UNITED STATES
A Sound of Sheer Silence
Michael Boyle
Any honest discussion of sexuality and the Roman Catholic priesthood must start with the elephant in the room–something approaching a majority of priests are closeted gay men of one form or another. That seems impossible to believe for many people, but no one speaking honestly has ever seriously challenged this premise, at least not to me. And my own experience confirms this assessment.
If you think it through, though, it’s not really surprising. In a pervasively homophobic culture, a priesthood in which you were not allowed, and thus not expected, to enter into a (opposite sex) marriage would be logically attractive to men who understood that such a marriage was not an option for them. It doesn’t even have to work on a conscious level. I remember asking an elderly priest how he knew he had a vocation to the priesthood, and his response was, “I remember being 14 and seeing all my friends starting to get really into girls, and I was never particularly interested, so I took it to mean that I had a vocation to be a priest.” Knowing this man (now deceased), I believe it never occurred to him that he may not have been interested in those girls because he was not straight. Whether or not he was gay I can’t say, but you can imagine how someone who was would be steered toward becoming a Catholic priest by this thought process.
Another factor that encouraged the presence of gay men in the Roman Catholic priesthood is the operation of what writer Libby Anne calls the “Two Boxes” model of sexual morality. The Two Boxes model of sexual morality says that there is one box labelled “acceptable sexual practices”–in the Catholic account, sex between a married man and woman that is “open to the transmission of life”–and one box labelled “unacceptable sexual practices” which is everything else. Critically, in the Two Boxes model, the “everything else” is not differentiated into gradations of more or less unacceptable, but basically lumped together into one mass.
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