Too Many Priests Preach Truth, but Live a Lie
By Peter Stanford
For us million or so run-of-the-mill Catholic Mass-goers in Britain, there have been plenty of bishops’ letters and other hellfire sermons about gay marriage to sit through of late. Since the argument from the pulpit is always the same, my mind often wanders and I find myself focusing instead not on the message but on the messenger. As a “professional” Catholic – having once edited the Catholic Herald – as well as a private one, I’ve met many clerics. Many are openly gay. Or so open when not saying Mass that it is easy to forget I’m not meant to remember it when they are. In general, such double standards don’t overly concern me. Like the rest of us, priests, monks, bishops and even cardinals are as God made them. Whatever inner tension they struggle with as leaders in a Church that teaches that to be gay is – and I am quoting a document sent out by the soon-to-retire Pope when he was Cardinal Ratzinger – “a strong tendency towards an intrinsic moral evil”, that is a matter for their own conscience. Tolerance wears a bit thin, however, when they start attacking gay marriage in such strident terms from the pulpit, and even signing letters en masse in protest at the Government’s proposals. It is getting dangerously close to hypocrisy. “Madness” and “grotesque” are two of the many inflammatory words used by Cardinal Keith O’Brien, until yesterday Britain’s most senior Catholic cleric, in his virulent and very public campaign against gay marriage. He may have failed to move public opinion, but his efforts did win him the “Bigot of the Year” award from the gay rights lobbying group, Stonewall. At the time, I recall thinking that they were being a bit harsh. As a person, O’Brien is said to be charming and rather diffident, and on platforms he is only trotting out Catholic dogma, stripped of the caveats and nuances that more polished ecclesiastical bigwigs south of the border tend to employ. But now O’Brien has been forced to resign by allegations that, at its simplest, suggest he is a hypocrite who doesn’t practise what he preaches in matters of sexuality. Three priests and one former priest have claimed that he behaved inappropriately towards them – charges that he denies. It has long been the rule of thumb among Catholic leaders that a blind eye will be turned in the corridors of power to what allegedly goes on in private, but if the details come out in public – the bishop who fathers a love-child, for instance – then the institution throws up its hands in horror. “We never even suspected,” they say. “How could he [and it is always a he] have misled us so!” I had thought my Church was growing out of this habit. Pope Benedict has given a clear and consistent lead during his eight-year pontificate about the need openly and honestly to address the institutional culture that allowed the scandal of clerical abuse to go on unchallenged for so long. His apologies to victims of that abuse, and his promises that the Church will do better in future, are among the most important legacy he will leave when he steps down later this week. And yet the continuing stream of allegations against priests suggests that nothing is really changing. Various research projects over recent years have tried to estimate the number of Catholic priests who are gay. Figures come in between 10 and 30 per cent. At the lower and more realistic end of the scale, that is nothing surprising, merely mirroring what goes on in society at large. But the Catholic Church is not the same as society at large. It defiantly stands out against the tolerant tide of a secular and sceptical society and claims to represent a more enduring set of values. And in many ways that is a positive thing, when it comes to challenging prevailing economic arguments, or rampant individualism, consumerism and the celebrity culture. It is why I keep going to Mass every Sunday and send my children to a Catholic school. Indeed, that is what I want to hear sermons about, not what sound perilously close to condemnations of openly gay men and women from those in the closet. It is impossible to sit in the pews and not be concerned by the present unhealthy state of affairs where a Church that in essence preaches that homosexuality is wrong attracts and admits so many gay men into its priesthood. It can scarcely make them effective as our future leaders if they are busy trying (and apparently failing) to suppress something at the core of their being. If we are to have the sort of root-and-branch examination Benedict wants of why the child abuse scandal happened, then the question of what prompts a vocation needs to be examined. I am not being so crass as to suggest that allowing a married priesthood would solve this problem at a stroke. Some of the most notorious child abusers are “happily married men”. And neither am I falling into the same mistake so often made by Church leaders who, knowingly or not, equate homosexuality with paedophilia. Yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that all this hypocrisy around sexuality has to be renounced, if only so we can get on with the real business of the gospels. Jesus, it is worth noting, says not a single word about same-sex love.
|
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.