Pope Benedict XVI, who resigned as head of the Catholic Church in 2013, died on Saturday (31 December) aged 95, the Vatican confirmed in a statement.
As tributes poured in for the Pope Emeritus, LGBTQ+ Catholics recalled how his time in the Vatican marked a dark, painful era for queer people.
Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of LGBTQ+ Catholic organisation DignityUSA, said Pope Benedict XVI’s words harmed queer people and damaged families.
“The death of any human being is an occasion of sorrow. We pray for Pope Benedict’s soul and express our condolences to his family, friends, and loved ones,” Duddy-Burke said in a statement.
He refused to recognise even the most basic human rights for LGBTQIA+ people.
“However, his death also calls us to reflect honestly on his legacy. Benedict’s leadership in the church, as Pope and before that as head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), caused tremendous damage to LGBTQIA+ people and our loved ones.”
Pope Benedict XVI leads the Ash Wednesday service at the St. Peter’s Basilica on February 13, 2013 in Vatican City, Vatican.
She continued: “His words and writings forced our community out of Catholic Churches, tore families apart, silenced our supporters, and even cost lives.
“He refused to recognise even the most basic human rights for LGBTQIA+ people. Many of us experienced the most harsh and blatant religiously justified discrimination of our lives as a result of his policies.”
Pope Benedict XVI labelled queer people ‘objectively disordered’
DignityUSA pointed out that, as leader of the CDF, Pope Benedict XVI was responsible for a 1986 letter which labelled gay men and lesbians as “objectively disordered”.
The same letter said same-sex sexual relationships were “intrinsically evil” and “essentially self-indulgent”.
It is impossible to overstate the damage Pope Benedict’s repeated dehumanising of LGBTQIA+ people has caused.
Furthermore, DignityUSA condemned the former pontiff for banning the distribution of condoms by Catholic health and social services agencies – a move which impacted the spread of HIV.
In 2012 – during his final year as leader of the Catholic Church – he spoke out against same-sex marriage, saying it “destroyed the essence of the human creature”.
He also said allowing same-sex couples to adopt represented an “attack” on the “traditional family”.
“It is impossible to overstate the damage Pope Benedict’s repeated dehumanising of LGBTQIA+ people has caused,” Duddy-Burke added.
Pope Benedict XVI attends his final general audience in St. Peter’s Square on February 27, 2013 in Vatican City, Vatican.
“Individuals, families, and whole communities across the globe suffered tragic consequences, many of which are still felt today.
“We pray that the church will use the period of reflection following Pope Benedict’s death to acknowledge that in many cases he used his power in ways that failed to further the gospel message of love, human unity, and the responsibility to care for the marginalised.”
‘God’s Rottweiler’
Pope Benedict was a polarising force within the Catholic Church, and he was dubbed “God’s Rottweiler” during his time as pontiff for his careful adherence to traditional interpretations of church doctrine.
One of the biggest challenges he faced when he took over from Pope John Paul II was to tackle various sexual abuse scandals within the church – but he ultimately failed to take appropriate action.
In January 2022, a report found that he failed to take action against priests who abused children during his tenure as archbishop of Munich, even though he knew of allegations against them.
Honouring Pope Benedict XVI now is not only wrong. It is shameful.
Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), an organisation that advocates for survivors, described Pope Benedict XVI as an “abuse enabler” in a press release shortly after news of his death was confirmed.
“Any celebration that marks the life of abuse enablers like Benedict must end,” the group said.
“It is past time for the Vatican to refocus on change: tell the truth about known abusive clergy, protect children and adults, and allow justice to those who have been hurt.
“Honouring Pope Benedict XVI now is not only wrong. It is shameful.”
Former pope drew strong criticism for Church’s views on homosexuality and women priests
Fr Tony Flannery says he suffered ‘at the hands of a system shaped and defined by Cardinal Ratzinger’.
By Sarah Mac Donald
Several leading Irish priests who clashed with Pope Benedict’s stance on key issues admit it will be “very hard” to mourn his death.
he issues over which they strongly differed range from women priests to the church’s teaching on homosexuality.
Censured priest Fr Tony Flannery, who was put out of ministry during the papacy of Benedict, said he had suffered “at the hands of a system shaped and defined by Cardinal Ratzinger”, so he “doesn’t really feel much regret at his death”.
The 75-year-old Redemptorist priest said he was “one of the Irish people whose life has been most significantly affected by his [Benedict’s] attitudes and his exercise of power”.
Fr Flannery has been forbidden to exercise his ministry as a priest since 2012 over his views on women priests and the church’s teaching on homosexuality and contraception.
He noted the impact of Benedict’s papacy, from 2005 to 2013, and his time as head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office on theologians, priests, religious and lay people who, like Fr Flannery, were punished for their writings on matters relating to church doctrine and various aspects of the faith.
“I wouldn’t even attempt to measure the negative impact his teaching and action had on LGBTQ people, and on those abused by priests and religious,” he said.
Fr Roy Donovan, of the Association of Catholic Priests, said he found it “very hard to mourn” for Benedict and remained “very angry” over his pontificate and his time as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (CDF).
Referring to Benedict’s negative comments on gay people and his silencing of those with whom he disagreed, Fr Donovan asked: “What was he afraid of? Why did he need to adopt an approach of circling the wagons? With his intellect, why could he not listen and debate opposing views?”
His comment was echoed by Fr Iggy O’Donovan. He said that the German pontiff, who died on Saturday, had led a “McCarthy-type purge of fellow scholars”.
He said: “It was on his watch at the CDF that [theologian] Hans Kung, his one-time colleague, was stripped of his right to teach Catholic theology. Think of [Leonardo] Boff and [Gustavo] Gutierrez, the liberation theology scholars. Our own Fr Sean Fagan was hounded to his death.”
Fr O’Donovan said that the staunchly traditionalist theologian who succeeded John Paul II was “brilliant” but had inflicted great damage.
Separately, the reform group, We Are Church Ireland, has described Pope Benedict as “a highly contradictory theologian who shaped the Roman Catholic Church for decades in a backward-looking way like no other post-conciliar church leader”.
In a statement, Colm Holmes said Benedict, whose funeral takes place on Thursday, had left “a climate of fear”.
Meanwhile, the Vatican has revealed that Benedict’s last words were “Lord, I love you.”
Archbishop Georg Gaenswein, Benedict’s long-time secretary who lived in the Vatican monastery where the former pope took up residence after his 2013 retirement, said a nurse heard the late cleric utter those words about 3am on Saturday.
He died later that morning about 9.30am local time.
“Benedict XVI, with a faint voice but in a very distinct way, said in Italian, ‘Lord, I love you,’” Archbishop Gaenswein said, adding that it happened when the aides tending to Benedict were changing shifts.
“I wasn’t there in that moment, but the nurse a little later recounted it,” the archbishop said.
“They were his last comprehensible words, because afterwards, he wasn’t able to express himself any more.”
In the United States, admirers of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI remembered him warmly for his theological prowess and devotion to traditional doctrine. However, some U.S. Catholics, on learning of his death Saturday, recalled him as an obstacle to progress in combating clergy sex abuse and expanding the role of women in the church.
Professor Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, depicted Benedict as “a man of unwavering faith, deep conviction and towering intellect,” yet added that he left “a complicated legacy.”
She noted that last February, following a report that implicated him in the cover-up of sexual abuse during the years he served as Archbishop of Munich, Benedict “acknowledged his failure to act decisively at times in confronting sexual abusers.”
Steven Millies, a professor of public theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, noted that Benedict – before becoming pope – had a lead role in enforcing church discipline at a time when the sex-abuse crisis was making headlines in the U.S. two decades ago.
“When he was elected to succeed John Paul II as pope in 2005, Benedict XVI was the person who was most knowledgeable about clergy sexual abuse.” Millies said via email. “Yet, the crisis continued to fester throughout Benedict’s papacy past his resignation in 2013 and even today.”
Millies suggested that Benedict’s most important legacy was his resignation, arising from “his recognition that he could not fix the abuse crisis or accomplish much else in the face of the deeply entrenched power of the Vatican’s centralized bureaucracy.”
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who heads the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, and is president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, praised Benedict as “a superb theologian” and recalled how the announcement of his resignation “shocked the world.”
“He recognized the great demands made of him as the chief shepherd of the Universal Church of a billion Catholics worldwide, and his physical limitations for such a monumental task,” Broglio said in a statement. “Even in retirement, retreating to live out a life in quiet prayer and study, he continued to teach us how to be a true disciple of Christ.”
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who was appointed archbishop of New York and nominated as a cardinal by Benedict, praised the pope emeritus as a “erudite, wise, and holy man, who spoke the truth with love.”
Dolan held a special Mass for Benedict at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; its bells tolled 95 times before the Mass — reflecting Benedict’s age when he died.
President Joe Biden — a church-going Catholic who differs with church teaching on abortion and some other social issues — issued a statement evoking a meeting with Benedict at the Vatican in 2011. Biden recalled Benedict’s “generosity and welcome as well as our meaningful conversation.”
“He will be remembered as a renowned theologian, with a lifetime of devotion to the Church, guided by his principles and faith,” Biden added. “May his focus on the ministry of charity continue to be an inspiration to us all.”
Monsignor Kevin Irwin, dean emeritus at Catholic University of America, called Benedict a “theology professor extraordinaire… a clear thinker who was a quiet contributor to the church’s continuity after Pope John Paul II.”
Irwin said Benedict’s resignation left him stunned.
“But, in the end it was about understanding he was overwhelmed and letting him go,” Irwin said.
Monsignor Stephen Doktorczyk, vicar general for the Diocese of Orange in Southern California, remembered Benedict as a gracious leader who had the ability to build bridges and foster reconciliation.
“There was this unfair perception that he was there to cut people off at the knees,” said Doktorczyk, who served for five years — from September 2011 to December 2016 – in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office responsible for processing clergy sex abuse complaints. “He tried to be a peacemaker. When there was a way to reconcile, he tried to look outside the box.”
Others were more critical, including Kate McElwee, executive director of the U.S.-based Women’s Ordination Conference, which seeks to enable women to be ordained as Catholic priests.
“For many Catholics, Pope Benedict’s papacy is a chapter of our church’s history that we are still healing from,” McElwee said. Her statement asserted that Benedict, as head of the Vatican’s doctrine office and as pope, “orchestrated a rigid campaign of theological suppression on the question of women’s ordination, creating a culture of fear and pain within the church.”
Also offering a harsh judgment was David Clohessy, a longtime leader of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
“In more than 30 years as a mighty Vatican bureaucrat – nearly 10 of them as the world’s top Catholic figure – Benedict enabled countless child sex crimes and cover-ups to continue by virtually refusing to publicly expose even one child molesting cleric or a complicit church official,” Clohessy said via email.
“With his extensive power and bully pulpit, he could have prevented hundreds or perhaps thousands of kids from being sexually assaulted. But he didn’t. Instead, he chose, time and time again, to side with ordained clergy over vulnerable children.”
The Survivors Network’s leadership, in a statement, said honoring Benedict now “is not only wrong, it is shameful.:
“Benedict was more concerned about the church’s deteriorating image and financial flow to the hierarchy versus grasping the concept of true apologies followed by true amends to victims of abuse,” the statement said,
The leader of a Maryland-based group that advocates for LGBTQ Catholics, Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry, noted that Benedict — prior to his papacy — helped shape a document that called homosexual orientation as ”an objective disorder” and a Catechism describing sexual activity between people of the same gender as “acts of grave depravity.”
“Those documents caused — and still cause — grave pastoral harm to many LGBTQ+ people,” DeBernardo said,.
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.
— Two decades after the U.S. Catholic Church finally began to confront priest abuse of minors, and many other countries followed suit, Italian bishops who live with the Vatican in their midst are reluctant to break the church’s vow of silence and answer to victims.
Nuns at St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican
By Francesco Peloso
It was in 2002 that the scandal of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests erupted in the United States, prompting the country’s conference of bishops to draft the first Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in the Church.
The charter allowed guilty clergy members to be removed, and dioceses — the group of churches that a bishop supervises — were asked to cooperate with civil authorities in cases of violence against minors in the name of transparency.
But 20 years later, the scandal, which has since spread to many other countries, is far from over.
In the meantime, things have changed in the Vatican as well. Abandoning its longstanding policy of denial and systematic cover-up, the Vatican introduced policies to protect victims, collaborate with judicial authorities in different countries and reflect on the root causes of the scandal, namely the abuse of power and conscience, and the Church’s tendency to defend the institution at all costs.
Still, the Vatican’s new approach only goes so far, because every law and regulation handed down from Rome must be dropped into the reality of thousands of dioceses scattered across the world, where secrecy often prevails over the search for truth.
In this sense, the Italian Catholic Church seems to be unsurpassed in maintaining a rigid vow of silence. This reality is of course more notable because the Vatican is located inside of Italy, and much of its staff and leadership is Italian.
In recent years, the church has distinguished itself by the tendency to leave things as they are, hoping problems would eventually fade away. But this was ultimately not possible with the abuse scandal – especially when it became clear it would keep widening and engulfing the church in many countries.
The silence of the bishops
Outside of Italy, we’ve generally seen two types of reactions: first, in many cases national church authorities themselves have decided to ask third parties to open fact-finding investigations. Or secondly, the seriousness of the facts has often provoked upheaval within the church and demands for major change.
This was the case in France and Germany, and to some extent in Australia, Austria, Belgium and elsewhere.
But those who hoped for a turn toward truth and justice have been left disappointed: the report only takes into account cases of abuse reported to ad hoc listening centers over the two-year period 2020-2021, excluding those received by the judiciary or by third parties. During this laughably brief time frame, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, 89 cases of abuse were reported by 30 centers.
A sick system
The bishops’s conference itself, perhaps realizing the report’s limitations, announced a second survey on the cases of sexual abuse reported to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the last 20 years.
The problem of abuse in the church cannot be traced back simply to the presence of a few ‘bad apples.’
The bishops say they expect about 600 such cases, but recent investigations around the world suggest the real numbers are far higher.
“The high number of cases that have emerged and the extent of the phenomenon clearly show that the problem of abuse in the church cannot be traced back simply to the presence of a few ‘bad apples,’ but is rather the sign of a sick system that needs to be healed,” Vatican official Isabelle Cassarà wrote in a 2020 report.
She described the problem as more “structural” than any individual transgression. “There is a specific dynamic of abuse,” Cassarà wrote. It is “a system with precise rules, in which sexual abuse is fostered and covered by a long succession of other abuses of power and conscience.”
The problem, in short, is not just statistical. Rather, the church’s reticence conceals a broader problem.
Church investigating itself
Italian Church officials have also said they won’t bring in external investigators to look into the abuse scandal.
“We are not going to create a national commission made up of individuals who know nothing about the life of the church, who are qualified as objective only because they are not bishops, nor priests, nor believers, as it has been done elsewhere and caused damage,” Archbishop Lorenzo Ghizzoni, president of the council of bishops National Service for the Protection of Minors and Vulnerable Persons, said while presenting the November 2022 report on abuse.
Ghizzoni added: “We are going to look at real data and try to find ways for prevention. What we are interested in is not pillorying priests – it is preventing abuse, and this will require decisive action. We as bishops have committed ourselves to cooperate with law enforcement.”
In essence, the Italian bishops’ stance is that the only ones authorized or with the necessary expertise to carry out investigations on the church are the clerics themselves. In this perspective, prevention, which in itself is right and necessary, serves mainly as an excuse for not shedding light on the past.
The Italian Catholic Church seems to be unsurpassed in maintaining a rigid vow of silence
Blaming drinks and stress
But there is another passage worth noting, when Ghizzoni explains the meaning of the second ongoing investigation into abusive priests in the Vatican: “Whoever commits 10 to 50 cases in his life is a serial abuser and is a very dangerous character, but whoever has committed only one abuse in his life, one day that he drank, he was under stress or let himself be provoked, can we consider him a serial psychopath? We will have to think of solutions for these as well.”
I wonder what the victim thinks of the priest who had been drinking that day. The statements made by the head for the protection of minors seem a transparent, even if evidently unconscious, summary of the Italian church’s motivations to defend itself before seeking justice and truth.
Ultimately, the issue of sexual abuse has become one of the key issues on which the church’s ability to matter in today’s world will be measured.
Sexuality, affective relationships, compulsory celibacy, the role of laity and women, clericalism and institutional secrecy as a method of governance: these are just some of the themes that have arisen from the debate on sexual abuses — and that the church will inevitably have to face.
Impure acts
According to Christine Pedotti, a Catholic feminist and editor of the French magazine Temoignage Chrétien, the causes of the scandal can be found precisely in the church’s relationship with sexuality and democracy.
‘Impure’ thinking, masturbation, rape, are all confused under the generic term sin.
“There is no direct link between the sexual abstinence required for Catholic clerics and the abuses, but there is a very powerful indirect link,” she says.
“First, when any form of sexual activity, including simple masturbation, is considered wrong, disordered, and sinful, there is no longer a hierarchy of transgression: ‘impure’ thinking, masturbation, rape, are all confused under the generic term sin, to the point that the difference between sin and crime becomes blurred,” Pedotti says. “This confusion is expressed in the very words of those in charge, who never stop talking about sin, penance and forgiveness, when they should be talking about crime, guilt, victim, investigation, judgment and verdict.”
The problem, Pedotti says, is that the church judges sexuality in relation to the sixth commandment – not to commit adultery – rather than in terms of consent.
“In a non-consensual relationship, it is a person that is being violated, not a commandment. That is why victims are regularly ignored,” she says.
Democracy and the principles of rule of law and separation of powers should also guard against abuse, Pedotti says.
“The independence of the judiciary is guaranteed; the rights of the defense and the accused are protected. Except for special cases, proceedings and, most importantly, judgments are public,” Pedotti says.
