he does not claim immunity from secular law.
Pilate asks him: “Are you the king of the Jews?”
Jesus replies: “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But my kingdom is from another place [is a different kind of kingdom]” (John 18,33-36).
Even though Jesus knew he was unjustly condemned to death, he did not deny Pilate’s secular authority over himself.
Questions
In recent years the official position on clerical immunity has changed, but do we show it in action? If bishops or priests harm another person, are we on the side of the cleric or of the victim?
Do we cooperate fully with secular authorities investigating misbehavior or crimes committed by ordained persons?
— A group of philanthropists poured money into a Denver nonprofit that obtained dating and hookup app data and shared it with bishops around the country, a Post investigation has found
A group of conservative ColoradoCatholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country.
The secretive effort was the work of a Denver nonprofit called Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal, whose trustees are philanthropists Mark Bauman, John Martin and Tim Reichert, according to public records, an audio recording of the nonprofit’s president discussing its mission and other documents. The use of data is emblematic of a new surveillance frontier in which private individuals can potentially track other Americans’ locations and activities using commercially available information. No U.S. data privacy laws prohibit the sale of this data.
The project’s aim, according to tax records, is to “empower the church to carry out its mission” by giving bishops “evidence-based resources” with which to identify weaknesses in how they train priests.
In response to requests for comment and a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson for Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal initially said the group’s president, Jayd Henricks, would agree to an interviewat a certain time, but Henricks did not call or return several messages seeking comment.After The Washington Post reached out again, Henricks on Wednesday posted a first-person piece on the site First Things, saying he was proud to be part of the group, whose purpose was “to love the Church and to help the Church to be holy, with every tool she could be given,” including data. He wrote that the group has done other research, in addition to the analysis of dating and hookup apps.
The Post interviewed two people with firsthand knowledge of the project, heard an audio recording of Henricks discussing it, and reviewed documents that were prepared for bishops as well as public records. One of the two people works for the church and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about it. The second person is active in the church in Colorado, knows some of the project’s organizers, and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the project is not supposed to be public. Both disapprove of the project because they see it as spying and coercive in ways that are damaging to priest-bishop relations and to the reputation of the Catholic Church and thus its ability to evangelize. They also see the project as taking a simplistic approach to morality that they call un-Catholic.
Some of the men who are part of the Renewal project were also involved in the July 2021 outing of a prominent priest, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, according to the two people with firsthand knowledge of the project and comments by the group’s president on the audio recording. Burrill, who declined to comment for this story, resigned from his post as the top administrator at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) after a Catholic news site, the Pillar, said it had mobile app datashowing he was a regular on Grindr andhad gone to a gay bar and a gay bathhouse and spa. The Pillar did not say where its data came from.
The anonymous tracking of a gay priest through his phone made news around the world, with critics calling it a kind of weaponized, anti-gay surveillance.
Until now, the peoplebehind Burrill’s outing and the extent of the projectwere not public, nor was the fact that the effort continued — for at least another year after that incident, according to the people familiar with it and documents.
“The power of this story is that you don’t often see where these practices are linked to a specific person or group of people. Here, you can clearly see the link,” said Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke University’s public policy school, who focuses on data privacy issues. The number of data privacy laws in the country, he said, “you can count them on one or two hands.”
According to two separate reports prepared for bishops and reviewed by The Post, the group says it obtained data that spans 2018 through 2021 for multiple dating and hookup apps including Grindr, Scruff, Growlr and Jack’d, all used by gay men, as well as OkCupid, a major site for people of various sexualities. But most of the data appears to be from Grindr, and those familiar with the project said the organizers’ focus was gay priests.
In the First Things piece, Henricks said: “It’s not about straight or gay priests and seminarians. It’s about behavior that harms everyone involved, at some level and in some way, and is a witness against the ministry of the Church.”
One report prepared for bishops says the group’s sources are data brokers who got the information from ad exchanges, which are sites where ads are bought and sold in real time, like a stock market. The group cross-referenced locationdata from the apps and other details with locations of church residences, workplaces and seminaries to find clergy who were allegedly active on the apps, according to one of the reports and also the audiotape of the group’s president.
Sherman said police departments have bought data about citizens instead of seeking a warrant, domestic abusers have accessed dataabout their victims, and antiabortion activists have used data to target people who visit clinics.
But Bennett Cyphers, a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, said the Burrill story was the first time he had heard of a private group buying commercial data and using it against a specific individual.
“It was the first needle-in-a-haystack case, where someone sifts through millions of locations in apps and looks for one person and then tries to use that info to impeach them,” Cyphers said. “It was a character assassination of a private citizen for some kind of political reason based on information [the citizen] didn’t know they were being tracked on.”<
Still, some have celebrated Burrill’s outing as a way to purify the church by making other clerics more fearful of breaking their promise of celibacy.
The Rev. Gerald Murray, a New York City canon lawyer who offers church commentary on the Catholic channel EWTN and Fox News, said Burrill being a priest in a prominent role makes any misbehavior “a much greater scandal” and essentially eliminates his right to privacy.
“The promise of celibacy is a public act, it’s not a private commitment. It’s of public interest when those are violated in a scandalous way,” he said.
The Renewal group has spent at least $4 million, according to the recording of Henricks, and approached more than a dozen bishops with the information. It’s not clear what impact the project is having on clergy who the data suggests have actively used a dating or hookup app on their phone. Except for Burrill, it is not known whether the data has led to the resignation or termination of any other priests or seminarians.One of the two people familiar with the project said people may be kept from promotions or wind up in early retirement but not know why.
The project’s existence reflects a newly empowered American Catholic right wing that sees enforcing its interpretation of church teaching on sexuality and gender as an existential issue for the church and that no longer trusts bishops to do so.It is a flip of traditional church power dynamics, with the Colorado laypeople in a position to pressure bishops.
“Revealing information that harms a person’s reputation without an objectively valid reason — even if it’s true — is considered a sin,” said a member of the USCCB who knows Burrill and watched the monsignor experience “intense emotional distress” when his orientation and use of Grindr were made public in 2021. This person spoke on the condition of anonymity because of their working relationship with bishops. This person had heard about the data project before the Burrill news from another person who was approached by the nonprofit who told the USCCB member the effort was mainly focused on exposing gay priests.
A data project
In 2018, a man “concerned with reforming the Catholic clergy” approached a few Catholic organizations, including the Catholic News Agency, according to a cryptic article CNA published the day before the Burrill story broke.
That 2018 pitch, CNA reported, “was to provide this information privately to Church officials in the hopes that they would discipline or remove those found to be using these technologies to violate their clerical vows and possibly bring scandal to the Church.” CNA had declined the man’s offer, the story said, “but there are reports this week that information targeting allegedly active homosexual priests may become public.”
Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal opened for business in June 2019, incorporation records show.The nonprofit was created to “support the commitment of Roman Catholic clergy to living the teachings of the church,” its 2019 tax filing states. Its purpose is “to work systematically with bishops, priests, religious and seminarians to … provide evidence-based resources to bishops that enable them to effectively judge and support quality formation practices, and [to] identify weaknesses in current formation practices and priestly life.”
It’s not clear if or how the Renewal group is connected to the man who approached CNA.
Bauman, Martin and Reichert are listed as trustees on the nonprofit’s tax filings for the two years they are publicly available.
Martin is a co-founder of one of the largest natural gas producers in the western United States, McMurry Oil Co. He supports many charitable efforts through his and his wife’s Martin Family Foundation. Those include his co-founding of the Amazing Parish, a national consulting firm to help improve parishes, and major donations to the causes of campus evangelization, antiabortion, anti-poverty and religious education. He contributed $555,000 to Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal over two years, tax records show.
Bauman is a former entertainment company executive who is now president of the board of Christ in the City, a nonprofit organization that trains missionaries and serves the homeless. He is a benefactor of some of the same Denver-area groups as Martin and Reichert, including Catholic Charities and Focus campus ministry. He did not donate money to the Renewal group in 2019 or 2020, according to tax documents.
Reichert is the founder of Economics Partners, a consulting firm that employs dozens of economists. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress last year in the central 7th District as a Republican. With his wife, he gives major gifts to Catholic Charities, Mother Teresa’s order Missionaries of Charity and college evangelization. The couple also gave $600,000 to Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal over two years, according to the group’s tax returns.
In a speech last year given to a Catholic Charities men’s breakfast, Reichert said Christians need to oppose false ideas like “post-Christianity” or “pluralism,” which he calls a “fool’s errand.” Instead, he said, they need to boldly proselytize and not worry about being unpopular or canceled. “To be free, one has to be willing to lose one’s reputation. That’s the way they’ve set up the game.”
According to two people with knowledge of the project, the philanthropists hired Henricks, the former head of government relations for the USCCB, the organized body of Catholic leaders in the United States. Henricks by then had moved from D.C. to Denver to work for the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school. Martin and Bauman have donated to the school. Reichert’s wife, Martha, is listed as a staff member there.
Tax documents for Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewalshow revenue of $1.5 million in 2019 and $1.8 million in 2020, the most recent year information is public. Most of the money each year was spent on “data and computing,” staff salaries and attorneys’ fees.
The law firm representing the group is D.C.-based Schaerr-Jaffe, founded by Gene Schaerr, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who has called fighting same-sex marriage “a religious duty.” Schaerr advises evangelical colleges on how to protect their government funding while upholding practices such as barring LGBTQ student clubs.
In an email to The Post, Schaerr confirmed the group is a client. “My charge was and is to help them ensure that their efforts — which are focused on empowering Catholic bishops to more effectively oversee and mentor their priests and seminarians — comply with all relevant privacy and other laws.”
He deferred other questions to the group.
Other donors to the nonprofit include the Catholic Foundation of Northern Colorado, which works in tandem with the Archdiocese of Denver to support its ministries and parishes. The foundation gave the Renewal group $400,000 in the two years for which tax forms are available.
The Catholic Foundation of Northern Colorado did not return messages seeking comment.
Henricks knows many bishops from his previous job with the bishops’ conference. According to the person who works for the church and to the audio recording, Henricks’s rolehas been to take the data sets to various bishops and use their knowledge of priests’ and seminarians’ locations to match the known device locations with actual people.
Henricks wrote in First Things that he shared this information with “a handful of rectors and bishops” and did not make the information available for public use, so as to be able to “have honest and frank conversations with Church leaders, and protect the privacy of those affected.”
However, one of the people with knowledge of the project said some bishops felt pressure from the group to take action.
The Post has seen copies of two differentreports presented to bishops. One is from the Renewal group to a diocese and the other is the one that the Pillar presented to the USCCB about Burrill. The information in both is mostly about Grindr, although the reports also say they have used data from other gay dating apps Growlr, Scruff and Jack’d, as well as OkCupid.
These dating and hookup apps let people create profiles, search for other users and send private messages back and forth. The apps can use a person’s exact location to show them potential matches nearby, in real time, for in-person meetups.
The datacovers periods from 2018 to 2021 and the reports include images of certain addresses with location pings marked on top, such as parishes, rectories and seminaries.
The documents The Post reviewed do not name the ad brokers and exchanges where they say the data came from. It isn’t clear whether the Renewal donors purchased data directly from brokers,or from someone else who had, or a combination of the two.
According to one of the people familiar with the project and the audio tape, the philanthropists, Henricks and church officials have varying views about how best to use the data.
Some wanted to out the men, like Burrill, believed to have the apps on their phones, the person said.
Others want to use data to work behind the scenes, to monitor the men, perhaps confronting them without saying how their app use was known, or maybe keeping such men from rising in their careers, the person said.
Vulnerable tech
The digital advertising industry has compiled and sold such detailed data for years, claiming that stripping away information like names made it anonymous. Researchers have long shown, however, that it is possible to take a large amount of data for a specific location and re-identify people using additional information such as known addresses, and the outing of Burrill showed the practice in action. This buying and selling of data — from demographics and political beliefs to health information — is a multibillion-dollar, almost unregulated industry, said Sherman of Duke University.
Although no names were in the original data from brokers, it included enough identifying details and location pings that the group was able to analyze it for specific locations and narrow down likely people using the apps. The information the group told bishops they had included: the type of device, the location, the device ID and the internet service provider being used, among other characteristics, according to the reports.
The group also focused on devices that spent multiple nights at a rectory, for example, or if a hookup app was used for a certain number of days in a row in some other church building, such as a seminary or an administrative building. They then tracked other places those devices went according to location information and cross-referenced addresses with public information.
Henricks said in his First Things piece that they were “meticulous” about complying with all applicable laws, including data and privacy ones.
The app companies say they have changed what information they share.
Grindr spokesman Patrick Lenihan told The Post that the company stopped sharing location information in early 2020. The company says it only shares limited information with ad partners now. Grindr has said it asked the Pillar several times to see the data to verify it came from the app but no data was provided.
Growlr said it previously shared location data with advertisers but stopped in May 2022, “in light of potential vulnerabilities that could lead to unintended misuse,” said a spokesperson for its owner,the Meet Group.
“Location data, while the user was using the app, was made available to advertisers in real time for the purposes of advertising. Growlr no longer shares GPS location data.”
>Match Group, which owns OkCupid, says the app did not share that kind of location data during that time and does not currently. “Location data is obfuscated within a kilometer for safety reasons,” said Match Group spokeswoman Justine Sacco.
Perry Street Software, which owns Jack’d and Scruff, did not reply to requests for comment.
Buying and selling precise location data is still common in the digital ad industry, despite a few bigger apps changing their own policies, said Matt Voda, chief executive of marketing analytics company OptiMine.
Regardless, the data used by the Denver group shows only when and wheredating apps have been activatedon a phone; they don’t prove conversations or in-person meetingstook place. That lack of information was cited by critics of the Pillar’s 2021 reporting, which said Burrill was guilty of “serial sexual misconduct.” The Pillar also described Grindr, which is used by 11 million people around the world each month, as a tool of child predators. The site did note that there was no suggestion or evidence Burrill was in communication with minors.
In 2021, Pillar editor JD Flynn defended their reporting, saying a priest shouldn’t be on Grindr for the same reason a priest shouldn’t ride alone in a car with a child.
“It seems totally reasonable to say the Church must ask: ‘Is there a similar technological analog where no cleric would use such an app because of the way in which an infinitesimally small number of clerics have already been demonstrated to use the app inappropriately.
Grindr said the connections are harmful.
“We are infuriated by the actions of these anti-LGBTQ vigilantes. Grindr has and will continue to push the industry to keep bad actors out of the ad tech ecosystem, particularly on behalf of the LGBTQ community,” Lenihan said. “All this group is doing is hurting people.”
After the Pillar’s reporting in 2021 on Burrill, it initially seemed as though the then-anonymous project was about to explode in public across the country
Three days after the Pillar wrote about Burrill, it published a story saying its analysis of signal data within the Archdiocese of Newark showed “patterns of location-based hookup app use” at various church residences. It said it did not de-anonymize the Newark data.
A few days later, the Pillar reported that its data analysis showed that 32 devices in the Vatican complex put off signals in 2018 from hookup apps.
A Newark spokesperson told The Post that the Pillar provided no actual data or evidence of misconduct and that the matter was being reviewed. The Vatican complex in Rome declined to comment to the Pillar.
After that, the stories stopped.
A Catholic debate
The topic of clergy sexuality has vexed the U.S. Catholic Church for decades. Several prominentexperts on clergy sexuality estimate a third of U.S. priests are gay men, who serve a church that teaches being gay is “disordered,” in opposition to God’s plan. Social conservatives have noted that abuse victims of Catholic clergy in recent decades were mostly male and have tried to paint gay priests as the problem. But professional advocates for abuse survivors say the problem isn’t gay priests, but instead a silence and simplification around the topics of celibacy and clergy sexuality that in a minority of cases allows secrets to fester.
The Catholic Church teaches that priests make promises of “celibacy,” which falls under the Sixth Commandment (in Catholicism the Sixth Commandment calls for permanent fidelity to your spouse) and literally means they will not marry. Celibacy, Catholicism teaches, is also considered a spiritual discipline created for the good of the church. Church law requires priests not to have sex, but church leaders have long disagreed about what that literally means, long before the complex digital era. Experts disagree whether actions such as having a hookup app on your phone, engaging in sexual talk on an app or watching people have sex at a bathhouse qualify under church law as sex.
“These aren’t new issues; the internet is just a new tool. There is a tension between these policies about sins involving the Sixth Commandment, and the fact that [the Church] has never defined that in law. It always shifts and is up to the opinions of moral theologians,” said Jennifer Haselberger, a canon lawyer in private practice who worked for several dioceses, including Minneapolis-St. Paul, where she was head of the canonical department.
Simply having Grindr on a phone, as a priest, is not against the Sixth Commandment, she said. Church law “isn’t there at all.”
Monsignor Fred Easton, a canon lawyer who was top judge for the tribunal of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, said there is no automatic penalty under the code of canon law against a priest for having a dating app on his phone, but bishops have discretion.
In Burrill’s case, after an extended leave, his bishop, William Callahan of La Crosse, Wis., in June appointed Burrill to serve as the parochial administrator of a parish there.
Murray, the New York City priest, noted that church law calls for clerics to “behave with due prudence toward persons whose company can endanger their obligation to observe continence or give rise to scandal among the faithful.”
The tracking and outing of Burrill was “a very good thing,” he said
Murray, like many Catholic conservatives, is concerned about increased acceptance of LGBTQ relationships in the church. That said, it’s “gaslighting” to call stories focused on Grindr anti-gay, he said. “The issue is unchastity and the scandal given to the people in the pews.”
— Church’s effort to stay afloat while settling abuse cases is scorned as a cynical move to shield secrets and assets.
Rev. Robert Vasa, the new Coadjutor Bishop of Santa Rosa, closes his eyes in prayer during a mass for his reception at St. Eugene’s Cathedral in Santa Rosa, California, Sunday, March 6, 2011.
Scores of survivors of clergy abuse — people who had spent decades trying to escape the grief and trauma of childhood sex assault — have come forward over the past three years after deciding now is finally the time to seek justice.
At least 130 — likely many more, attorneys say — have filed or will file lawsuits against the Santa Rosa Roman Catholic Diocese during a special three-year window that allows adults of any age to file personal injury cases for childhood sex abuse in California. That window closes on New Year’s Eve.
But none of those cases is likely to go to trial.
The diocese announced to the court Nov. 30 that it would seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early next year, a move that will suspend state court proceedings and leave the whole matter in federal bankruptcy court.
In effect, experts and plaintiffs attorneys say, that means the judicial process becomes less about finding the truth in each case and holding those in power to account for decades of horrific abuse and more about assigning dollars and cents.
The priority under Chapter 11 reorganization is the well-being of the church and its ability to carry on while the abused become just more creditors, “fighting for the same dollar” as, say, a roofer or any other vendor, said Professor Marci Hamilton. She is the longtime senior fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania and founder and chief executive officer of CHILD USA, a nonprofit think take dedicated to protecting children from abuse.
“The truth-seeking function of filing a lawsuit is sidelined, and the only issue that winds up being part of the discussion is, ‘How much money can we, the debtor, save by filing for bankruptcy?’ ” she said.
Assessing the claims, San Franciscoplaintiffs attorney Mary Alexander said, also becomes a function of categorizing and counting different kinds of abuse “rather than actual harm,” and overall seeing “a huge case” turn “into a little tiny settlement.”
It’s also “taking away from their ability to find out what really happened — who at the church was responsible or at the school — and in exchange for a two-to-three-year delay and for far less money,” Alexander said. “And it’s still going to be the insurance companies that are paying.”
Months, likely years, will soon be spent fully assessing church assets and vetting claims to determine how church funds should be divided among the survivors.
Attorney Adrienne Moran, whose Santa Rosa law firm has long represented the Santa Rosa Diocese, said bankruptcy is a way to make sure whoever is first in the door doesn’t take everything and leave nothing for the rest.
“The purpose of filing for the bankruptcy is really to make sure that all of the survivors get a fair and equitable settlement,” Moran said, “and to ensure that Plaintiff No. 1, who might go to trial, doesn’t get all of the reward and then leave nothing for the remainder of the survivors.”
Santa Rosa Bishop Robert Vasa said the diocese really had no choice, given what he said were limited diocesan assets and “the overwhelming number of sexual abuse lawsuits filed against the diocese.”
Bankruptcy additionally would short-circuit the 2019 state legislation that expanded the time for survivors of childhood sexual assault to file civil cases.
Previously, child sex abuse survivors could file suit in California until they turned 26. The 2019 legislation, AB-218, raised the age cap to 40 and opened the three-year window for those 40 and older to file suits for childhood abuse.
But bankruptcy is a federal court proceeding, which supersedes state law, and would foreclose future claims for actions that occurred before the bankruptcy.
That means no one, even those under 40, would ever be able to sue the diocese again for past abuse, attorneys said.
“I’m sure that’s part of the reason they’re going into bankruptcy,” said Rick Simons, an East Bay plaintiffs attorney, who serves as liaison counsel for the Northern California cases generated by the three-year window, all of which are being coordinated through the Alameda County Superior Court.
“One thing the bishop wants to avoid,” said Sacramento attorney Joseph George Jr., “is to get sued two years from now and four years from now and seven years from now. They want to end this.”
The diocese, which runs from Petaluma to the Oregon border and includes 41 parishes and more than 178,000 parishioners, already had paid out more than $33 million in clergy abuse claims over the past three decades, some of it paid through insurance.
As a young man, Roy Bourgeois enlisted to fight in the Vietnam War. After being injured, he became a volunteer at a local orphanage and was inspired to become a priest upon his return to the US. Bourgeois became a priest in Bolivia during the dictatorship of General Hugo Banzer. He decided he could not be an apolitical priest. He spoke out against Banzer’s political repression, leading to his arrest and expulsion from Bolivia. Back in the US, Bourgeois organized protests outside Fort Benning, Georgia where the US was training Salvadorian soldiers to fight the leftist insurgency. He was imprisoned twice for illegally entering the base during planned direct actions against the war. In 2012, Bourgeois was excommunicated by the Catholic Church for supporting the ordination of women.
Studio: Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino, Dwayne Gladden
Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden, Adam Coley
Transcript
Chris Hedges: Welcome to another podcast from The Chris Hedges Report. I’m Chris Hedges, and you can find more of my work at chrishedges.substack.com.
When one makes a commitment to become a Christian, he or she, if they are serious, are required to lift up and bear the cross. This is not a rhetorical thing. If you take this call seriously, it means a life in perpetual opposition to power, including the institution of the church itself, and a commitment to always stand with those the theologian James Cohen called “the crucified of the earth”. It is a hard and lonely road, one that will see you, if you truly stand with the oppressed, soon treated like the oppressed. Roy Bourgeois takes this call seriously. He has paid the price. Born in a small Cajun town along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, he played football in high school, and after graduating from the University of Louisiana, joined the Navy eventually ending up in Vietnam as a lieutenant where he would be wounded.
Vietnam, he writes, became a turning point in his life. He worked in his off-hours with a Catholic priest and two nuns who ran an orphanage, seeing in their work a compassion and love that was in stark contrast to the violence and death of war. He went to seminary and became a priest. He worked in the slums in Bolivia during the US-backed military dictatorship of general Hugo Banzer. He decided he could not be an apolitical priest, only saying mass and baptizing babies. He spoke out against the political repression, leading to his arrest and expulsion from Bolivia. This was just the start. He organized protests outside Fort Benning, Georgia, where the US was training Salvadoran soldiers to fight the leftist insurgency. He illegally entered the base to broadcast a taped message by the assassinated Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, calling on Salvadoran soldiers to stop the repression, an act that saw him sentenced to 18 months in prison.
In 1990, he entered the base again, sprinkling his own blood along with the blood of other protestors, including medal of honor winner Charlie Littky, over photographs of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and daughter murdered by US-backed death squads in El Salvador. He went to prison for another 16 months. He defied the Catholic hierarchy by actively supporting the ordination of women. And for this act of justice, he was expelled in 2012 from the priesthood.
Joining me to discuss his remarkable life of resistance and his steadfast fealty to the Christian call is Roy Bourgeois, author of Male Supremacy In The Catholic Church: An Insider’s View.
So Roy, I want to begin early on in the book where you don’t talk about it in detail, but I’d like you to explain it. You are in a, I believe, a barracks or somewhere, you’re attacked. I think there are eight people who were killed, you yourself are wounded. Can you tell us what happened?
Roy Bourgeois: Yes. I was transferred to the space thinking it was near Saigon, I would be safe there. But then I learned there was no safe place to be in Vietnam. And one night, actually it was about 4:00 in the morning, we were attacked, and we just had to take cover. We were trained to do that just in case this would happen. And it was totally by surprise, and I regret to say that some friends were lost, there were a number killed, many wounded. I was very fortunate, I was among the wounded. But really, that experience causes one to really reflect. And I began to realize how fortunate I was to… I remember then just months later my year in Vietnam had ended, my tour. I was four years in the military as a young lieutenant, and I was going home. And as that plane left Saigon, returning a plane load of us to return back home, many of us wept. We were alive. We lost some friends there, and we were just grateful to be alive. It was a new beginning. It was a new beginning.
Chris Hedges: So as you know, my father was a Presbyterian minister. He served in World War II. What was interesting about him and his generation is that so many of the other ministers around him came out of the experience of war and entered the church because of their experience in war. And I’m wondering if Vietnam served that same role for you?
Roy Bourgeois: It was a turning point in my life. I mean, I volunteered to go to Vietnam. I didn’t have to go. I was two years aboard ship after I became a young officer. I went to Greece at a NATO station for a year. And then when they were asking for volunteers, I believed our country’s leaders. I was also very conservative, traditional Catholic. Many bishops like Cardinal Spelman, they were calling for, saying that the cause was noble. That it was a noble thing to go there to stop the spread of communism. I believed them and I went.
And I later learned, especially after that experience there and meeting Father [Livier], caring for all these children, a few hundred children, I would go there with my buddies to try and help them with food and medicines. But I began to see the war for the first time through the eyes of the victims. And this priest had a big influence on my life. I had never met someone like him. He was a healer. He was really, in a sense, I was learning for the first time the meaning of that word, solidarity. Solidarity. And I talked to an Army chaplain. My fourth year was coming to an end, I expected to make the military a career, but that changed now. I wanted to become a missionary priest like Father [Livier] here and be a healer in our world, a peacemaker. And I came home and later joined the Maryknoll Missionary Order.
And I just felt again, once again, it was a new beginning. I was alive. And when I entered the seminary, I must say my life had a lot of meaning. I felt joy and hope once again.
Chris Hedges: There was a line in your book that I thought was important. You’re at the orphanage, you’re volunteering your off-hours with this Catholic priest and the nuns, and you say that he wasn’t trying to convert anyone to Catholicism, most of these people were Buddhists. And I thought that was really an important point. It’s about bearing witness. I want you just to expound upon that.
Roy Bourgeois: Yeah, I was just very moved because, to be very honest, I was never that, while I grew up a traditional Catholic in Louisiana and we were taught never to question the church’s teachings. But this priest was the first priest I ever got to know. And what really inspired me was that he was just filled with compassion for the children who were being killed. So many of their parents, these were orphans, their parents had been killed by our bombs and napalm and our bullets. And he was a healer. He stood out. He was from Canada and had been in Vietnam for years. He had gone there as a young missionary priest.
And one thing that inspired me, too, he was not trying to convert these children who came from Buddhist families. He wanted to just try and get them to be healed. Many of them were sick, wounded by our bombs, again. And he stood out. And I thought, really, I no longer wanted to spend my career in the military. I started thinking of being a missionary priest like this priest. And I talked to an Army chaplain about doing that, and he recommended the Maryknoll Missionary Order headquartered in New York, New York, with missions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And I remember I just felt, wow, this is what I want to do. And I returned home again feeling some new hope, joy. And it was again, once again, a new beginning. I was alive.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about seminary, because when you entered seminary 40-plus years ago – Maryknoll no longer, I think, has a seminary – Vocations have fallen dramatically. This will get to the whole point of your book in many ways. But let’s juxtapose what it was like in the seminary in terms of vocations, in terms of the strength of the church and what’s happened today.
Roy Bourgeois: I mean that was way back in 1966 when I entered the Maryknoll community, I went to their seminary in Glendale, Illinois, outside of Chicago. At that time there were over 300 seminarians. They had over a thousand priests working in Asia, Africa, Latin America. Well that has all changed. I mean today, fast forward, there’s only 16 seminarians, only four in the United States. The seminary has since closed. They’re down to 250 priests. The majority, more than half of the 250 are over 70 years old. In short, Maryknoll is on life support. And Maryknoll is just a microcosm of what’s going on in the bigger church, the Catholic Church.
Once again, I think because it became clear, but not in the seminary. When I went to the seminary, we didn’t question the all-male priesthood. We didn’t have a problem with women, but something happened to us over the next six years, as I look back on that experience. Little by little being put on a pedestal, we were told that we were special, called by God, and what we could do, women could not do. We were the chosen ones to be leaders in the faith community. And again, little by little we become addicted to… I could see that as I look back, addicted to power. And how we began to see women as a threat to our power and very privileged lifestyle. And that addiction to power only accelerates, really, when we become ordained and we are treated differently. And it took me years, actually, in the seminary. We didn’t really have anyone calling for the ordination of women.
But then it was years later that I began to meet very devout Catholic women in my ministry. And as a priest, I must say I was very happy. I found the meaning and the joy and the hope I was seeking in life and went about my ministry and got a lot of support from the Maryknoll community. My fellow priests working on this issue of the School of the Americas military, US military involvement in Latin America and how we were causing a lot of suffering and death. And when we started the School of the Americas Watch protest and went to prison, I among the many, my fellow priests supported me, came to our vigils at Fort Bennings to protest.
But something happened when I began to meet Catholic women in my ministry talking about this injustice of US foreign policy in Latin America. I discovered an injustice closer to home. It was in my church, the Catholic Church. I began to meet devout Catholic women who said to me they were called like I was to the priesthood. And what I heard from these devout women, many of them in the movement I was a part of, the School of the Americas Watch, it kept me awake at night. I began to ask basic questions: who are we as men to say that our call to the priesthood is authentic, but the call of women is not?
Galatians 3:28, the holy scripture said very clearly, it’s not complicated. It says very clearly that men and women are created of equal worth and dignity. They’re one. They’re one. Men and women are one, and both are called, of course, to the priesthood. And I started to ask my fellow priests, why can’t women be ordained? And I remember I thought I would get a better response, but I underestimated… Let me put it this way. I underestimated the depth, the depth of the sexism and the misogyny in the church and in the priesthood. I was quite surprised at the resistance and the anger I got when I started asking my fellow priests, why can’t women be priests? As we’re called, they too are called. And that was only the beginning of my being expelled from the priesthood.
Chris Hedges: Well, you eventually take part in a kind of ad hoc ordination service for women, and this leads to your expulsion. You write in the book, “The crisis in the Catholic Church is not complicated. If the patriarchy that dominates the church is not dismantled and women are not treated as equals, the church will continue to diminish and eventually die.”
Roy Bourgeois: That’s what I began to see. It became very clear that we were in trouble. The Maryknoll Missionary Order was but a microcosm of the larger Roman Catholic Church. It’s in a crisis. And at the core of that crisis is the all-male priesthood. At the very core is male supremacy. And how men, how we somehow… We were not that way when we entered the seminary, something happened to us. And of course over the years, many of the ordained priests left and married, and they of course were expelled and they did not fear women or see them as a threat. They married and they were expelled. Somehow I just cannot see Jesus expelling someone in front of one of his followers who said that he was going to get married, that they had to leave the community. But let me just say the church is in a big crisis. The sexual abuse scandal, of course, contributed to that. But at the very core is the all-male priesthood, men who see women as a threat.
Chris Hedges: You write, “Among the thousands of Catholic priests who raped and sexually abused thousands of children, the vast majority were not expelled from the priesthood or excommunicated. Every woman who has been ordained as a priest in the Catholic Church has been expelled and excommunicated by the Vatican.”
Roy Bourgeois: Yes, I was very upset, in a sense saddened by the letter I got from the Vatican. After I attended, it came to the point where it was time to cross the line, and I did the unspeakable. I actually attended the ordination ceremony of one of the many women called by God to the Catholic priesthood in Lexington, Kentucky. And her name is Janice [Seversisnisky], a longtime Catholic, a teacher in school, and a longtime friend. And when she invited me to attend her ordination, I thought about it. I knew it was a serious invitation and I could get in trouble. And I wrote back after much reflection and said, it would be an honor. And I went, and hundreds came for the ordination.
But when I returned from the ordination, I was summoned. I was summoned by Maryknoll to go to the headquarters. I had to go before the Superior General and the General Council, the leaders of Maryknoll. And they sent a report to the Vatican, Pope Benedict, who was Pope at the time. And it didn’t take long. They sent the report and I had to explain the ordination ceremony was the same as when we were ordained, and it was such a joy for everyone to be there. But I must say my fellow priests did not share our joy. They were very upset, very angry. And they wrote to the Vatican about my participation in this ordination. And it didn’t take long to get a letter from Pope Benedict, the Vatican, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In the letter stated that I had caused grave scandal in the Catholic Church by believing in the ordination of women.
Chris Hedges: I want to ask you about El Salvador. It’s where we met. I was covering the war. You were very involved in Salvador, you started the America’s Watch. But before, I just want to, as an aside, you’ve also been very outspoken about GBLTQ, right? So one of the things you did, you write about in the book that I thought was great, you wrote to all your friends in the priesthood who you knew or assumed were gay and asked them, you don’t have to come out of the closet, but you do have to stand up for GBLTQ rights. And of course I believe none of them did.
Let’s talk about Salvador. You go to El Salvador on a fact-finding mission. There was a famous moment where you disappeared in El Salvador. I think you went off with the FMLN or something. But talk about Salvador, and it of course deeply affected me, I was there for five years. And you just became one of the champions after that visit. And of course set up this… because Salvadoran soldiers were being trained at Fort Benning, but talk about Salvador.
Roy Bourgeois: After being expelled from Bolivia after my ministry there for five years, I must say I came back to the United States and then became very involved in El Salvador after Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated, gunned down at the altar while saying Mass. And just months later, four US church women were raped and killed by the Salvadorian military. And two of them, Moira Clark, Anita Ford, were Maryknoll sisters, nuns, and good friends. And I must say what happened to them really was very serious.
It was then later that I went to El Salvador, and I had never seen anything quite like El Salvador, reminded me of the violence and the death of Vietnam. But when I came back from El Salvador, I could not be silent. It was a slaughter of the innocents. And what hurt too was to see my country, the United States giving millions of dollars in military aid, and of course training the military [inaudible] at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning.
And when I was invited to go to El Salvador on another trip, that’s when I was invited to join the landless farm, the Compacinos, who were being killed, to go off with them. And that was very serious. I was missing for a while, I was alive, but way out in the mountains, and they thought I had been killed. I was alive. And when I came back from that experience, it was another great opportunity to let the people know in the United States that we have to speak out, and our silence on US foreign aid, military aid to El Salvador was a grave injustice.
When there’s an injustice – This is what I learned – When there’s an injustice, silence is complicity. And I couldn’t be silent about El Salvador. I couldn’t be silent about this issue of the all-male priesthood. Silence when there’s an injustice is complicit in that injustice. But I came back, I must say once again, death is very close in El Salvador. I came back grateful to be alive, grateful.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk about prison. Your first bout in prison, you get out and go to, I believe to a Trappist monastery. I think you last about five months, which is five months longer than I’d last there. But talk about the effect of prison on you. There’s a wonderful line in there, I think, where you said that you were freer in prison than you were in seminary. Is that right?
Roy Bourgeois: I know prison, family and friends, I know it was a hard thing to understand, and I’ve always appreciated that sort of unconditional love from my family, my dear parents and two sisters and a brother in Louisiana. The support I got from them and friends. Going into prison, protesting and going to prison for nonviolent protests is very difficult for a lot of people. But for us, it’s trying to be true to ourselves, to be true to our experiences in life, which is different from others. And I and others have been in the movement, over 250 who have crossed the line, done protests and gone to prison. I’ve served a total of a little over four years in federal prisons over the years.
But to be very honest, when I got to prison, I did well. It was some of the best retreats I’ve ever had. I’m a great lover of solitude, I’m an activist, but I really feel in my life it’s important to have quiet time. And prison was a time to… I was in solitary confinement for a couple of months, and that was challenging. But there, too, I was able to read. I had access to books of the great theologians like Thomas Merton and many others, John of the Cross, and men and women, really what was spiritual… Gave me courage there.
And I always got out of prison feeling, though this happened when I got out of prison, I was in solitary confinement, and became very much of a contemplative. And there was a time when I got out of prison, I thought I was being called to the contemplative life. And I used to make retreats with the Trappist monks in Georgia outside of Atlanta. And I joined their community thinking this is where I was being called. It was all leading to this, Vietnam, Bolivia, El Salvador was leading to the monastery to be a contemplative monk.
But I was there only five months and I realized that I’m not a full-time contemplative. Meditation, silence, solitude, spiritual reading is very much, very important to me. But I’ve got to integrate that in my active life. Most people do not live in a monastery, are not full-time contemplatives, but we need some quiet time, especially at the end of a long day. So many called family members, friends, couples, and I too have learned, tried to learn to keep that balance.
But I came back from the monastery, it was a good experience, and returned to Maryknoll, and really got much more involved in the protesting of US foreign policy to Latin America – With the support of my Maryknoll community, I must say. But when it came to the issue of, again, women being treated as equals, honoring and accepting the call of women to the priesthood, they just couldn’t somehow handle that. And that’s when I got in big trouble. I was told, in a letter from the Vatican, Pope Benedict said that I must recant my public support for the ordination of women, my belief that women can be ordained. I had 30 days to recant or I would be expelled from the priesthood. And I remember going on a retreat, giving it a lot of thought, and going to the Trappist monastery to think about that. On return, I realized I could not recant. This would be a betrayal of my conscience. It would do violence to what I believed in.
And I wrote the Vatican and said, what you’re asking of me is not possible. Our loving God calls both men and women, both men and women to the priesthood. We are created equal. And I will honor that. And that day will come, I said. But what hurt, too, was how I and all the women are automatically excommunicated, expelled, but the many, many priests who raped, sexually abused thousands according to the USA, in the US alone, over 5,000 Catholic priests raped, sexually abused over 12,000 children, and these priests were not excommunicated, nor were the bishops who knew of their crimes and just transferred them to another parish. And of course that had caught up with the church. The truth comes out. And a big part of the crisis in the Catholic Church today, of course, is that sexual abuse scandal, combined with the all-male priesthood. And the church, if it does not change and start ordaining women, it will go the way of the dinosaurs.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk about Pope Francis. He’s good on many issues, but not on the ordination of women.
Roy Bourgeois: Exactly. He’s light years ahead of Pope John Paul or Pope Benedict on many issues. He’s much more progressive. But as the CEO of the all-male priesthood, his position on their ordination of women is no different from Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul. In fact, he quoted them, Pope John Paul, he said, and Pope Benedict said, “The door to ordination is closed.” He said, I agree with them, the ordination of women, the door is closed, women cannot be ordained. And that hurt. That hurt.
But let me just say if right now that the church is in a crisis, as I mentioned Maryknoll is closed and many of its missions in Asia, African, and Latin America, they’re down to 250 priests, and more than half are in retirement. And the seminary that I attended, the two seminaries, they’re closed. They’re closed. There are no vocations coming in there. Again, Maryknoll is but a microcosm, and if priests will not be ordained in the Roman Catholic tradition and women will be ordained and treated as equals, the church will continue to diminish and go out of existence.
Chris Hedges: Do you still think of yourself as a priest?
Roy Bourgeois: Well, they tell us when we are ordained, thou art a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek, thou art a priest forever. And they teach us this in the seminary. And the many who married, so many, over half of the Maryknoll priests who were ordained are now married. And many of them continue to be good friends, and some of them continue to do mass, say mass for small communities. And so many of us have been expelled. But when we are taught in the seminary, and I feel I was a priest for 40 years and another six years in the seminary, and that has been my life. I feel a lot of hope, but my hope is not coming from the priest or the Pope or certainly not the bishops. They’re not going to change. They’re so addicted to their power, they’re not going to change.
My hope is coming from young people, in Latin America, the change came not from the oppressors but it came from the oppressed, from the bottom up, not from the top down. I learned that in Bolivia, in El Salvador, Nicaragua. And I see this with so many young people. In my own family, nieces and nephews are not a part of the church because of the church’s teaching when it comes to the LGBTQ community, when it comes to women. It’s not complicated theology. So many people in the Catholic Church, especially now, our gay sisters and brothers and women, they are not treated as equal, and there’s a cost for that. And right now, again, many Catholic churches are closing. Where I grew up, there were three churches, back then there were seven Catholic priests. They’re down to one priest. And that church will eventually close real soon because they don’t have the priests coming in to do the work.
But I do believe, perhaps not in my lifetime or during this interview, this is going to happen. But I have no doubt that the Catholic Church will one day have women priests, and they will also have to change that church teaching that homosexuality is a disorder. I remember, let me just touch on that. I remember meeting, after being expelled from the priesthood, I was invited to give many talks. But this mother and father got on your side and wanted to talk and said that their son, high school senior, had committed suicide. He was gay. They accepted him no problem. But they were Catholic, and the priests where they went to mass would ridicule and really was very cruel toward the gay people. And also at the school there was a lot of hurt.
And they said, they told me, I’ll never forget what they said, that the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality played a part in the suicide of their son. And that prompted me to write to many longtime priest friends in Maryknoll. I was with the community, what, 40 years, and many of them are gay. And I wrote to them and asked in a respectful way, could you please break your silence for young people and call for the church’s teaching to change? God created everyone of equal worth and worth in equality, and there are no exceptions. And the way we, the Catholic Church, is treating, and our behavior, our LGBT brothers and sisters, it’s uncalled for and it’s cruelty. It’s a heresy at its worst.
And I must say I’m sad to say that very few of the gay priests responded to my letter. They too are accepted in Maryknoll, in the priesthood, but on one condition: they cannot break their silence and go against their church’s teaching. And they know if they do, the same will happen to them where they are going to be expelled. They are going to lose their power and many privileges as a Catholic priest. And they are not willing to risk losing their powers. So they are silent. Silence when there’s injustice is complicity. And I just hope that one day they can break their silence.
